Posts Tagged ‘Starch’
September 10, 2012
It’s time for another set of food related pet peeves for no particular reason other than that I’ve spent quality time recently trying to work my way around the issues that they present (albeit none of them for this particular dinner).
1 – Restaurants that don’t have websites. Or, restaurants that only have place holder websites.
This is mostly because I like looking at menus, and even if the menu that you have up isn’t the menu that I’m going to be ordering from when I show up I like to have an idea of the prices and kinds of dishes that you serve. Read the rest of this entry ?
Posted in *Petra | Tagged Chicken, Side Dish, Starch | 2 Comments »
July 25, 2012
The other week as I was standing in the check out line at Wilsons and ruefully surveying my weekly purchase of bags of lemons, limes and oranges I made a flippant comment about how apparently I was worried we were all going to die of scurvy. The teenage checkout clerk shot me an alarmed look and asked in concerned tones, “Ma’am? Are you alright?” Read the rest of this entry ?
Posted in *Petra | Tagged Side Dish, Starch | Leave a Comment »
June 7, 2012
When I finished 10th grade everyone involved agreed that for their sanity and mine it was better that Chemistry and I part ways. I don’t know exactly what my mental block on Chemistry was, but I was terrible at it. The only parts of it that I even marginally understood were the parts where you set peanuts on fire and boiled water in a test tube from the resulting flame (to calculate the number of calories in a peanut), and balancing equations. The balancing equations part of chemistry I still wasn’t exceptionally good at, but at least derived a sense of satisfaction from making everything achieve a state of equilibrium on either side of the = symbol. This is also, I suspect, why I enjoyed doing math proofs (plus, at the bottom of math proofs you get to write Q.E.D. which always made me feel terrible erudite and like I was one step closer to inhabiting a British school boy novel). Read the rest of this entry ?
Posted in *Petra, Uncategorized | Tagged Side Dish, Starch, Vegetables | Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2012
I am normally the queen of delayed gratification. I can have a birthday present arrive in the mail weeks before my actual birthday and feel no overwhelming impulse to tear into the wrapping early. I wasn’t a child who went around shaking presents under the Christmas tree (at least, I don’t think I was). For me anticipation is genuinely half the pleasure. I love making restaurant reservations in advance and then perusing the menu online (at length and frequently multiple times) to build a sense of expectation for the enjoyment to come. Read the rest of this entry ?
Posted in *Petra | Tagged Chicken, Meat and Seafood, Side Dish, Starch | 4 Comments »
May 16, 2012
All right y’all, I need to have a conversation (okay, monologue) about a distressing recent trend in food television. By which I mean I want to talk about the television which is more about gluttony and conspicuous over consumption than it is about food. There are lots of food shows I find boring (Sandwich King), or pointless (Chef vs. City), or repetitive (Diners, Drive-ins & Dives), but lately there have started to be shows that I find actively offensive. Read the rest of this entry ?
Posted in *Petra | Tagged Chicken, recipe-repeats, Side Dish, Starch | 3 Comments »
May 14, 2012
Very occasionally aphorisms come true. In the first instance, virtue was both its own reward and the early bird caught the worm. Or, put another way, a couple of weekends ago I got myself up and dressed on Saturday morning long before I actually wanted to be awake and took myself off to the grocery store to get it out of the way so that I could have time for the more interesting parts of my weekend. The reward for my virtue? I scored two of the few bundles of early local asparagus at Wilson Farms. In fact, I had a bag of green beans in my hand when I spied the slender green stalks of local asparagus out of the corner of my eye, turned around, dumped out the green beans and grabbed for the asparagus. It’s possible the Produce Manager at Wilson Farms laughed at me a little when I squeaked in excitement. Ask me if I cared; I had asparagus. Read the rest of this entry ?
Posted in *Petra, Uncategorized | Tagged sandwiches, Soups, Starch, Vegetarian | 4 Comments »
May 14, 2012
I have a confession. I need my cookbooks to have pictures. This makes me feel like a little kid, but when I’m faced with a cookbook that’s just text I get lost and overwhelmed. I need pretty pictures of the food to go with the recipes. Partially this is for the simple reason that I believe in white space on the page like some people believe in the power of a good martini at 5pm on a Friday*. Partially it is because, like many people, I eat with my eyes first and I need/like to be enticed by what something looks like as well as by the description of the ingredients. And partially, it’s because I’m shallow and I just like the glossy food porn quality of the current cookbook market. Read the rest of this entry ?
Posted in *Petra | Tagged Chicken, Meat and Seafood, Side Dish, Starch | Leave a Comment »
April 13, 2012
Dear Everyone in the Food Industry:
Please stop tormenting me with exciting recipes for Spring produce. Yes, we’re having an early Spring (the fact that we’re having Spring at all is kind of remarkable) here in the Northeast, but it’s not that early. It’s not that I begrudge you your access to fresh produce after a long winter (except for how I totally do). It’s not that I don’t want you to post recipes for Spring sandwiches filled with hard boiled eggs, pickled onions and seared asparagus, and gorgeous appetizers of crostini with strawberries and peashoots, and noodles with kale & spicy rhubarb sauce (just so you know, y’all, this is getting made the instant I see rhubarb at the store); I can (and do) bookmark them for later experimentation and consumption. It’s just that, well, I’m positively green-eyed with jealousy of your Spring bounty. Read the rest of this entry ?
Posted in *Petra | Tagged Side Dish, Starch | Leave a Comment »
February 29, 2012
My office runs a Super Bowl pool every year, and every year I get asked multiple times if I want to participate. I get tired of finding clever non-offensive ways to say no (in my office an unexplained ‘no’ is not an acceptable answer). Most years I don’t even know who’s playing – although this year I did because it’s impossible to live in Boston and not know that the Patriots have made it to the Superbowl. This year my standard response was that I didn’t care about the Super Bowl, but if someone wanted to handicap the Oscars I’d be in like Flynn. Nobody too me up on my suggestion. Read the rest of this entry ?
Posted in *Petra | Tagged Meat and Seafood, pork, Salad, Side Dish, soup, Starch, Vegetables | 6 Comments »
February 9, 2012
When I was little we lived in a sequence of places that were nowhere particularly near Virginia. This is only relevant because Virginia was where my grandmother lived, and my mother and I used to spend a month visiting with her every summer. I loved the month we spent in Richmond, among other things it has left me with a lifelong appreciation for heat and humidity which pretty much nobody else I know shares. What I didn’t love was the process of getting there, which was long and tedious. I imagine it was even longer and more tedious for my mother who had to play the responsible adult in that scenario as opposed to being the bored 7 – 9 – 12 – 14 year old whose biggest responsibility was trying to sleep on the plane, picking at the food, and not being too much of a pill about traveling for 24 hours straight. Read the rest of this entry ?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged fruit, Side Dish, Starch | 5 Comments »
Monday Night Dinner 