I’m having a moment of schadenfreude at the recent backlash I’ve seen at the organic foods/eco movement. Or well, not precisely schadenfreude, but the warm glow that comes with seeing someone get a little of the comeuppance you’ve thought they’ve deserved for several years. Read the rest of this entry ?
I like old cookbooks for the same reason that other people like horror movies. It’s that frisson of terror you get at the thought of what might be waiting at the bottom of the stair, or what fresh culinary horror could be lurking at the turn of the page. I find Norman Bates’ smiling slyly and saying, “Mother isn’t quite herself today,” and recipes that call for cans of condensed cheddar soup to be equally terrifying. Read the rest of this entry ?
I’m not the kind of cook who invents recipes. If I want a specific flavor combination I tend to go in search of a recipe that will provide that for me. I edit recipes on the fly sometimes – more cinnamon, less stock, a little heavier on the paprika – but I don’t do a lot of wholesale inventing. Usually if I think a recipe needs that much help I’ll go find a recipe that I think will actually work as written. However, this week I was well into my recipe before I realized how unworkable it was, and what I ended up making bears so little relationship to the recipe I started with I might as well have started from scratch. Read the rest of this entry ?
I acknowledge that I am not sane about the Oscars. I don’t mean about caring who wins – although I’ve seen more than a usual number of the movies up for awards this year and hoo boy did I have firm opinions about who shouldn’t win Best Picture/Best Director. Mercifully, the Academy chose to reinforce my faith in humanity this year rather than crush it like they did in 2006 so four years from now I won’t still be grousing about what should have won but didn’t. Sadly there were very few really entertainingly terrible dresses this year – which, let’s face it, is the real reason I watch the Oscars. There was far too much pale pink, and flesh-tones, and Miley Cyrus needed to stand up straight (apparently Lauren Bacall agrees with us on this, which is reassuring because it means that I could be turning into a classy dame and not just channeling my father) but nothing that approached the cheerful insanity of Bjork’s swan dress from 2001, although that is the gold standard for insane Oscar dresses and would be hard to beat.
All that being true, the reason I like entertaining for the Oscars is because it’s an excuse to experiment and make things I’m not entirely sure people will like (b’stilla), things that are just too rich for everyday (cauliflower tart), and things that are just fun (pickled grapes). The Oscars are a chance to fiddle with appetizers and try things in small quantities because I’m not entirely sure what they’ll taste like, and if they’re not entirely successful it won’t be disastrous because there are other things on the table to eat. Read the rest of this entry ?
I firmly believe that there should be a vegetable on the table at all meals. I don’t think it count unless it’s a green vegetable – or tomatoes, because tomatoes are totally a vegetable in my book. But, when it comes to eating them I tend to smother them with something else that’s on the plate to mask the taste – the sauce that came with the meat, or a forkful of mashed potatoes. I know I’m supposed to like my vegetables, and I’ve never served a meal that didn’t include a green vegetable (unless I’m cooking on a weekend and have run out of salad, in which case it’s possible that I’ll count tomato sauce as a vegetable). I just wish I liked them more, but honestly just not so much. Read the rest of this entry ?
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 ?
The Food Network has a new show on called “The Worst Cooks in America”. I had hopes for it, mostly because the promo of the two professional chefs staring in horrified bemusement at the man who’d boiled a whole chicken was entertaining. The premise of the show is that they’ve found 12 of the worst cooks in America – as nominated by their friends and families – and in a couple of months they’ll turn at least two of them into cooks who can fool professional food critics into thinking they’re eating a meal prepared by one of the host chefs and not by one of the (presumably now formerly) worst cooks in America.
The promos for the show were really entertaining in a shadenfreude reality TV kind of way – seriously, who boils a whole chicken? Read the rest of this entry ?
Monday Night Dinner 
