Monday Night Dinner

Dinner September 3rd
Cauliflower Cheese
Chai Brined Pork Chops with Peach Skillet Sauce
Tomatoes
Salad Read the rest of this entry ?

Dinner August 27th
Asian Chicken Salad
Jammy Cornbread Read the rest of this entry ?

I sometimes buy things just because I’m curious (okay, mildly curious – not like buy frozen durian fruit curious). Sometimes this works out for me – amchoor (sour mango) powder is amazing. Sometimes it doesn’t – I have yet to do anything with the dried pomegranate seeds I bought at the same time I got the amchoor powder. And sometimes it falls somewhere in between. Read the rest of this entry ?

Let’s be honest, hands down, the world over, breakfast is the best meal of the day.  Breakfast food is just so wonderfully flexible.  It can be savory.  It can be sweet.  It can be a combination of the two.

In many parts of Asia, breakfast is a bowl of a thick savory rice porridge (congee) made with chicken (or pork) stock and served with slivers of meat and vegetables.  As someone who frequently salts & peppers her morning oatmeal, I think that sounds delightful.  In China, dim sum is a perfectly legitimate breakfast option, and you have to appreciate any country where breakfast can be made up of dumplings. Read the rest of this entry ?

For certain (flexible) systems of accounting Dinner is now 15 years old.  There was a whole convoluted logical reasoning behind this.  I don’t remember what it was, please don’t ask me to recreate it.  Suffice it to say we missed the 10th Anniversary of Dinner by several years and were entirely too impatient to wait for the 20th Anniversary to do something special; Jes was in town from California for her college reunion anyway; and, we wanted an excuse to get all dolled up and go out to dinner.

Anyway you count it, or slice it, that we’ve been doing this for 15 years is mind boggling.  It is also cause for celebration.  And, in our case, elaborate celebration involving Save the Date Cards, an official invitation, a formal menu at a fancy restaurant, and everyone getting dressed to the nines.

The 15th Anniversary of Dinner was like planning a very small scale wedding.  I have new found respect for all my friends who’ve pulled off wonderful weddings.   Read the rest of this entry ?

I was half watching an episode of Chopped the other night (one of the many many many cooking competition shows the Food Network has embraced in place of shows that are actually about cooking – rant for a different day) while I ate my dinner and checked my email. I glanced up, however, when one of the contestants was revealed to be deaf. It caught my attention because in one of his ‘to camera’ interviews he said that people didn’t expect a deaf person to be able to cook, but that after all you don’t need to hear to cook. Read the rest of this entry ?

Continuing on my recent theme of childhood nostalgia, or possibly by eager anticipation of being in London this year for Christmas, this is a meal brought to you by a trip my parents and I took around England when I was about nine. I can’t remember why we were there, or where else we must have gone in Europe on that vacation (on our way back from Hong Kong? I have no idea – Dad?). I do remember an endless stream of pub lunches eaten out on the patio because I was too young to be allowed in the pub room, and pint glasses of cold spicy ginger beer (non-alcoholic). I remember the chalk horse at Uffington,  the Iron Age earth works at Maiden Castle, the standing stones at Stone Henge (building a henge are we?), and wandering across the moors collecting tufts of wool left by wandering sheep (because I was the kind of kid who collected tufts of wool in the hopes of being able to card them and learn to spin them into wool – yes, I read entirely too much historical fiction as a child). Read the rest of this entry ?