Monday Night Dinner

In hindsight – actually even in foresight, but let’s ignore that – soup + plated food for a dinner when there were too many people to seat everyone around the table was maybe not the wisest decision. In my defense, I did try to think of something else to make when I learned that there were going to be 10 people at Dinner this week. I futzed through epicurious looking for summer recipes, and I trolled a variety of my favorite blogs looking for inspiration, but when it came down to it all I really wanted to eat was corn soup and this decadent sounding tomato tart that I’ve been eying since David Lebovitz posted about it way back in May. All the other recipes I came across just left me bored, and nothing is worse than making food you find boring, because nothing will convince you that other people will like it if you yourself are bored by it. Read the rest of this entry ?

At work I have a space heater under my desk, a wool scarf hung over the back of my chair, and a pair of arm warmers in my desk drawer that make me feel like Cyndi Lauper circa 1985, but also stop my hands from aching in the frigid air of my office so I’ll accept the hit for the dubious fashion statement (other comments from my office – ‘I thought you’d broken both your arms,’ and ‘hello, Debbie Gison’). At lunch I go outside and lie in the sun, and it takes 20 minutes for my feet to defrost after a morning at work. Some of this is a reflection on exactly how cold my office is, but a lot of it is a reflection on the fact that I’m just always cold. Read the rest of this entry ?

In my grandmother’s house there was a fire alarm mounted on the wall of the kitchen.  Anytime you turned on the stove to cook something more complicated than water the fire alarm would inevitably go off, and someone would have to grab a towel and use it to frantically fan the air in front of the fire alarm until it stopped shrilling.  I always wondered what had possessed my grandparents to mount a fire alarm in their kitchen, or what had possessed them to leave it there for decades given that it went off every time you tried cook anything.  I mean, for me it was just part of the tradition of summer – standing in the corner of the kitchen with a towel at the ready while dinner was being prepared – but if I had to live with it year round I would have found somewhere else to put it. Read the rest of this entry ?

I ran across a recipe for leek bread pudding last week and was on fire to make it for Dinner. I spent a while trolling for braised chicken recipes on the theory that I didn’t want anything else that would need to bake in the oven at the same time as the bread pudding, and didn’t feel like pan frying chicken again since I did that last week. I wound up with a recipe that didn’t go with bread pudding at all so I nixed the leek bread pudding for Dinner, and made it for us on Tuesday night (verdict – disappointing, don’t need to make it again). What sold me on the Braised Chicken in Aromatic Tomato Sauce was one of the reviews which described the ingredient list as ‘reading like the contents of a medieval lord’s pantry’. Even as I nodded in agreement at the cinnamon, nutmeg, cumin and allspice, I thought well except for those pesky new world tomatoes*. Read the rest of this entry ?