Posts Tagged ‘Side Dish’

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

March 5, 2009

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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 ?

Posted in *Petra | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

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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.

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Posted in *Petra, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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WND – Let’s Party Like It’s 1517

February 12, 2009

apple-peel

Apparently the world wants to party like it’s the Middle Ages. If it isn’t news that the Catholic Church is bringing back indulgences (did they learn nothing from the Reformation?), it’s articles in the New York Times about people turning off their refrigerators. To be fair, the New York Times sounds as skeptical about the whole endeavor as I feel.

There’s being green, and being a locavore, and being conscious of your carbon footprint, and then there’s turning the clock back 60 years. Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in *Petra | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

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WND – Cleaning Up the Fridge

December 18, 2008

lemon-juicer

My roommate and I have a deal.  She doesn’t ask me to buy boxed macaroni & cheese, and I pretend not to notice that she’s snuck PAM cooking spray into the pantry while I’m out of town.  She watches Disney movies when I go away, and I watch ridiculously cheesy romantic comedies when she’s away.  It works well for us.

This was the last Dinner before I go to my parents for Christmas.  It was therefore the last chance I had to use up the various things in my fridge that I know my roommate won’t eat while I’m gone, and that will have gone bad by the time I get back.  There’s some unfathomable number of mushrooms in the fridge.  I clearly bought them to make something, but I can’t remember for the life of me what it was.  Possibly it was the same dinner for which I bought an enormous quantity of green beans.  Then there’s the 4+ lb of butternut squash that I bought a month or so ago with the intention of making soup.  I never got around to roasting the squash, and while it’s not going to go bad in the 10 days I’ll be gone I’m of a mind to clean up the kitchen before I leave. Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in *Petra, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 10 Comments »

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WND – Knife Dropping & Other Kitchen Skills

September 4, 2008

I have to ask, have you ever dropped a knife while you were cooking in such a way that you were worried it was going to slice your feet?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I ask because the advertising for “Cook With Your Kids” Week on the Food Network has started and the degree of caution with which the Food Network approaches the idea of kids and kitchens always strikes me as a little extreme.  I understand that they have lawyers breathing down their necks about liability and the FDA and who knows what else, which is why everyone on the Food Network washes their hands obsessively.  But surely there must be a happy medium between caution and wrapping everyone in cotton wool?

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Posted in *Petra | Tagged , | 5 Comments »

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WND – Taking the Easy Way Out

August 14, 2008

We were up in Vermont this past weekend for the annual antique car show. It was unexpectedly gorgeous in Stowe – we’d been threatened with a weekend of rain and gloom and instead got clear blue skies and sunshine. However, the drive up and the drive back were both nightmares of bad traffic and inexplicable traffic jams and I was exhausted by the time we got home on Sunday night.

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Posted in *Petra | Tagged , | 7 Comments »

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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.

Roast Chicken. Run!

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

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WND – Paean to Summer Vegetables

August 7, 2008

The hard part about Dinner isn’t making Dinner, or figuring out how to time everything so that it’s ready at the same time. That’s just a question of practice. The hard part about Dinner is coming up with something to make every week. There comes a time in every week, usually sometime between Friday afternoon when I’m willing the work day to end and Sunday morning when I’m making a grocery shopping list, when I say plaintively, “I don’t know what I’m going to make for Dinner this week.”

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WND – The Beauty of Chaos

July 31, 2008

Everyone has a scrap recipe book. It’s that thing that holds the accumulation of recipes torn out of cooking magazines, and scribbled on scraps of paper, and printed out from websites. It’s usually a binder or a box that’s stuffed to overflowing with no discernible method to its madness. It’s full of recipes you make all the time, and recipes you’ve never thought about again after you stuck them in there. It’s a combination of recipes that you got from friends, and ones that you insisted your mother give you, and ones you just thought sounded interesting when you read about them and tore them out even though you know you’ll never ever make them.

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Posted in *Petra | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

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WND – Farmer’s Market Addiction

July 24, 2008

I hear that the first step is admitting that you have a problem . . . . I have a problem with farmer’s markets.

They’re so enticing. They make me want to buy far more fruit and vegetables than we can possibly eat before they go bad. They make me want to buy vegetables that I know I don’t like just because they look so pretty sitting there in cheerful jumbled piles. I am lured by the huge glowing purple eggplants, and the muted greens and yellows of summer squash. I am seduced by the earthy mounds of yellow and magenta beets. Read the rest of this entry ?

Posted in *Petra | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

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