Cinque

Boy did I have an exciting photo post planned for you folks. I (foolishly) didn't photograph the literal FEAST that was assembled today. Menu: those best and famous ribs (the recipe has still never been posted on Epicurious, even though I know for a fact I cut it out of Bon Appetit, and this baffles me because it is remarkable), broccoli slaw (thanks, Paula!), mashed potatoes and grilled corn with hoisin-orange butter. For dessert: coconut chess pie from the Amish stand at the farmer's market, god bless those Amish because what a pie it was. Served with a small scoop of vanilla ice cream and some grilled brown sugar peaches. Such sweetness, such delight. I'm a little worried that the shivers of ecstasy that this meal brought on may or may not induce an early (but not too early) labor in Leia, but it was probably worth it.

But no, I didn't take any pictures. I didn't even think of it. But I DID take pictures of the MEGA HAUL I got from my Pampered Chef party products that came in today. And then I took pictures of my kitchen, and was going to provide you with possibly a 360 degree tour including notes (surely there is a tool like that on the web, right?). And then, instead of taking the final kitchen photograph which includes the area with the desk and the rolling cart, my camera decided to start taking photographs of black backgrounds with some moving horizontal purple lines. Aack.

So I'm going to let my camera sleep it off and think about what it has done, and try not to assume that an enemy from my past life is trying to contact me through the photo memory card (thanks, X-Files, I never would have thought that up all on my own). And hopefully tomorrow my 4+ year old Canon Powershot SD110 will wake up bright and sunny and feel like properly documenting Curried Couscous with Roasted Vegetables, Peach Chutney and Cilantro Yogurt, and we can revel in the cool easy deliciousness together.

Oh damn, and can I say, how great are three day weekends? Usually we get one lazy day and one worky day every weekend (except for terrible weekends when we get two worky days), and the real thing is which type of day we want to be the Saturday and which the Sunday. But yesterday we had a lazy day, and today was a worky day, and TOMORROW CAN BE LAZY AGAIN.

On that note, buenos noches. Please send my camera Get Well Soon thoughts. Or send me a new camera. Either one. No bigs.

P.S. Big up thanks to my tied-for-first-place (sorry, Mom) Best Sous Chef Ever, Megan, for not only helping but staying til every last dish was cleaned and put away, and also for helping me photo style my new kitchen goodies for your photographic pleasure. Stay tuned!

Quad.

This is going to be one of those "damn, I forgot to blog" blogs. Sorry, folks. No excuses here, either; I didn't get out of my pajamas until 8 pm and I was on the computer for a healthy portion of the day. Nope, I'm just lazy, and I ate leftovers for lunch and grilled cheese (yuuuuuum) with canned tomato soup for dinner. There are no food tales to report.

...exCEPT we watched Waitress this morning, and it made me (of course) want to make a pie. I'm not much of a pie person, and am slightly dreading Austin's birthday request for this year, which is raisin cream pie. But this movie made pies look like pop art, and was otherwise quite charming and well done. Andy Griffith especially was a winner! What a guy.

So check out Waitress, it's in the Free Movies on Demand right now, and stay tuned for Rib-tastic goodness tomorrow.

Happy 4th, folks. Be safe.

troi

Today was an unremarkable day for food, a most remarkable day for movie-going. Please see Wall-e, immediately. It was certainly one of the most transcendent cinema experiences of my life. I didn't even realize I had tears running down my face. This movie is also perhaps the most effective campaign advertisement for regime change imaginable. And it is really, really funny. If I had more thumbs, I'd have them turned up for this one. Two doesn't seem nearly enough. The opening and closing credits are unmissable. AND that damn cute short film at the beginning, god bless Pixar.

I had leftover noodles and vegetables for lunch, maybe my favorite leftover lunch ever (no, that's not true, it's poppyseed chicken, lined up for next week!). Dinner was movie popcorn, and I'm still not quite back to hungry after that.

As promised, though, I can review this weekend's cookfest.

