Posts Tagged ‘Meat and Seafood’

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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 ?

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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 ?

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WND – Top 10

June 17, 2010

We moved an average of every two years when I was growing up. The top ten list of things I learned from this runs something like this:

– Picking up marbles from bowls of soapy water with chopsticks is not as universal a party game as I thought it was when I was 8 (we lived in Hong Kong, you start with m&ms and work your way up to marbles).

– Europe is awesome, not the least of which because if you drive about 4 hours in any direction you’re going to be in another country with an entirely different language, currency, and food (yes, I’m still bitter about the Euro).  Also, it gives you a totally unfair advantage when memorizing slides of medieval buildings for an art history class. Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – Same Batplace

January 7, 2010

I believe in the power of a pair of 3 ½” heels, not just because I’m short, but because they make awesome clicking noises when you walk across marble floors and that is the universal sound of being a grown-up (well for women anyway).

I believe that foie gras is one of the best things you can eat, and that the santon we saw on the market was of a duck being fattened up with an eye to a nice foie gras at Christmas, not a beloved pet being hand fed, no matter what the woman behind the counter said.  I know I speak English, but that doesn’t actually make me an idiot. Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – Weight Lifting

December 10, 2009

This is the part where I admit that I’m the most boring person in the entire world.  I get excited about kitchen equipment.  I’m like a bad parody of a 1950s housewife.  My parents asked what I wanted for Christmas/birthday and all I could really come up with was gloves (because I lost one of mine at the end of last winter – and why is is that you only ever lose one glove and never the pair?) and a Dutch oven.  Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – Ad Majorem Gloria Orangae

October 8, 2009

spices

This past Saturday was the 435th anniversary of the Siege of Leiden which is otherwise known in my house as the long historical story with no good food at the end (as opposed to the Escalade which is a long historical story which ends in chocolate and marzipan).

For those of you who may be a little fuzzy on your 16th C Dutch history, the Siege of Leiden was part of the 80 Years War during which the Dutch successfully overthrew their Spanish feudal lords and set themselves up as an independent nation.  The impetus for the war was mostly about taxation, with side excursions into the growing popularity of Anabaptism in the low countries which the Spanish (justifiably) saw as a threat to the Catholic faith.

In the year of our Lord 1574 the Duke of Alba laid siege to the town of Leiden which was a hot bed of radicalism and revolution.  Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – Of Shoes and Ships and Ceiling Wax . . .

June 11, 2009

pea strings

I was idly flipping channels a couple of Sundays ago and ran across Sandra Lee’s new show on the Food Network.  It’s called “Sandra’s Money Saving Meals”, and I paused to watch it.  It’s indicative of the current financial environment that this kind of show has a place on the Food Network, and given her upbringing Sandra Lee brings a certain amount of authority to the show that I suspect other Food Network Chefs would lack, so I was curious about what it was like.

In the end I was torn between deeply amused and somewhat disturbed by the show.  On the one hand, it’s entertaining because Sandra Lee has branded herself on the Food Network with the prescription of 70% store bought/30% homemade.  But of course that costs money, so on the budget show she cooks everything from scratch.  There isn’t a single instance of store bought sauces or mixes, because it is cheaper to use real ingredients (it also tastes better, but that’s a separate issue).  On the other hand, I was concerned by the sheer lack of vegetables being presented.  In the five shows, and 33 recipes that have aired so far only three recipes have involved vegetables (five if you decide to count spaghetti sauce as a vegetable, which granted I do all the time but acknowledge isn’t really a vegetable). Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – Things I Fail to Understand

May 28, 2009

cucumber peel

I had something different that I was going to write this week, about Whole Foods and comment cards, and how they’re both similar and dissimilar to the napkin notes we used to leave for Dining Services in college.  But, it stubbornly refuses to come to a graceful conclusion, so instead I give you a random collection of grievances and observations, and other food related things I read on a regular basis.

Things I fail to understand –

– The entire concept of Tofu Wellington with shitake “bacon” (air quotes not actually mine, but well deserved nonetheless).

– People who scratch themselves in public.  I’m not talking about a discrete rub along your thigh, or leaning down to get at that mosquito bite on your ankle.  I’m talking hand down the front of your sweatpants for a solid five minute scratch in the middle of the grocery store.  I stood in the longer checkout line even though I was in a hurry just so that I wouldn’t have to touch anything that he might have touched after his luxurious personal grooming session in the baking goods aisle. Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – If I was stranded on a desert island . . .

March 5, 2009

cut-squash3

In a shocking turn of events I found myself watching the Food Network this weekend and ended up watching one of the new shows, “Ask Aida” while I ate my breakfast*.  The premise of the show is that Aida, who is the Food Editor for Chow.com, prepares a relatively simple meal while answering questions emailed in from viewers.  This is not a new concept, Sara Moulton did it way back when the Food Network first started, only she did it with the added terror of live calls from viewers and the possibility that they would ask a question she had no idea how to answer.  Most of the time I find that people email in with questions they could have found the answer to if they’d spent five minutes with google, but this time someone emailed in to ask what ten staples she recommended everyone keep in their pantry. Read the rest of this entry ?

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WND – Oscars 2009

February 25, 2009

This 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.

kool-icles1

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