Archive for September, 2007
This Weekend in the Kitchen
An entire weekend of successes! It felt great to have everything come together and even better that my wife could see the advantages of her husband’s newest moodswing.
Here’s what we dined upon:
Friday night was a night without my wife Lisa, so I spent the large part of it tracking down the ingredients for Pancetta and Hominy Polenta. If one store had Polenta, it didn’t have Pancetta, vice versa, and absolutely none of them had hominy (and I went to five different stores!). I ended up making:
- A salad with gorgonzola dressing and crumbled gorgonzola
- Rib-Eye for One. I splurged and bought some aged beef from Stew Leonard’s. It was worth it.
A pretty tasty Cabernet Sauvignon I bought for the occasion accompanied it all, and although the night was planned as a movie marathon night, the food and the wine put me in a coma halfway through my first movie, A Night at the Opera.
My wife got home around 5 am on Saturday morning, so while she slept in, I made a big breakfast:
- Pancakes with warm Grade B Maple Syrup
- Brown Sugar Lacquered Bacon, the recipe for which advertised itself as a “bacon improvement” and, shockingly, it was. Who knew bacon could be improved upon?
She got some freshly brewed coffee along with it all, so it all turned out great.
For lunch I got to share some of that Gorgonzola salad I mentioned above, which I coupled with sliced fontina cheese and some pears.
Dinner’s highlight was not the main course, which was a Beef Stew we made at Dream Dinners. The highlight was the No Knead Bread. I had whipped up a batch of the dough the night before (in under three minutes, even) and we went through the very slight preparations for it together. The house was filled with the aromatic beef stew and the unmistakable smell of fresh bread. The bread was finished first and we slathered it with Kerry Gold butter, our eyes rolling back in our heads with each bite. Damn good bread.
Sunday morning was spent entirely in preparation for the coming weeks of cooking frenzy. We emptied out every drawer and cupboard, making the more frequently used items more accessible and storing the unused stuff (like our several unused cake caddies and the Butter Boy) in the closet. We whipped up another batch of pancakes before heading out to shop for more kitchen utensils and the night’s meal.
Dinner:
Every ingredient in the name Pancetta and Hominy Polenta proved near impossible to find, although find them we did, in seperate stores. The end result was well worth the effort, as was everything we made. Lisa was doubtful of the Rosemary Pears, but in the end enjoyed them even more than I did.
Lisa’s still referring to this as my “new cooking thing” in conversation but I hope it’s hear to stay. If I’m going to be fat, I might as well be fat from eating delicious food than another faceful of KFC.
President of 9/11 Survivor’s Network May Not Have Been in the Attack at All
Insanity: Tania Head, the President of the 9/11 Survivor’s Network may not have been in the attack at all. She claimed to be married to a man who died in the tower collapse whose family had never heard of her. Firefighter who saved her alsodied in the attack.Darjeeling Limited Prequel: Hotel Chevalier
Free on iTunes: Hotel Chevalier, the 13 minute prequel to Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited. Featuring Natalie Portman nude.I Hurt the Environment
I was going to post about how wasteful I was yesterday, but my actions today just compound the fact:
Yesterday I ordered, and had shipped with Two Day Shipping, a 32 ounce jug of Shady Maple Farms Grade B Maple Syrup.
Today, shipped separately, also with Two Day Shipping, I ordered a six-pack of 16 oz. cans of Carbon’s Golden Malted Waffle and Pancake Flour.
Counting transit and packaging, I’ve reduced the lifespan of humanity by at least another hour. Sorry.
What I’m Eating From…
Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools featured the Mr. Bento Lunch Jar last week and the concept was exactly what I was looking for. Eating out for lunch every day costs way too much and the kitchen in my office is just plain gross. The only happy medium seemed impossible: bring in hot food that’ll somehow stay hot until I was ready to eat lunch.
The Mr. Bento Lunch Jar is a large thermos with two vacuum sealed containers (one for soup or any kind of liquid, the other for solids) and two regular tupperware containers. The two vacuum sealed containers keep either hot or cold while the two tupperware containers are kept at room temperature. It even comes with a metal spork and a carrying case to make the thing as useful as possible.
Today was my first day using the Mr. Bento Lunch Jar and food that I heated up at 7:30 in the morning was piping hot at 12:30 in the afternoon. Screw eating out, now I can just reheat some leftovers, half a can of soup, throw together a tiny salad and some trail mix in the room temperature containers and I’ve got a four course meal that’s better for me than wherever I got takeout from and easier on the wallet as well.
The box advertises it as being able to keep food at temperature (hot and cold) for 6 hours and there will be days where I can test this claim more fully. I look forward to loving it as much as the people who make Mr. Bento porn.
What I’ll Be Eating Soon…
Here’s a collection of recipes I’ve found around the web that I’m anxious to try out:
- Brown Sugar Lacquered Bacon - A recipe that dares say it can improve the natural perfection that is bacon? How can I not try it? There are a ton of variations on the Lacquered Bacon theme in that link, too.
