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 ‘Side Dish’
WND – More than one standard deviation from the norm
November 18, 2010
Generally speaking I can tell how my week is going by how early in the week I make my menu plan, and therefore my grocery shopping list. The earlier in the week the list gets made, the worse the week is. Last week I didn’t get around to making my grocery shopping list until Friday evening because that was the first time I had time to breathe. This week I had my grocery list done by Monday afternoon, but that owes more to the fact that next week is Thanksgiving and I’ve had that menu plan down since early October than it does to the quality of my week thus far. This particular grocery shopping list is typed, itemized, has been double checked and includes a timetable for Thanksgiving. It’s not the most fussy list I’ve ever made, but it’s possibly in the running for the top 10. Read the rest of this entry ?
MND: Orange October and November
November 16, 2010Pardon 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.
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 – The Chalice from the Palace
July 15, 2010
One of the weirder parts about growing up is discovering where your taste diverges from your parents’ taste. When you’re a kid you eat what your parents eat – or well, you did in my house, I’ve heard tell of kids who will only eat white food, or round food, or frozen peas and Vienna sausages (she grew up to be a perfectly normal person who comes to Dinner every week and eats all sorts of things), but they didn’t live in my house. When I got my first apartment I started by cooking the foods that I’d grown up eating. Gradually I branched out and discovered a love affair with cinnamon, and how well dried fruit pairs with meat, and that while I don’t like coconut desserts I think coconut milk in savory dishes is the cat’s meow. Read the rest of this entry ?
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 ?
WND – CSI Boston
June 10, 2010
All due respect to Dorothy L. Sayers who writes a cracking good mystery, but I don’t think that dusting Turkish Delight with arsenic laced powdered sugar would kill many people these days. Putting arsenic in something chocolate on the other hand . . . we’ve long theorized that if you wanted to off your coworkers the best way to do it would be to poison something chocolate and then leave it in a public place. The trick is doing it so that not only do you not die, but also so that no suspicion falls on you for being the one person left standing. This wasn’t actually proved in practice this past Monday since everyone in my office is still alive and well, but the theory was definitely proved sound. Read the rest of this entry ?
WND – Dinner with a side of Schadenfreude
April 29, 2010
I’m having a moment of schadenfreude at the recent backlash I’ve seen at the organic foods/eco movement. Or well, not precisely schadenfreude, but the warm glow that comes with seeing someone get a little of the comeuppance you’ve thought they’ve deserved for several years. Read the rest of this entry ?
WND – Your Logic Is Not Like Our Earth Logic
April 8, 2010
What I wanted was asparagus, so what I bought was a pineapple. No wait, I swear this makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t make strictly logical sense but there was a train of thought that lead from one to the other. Read the rest of this entry ?
WND – And the moral of the story is . . . .
March 18, 2010
I’m not the kind of cook who invents recipes. If I want a specific flavor combination I tend to go in search of a recipe that will provide that for me. I edit recipes on the fly sometimes – more cinnamon, less stock, a little heavier on the paprika – but I don’t do a lot of wholesale inventing. Usually if I think a recipe needs that much help I’ll go find a recipe that I think will actually work as written. However, this week I was well into my recipe before I realized how unworkable it was, and what I ended up making bears so little relationship to the recipe I started with I might as well have started from scratch. Read the rest of this entry ?
Monday Night Dinner 