eleven

This is a very close call. It's 11:45 and I almost forgot. I got distracted by:

1. the best day at work ever (ask me! I'll tell you all about it) which led to
2. margarita party at work in the afternoon, then
3. randomly dropping into Dad's show at Douglas Corner, and sampling another margarita there
4. then heading to Rumours for three hours, which encompassed two glasses of wine, one tiny bowl of perfect, perfect parmesan vegetable rice and one big bowl of summer salad (greens, white balsamic vinaigrette, sliced pears, pecans, goat cheese, yes, please).
5. Long rambling ride home with Leia and Carmen, and enthusiastic welcome by animal menagerie of Eastside Avenue.

Now I'm in bed and so ready to fall asleep and Austin is snoring happily and Mischa is curled up between our ankles. It was a delicious salad at Rumours, and tomorrow I'm going to give the corn soup from the most recent Bon Appetit a whirl. I'm out for tonight, foodie talk or otherwise. Sweet dreams.

x.

Should I try to type or compose while I'm actually watching an episode of the X-Files? No. I shouldn't.

But I do have some fun news, as I hinted at yesterday. Austin and I spent this evening at the Nashville Rollergirls practice, learning how to keep stats. In theory, we're going to be two of the new Statsgeeks, and tonight was the first night we started to learn the process. At first everything was a little weird but once we started actually watching some jams and marking down the offensive and defensive moves, it started to come together like a puzzle. Who knows if this will turn into a major extracurricular, but it was entertaining and it was fun to talk about it on the way home.

Here's my food-themed contribution for tonight (because you don't want to hear about the frozen pizza I just happily consumed)...

Foods that Remind me of My Mother:

Potato Salad- When I write this on a menu, I refer to it as Mom's Potato Salad. On the recipe card, which I wrote down from her dictation about thirteen years ago, there are such helpful instructions as "add a clunk of mayonnaise, maybe a little more." I don't know at which point she started putting chopped dill pickles in her own version, but Uncle Bill told her that Grandma said to him privately, in a very prim manner, "Vickie puts RELISH in her potato salad." I started using unpeeled red potatoes in my own variation, and I feel a little impious every time I do.

Sweet Potatoes- My mom isn't quite a foodie. When we were little, her mantra was, "It's just fuel for the body." This was generally in response to us saying, "I don't WANT to eat white beans! I HATE white beans." (Okay, to me. I was the one who said that.) It is certainly a universal truth that often the simplest foods taste the best, and for my mom, when she only has herself to feed and no obligations for the evening, nothing satisfies like a baked sweet potato. It is both an indulgence and a necessity.

Tootsie Roll Pops- In retrospect, I don't know if Mom even likes these. But she always had them in her purse, and we only got one if we were well behaved. Candy was a very, very limited commodity in my youth, so these made an impression. The unfortunate side effect is that now, they don't really count as candy to me at all. Only the hundreds of other forbidden sweets will do.

Toasted Bread with Garlic and Tomato- In the summer of 2003, the week of our Jansen family reunion at Dunn School, I got there a day or two earlier than my sisters, and got a little private hangout time with Mom. I cooked dinner for her, Kam, Mark and Amy, but I can't remember what I made (probably the famous pork loin, and grilled corn with Parmesan butter, my favorite recipe that summer). Mom came out and sat with me on the steps of the patio, and she brought a knife, some slices of toasted crusty bread, a few ripe tomatoes and some garlic cloves. She had learned a trick in her travels to Italy earlier in the summer, and she showed me how to slice open the garlic and smear the cut side into the bread, really pressing hard to imbue the bread with the garlic oils. Then she sliced the tomatoes in half and crushed the open tomatoes against the garlicky bread, seeds and all. I can't remember if this trick also involved olive oil; it seems likely but I am pretty sure I'm skipping a step. I only remember it was sunset, and she was describing these perfect evenings in Italy that started with this simple snack that oozed with flavor and freshness.

