Monday Night Dinner

I have a love/hate relationship with America’s Test Kitchen.  On the one hand any recipe you get from America’s Test Kitchen will be absolutely reliable.  It will work as advertised, and it will result in the quintessential version of whatever it is that you’re making.  If you’re looking for the archetypical beef stew, or apple pie, or blueberry slump, you cannot do better than referring to America’s Test Kitchen for a recipe.

On the other hand, in their quest for perfectly replicable results and classic recipes they often end up adding about seventeen more steps than I think are necessary, or am willing to contemplate doing.  I’m sure that their garlic bread with two kinds of garlic – slowly cooked in a little butter until sweet and nutty, and also sprinkled on raw at the last minute for punch – and eight steps is the best garlic bread in the world and if garlic bread had aspirations, this is what it would aspire to be.  But, I also think that’s a lot of work for garlic bread. Read the rest of this entry ?

If I see one more Dunkin’ Donuts ad for iced coffee to “cool you off during those hot summer days”, or get another email from Anthropologie suggesting “sultry colors for spicy days”, or have to watch another episode of Barefoot Contessa where she picnics outside in the sunshine I may snap and do something drastic. Like move to England in search of the sun, it looks lovely and sunny at Wimbledon.

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In which baby showers are had, the cause of the recent bad weather is determined, and the limitations of etch-a-sketch are discovered . . . .

The baby shower was a success.  It wasn’t outside, since while Saturday dawned sunny and beautiful and the temperature rose to the heady heights of the mid-70s, we paid for it on Sunday with endless drizzle and temperatures that were back in the low 60s.  We are all, I’m afraid, paying the price for my vanity.  I was the one that bought the white sundress three weeks ago in the expectation that it might be summer soon and I would be able to wear cute little sundresses to work.  Louisa May Alcott is rolling over in her grave.  Read the rest of this entry ?

Mild panic is my default state for party planning. We’re throwing a baby shower for a friend this weekend and I’ve been planning the menu for the past three weeks. It’s not that it takes three weeks to plan a menu for ten people, but that’s when I sent out the invitations and therefore that’s when I started obsessing about it. On the downside I’ve revised the menu about once a day for the past three weeks. On the upside, I’ve only made one grocery shopping list, and I’ve mostly refrained from writing my ‘To Do’ list for Saturday more than once. In fairness, when I redo my ‘To Do’ lists multiple times at least once is because even I can’t always read my handwriting. This just means I would never be invited to be part of a medieval scriptorium, not that I’m completely OCD. Read the rest of this entry ?

It was my 10 year college Reunion this past weekend. I didn’t end up going for a variety of reasons that aren’t even remotely interesting, but it has made me terribly nostalgic for college. All things considered the food at Bryn Mawr was really pretty good. Oddly enough exactly the same food a mile down the road at Haverford was terrible. This can clearly be attributed to the distressing presence of testosterone on their campus, or possibly it was because they had one dining hall to feed 1200 students and we had three and a half.

The problem is that when you have 1200 women who’ve spent four years being taught to think critically about everything – Foucault, Bede, Virgil, Nietzsche – it starts to spill over into other parts of life. You’ll be innocently watching something on TV – Dawson’s Creek perhaps, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and all of a sudden you find yourself tilting your head sideways, narrowing your eyes slightly, and commenting on the post colonialist imagery of Ethan Allen commercials, or the negative gender expectations in Friendly’s ads, and of course the food in the dining halls. Read the rest of this entry ?

There are a lot of things to miss about living in Europe.

There’s the fact that in France and Italy even in the most run down bar with the sketchiest clientele, you are still guaranteed a good cup of coffee.

There’s the fact that even in Heathrow’s dingiest terminal at 6am (Terminal 4 – the one you fly out of to get to Malta – if you’re curious) you can still get an excellent fry up and tea made with boiling water poured over tea in the pot and then brought to the table. The sequence is important, because it’s in contrast to the dire American habit of bringing you a cup of microwaved water with a tea bag sitting next to it. You cannot achieve a good cup of tea this way, and one of the reasons that our favorite diner is our favorite diner is because they understand this. Also, they make really excellent sweet potato pancakes. Read the rest of this entry ?

The things that I can and can’t find in my local grocery store never cease to bemuse me.  I went in search of frozen pearl onions this week because peeling fresh pearl onions is for the birds.  I did not anticipate that this would become a quest and would turn out to be the most complicated part of making Coq au Vin.  I blithely assumed that every grocery store would have 12 oz bags of frozen pearl onions.  Oh how wrong I was.

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I hate being sick.  This is not an earth shattering secret.  Everyone hates being sick.  I’m particularly bitter about this cold since it’s finally nice weather outside, and being sick when it’s sunny and warm always feels like adding insult to injury.   No, my deep dark secret is that I don’t like chicken soup.  I don’t really like any variation on chicken soup either.  I don’t like matzo ball soup.  I don’t like chicken & dumplings.  I feel like such a bad sick person. Read the rest of this entry ?