Let’s take a moment to discuss space or, rather, my kitchen’s distinct lack of it. My kitchen has one 36-ish inch long section of counter and one 12 inch long section. That’s it. There’s space for one cutting board next to a bowl with maybe space for some (but never all) of your ingredients. There’s space for two people to be actively cooking… but not if you also want to open the fridge. Read the rest of this entry ?
Posts Tagged ‘Dessert’
WND – The Little Things in Life
May 6, 2010
Saturday morning started with a water main in one of the western suburbs rupturing. This doesn’t sound like a big deal until someone tells you that it was a 10’ wide water main that connects the Western Mass water supply to the water supply for the greater Boston area. The practical upshot of this was that from Saturday morning through Tuesday morning all of the Boston area – 30 communities, 700,000 homes and 2 million people were under a boil water order. Read the rest of this entry ?
WND – Belated Birthday Wishes
November 19, 2009
As I beat several cups of cream into whipped cream this week I found myself wondering, not for the first time, about how people make culinary leaps of logic. It doesn’t take all that much imagination to turn really heavy cream into whipped cream. Really heavy cream practically whips itself, and only a little bit more agitation will turn it into butter, and I can see how it might have accidentally happened the first time. Egg whites, on the other hand, are a lot less obvious. Who decided to stand around and beat those vigorously until they turned into a meringue the first time around? It takes a lot of beating to take egg whites from something that’s kind of slimy to something that’s fluffy and white, and I can’t say that I think it’s a logical transition. Read the rest of this entry ?
WND Extra – Baby Shower Recipes
June 25, 2009Spanish Omelet
6 Tbsp olive oil
1.5 lb (Yukon gold) potatoes
1 small onion, sliced thin
1 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
11 eggs*
Peel and quarter the potatoes, and then slice into ¼” slices. Slice the onion thinly and add to the potatoes. Toss with 4 Tbsp olive oil and ½ tsp salt and ½ tsp pepper. Read the rest of this entry ?
WND – In which my cat sadly doesn’t talk
April 30, 2009
Going to Wilson Farms in the Spring is always a battle between the person I kind of secretly want to be, and my common sense. My common sense says that I (a) don’t have a garden, (b) did not inherit a green thumb from either one of my grandmothers, and that (c) to call my interest in learning how to garden cursory would be exceedingly generous. But, I go up to Wilson Farms to do my weekly grocery shopping and I walk past flats filled with velvety purple pansies, and racks of enticing seed packets, and shelves of aromatic basil plants and I want to be the kind of person who gardens. Personally, I blame my childhood reading habits. Read the rest of this entry ?
WND – Oscars 2009
February 25, 2009This all started a couple of years ago when I was watching the first season of “Feasting on Asphalt”. In the course of their voyage across the United States Alton Brown and his crew ate a wide and weird variety of things, including koolicles at one stop somewhere in the deep deep South. Koolicles are dill pickles that have been removed from their brine and then marinated in Kool-Aid for several weeks to give them a nice unnatural fluorescent glow and a sweet sour flavor.
WND – Birthday Season 2008 – Part II
September 24, 2008
There are two schools of thought when it comes to soup. There are the people who think that soup is the perfect food, and is an end in and of itself. And, there are the people who think soup is lovely, but get to the bottom of the bowl and want to know where the rest of dinner is.
I grew up in a family that belongs to the first school of thought. Except for the unfortunate black bean soup my mother made when I was in high school that was promptly dubbed river sludge soup, I’ve pretty much never met a soup I didn’t like. My mother admittedly did not think it was the best soup she’d ever had, but didn’t think it was quite as bad as my father and I made it out to be.
SND – The Fiasco Version
August 7, 2008[Note: I started this entry…oh, 6 months ago? And am just now finishing it. Roasted chicken was just the thing to make… in February.]
I imagine that every self-taught cook has some dish that they’re absolutely petrified of for no good reason at all. Mine’s roasted chicken. Simple, right? Basically impossible to screw up, yes? Hundreds of time-tested recipes to choose from!
And yet, I have irrational fear of roasted chicken. But I decided to conquer that fear – to take on the roasted chicken and win! Which. I kinda did. An hour and half after all the rest of the food was already on the table.
No, I don’t know how it happened either.
So this entry is not about how to make the perfect roasted chicken. In the end, mine tasted pretty awesome, but I figure I’ll wait till I’ve cooked it a few more times and can actually offer pointers for how best to conquer the beast. Click on the link for side dishes and dessert.
Dinner:
Roasted Brussel Sprouts
Roasted Potatoes
Chocolate Mousse with Chambord Whipped Cream
WND – The “they’re breaking down the hegemonic structure of the heteronormative language system*” edition
July 19, 2008
You’d have to ask Jes what it’s like to meet us en masse for the first time. I can only imagine that it’s mildly terrifying. Strictly speaking on an individual basis we’re not particularly scary. But, we’ve all known each other for at least 10 years and we’ve been having dinner together once a week for most of that time. We don’t always communicate in full sentences anymore. A lot of the time we short hand ideas via various British comics – Eddie Izzard, the folks at Beyond the Fringe, the occasional influx of Yes, Prime Minister, although that’s mostly just me. We have multiple in jokes about homunculi (because well, once you have one they seem to multiply – the jokes, not the homunculi). We’ve had perfectly serious conversations about the composition and history of blood mead that sounded for all the world like we were contemplating serving it at our next party. Rest assured, to the best of my knowledge none of us has ever served anyone blood mead for any occasion. And, while having an opinion about which captain was the best captain isn’t a requirement, having the answer not be Janeway probably is*.
Read the rest of this entry ?
WND – My Colors are Blush and Bashful
April 17, 2008“The groom’s cake! It’s awful…it’s in the shape of a giant armadillo. Worse, the cake part is red velvet. People are going to be hacking into this poor animal that looks like it’s bleedin’ to death!” – Steel Magnolias –
Monday Night Dinner 