Katharine Hepburn's Brownies- Surely the simplest brownie recipe ever, and I think she says she cut it out of the newspaper. Who knows if Katharine Hepburn ever actually baked them, but I love the idea that such a classy and timeless woman would definitely have preferred a classy and timeless recipe like these. We always cook them a little bit to overdone, and the nearly-burned corners are, of course, the best. I can remember many a night, growing up, that would end with brownie snacks while we finished a movie downstairs in the family room, all five of us piled up on the big gray sectional couch with Grumpy at our feet and a pot of tea on the coffee table.

I'm sure there are so many more, and I'll think of all of them as soon as I close the computer and start getting ready for bed. Maybe I'll pull together a Volume 2 for you, as we soldier on through July, the month of Food Writing.

hut

I asked Austin for a food topic I could write about tonight. With gusto, he immediately suggested,"SAUSAGE!" Thanks, babe. We did have our new favorite sausage dish tonight, Rigatoni with (Italian) sausage and Parmesan. I'm not sure if I'm crazy about rigatoni? It's tough to cook just right, without it ending up too toothy or too mushy. But it's an easy carbonara-type recipe where you stir eggs and cream in at the end and it comes together as a creamy sauce. Mushrooms, onions, garlic, can't go wrong there. Loads of beautiful roasted squash for a side dish, from the farmer's market, including butterfinger zucchini, which is the same shape and texture as regular zucchini but super rich sunflower yellow. Just gorgeous.

The good news is, our new camera came. And it is great looking, and I already took one very cute picture of Emily. The bad news is, I did not take any pictures of our cooking adventures tonight. I forgot.

I was going to try to pull something thoughtful out tonight, but James McAvoy is on The Daily Show and boy, am I distracted. Are Austin and I going to see Wanted, and not even be embarrassed about it? Yes. We are.

Our dogs must have had a long exhausting day, out there in those storms. Our house looks like some kind of canine Chernobyl. Limp, muddy corpses littered every few feet, both the living four-legged kind and the shredded, emptied stuffy kinds. Most of the time we keep the dog toys closed up in a box with a lid. If we leave it open, Mischa will continually play with a single toy for sixty seconds, discard it and dive back into the box for the next. You can't take a full step without an objecting squeaker under your heel. But she's seemed extra bored lately, and the joy with which she responds to every re-opening of the toy box is always worth it.

No more cooking plans til this weekend. Fridge crammed with leftovers, and fun plans tomorrow, about which I will hopefully brief you tomorrow night.

**You get a bag of chocolate chip cookies if you can correctly i.d. the origin and significance of tonight's blog title. Goodnight, y'all.**

octo

The good news is that Amazon, miraculously, announced that our new camera should be here tomorrow! So hopefully by this time tomorrow night I'll be ready to wow you with detailed photographs of the simple steps leading up to rigatoni with sausages and Parmesan. Actually, by this time tomorrow night I plan on not being awake at all, because folks, it's late, and I almost fell asleep without a post for today. I don't even know what reminded me after I'd already turned out the light.

It was another unsettled day, really tough for me to concentrate, with these weird minor undercurrents of vertigo ever since I opened my eyes this morning. I can't even begin to imagine what is tugging along at the back of my brain that is keeping me from being productive and effective. Some kind of worry that I haven't even found, something unfinished that is an unconscious distraction. I honestly do not know.

But I know I feel behind at work, and I know that when my inbox swells to 97 messages that I can't move out it makes it hard to focus on anything. And I also know that when I went to my director today and told her I was backed up on a project that I wanted to present tomorrow, she was so incredibly cool about it and it made me want to work even harder. I swear I will continue to work hard to deserve that job, the way I will always work hard to deserve the gift in my life that is Austin Gray. And I keep saying life is so good, to the point of feeling boring with nothing to talk about. So what is keeping me from feeling like I have my shit together this week?