Saturday, I made two cheesecakes for Leia's baby shower. One orange blossom, with a gingersnap crust and mixed berry compote. This is one of my classic cheesecakes, pretty much straight off of Epicurious, except I don't fuss with the more complicated crust on there and I half the berry sauce. I think it's a really interesting approach to cheesecake because it has a few tablespoons of flour in the filling, which makes a rather firm and even texture, and it bakes for 12 minutes at 500 degrees, then turned down to 200 degrees for 55 minutes. WAY off the cheesecake norm, let me tell you. The other cheesecake is straight out of the July Bon Appetit: S'mores Cheesecake. HOLY MOTHER it was good. And simply beautiful. Graham cracker crust (I sub in brown sugar for white sugar), chocolate cheesecake (oops, I used bittersweet instead of milk chocolate, oh well!), with a marshmallow meringue topping. Toasted the top with my kitchen torch and let the oohs and aahs just roll over me. Served both with that good (but risky) pomegranate berry compote and felt pretty pleased with myself.

I also made chocolate chip cookies, and I'm happy to say they were a damn close facsimile to my father's, but I still would like them to be a bit chewier. They were better on the first night, but that's always true, right? We hosted Jon and Ali for shredded beef tacos, potato and yellow squash torte and layered salad. The beef was a triumph, a 2 lb. beef roast from the CSA, I cubed it and browned the cubes, added cumin, tomato paste, tomato sauce, onions and bell peppers, and left the whole thing in the slow cooker for the rest of the day until the meat was falling apart. Served the tacos with refried beans, guacamole, a relish made with red onion and yellow bell pepper, cilantro, cheese.

Sunday I made benedictine (cucumber) sandwiches for the shower. For dinner we had lasagna and roasted vegetable panzanella, both of which were good that night but I can't muster much enthusiasm for the leftovers. I can't quite wrap my head around the panzanella; many changes would be made before I tried it again. Roasting green beans was a disappointment; we've gotten so many with the CSA and I can't find a way to cook them that I'm crazy about. I thought surely roasting with olive oil and s & p would be a winner, since it transforms all other vegetables into works of art.

Monday night we made chimichangas with the leftover taco ingredients, and they were shockingly good. I was forced to offer my gratitude for Austin's college job, which was waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant. He said we were going to fry them and I thought he was stark raving mad. Turns out, about 3/4 of an inch of hot oil, and he was totally right. They looked professional and tasted phenomenal with lots of cheddar cheese.

Folks, that's all I've got. I'm so OVER people shooting off fireworks outside my bedroom window. I'm glad I don't have the type of dogs who think we're under attack. Really, they can hardly be bothered with it all...

Two.

Instead of eating leftovers last night, I played a Whiny Card and demanded pizza. All I could think about was pizza. Specifically ground Italian sausage on a pizza. Austin finally gave in, asking if it could please be hot Italian sausage, and onions on half. I graciously conceded, I know when to settle my bets. We picked it up from Nashville's Most Wanted, which is definitely our favorite pizza joint. And it turns out their hot Italian sausage is sliced, not ground. And the mushrooms seemed sort of wet, and all in all it was a rather meh experience.

Then at approximately 6:15 this morning, I opened my eyes and remembered it was Pizza Wednesday at work, and I'm a moron. Why would I throw away a Whiny Card that could have been used for a Guaranteed Delicious meal like Gold Rush or Samurai? Dumb. And of course I wasn't even in the MOOD for Pizza Wednesday by the time it rolled around. What a waste of two perfectly good meal opportunities.

Happily, today was also CSA day in addition to Pizza Wednesday. I was inspired by a beautiful box of goodies. The contents of today's box of 1/4 bushel of veggies plus 4 servings of meat:

6 ears of corn
2 green bell peppers
2 good-sized yellow squash (one is yellow on one end and pale green on the other)
3 baby beets
1 hot pepper (resembles banana pepper, have been warned it's hot. That's all I know)
1 white onion
5 small young Yukon gold-type potatoes
2 small, simply gorgeous, heirloom tomatoes
2 lemon cucumbers
1 patty pan squash
6 eggs
1 2 lb. beef roast
1 2 lb. jar of popcorn (special order)

All this for a grand total of $33.50 (the popcorn was an extra $3.50).

