Monday Night Dinner

I can feed two people without leftovers, and I can feed 6-8+ people with minimal leftovers.  But ask me to feed 2-6 people and I’m flummoxed.  It’s like I’ve completely forgotten how to scale for groups of less than six.  Last night one person was off in Vancouver for the Olympics, one person was sitting at Logan airport attempting to fly to Virginia, one person had class and one person was running a book club, which meant we were down to a total of four people for Dinner and I spent 15 minutes trying to work out how much rice four people would eat.   Read the rest of this entry ?

Day late and a dollar short, apologies. I was distracted yesterday by stories from Jes of people drowning in yachting accidents in 1922, being told I couldn’t use the word idiosyncratic in a write up because nobody would know what it meant, and the new developments in the Amy Bishop case which gets weirder by the day. Read the rest of this entry ?

A couple of years ago I signed up to do recipe testing for America’s Test Kitchen, and then when they started up their offshoot Cook’s County – although, honestly I can’t really tell the difference between the two of them, except Cook’s County seems to involve more gingham? – I signed up to do recipe testing for them too.  Because, why not? Read the rest of this entry ?

A couple of weeks ago I was tired and cranky and in a rush, and then I started cooking and threw knifes into the mix which is a terrible combination.  Sometimes if I’m tired and cranky the routine of cooking will calm me down and bring me back to someone who’s fit to be around other people, but if I’m in a rush it just makes being tired and cranky that much worse.  Upshot was, I wasn’t paying much attention and I was chopping onions in a hurry and brought my big chef’s knife down hard against my knuckles.  Now, normally this would result in a lot of blood and band aids and would make washing the dishes painful and annoying for the next 10 days or so.  But, that’s not at all what happened because my knife hasn’t be sharpened since I got it as a birthday present about three years ago.  On the upside, my knuckles remained intact.  On the downside, my knife wasn’t sharp enough to break skin.

Fortunately my local fabric store is a collection point for knife and scissor sharpening.  So on my now weekly trip to the fabric store – don’t ask, I’m finishing one enormous quilt and starting another smaller quilt and I’ve been at the fabric store every weekend for the last month and it’s entirely possible that they know me by name now – I took along my sewing scissors which were also nicely dull and my large kitchen knife.   Read the rest of this entry ?