Spice-rubbed salmon with green curry sauce got punted to next week's menu. I had leftover poppyseed chicken tonight, about six pounds of it, and am taking more with me to work tomorrow even though it's Emma Lunch Wednesday. That's right, I'd rather eat more poppyseed chicken than eat the catered lunch from Pei Wei. I'm telling you people, it's my favorite.

luckies

Today was actually sort of a long day. There aren't many of those at my job, two or three a month. Most days I can't believe how fast the time has flown, and I'm feeling good about all of it. Today I didn't eat lunch until 3:30, and only a bit when I did. Sometimes I revert back to my oldest ways of not being able to organize my thoughts and my projects, and everything takes longer than it should.

It has been a proud accomplishment in my life to have moved almost completely away from my original scatterbrained nature, which I came by honestly, thanks to Dad and Grandma Jansen. It was a conscious decision, an internal effort, to stop being the girl who got an F in Math in fourth grade because she lost her homework every day. Even as recently as college, I got behind on my bills not because I didn't have the money, but because I forgot to mail the payments. I just never really had my stuff together. I had a whole room in our house on the highway that was filled with junk and projects I couldn't manage to make sense of.

At some point during this process of transformation, I also became a control freak. And I'm sensitive about it, enough to the point of making fun of myself but getting my feelings hurt if you make fun for me. I learned that I was good at organizing, particularly events (and spatial dimensions like refrigerators, but that's not my point). I get flustered when I'm in the midst of upheaval, I want to place order to it and take the reins. And, in truth and ego, things mostly turn out better when I do. Things turn out fair and even, or logical and calm. I will ruin a perfectly good chaos by applying systems and sense. Thanks to Mom for this, although she's been comfortably submerged in many a shared maelstrom in these most recent years.

Here's my example that I'm thinking of: cooking at home. This is, of course, a topic that I will happily entertain for hours of every day. I've been a mental and manual collector of recipes almost as long as I remember. I love putting together a menu and making a plan. But I can remember many nights, in my early twenties, of wandering around the grocery store after work, collecting my thoughts and ingredients, and eventually cobbling together a very disorganized meal that wouldn't be ready to eat until 10 pm. And somehow I'd drop $60 on every one of those grocery trips, three or four nights a week, and be mystified by how I was spending so much when I wasn't eating out.

Now I make a meal schedule for the whole week in advance. I spend a few hours on Saturday on the floor of the kitchen with my dozens of cookbooks, making assignments of menus to go along with our weekly social plans. I try to know ahead of time which nights we're eating at home and which nights we're going out, hitting the ballgame, going to a show, or hosting friends. I make a master list of all the ingredients needed for the whole week, and then go through the cupboards and fridge and cross things off the list as I confirm that we already have them. I can't even tell you how much food and money this particular step has saved. How often did I grab a bottle of soy sauce because I couldn't remember for sure if I had any, and then came home to find I already had three half-used bottles? Wasteful.

I do waste one piece of paper every time, rewriting my grocery list from the master with all the items crossed off. I organize the list by aisle at my neighborhood Kroger, so I can start at the top and work my way down without doubling back or losing my focus. I rarely buy anything that isn't on the list, and I'm sure I've saved enough for a year's supply of groceries by doing this. I also hardly ever succumb to the temptation to shop at one of the nicer groceries, and this is a major secret to frugality. If there are fancy cheeses available to me, I will buy them, every time, so I just go to the store that doesn't sell fancy cheeses and I make do.

When I get home from the store and get all the groceries put away, I stack all the week's recipes on the desk and post the master menu on the refrigerator. This item earns more surprised exclamations than anything else in our house, I swear. People see it and laugh, or express their admiration. Everyone acts like it's crazy, to have that list, the whole week, all planned out. But it gives me mental peace of mind, and something to think about during the day, a game plan so that I can walk in the door and start cooking instead of knocking around trying to figure out what I'm doing. I'm really starting to hate feeling rushed in the kitchen, especially in the summer when the heat makes our house feel like a pressure cooker.

Tonight I made poppyseed chicken, the kind your grandma made with canned soup, sour cream, Ritz crackers on top. Served it with rice (perfectly cooked, from my new rice cooker, thank you MCB!) and frozen spinach. The ultimate comfort food for me, and just about my favorite leftover lunches ever. I walked in the door after work and put the pot of water on to boil, and moved efficiently through the meal preparation until the rice, chicken and spinach were all finished at nearly the same time and we sat down to a delicious meal.