When I planned this week's menu, I took CSA day into account and didn't buy a side dish for tonight's planned dinner, chicken Parmesan (with noodles). So when I got home I scrubbed and cut up the yellow squash, pattypan squash and those darling baby beets, plus a yellow onion. Olive oil, salt and pepper, tossed on a cookie sheet, roasted at 400 while I worked on the sauce for the chicken. It's a pretty simple puttanesca type, sweat garlic and onion and bay leaf in olive oil, stir in chopped Kalamata olives and some torn basil, then two big cans of crushed tomatoes.

Then things went awry. I had three chicken breasts from a recent CSA delivery, so I started to unpack them while I had Austin breaking some eggs into a pan for coating the chicken, eventually with breadcrumbs. He said, "These eggs are kind of stinky," right as I was cutting open the chicken package. I replied, "I don't think it's the eggs." The chicken was most. definitely. bad. Pretty much worst nightmare kind of circumstances. Double bag it and take it straight out to the trash. Ga-ross.
Luckily I hadn't messed with much more of the prep on the chicken, so I didn't waste any more ingredients. Austin the Logical pointed out that we could just eat the sauce on the noodles, which would never have occurred to me (I was winding up to send him the store). This is how we ended up with Off the Cuff Pasta Puttanesca with Mixed Vegetables.

July = Food

So remember back in November, when I annoyed you every day for thirty days with rants and raves about roof construction and Thanksgiving menus, all in the name of NaBloPoMo?

Well, here we go again, baby. The cheerful folks over at NaBloPoMo have started assigning themes to each month to encourage folks to participate in the daily blogging world, and the theme for July is Food. Okay, I'll bite.

Today's post will be short, because first of the month is the busiest for us at work. So I'll just post this photo to show you how the CSA has affected our life, and will start spilling out the details of this weekend's cooking rampage (which hasn't stopped yet!) shortly. Stay tuned for 31 days of foodie talk, folks.

Past Due

What does one write about when life is good? I feel like such a boring person right now; my family and old friends check in and I can only say, "We have lots of pets. I love my job. We're watching the first season of X-Files." Where's the drama? My best story from the last month involves Blue Cross Blue Shield somehow getting the wrong information and marking my account as belonging to a Man. So they weren't covering lady-type insurance claims, and I had to call and set them straight. It's a better story when I tell it (it involves my Korean pharmacist saying, "I tell them, 'I saw her! She a lady!'"), but my point is, it doesn't involve trees falling on houses, or dogs climbing into cars, or bosses making me want to rip my eyes out. It's just a funny little tale of a misunderstanding that was fixed easily, and that's all I've got right now.

And you know what? I'm OK with that. I smile a lot at work, and snicker to myself while I'm having amusing IM conversations with coworkers, and revel in this sudden addition of sixty new friends (and cool friends, too, with no power trip conflicts or flaking on dinner plans), and I also really enjoy kicking a project's ass at work. It's not just an amazing environment. I enjoy the work I'm doing and it's completely remarkable. I didn't really realize how much of my self-esteem was wrapped up in the 40-hour work week, and what a difference it makes to spend those hours feeling filled up with the good life.

And everything else is good too. The dogs are healthy and funny and dirty and affectionate. The boy kitties are great and handsome, and Mackenzie is, well, Mackenzie. Can't ask for more than that. Our house is really filthy all the time with summer storm mud drying off the dogs and becoming piles of dirt in our living room floor. But it's fine, I'm just not that worried about it. We clean when we have visitors. Otherwise we spend our time on the couch like always, and feel lucky, like always.

There have been fun things to plan, like my ice-cream themed birthday party (a major success! Thanks, Badness), a work outing to a ballgame (too cold but otherwise fun), lots of fun little girlie things, and now Megan's bday cabin extravaganza, for which I leave tomorrow (Happy 30th, MCB!). These plannings keep me busy in a pleasant, list-making way. We're also participating in a CSA, a local farmer's co-op where they bring me a box of vegetables and eggs to work every week and I spend the next week trying to figure out what to do with all these radishes. It's challenging and fun and, obviously, delicious. And we're sort of spending time lately with a different group of people, and boy is that fun.

