Menus for the week: Jan 18

Brussels Sprout & Mushroom Ragout
from Vegetarian Suppers
~~
Walnut Crostini with Cambozola & Pears
from Small Plates
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Buckwheat Crepes with Fried Eggs
from Vegetarian Suppers
~~
Guacamole & Chips
n/a
~~
Leap year cocktail
from what’s-its-name cocktail book

The media tells me that during a recession, people nest (tangential: and so big-screen TVs may do OK after all). During a recession, we all hunker down: conserve resources, have friends over for dinner, reduce-reuse-recycle, save.

And indeed, this weekend I spent two nights out of town, but at a friend’s house rather than a hotel, and contrary to custom there was no fancy restaurant involved. Instead, last night H made paella and we played with the baby and drank wine in the living room and looked out at the lake.

Today I logged on to PlanetOrganics.com to check out my upcoming produce order, and rather than my usual attitude of ‘let’s see what’s in the vegetable box and cross our fingers that it goes together to create dinner,’ which does occasionally result in my throwing out things that I either didn’t have time to prepare or just didn’t get around to, this week I planned what I will cook. See above. I’m assuming some nights of bread and cheese and a frozen pizza or two and fruit salad and mac-and-cheese and a couple of nights out.

Given that this week I’m also going to a Sharks game and presenting to one of our Most Senior Execs at work and trying to make progress on the Crazy Project and going to the gym three times (three! not two like last week!) and probably some other stuff too, I figure this is plenty ambitious. One relatively fancy thing, two simple yummy standbys, and a medium-difficulty. Not bad, I hope. The mushrooms are there as a tease, to get me to do the most complicated thing early-on, before they have time to go bad. If I can pull that off, the others will be easy by comparison.

Cake in a mug

This is too cool not to share: cake in a mug (from Wired). I may have to request that the break-room staff start stocking eggs & flour.....

...and no, I didn't keep The Vegetarian Epicure

I was tempted, I admit, but I eventually decided that since I’d end up editing most of the recipes pretty heavily, it was easier to just write down the best titles and use them as an idea list. There’s only so much bookshelf space I’m willing to give to period pieces, and Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook has dibs.

Housework June 22-28: do I do anything that isn't food-related?

The list of housework items below leads me to believe that no, I do not. Things are a bit skewed at the moment, though, because my guy is in the middle of going through a bunch of his stuff (5k books - I am not exaggerating) and since they are in stacks all over the floor, I’m suppressing what would otherwise be a powerful urge to mop. As it is, I’m wearing slippers indoors because the floors are slightly gritty (you wanted to know that, didn’t you?) - less the result of real neglect and more a reflection that since it’s summer, we tramp in and out a lot from the back yard.

Soon this will all be resolved - or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

June 28: 3.5 hours
I always spend more time on housework on the weekends - partly because I cook, partly because I garden, and partly because I like going through things and throwing them out (you would think this would mean I have nothing left, but no).

1. 1.5 hour: French toast with fresh plums for breakfast, and two loads of dishes
2. 1 hour: going through my three-inch-high stack of old Cook’s Illustrated while chanting my cooking-magazine mantra: “You don’t need the hard copy! That’s why you have an online subscription!”
3. .5 hour: rescuing the wisteria, cilantro, and fuschia from crispy sunstroke death in too-small pots
4. .25 hour: dinner prep: leftover vegetable soup from two days ago plus a frozen pizza contributed by my guy

June 27: . 5 hours
My guy went out by himself to a David Sedaris book-signing, so I got self-indulgent for dinner and ate a bowl of straight pasta sauce. Yummmmm.....OK, I also had some of it on toast with mozzarella. Grand total: 15 minutes. I’m sure I also put something away (mail?) so chalk that up for another 15 minutes. No time on breakfast prep due to the awesomeness of Donut Friday, which my friend B was kind enough to put on Calendar so I’d actually remember to go.

June 26: .5 hours
... all of which was spent making bruschetta.

June 25: 1 hour
Made vegetable soup from scratch. It rocked, in spite of my initial skepticism of shredded carrots and grits (grits?!) in soup. This was my first recipe from Jacques Pepin’s Fast Food My Way, which for years I’d thought was actually my guy’s cookbook rather than mine. The flaws in my mid-term memory leave me wondering how I get anything done at all; the cookbook is actually inscribed to me (it was a gift), so there really shouldn’t have been any doubt about whose it was.

There’s probably 5 minutes in there to pour a bowl of cereal for breakfast, too.

June 24: .5 hour
Was out late with T for our weekly commiseration about attempting to write while holding down a full time job. Topic for discussion: how damn hard it is to keep focus when your whole day is spent skimming, rather than focusing on, data and stories.

June 23: 0 hours
Which matches up nicely with going out to see Sex and the City with a good girlfriend, which is how I spent my evening. Really no one should do housework on a day when they go to see Sex and the City.

June 22: 2 hours
Split up somehow between picking plums from the trees in the yard, a couple of loads of dishes, and making breakfast and dinner.

"If you have passed a joint around before dinner..."

