This all started a couple of years ago when I was watching the first season of “Feasting on Asphalt”. In the course of their voyage across the United States Alton Brown and his crew ate a wide and weird variety of things, including koolicles at one stop somewhere in the deep deep South. Koolicles are dill pickles that have been removed from their brine and then marinated in Kool-Aid for several weeks to give them a nice unnatural fluorescent glow and a sweet sour flavor.
An infinite number of lists exist detailing what the absolutely essential pieces of cooking equipment are. When it comes right down to it I think the only things you absolutely have to have are a frying pan, a pot, a cutting board and a knife. However, for those of us who aren’t living like minimalists there are a number of other things that feel essential.
I feel the need for at least two large pots, one smaller pot, two frying pans, a pie plate, an uncounted number of small sharp knives made by Victorinox, a large chef’s knife, a zester and at least 5 bowls in a range of sizes. Pretty much everything else in my kitchen is a nice bonus, but I could live without it*. Read the rest of this entry ?
Apparently the world wants to party like it’s the Middle Ages. If it isn’t news that the Catholic Church is bringing back indulgences (did they learn nothing from the Reformation?), it’s articles in the New York Times about people turning off their refrigerators. To be fair, the New York Times sounds as skeptical about the whole endeavor as I feel.
There’s being green, and being a locavore, and being conscious of your carbon footprint, and then there’s turning the clock back 60 years. Read the rest of this entry ?
Step 1: Stop by the grocery store on Saturday to pick up some rock salt (to try and get rid of that ½ inch of ice that’s on your driveway – the collective sympathy in Boston for London’s 4-6 inches of snow is somewhat limited), and some milk.
Step 2: Wonder why the grocery store is packed to the gills at 2pm on a Saturday.
Step 3: Realize half way home that you remember reading something about the Vice President throwing a Super Bowl party. Realize they must have been talking about this weekend (my boss refuses to believe that I’m this oblivious, but he’s wrong). Spend the rest of the drive home trying to remember who’s playing.
Step 4: Forget that the Super Bowl is this weekend. Read the rest of this entry ?
It has to be said that of all the places we lived while I was growing up, Switzerland did not my make Top 10, which is too bad because we lived there longer than we lived anywhere else. Switzerland is an odd country, and by Switzerland I mostly mean Geneva because we tended to leave Switzerland as quickly as possible when we went on vacation and would escape over the border into France or Italy or Austria, kind of like the von Trapp family but in reverse and with less singing. Read the rest of this entry ?
One little piggy fled the city with her husband and child and went to visit her parents in a warmer locale.
Two little piggies had family in town who heard, “No, we can’t have dinner with you on Wednesday,” as “Yes, we’d love to have dinner with you on Wednesday”.
One little piggy went bowling.
And this little piggy cancelled Dinner and went out for Indian food and a ginger basil gimlet.
Stay tuned next week to find out what the two redeeming features of living in Geneva were.
When I plan meals sometimes I start with a side dish that I really want to have and then work outwards. Sometimes I start with a protein that I’m craving and then figure out what else goes with it. Sometimes I figure out what I have the energy to make and discard all recipes that involve a lot of work. Sometimes, I get lucky like this week and someone makes a specific request (birthday Dinner). Somewhere along the line though it all comes down to what it will look like on the plate.
A plate should always have at least three things on it – not more than five and never less than three. More than five separate dishes and your plate is chaotic and too full. Less than three things and the food looks lonely. This breaks down usefully to protein + starch + vegetable. Salad for these purposes does not count as a vegetable. Currently this is because I almost always serve salad in a side bowl, and growing up it was because salad was eaten after the rest of the meal. Either way it doesn’t contribute to the balance of the plate. Read the rest of this entry ?
When you go to visit someone for the first time you invariably end up drifting towards their bookshelves to check out what they read, or at least I do. When I go a new country I like to meander around a grocery store for pretty much the same reason. Admittedly this is possibly my bias talking, but I think that food and language are the two best ways to learn about another culture. Read the rest of this entry ?
My roommate and I have a deal. She doesn’t ask me to buy boxed macaroni & cheese, and I pretend not to notice that she’s snuck PAM cooking spray into the pantry while I’m out of town. She watches Disney movies when I go away, and I watch ridiculously cheesy romantic comedies when she’s away. It works well for us.
This was the last Dinner before I go to my parents for Christmas. It was therefore the last chance I had to use up the various things in my fridge that I know my roommate won’t eat while I’m gone, and that will have gone bad by the time I get back. There’s some unfathomable number of mushrooms in the fridge. I clearly bought them to make something, but I can’t remember for the life of me what it was. Possibly it was the same dinner for which I bought an enormous quantity of green beans. Then there’s the 4+ lb of butternut squash that I bought a month or so ago with the intention of making soup. I never got around to roasting the squash, and while it’s not going to go bad in the 10 days I’ll be gone I’m of a mind to clean up the kitchen before I leave. Read the rest of this entry ?
A combination of not having Dinner last week and having a birthday Dinner this week for someone whose birthday is actually on Thanksgiving, has completely thrown off my sense of time. I keep having to remind myself that it is not the week after Thanksgiving, and that I do not have most of December to go before Christmas. It is, in fact, two weeks to Christmas. It is 10 days until I leave for Christmas to visit my parents, which in turn means that it’s seven days until my mother remembers all the things that she wants me to bring her from the US that she swore she wasn’t going to need this year.
Monday Night Dinner 