Pardon that brief interruption in posting. I don’t know if you heard, but the San Francisco Giants won the World Series for the first time in 56 years. And, just for future reference, you can prep for a dinner, attend crazy street celebrations and still finish eating at a semi-reasonable hour.
WND/TND – Stuck a Feather In His Cap
November 3, 2010
I go through cooking phases. There are some weeks when nothing sounds appealing and menu planning is an exercise in whatever seems like it will be the least amount of work. Then there are weeks when there are more recipes I want to try than there are meals in the day. This is a week when everything is making my mouth water and my fingers itch to be at home in my kitchen cooking. Read the rest of this entry »
WND/TND – I see Queen Mab hath been with you
October 28, 2010
We had an almost full house for Dinner this week – only missing one regular member of Dinner who was off chanting to the Lord (otherwise known as rehearsing for a performance of Hildegarde von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum). I feel as though I have welcomed all my wayward ducklings home, which is such a horrifyingly Lisa Geddes kind of thought that I need to excuse myself for a moment to go scrub my brain with bleach and read something scandalous to try and eradicate any evidence of even the transient passage of such a thought through my mind. All this being true however, it was nice to have a full table again. Clearly we should have moved Dinner months ago. Read the rest of this entry »
WND – Never Trust Someone Over 30
October 21, 2010
First things first. Check it out, Jes has started up Dinner on the West Coast again, and finally got around to making apple sauce, three years after she said she really wanted to try it out.
Secondly, a small, but wordy, administrative note:
One of the reasons that Dinner works is because we’ve been around for so long. People will attempt to schedule their lives around Dinner because it was on their schedule long before whatever else they might be doing was. However, sometimes real life conspires against us all Read the rest of this entry »
MND: the West Coast Redux
October 19, 2010
Apparently, it only took me three years to get my act together and make this dinner (see the first comment on the linked post). It was worth it. Our brief summer is now fading into memory and while that usually means that it’s time for chili… For the next generation of MND, I decided to start off with my idea of comfort food. Thus the most traditional southern dinner imaginable. Read the rest of this entry »
WND – Introducing Fancy Molasses (and her cousin Black Strap)
October 14, 2010
I admit it, I’m a snob, but I don’t get the point of cake mixes. I mean, okay I do. They’re cheap, convenient and simple enough that small children (or Sandra Lee) can make them without supervision. On the other hand, they also don’t taste particularly good. If I’m going to spend the calories on a piece of cake, I want it to be a really good piece of cake, and box mix and frosting from a can just doesn’t hack it for me. Read the rest of this entry »
WND – In which I fail at birthdays, but am graciously forgiven
October 7, 2010
Last Friday I was having a conversation with a coworker in which he explained to me that the reason he could never move to suburbia was because he hated yuppies. I was relieved of the necessity of pointing out that as a commercial real estate broker who owned his own house and was married with an infant he was pretty much the definition of a yuppie by him waving his hand and saying, “Yes, yes I know I’m a yuppie, but that doesn’t mean I want to live near them.” Which okay, I can understand that. I make fun of the people who shop at Whole Foods even as I’m going up to Wilson Farms to buy organic free range eggs, organic milk in a glass bottle and opting for the locally sourced Macoun apples versus the Granny Smiths from Wisconsin. Hypocrisy and I are good friends. Read the rest of this entry »
WND – For His Heart Was Pure
September 23, 2010
Most dinners, no matter how simple they are, seem to produce a disproportionate number of dishes. Even just grilled chicken with greens and roasted sweet potatoes, which is close to the easiest dinner I can think of, requires two pans and a baking sheet to cook. That doesn’t even take into account the prep tools (grater, knife, dish to marinate the chicken, chopping board), or the serving dishes. The cooking part of dinner I quite enjoy, the cleaning up portion of the evening less so. Thus, the meal that can be made in one pot, contains all the elements of a balanced meal – protein, starch, vegetable – and, as a bonus, can be made in 45 minutes or less is the holy grail of week night cooking. Read the rest of this entry »
WND – Recipes & Advanced Math
September 17, 2010
When they teach you things in school they never tell you why they’re going to be useful. I think this is a failing. I mean, I was the kind of kid who generally speaking liked school, and was never particularly averse to learning things just because, but even I might have been more enthusiastic about certain subjects if they’d been prefaced with some kind of practical application.
Granted, I never needed a real world application for learning about post Enlightenment revolutions in Eastern Europe or reading Jane Austen. This is probably a good thing because I’m not sure that 10th grade me would have been convinced by the argument that I would desperately need to know 19th C European geography in order to read a newspaper one day. I might have been on board with the idea that learning how to parse an English text would stand me in good stead for critical readings of Ethan Allen commercials and the problematic racial narratives of wildly lucrative, if not very good, movies in later years. Then again in 9th grade I didn’t pepper my conversation with words like agency, heteronormative and paradigm, so maybe not. I did, however, use words like parse, because see above about being that kind of kid. Read the rest of this entry »
WND – Each Peach Pear Raspberry?
September 9, 2010
The first week after Labor Day always makes me feel vaguely misanthropic. I wander around Boston thinking, ‘who are all you people, and why are you cluttering up what was my nice empty city?’ Double that sentiment for every time I have to avoid the hordes of students who have invaded. I’ll get over this in a week or so, but right now I’m still wishing it was summer and the city was empty and you could be guaranteed that nothing useful would happen after 11am on Friday. Read the rest of this entry »
Monday Night Dinner 