- Risotto with Butternut Squash and Leeks - Risotto is one of those dishes that I would eat all the time if I wasn’t mystified by its production. It’s time to take that leap.
- Corn Chowder - from Jasper White’s book 50 Chowders. This may be my favorite chowder, so if I’m going to make my way through 50, might as well start with a bang.
- Rib-Eye for One - Back when Lisa was traveling, I had a lot more occasion to cook for just myself, and the recipes for the hungry single man were nonexistant. Now that I can’t get her out of the house, I’m stumbling on recipes that I’m dying to try. She’s going out this Friday, though, so I might crack this one out.
- Oatmeal Scotchies - Oatmeal cookies have long been ruined for me by the omnipresence of the raisin. I have no problem with the wonderful raisin, but I hate it in a cookie. Replacing it with Butterscotch? Genius of the highest order.
- Fried Apples - Served up with a little vanilla ice cream? Why the hell not.
- Mashed Potatoes - From Cooking for 2, a blog dedicated to recipes for two people. Portion control is a lot easier when there’s no more food waiting to be eaten.
- Oven “Fried” Chicken - the quotes are my own. Not sure where the fried part comes in, but if it even resembles a healthier fried chicken, it’s worth a shot.
- No Knead Bread - I’ve done a lot of baking with recipes out of Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” and it’s lightyears ahead of anything storebought. This recipe, brought to the world by the very same Mark Bittman (originating at the Sullivan Street Bakery) is so easy I may try it tonight.
I’m also looking for a good trail mix recipe. I bought some at the store after reading an AskMetafilter thread on breakfasts-on-the-go and it’s satisfyingly filling even in small quantities. Those small quantities cost like 4 bucks at the grocery store, so I’m looking to go at it on my own.
What I’ve Been Eating…
Coquillettes au Comté et Pousses d’Epinard or, in language I can understand, Elbow Macaroni with Comte Cheese and Baby Spinach. This is a dish that’s specifically written as an individual serving, although the recipe appealed to Lisa as well, so I ended up cooking a double portion. The end result needed a lot more cheese to reach excellence, but it was intriguing enough to merit another try, this time following the recipe exactly.
Popcorn, the Old Fashioned Way: Talk about return on investment! It costs less than microwave popcorn, requires only slightly more effort, and is amazingly good. I’ve only cooked it once so far, drizzling a few tablespoons of melted butter on top the result, and I have been craving it ever since. I briefly flirted with popcorn for dinner just so I could get another taste at it, but I’ll have to wait for another lazy movie weekend.
Ziti in a Gorgonzola Cream Sauce: This one came out of Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything, which has never let me down. Lisa and I were flipping throughthe cookbook, looking for a food project for the night, and we stumbled upon this dish, which is one of my favorite dishes in the world when I get Italian takeout down by my parents’ house. The end result was, again, promising, but a few missteps on my part led to a dish that was pretty good, but begged for another, better handled try.
Four Cheese Pasta: Some might call Cook’s Illustrated the Alton Brown of Food Journalism but Alton Brown is really the Cook’s Illustrated of Food TV (although Cook’s Illustrated produces the excellent America’s Test Kitchen on PBS, so I don’t know if he can even claim that). Just like Alton Brown, I partake in the entertainment portion and never cook the food. Lisa has made a couple recipes off America’s Test Kitchen with great success, but this Four Cheese Pasta was my first crack at it. This was, by far, the biggest success of all the dinner recipes I’ve tried. The four cheeses: Fontina, Gorgonzola, Pecorino Romano and Parmesan. After the pasta is boiled, you leave it slightly wet and pour it over the shredded/grated cheeses at the bottom of a large bowl, dump the accompanying heavy cream sauce on top of that and cover for five minutes. Of all the three cheese recipes I’ve made so far, this was bay far the best way of getting the most cheese-per-bite as the cheese is given proper time to melt. This one is a definite staple, although it’ll eventually make my heart explode.
The Farmer’s Market Brunch: sick of fast food and paying too much for crap, I decided it was time to make a good ol’ fashioned big breakfast this past Sunday. I got dressed and headed to Salinger’s Market by myself, leaving the sleepy missus to enjoy the lazy morning. I came home with: Thick Cut Bacon and Chorizo Sausages both smoked in a nearby smokehouse, a Dozen Apple Cider Donuts, a jug of Apple Cider, a small basket of pears, and a thing of pancake mix (I wasn’t energetic enough to make my own). We prepared everything together and it was far more rewarding and delicious than what we get from our usual trip to the bagel store. Even the pancake mix delivered some surprisingly good pancakes, topped with the best thing Alton Brown has ever recommended to me: Grade B Maple Syrup. I’ve kept away from maple syrup my entire life, finding the synthetic stuff in the grocery stores too sickeningly sweet. Grade B Maple Syrup makes me realize that I’ve been missing out on the true joy of syrup for far too long and that everyone else is slumming it with that Aunt Jemima crap.
Tonight I’m back to Dream Dinners, but I’ve got the cooking bug and it won’t be long before I try out my next recipe.
