In my never ending quest to find the winning strategy to turn my into a productive adult I’ve started buying audiobooks from iTunes to listen to while cooking or cleaning or whatever.
Positive results so far.
A word of advice, though, if you are blue. If it is a gloomy day and you are feeling down and it’s been ‘one of those weeks’, do not download Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking”. It’s an excellent book, but you will find yourself crying into the dishwater and you don;t need that.
I want to make eggplant parmesan for dinner, but I dont have half the ingredients and would have to run to the store. On the other hand I DO have bok choy and tofu and both of those need to be used before they go bad. Why did I buy the big bag of bok choy from United Noodle?? Because it was stupidly cheap and I like bok choy.
Problem is that you can really only make stirfry with bok choy and tofu and that just does not appeal to me.
I’ll keep you posted on the results as I am sure you are dying dying dying to hear what I make for dinner every night.
I wonder if my sister is interested in highly unhealthy food for dinner tomorrow night. Just the two of us. I’ll wear my fat pants.
Speaking of fat pants, I did fat pants laundry (the laundry where you put on the giant pants you only wear inside when no one is looking, in my case a pair of too long black velvet pants that are baggy and tie at the waist) and you wash every single other item of clothing you own. Everything is washed, even David’s brown shirt that I love so much.
When David gets back from home depot I will poll his dinner opinion and get started.
Category Archives: Delicious
Sometimes it is hard to be a small brown puppy
It’s one of those grey days with the weather that has more bite than mist but more mercy than drizzle. Chilled, but not cold. In response I’m making veggies and dumplings, it’s like chicken and dumplings but without the chicken. I am out of mock duck and tofu and don’t feel like making seitan right now. So veggies and dumplings. Good for us.
The other night for dinner I marinated some canned mock duck and onions in garlic sesame oil, franks hot sauce and lime juice, cooked up some rice, seasoned black beans with garlic, lime juice and special secret seasonings. Fried the mock duck and onions and served the whole thing with molé sauce (david got all the onions, i hate onions). Fantastic!
The molé that Lily brought me requires you to mix 3 parts water to 1 part molé. So, I don’t 2 quarts of molé in the fridge, I have what amounts to 2 GALLONS of molé in there! Happy eating! I made up the sesame seed variety (ajonjola? Lily is that right?). God it was good. I’ve had good molé but damn.
Dang
Work is coming along with the new site, hopefully I can go live soon. I’m bringing over each post one at a time. The funny thing is that the halfway point was reached at a post just over a year ago. I’ve been going since early 2001. I’ve really ramped up production around here. I use the term production loosely, in the same way a bulimic might ‘express her creativity’ into a toilet.
SO, while David practices his guitar and the dogs snooze and chew things, I will wander off into the kitchen and do my best to maintain the illusion of a productive human being.
Also, to those of you within breakfast radius, I’m taking a break from coordinating breakfasts for a while. If any of you want to take the baton and run with it, i will gladly pass it over. Otherwise you’ll have to wait a bit until I get things back under control again.
Would you prefer the easy way?
How is it that our mothers managed to put a meal on the table every damned night? How did they do that? I swear to god I’m lucky if I can get a real meal out there 3 times a week. I’m wondering if having kids is the defining point? The only other person here is David and I know he is capable of feeding himself so it’s not like he’s going to starve to death if I don’t put a plate in front of him.
The sad thing is that half the time i’m uninspired, which is a joke to anyone who has seen my pantry. There are ingredients in there that are so exotic, even I’m stunned. Bhutanese red rice? Yeah, second shelf from the bottom. Egyptian feta? Door of the fridge! Udon noodles? Fridge AND freezer! Authentic mole from mexico? 2 quarts! 2 varieties! in the fridge.
Of course the things I do want to make, like kale risotto or spanakopita have missing ingredients.
I’ve mentioned before that I would love to do something like the Julie/Julia Project as long as someone else funded it, but honestly I just don’t think I would stick with it. I would get bored or tired or disinterested or completely fucking freaked out about removing the membrane from calves brains (is there a membrane to be removed? I don’t know!).
The only time I’m really inspired to cook is when I have company over or when I have discovered a new ingredient. Even then I rarely pull out anything new. Poor Owen has been fed the same lamb meal probably 3 or 4 times now.
Cooking is like a drug, an addiction, you need more more new new all the time or you don’t get high and if you’re not getting high then what’s the point?
I have mole and I have seitan and I have rice and I have veggies and I am going to have to make seitan mole tonight because I really really need to get better about cooking meals.
Maybe I need to write more about what I cook. That would serve the dual purpose of being accountable and driving all of you away from my site completely from the last straw of boredom.
I took pictures of the process of making the rack of lamb dinner in order to share it but I completely forgot to take pictures of the entire middle part of the process and also forgot to take pictures of the side dishes being made so we essentially go from seasoned meat to plate.
Any suggestions out there? Any moms that manage to feed their families every night? Do I need to just give in and start buying more frozen food? Is it worth it to do that just to maintain the illusion of a thoughtful meal?
I got problems
Dear China, thank you for inventing the pork filled steam bun. What a wonderfully convenient delight. So wonderful that I ate 4 of them for dinner (they were small).
Oh, but China, why must the steam bun expand in my stomach? Why must it upset me so? I spent the night in and out of vividly inexplicable dreams.
China, China, China, you merciless scamp, whatever are we going to do with you?
With love,
h
oh also I had a weekend
It was all about food.
Saturday, Jessi and I went to do our ethnic grocery shopping. First, Bill’s Imported Foods for our Greek and Middle Eastern stuff. I got chick peas and tea and mini eggplants and pistachios and orzo and some spices and zatar. Then Jessi totally turned me on to Egyptian feta. You don’t know feta until you’ve had double cream Egyptian feta. After that we went to United Noodle for all our Asian food needs, including the aforementioned rice crackers, red bean ice cream, green tea mochi, sushi rice, every kind of bizarre ramen I could find and steam buns (veggie for him, pork for me).
Afterwards, David and I went to a fundraiser dinner for a Samoan who needs a kidney. I was all excited about eating Samoan food until I got the food. It’s a lot of very greasy and salty meat. Sigh. But the evening was fun and the cutest little kids were running around.
Sunday, after a movie and chilling at the coffee shop doing the crossword puzzle (I’m better at crosswords than i ever thought I was. Go me) we came home and I made the most delicious stuffed eggplants ever. Ever. What I did not know about eggplant (I’d never cooked them before) is that you lose a lot of volume squeezing out the water and frying them. I pulped the eggplants, salted the pulp and drew out the bitter water. As that was going on I prepped the other ingredients and was suprised at the amounts, I figured there was too much stuff to fit back in the shells. I was way wrong. After you fry the eggplant insides along with the garlic and onion you end up with this very tasty frizzled concoction that is more flavoring than filling. You mix that with tomatoes, the magical egyptian feta and chopped mint and stuff it all back in the shells and back. So good, like crack.
and I discovered that Maddie can eat a bowl of tzatziki in about 3 seconds. Note to self, maddie is taller than ghengis and can get into more things.
People brought me wine during my housewarming, it’s a nice gift. Unfortunately, I don’t know who brought what, but if you were the person who brought me the Yellowtail Shiraz-Grenache, thank you. It was entirely too lovely with the eggplant and pilaf.