Archive for the ‘*Petra’ Category

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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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WND – The “they’re breaking down the hegemonic structure of the heteronormative language system*” edition

July 19, 2008

You’d have to ask Jes what it’s like to meet us en masse for the first time. I can only imagine that it’s mildly terrifying. Strictly speaking on an individual basis we’re not particularly scary. But, we’ve all known each other for at least 10 years and we’ve been having dinner together once a week for most of that time. We don’t always communicate in full sentences anymore. A lot of the time we short hand ideas via various British comics – Eddie Izzard, the folks at Beyond the Fringe, the occasional influx of Yes, Prime Minister, although that’s mostly just me. We have multiple in jokes about homunculi (because well, once you have one they seem to multiply – the jokes, not the homunculi). We’ve had perfectly serious conversations about the composition and history of blood mead that sounded for all the world like we were contemplating serving it at our next party. Rest assured, to the best of my knowledge none of us has ever served anyone blood mead for any occasion. And, while having an opinion about which captain was the best captain isn’t a requirement, having the answer not be Janeway probably is*.
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WND – The Perils of Scury, or how I don’t eat my vegetables

July 10, 2008

Left to my own devices I have appalling eating habits. This is because I really only cook for other people. My roommate’s been away for two weeks at various library conferences and if it wasn’t for Dinner I’m not entirely convinced I would have eaten a vegetable in that time. I eat fruit in the form of smoothies and baskets of blueberries, but vegetables not so much.

This doesn’t actually make much sense. I like vegetables. I firmly believe that they are an important part of a balanced diet. I’ve never made a meal that didn’t include a vegetable (well, okay spaghetti, but tomato sauce counts as a vegetable, right?). But, I don’t really cook for myself – too many dishes, too much effort for just one meal – and I don’t tend to just snack on vegetables. I suppose that eventually I would start cooking for myself if I lived alone, but two weeks isn’t long enough to break me of the habit of viewing cereal as a perfectly acceptable dinner and Dinner comes along once a week and prevents me from developing scurvy. You’ll note the preponderance of vegetables in tonight’s Dinner.

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WND – You want me to do what?

July 3, 2008

Some of my best friends make recipes out of Martha Stewart Living.

This is actually true and not just a facetious statement, and since occasionally they bring us the fruits of their labors and thus far haven’t shown any signs of alien possession we call this quirky and endearing rather than insane.

Admittedly I occasionally read Martha Stewart Living – usually when I’m over for dinner at afore mentioned friends’ house – but I’ve never seen a recipe of hers and thought, “now that’s something I’m going to make”.  It isn’t that her recipes are unappetizing, it’s just that they’re unrealistic.  They’re for desserts that call for 30 eggs and involve three cakes stacked together to make a single centerpiece.  They’re for stews that have 18 steps and take five hours to make.  I lack that kind of patience.

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WND – The Curse of the Devilled Eggs is Lifted!

June 26, 2008

The single most useful part about this blog, for me at least, is keeping track of what I’ve made when.  My mother keeps a small journal of the meals she makes for guests so that she doesn’t repeat them.  While acknowledging the usefulness of this, I remain faintly horrified at the thought of being that organized.  It’s a little too Martha Stewart for me to wrap my head around.

I sat on my couch on Sunday morning in search of inspiration, which is a more polite, if less accurate, way of describing looking blankly at a wall and complaining to my roommate.  What I really wanted was devilled eggs – because clearly I’m a masochist and wanted to try again despite three fairly spectacular failures – but I felt like we’d had a dinner of summer salads just the other week.  But!  The blog revealed that the last time we had summer salads was in the beginning of May, it’s just biscuits that I’ve made more recently, and really, I ask you, can you have too many biscuits?*

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WND – No Dinner

June 19, 2008

No Dinner this week (although I assume that everyone did eat dinner last night). My parents were in town and took me out to dinner instead.

Back to the regularly scheduled mischief and mayhem next week.

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WND – Grilled Chicken Salad

June 12, 2008

There are advantages to living in the US – libraries, book stores, movies, TV – but I wouldn’t class grocery stores as one of them.

What I like about shopping in France is that by and large it still operates on the principal of buying your food only 2-3 days in advance. There are green grocers and butchers and bakeries in the middle of cities – not just in the residential areas, but in the financial districts as well. Food and food shopping hasn’t been relegated to the outskirts and the suburbs. I am always frustrated by the fact that if I forget something at the grocery store on the weekend there is nowhere easy for me to pick it up during the week. There’s no small grocery store on my way home where I can go to buy a can of tomatoes, or bag of flour. There’s a 7-11 where I can get some milk, but no eggs or cheese. There’s a farmer’s market in town twice a week during the summer, and while I can get amazing tomatoes there I can’t pick up a box of pasta. If I forget something when I go shopping on the weekend it means that at some point during my week I’ll have to get in the car to go back to the grocery store to pick it up.

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WND – Food Snobbery or No Tofurky Please

June 5, 2008


Here’s the thing. I’m a food snob. I freely admit this, and while I don’t always say it out loud I’m pretty sure it’s not going to come as shocking news to anyone who knows me.

It’s not so much that I don’t believe in tofu, it’s that I think that tofu has a time and place and if I chose to mostly avoid that time and place that’s my own business. What I emphatically don’t believe in is tofu dressed up to taste like bacon or sausage or beef. If you want to be a vegetarian, that’s fine*. Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – Ice Tea vs. Mac & Cheese

May 29, 2008

Memorial Day weekend heralded the first time this year that it’s been hot enough to make ice tea.

My mother is from the South. Mostly this means that I think that the plural of you is y’all and that dark meat in your chicken salad is tacky. It also means that I’m serious about my ice tea.

Ice tea in my house was always made with cold water and a sufficient number of tea bags in a glass pitcher and then left to steep in the sun until it is a warm golden brown color. There are lots of people who make their ice tea by brewing tea and then leaving it to cool, but I find that sun tea is less tannic tasting. And, it’s fanciful, but I always think you can taste the sunshine in the tea when you drink it.

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WND – The Trials of Yeast

May 22, 2008

I have a theory. Everyone has one thing that completely flummoxes them in the kitchen. It’s not something difficult. It’s something everyone else can do just fine, but completely eludes you.

Mine is bread.

Yeast and I have a troubled relationship. We have great first dates. We have an immediate chemistry. Then there’s the second date, and that’s where it all falls apart. Or, in my case that’s where it just falls, never to rise again. There’s never a third date.

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