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WND – Birthday Season 2008 – Part II

September 24, 2008

There are two schools of thought when it comes to soup.  There are the people who think that soup is the perfect food, and is an end in and of itself.  And, there are the people who think soup is lovely, but get to the bottom of the bowl and want to know where the rest of dinner is.

I grew up in a family that belongs to the first school of thought.  Except for the unfortunate black bean soup my mother made when I was in high school that was promptly dubbed river sludge soup, I’ve pretty much never met a soup I didn’t like.  My mother admittedly did not think it was the best soup she’d ever had, but didn’t think it was quite as bad as my father and I made it out to be.

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WND – Birthday Season 2008 – Part 1

September 18, 2008

Fundamentally I’m a fairly lazy person.  I’ll buy the organic, local food that’s grown without pesticides that minimizes my carbon footprint and comes from humanely treated animals, but only if it’s convenient.  I’ll walk up to the farmer’s market at Government Center and I’ll lug home a dozen ears of corn, but I won’t drive out of my way to go buy it.  The trick to getting me to do the socially responsible thing is to make it really really easy.

It does not get easier than having it delivered to your doorstep before you go to work. Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – Hubris & Recipe Testing

September 11, 2008

The general rule of thumb is that you should never attempt to cook something new for company. I disregard this rule with a flagrancy that borders on hubris. I figure I have my next kitchen disaster coming to me.

Dinner occupies a liminal space between company and family. I cook more elaborately for Dinner than I do for just us at home. But, everyone at Dinner has done our dishes, and they all know where to find the tea things, so they’re not exactly company either.

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WND – Knife Dropping & Other Kitchen Skills

September 4, 2008

I have to ask, have you ever dropped a knife while you were cooking in such a way that you were worried it was going to slice your feet?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I ask because the advertising for “Cook With Your Kids” Week on the Food Network has started and the degree of caution with which the Food Network approaches the idea of kids and kitchens always strikes me as a little extreme.  I understand that they have lawyers breathing down their necks about liability and the FDA and who knows what else, which is why everyone on the Food Network washes their hands obsessively.  But surely there must be a happy medium between caution and wrapping everyone in cotton wool?

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WND – Rambling & Housewifery

August 28, 2008

Unless I’m planning on doing something really interesting on Sunday, Saturday is my day off.  I don’t cook (usually).  I don’t run errands.  I don’t think about menu plans, or go to the grocery store.  I might go shopping, but not that kind of shopping.

Sunday, on the other hand, is my day for being a good little housewife.  I make a menu plan.  I go to the grocery store, and clear out the fridge of old leftovers and milk that’s gone bad.  I take the trash out and try to figure out if this is a recycling week or not (usually solved by looking up the street to check whether my neighbors have put theirs out, since they apparently actually kept the schedule that the town sends out every year).  I do laundry and change my sheets.  I’m so very very boring. Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – Are You Paranoid Enough?

August 21, 2008

After many years of cooking for groups of people I have to say I agree with the sentiment:  It’s not whether you’re paranoid, it’s whether you’re paranoid enough.

I have a running list in my head of everything that everyone who comes to Dinner regularly is allergic to, and what they’ll eat but rather wouldn’t, and what they’ll carefully pick out of any given dish.  I also have a running list of substitutions, additions, subtractions and the point at which I don’t care if they pick it out of a dish and leave it on the side of the plate.  On the other hand, if you haven’t been to Dinner in more than six months, I’ve probably forgotten what your food quirks are and will require reminding.

Case in point, when a friend and her boy came up to visit last month I sent about five emails checking to make sure that they ate meat/eggs/dairy products.  The final response was more or less an exasperated, “Yes.  Do your worst woman.” Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – Taking the Easy Way Out

August 14, 2008

We were up in Vermont this past weekend for the annual antique car show. It was unexpectedly gorgeous in Stowe – we’d been threatened with a weekend of rain and gloom and instead got clear blue skies and sunshine. However, the drive up and the drive back were both nightmares of bad traffic and inexplicable traffic jams and I was exhausted by the time we got home on Sunday night.

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WND – Paean to Summer Vegetables

August 7, 2008

The hard part about Dinner isn’t making Dinner, or figuring out how to time everything so that it’s ready at the same time. That’s just a question of practice. The hard part about Dinner is coming up with something to make every week. There comes a time in every week, usually sometime between Friday afternoon when I’m willing the work day to end and Sunday morning when I’m making a grocery shopping list, when I say plaintively, “I don’t know what I’m going to make for Dinner this week.”

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WND – The Beauty of Chaos

July 31, 2008

Everyone has a scrap recipe book. It’s that thing that holds the accumulation of recipes torn out of cooking magazines, and scribbled on scraps of paper, and printed out from websites. It’s usually a binder or a box that’s stuffed to overflowing with no discernible method to its madness. It’s full of recipes you make all the time, and recipes you’ve never thought about again after you stuck them in there. It’s a combination of recipes that you got from friends, and ones that you insisted your mother give you, and ones you just thought sounded interesting when you read about them and tore them out even though you know you’ll never ever make them.

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WND – Farmer’s Market Addiction

July 24, 2008

I hear that the first step is admitting that you have a problem . . . . I have a problem with farmer’s markets.

They’re so enticing. They make me want to buy far more fruit and vegetables than we can possibly eat before they go bad. They make me want to buy vegetables that I know I don’t like just because they look so pretty sitting there in cheerful jumbled piles. I am lured by the huge glowing purple eggplants, and the muted greens and yellows of summer squash. I am seduced by the earthy mounds of yellow and magenta beets. Read the rest of this entry ?

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