I'm only writing to be writing now, to get something back out there. Maybe I can check back in from the cabin tomorrow or Monday. We're going to get some cheeseburgers right now...

for Midgie

Dear Mary,

My earliest memories are of your home. It was a retreat, a playground, replete with treats and marvels. I spent hours of my childhood sifting through boxes of costume jewelry (which I never saw you wear) or scheming to get into the cookie jar (shaped like a cow) where I knew I'd find Milanos or Fudge Stripes. Yours was a home filled with comfort and mystery: apothecary jars, glass figurines, towers of books, bottles of rose-scented lotion, and your father's desk, crammed with secret cubbyholes and coin collections. I was certain that your backyard, with a swing on the cherry tree and a pool we weren't *supposed* to jump into, was my happiest place on the planet.

After we moved to Tennessee, I mythologized you. We were removed by distance from the daily annoyances of generation gaps, necessary discipline, family conflict. I wrote you hyperbolic letters and believed that perhaps you would intervene and force my parents to grant my dearest wish (which was to have my ears pierced). I read you the lyrics to Missing You by John Waite over the telephone. You sent the most fabulous and thoughtful birthday boxes, which were always late but legendary.

It is from you that I am sure I inherited my tendency to lavish affection on animals, having conversations with them, sneaking them treats. I developed a love of word puzzles and classic novels from years of sharing them with you. When I was young my mom told me about many Christmas eves when she would hear you up late, crying, overwhelmed because you had so many presents to wrap and had waited until the last minute. Even as a little girl, I recognized my own tendencies in this story, the likelihood that I would procrastinate and then be angry with myself, the self-pity, the desire to do everything for everyone and make everything the most special, the most perfect.

When I was younger, I was sure I had been granted two of the most opposite grandmothers possible. In comparison to my father's brash mother, who brooked no bullshit and used that word often, yours seemed a mild-mannered, profanity-free life. Hazel had been married often, lost husbands in wars, kept a lot of convenience foods in her vast freezer, and governed her entire family (almost none of whom were related by blood) with guilt and sass. In contrast, you were soft-spoken, a little bit silly, devoted to your church, reserved in dress and a total pushover. Even when you were angry, which wasn't nearly as often as it should have been, there was an optimism to it, a disappointment in the offending party because you expected more of everyone else around you.

I can see it clearly now: you and Hazel were united by a single driving force that provided you with a life's purpose and also something to talk about with each other, despite being on opposite sides of an historical divide. You both loved and protected your family with a fierceness that can't be captured in words, and by which I find myself shaped every day of my life. It moves me the way other people are moved by ambition or desire.

As your memories and realities faded, you kept your sweet demeanor and curious nature. Your face, as it grew more and more blank, was still always smiling. I haven't had a conversation with you that related to our real lives in years. It's like you've been gone the whole time. And now you really are, you were gifted your wish of a peaceful passing, and somehow it's made you more real in my mind than you have been in a long time. My sisters and I are flying to San Jose today for your memorial, and I'm planning the menu for the April birthday party at Bill's house after a service at the church. Wednesday night I dreamed that the food wasn't ready and there were hungry boys everywhere (and a lion) and I was deciding to cook churrasco even though we didn't have a grill or any meat marinating. And then you were there, and you gave me this long, strong hug, and I was filled with a rush of power and gratitude and light that I carried with me long after I woke up, got dressed, moved on with my day.

There is no less trite way to say it: our family was blessed to have you at the start of it. You brought countless discoveries and beauties into our lives, and I don't think any of us are going to ever stop missing you. Thank you for always bringing and keeping us together, and for giving us all the strength and intelligence to also go our own ways, wherever that has been. I'm hoping for another visit with you in my dreams soon. There is still so much I can't wait to tell you.