I'm not saying that I'm always a well oiled machine. More often I am not, like on Saturday, when I had a ketchup massacre while I was trying to put together the barbecue sauce for the ribs. I pride myself on having a well stocked and supplied kitchen, but I have to admit that too much of my fridge is dedicated to condiments, and I shouldn't have to completely unload my baking cupboard every time I need brown sugar, which I'm sure is the thing I use the most from that shelf. And even though I don't have an entire room for my messy projects like my old house, I do keep a disaster of stacked cooking magazines and ripped out recipes in our living room, and I know it's an eyesore and should be dealt with. Every weekend I plan to tackle that stack and do something about it, but then my thoughts get drawn into baking adventures for Sunday afternoons or perfect side dish pairings for that new salmon recipe I can't wait to try...

sixxxxxxx

So my camera? That's right. Toast. Still taking pictures of black screens with horizontal lines, even when I turned off the digital display. Sad. But I'm happy to announce that Austin, in all of his infinite kindness and generosity, let me order a new one today on Amazon, featuring an upgrade from my measly 3.2 megapixels to a whopping 7.1! Whoop whoop! Thanks, my Boo. I'm so excited. Of course once I accepted the death of the SD110, I spent all day seeing things I wanted to take pictures of. Like three sweet and funny dogs passed out on the floor, or Charlie Murphy and Corvinius hanging out on the treat table like best friends, or Mackenzie giving herself a very ungraceful bath in the brown chair. What a champ.

I also really wanted to photograph the (slightly elaborate) process of assembling Curried Couscous with Roasted Vegetables, Cilantro Yogurt and Peach Chutney. It's an interesting recipe and one of our favorites, really extra great for summertime. Let's see if I can sum it up for you:

We chopped a whole bunch of farmer's market zucchini up and tossed them with cumin, crushed red pepper, chili powder, curry powder, olive oil, lots of salt and pepper. We roasted them at 400 degrees for about 25 minutes, tossing occasionally, then left them out to cool. Then we sauteed some chopped onion in my biggest heaviest Le Creuset saucepan (oh, the beauty) in some olive oil, then stirred in two big tablespoons of curry powder, and let that get toasty for a second. Added three cups of water and simmered for ten minutes (hot curry water! not to be confused with hot ham water). Then toasted two cups of couscous in one tablespoon of olive oil until it was browned, then poured the curry/onion water over. Put the lid on and took it off the heat for ten minutes for the couscous to fluff up. Then stirred in a half cup of dried currants so they would plump up by the time it cooled.

Then I pureed two big bunches of cilantro with the juice of two limes and a half a lemon, plus some salt, and stirred that into a combination of plain yogurt and sour cream. In a different bowl I combined some hot mango chutney, some peach preserves, a little sriracha, a little hot chili oil, some rice vinegar and rice wine. This is my sub for peach chutney as the recipe calls for it.

So we ate the couscous with some roasted, salted cashews and the good, spicy roasted zucchini, all piled into warmed up pita with the cilantro yogurt and the spicy peach mixture. It's a super recipe because you can make everything ahead of time and it's all perfectly good at room temperature. The leftovers are great too, and trust me, it makes a vat. The whole recipe is here but I clearly made a lot of adjustments. We decided this time that eggplant is just not for us, and I eschewed the roasted red peppers too, I just never *get* them. I think by spicing up the roasted zucchini it adds a great depth of heat to the whole thing, and I'm sure I almost double all the flavorings in the cilantro yogurt, which is by far the best part.

I'm telling you, this would have made a great photo essay.

Badness, I'm going to crib a cue from you and start working on my own Moments in Food, since I'm sure tomorrow no one is going to want to hear about Poppyseed Chicken. I'm positive I am the only person on the planet who gets so excited about a canned-soup based casserole, but I am. really. excited.

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!