I recently looked at my cookbook shelf and realized it needed pruning: not all the cookbooks fit on the shelf, so they're in a bunch of miscellaneous piles. I hate miscellaneous piles. Something had to go. The question was, what? Clearly I must keep the Gourmet cookbook and the Santa Monica Farmers Market cookbook; I use those all the time. Clearly I must also keep the Betty Crocker cookbook from the '40s because where else can you get two-tone sketches of wasp-waisted women in shirt-dresses & heels, cooking enormous turkeys while pondering whether a story about a kitten up a tree is appropriate for mealtime discussion? The Joy of Cooking is a staple and I learned to cook from the New Vegetarian Epicure, so those both had to stay. When I want something particularly interesting I turn to the Turtle Bay or one of several New Mexico cookbooks, so those had to stay too. 

Eventually I spotted the original Vegetarian Epicure. Once upon a time I bought this because I liked the New Vegetarian Epicure so much - but I have never actually made anything out of the original Vegetarian Epicure (except for cornbread, and that was in college). It seemed like a reasonable candidate. I took it into the backyard to read through it and consider whether my cooking repertoire would be seriously hampered by its disappearance. And that's when I ran across the quote that forms the title of this post: 

"If you have passed a joint around before dinner to sharpen gustatory perceptions, you most likely will pass another one after dinner, and everyone knows what that will do - the blind munchies may strike at any time."

This is embedded deep within the otherwise-completely-serious chapter on how to design menus. It forms the backbone of the author's argument for why you need to have a two-hours-after-dinner course in case anyone gets hungry again. 

Not only that, but about half the soup recipes call for 1 1/2 cups of heavy cream. And there's a Roquefort Mousse that lists the ingredients as "2 envelops gelatin | 1 cup light cream | 3 eggs | 10 oz Roquefort cheese | 1/2 cup heavy cream." 

I think the '70s must have been much, much, MUCH stranger than any of us born too late to remember them clearly realize.* 

* Yes, I know, I was born in the '70s, but my focus was more on my sandbox and blocks at that point, so it doesn't count for purposes of this post.  

Cheddar Cheese Soup

This was the first weekend I'd been home in a while, and it was about as perfect as a weekend can get.

Things that contributed to my happiness: a new Italian place that turned out to be great; warm weather (Saturday was my first hammock day of the year); buying an empty barrel from a winery to use as an herb garden planter, which my guy sawed in half for me and which cost less than a quarter as much as buying a pre-made planter in a garden store; sleep; and last but not least, cheddar cheese soup (yes, it can be vegetarian, just switch the stock).

Of course, when I woke up this morning, I thought, "Why do I hear a garbage truck? The trash pickup is on Monday." Pause while the sleep clears from my brain. "Oh. Today is Monday."

Mangoes and nukes

A while back my guy and I both heard the exact same story on NPR: some political interview (or maybe a discussion with an author?) mentioned, as a side note, that there are around 1000 varieties of Indian mangoes - and due to US-imposed trade restrictions, none of them are available in the US. The interviewee was from India, and hoped, rather wistfully, that maybe the trade restrictions would be lifted as part of a new nuclear treaty (?!) currently in discussion.

My guy and I both came home absolutely incensed, bursting in our front door to tell each other - did you hear?! There's an import restriction on mangoes! There are types of mangoes in the world that we have never even heard of! What is the US government thinking?! (Not to mention the whole nuclear tie-in. What the ...?!)

I nearly wrote to my Senator.

And now, I am happy to report that NPR has once again informed me (as a side note to another story) about the State of Mango Trade with India: relations have improved! Indian mangoes are now allowed into the US! After searching Google News I found several Indian papers covering the story (like this one), but the US press seems so far oblivious.

That is so sad. I mean, come on - cover some happy news for once (bloggers, however, are all over the story).

Oh well. I'm left with one question: where is this first shipment of mangoes going, and how can I find it? Is it, by any chance, heading for California? We have a large Indian population in the Bay Area.... I doubt my Senator is the right contact for this, but I have every intention of suggesting Indian mangoes to Whole Foods.

#1 reason to eat out when you don't really want to ...

... or at least would be equally happy eating in, and in fact already have some nice sausages that are just begging, begging!, to be devoured with the amazing horseradish mustard acquired at Hop Kiln Winery a couple of weeks ago:

Your fridge has stopped doing what fridges are supposed to do, namely, producing any coldness whatsover (in spite of the fact that the darn thing is less than 3 months old!) - and the service people can't come till Monday. End result is a nasty suspicion that the tasty-looking sausages, like the milk, the favorite fig Greek yogurt, and the very expensive cheese which was a nice present from your mother-in-law, have gone bad way before their time and should be thrown out.

Grrrr......

Practical cooking

A while back, I started a recipe blog at http://www.impatientcook.com. I enjoyed it, but really - after a couple of months I lost time & inclination to deal with it. One blog is all I'm up to at the moment, and as I've gotten more comfortable with this one, I've deprecated the other (ah, the joy of techno-corporate-speak!).

I am still putting recipes online, though; it works nicely with my habit of finding something good and then using it as a jumping-off point because a) I don't have thyme, and neither does the grocery store b) it would be better if I. . . . I'm an archivist at heart, so I like to save the originals, but I usually like my results, so I'll cook from those. The web is a much better venue for this sort of meandering thought-process than paper.

And so . . . see the recipe for Six Onion Soup I made last night. It was awesome. You should try it. (at least, if you like onions. If you don't like onions you should stay far, far away). Cheers!