I used to work at a nonprofit which, to help pay our salaries and other overhead, operated a thrift store. Our offices were upstairs from the store, which made for great coffee/tea/computer eyestrain breaks. Because it meant shopping! At a thrift store! While you were working!
Every year come February, I find myself in a bit of a rut. The excitement of the holidays has come and gone, and my gusto for squash, winter greens, and slow braises has begun to fade. I dream about those market days when the first bunches of asparagus appear, still small but green and spindly with hope.
Unlike Adam Roberts I was not a “smart little squirrel” this past summer. I was in fact, a trying-to-keep-my-sanity-while-planning-an-out-of-town-wedding squirrel, so aside from a few handfuls of blackberries my freezer has lacked those frozen bits of summer to pull me out of this predictable February slump.
So what, you ask, is a girl to do with an empty freezer and case of the February blues?
Well I did what any girl in her right mind would do.
I threw on an old Belle and Sebastian record and I baked a cake which I promptly filled with plum jam.
Can a headache be an excuse for a bad meal????
I made this before and everyone luvs it. Pan fried chicken/white rice/ cream sauce. I try to have dinner ready or almost done by the time my wife gets home,Wednesday I was right on time or was I . A massive headache come over me earlier in the day day and it was not going away regardless of what I took.The 500mg pain reliever I took shortly before starting this, might of had some thing to do with the bad meal or maybe the cook , (myself) was stuck on stupid for awhile
Good company. Hearty appetites.
A painting on the wall of my uncle’s hunting farm in Southwest Wisconsin read that phrase. It sat right in the living room and when you walked into the kitchen you looked at the painting and knew it was true.
For ten years I was fortunate enough to spend time at the farm with the guys in the hunting party. Each fall we’d get together. Mostly we’d tinker around the house and the woods. We had some success hunting, but the fondest memories I have from that farm were the times spent around the kitchen table.
Dinner was always a big deal at the farm and every year Wild Turkey Wild Rice Soup was on the menu.
The recipe always included actual wild turkey harvested on my uncle’s hunting farm. The turkeys were everywhere so there was no problem having a 20 to 25 pound bird or two or five ready for the soup in the fall.
As I sat eating breakfast at a rather lovely hotel in Milwaukee this past Thanksgiving weekend, my eardrums were assailed by what I now realize is quite possibly the most annoying traditional Christmas carol in history: Deck the Halls. The fa-la-la-la-las are excruciatingly painful in their repetitiveness and, in the context of the song, seem remarkably ridiculous.
You need to have a good breakfast.
Sure. But it doesn’t always have to be in the morning.
When I was little, the best nights were ‘breakfast at dinner’. Sometimes it was french toast. Sometimes it was cereal. On special occasions it was lacy pancakes with lemon juice and the crunch of raw sugar. In winter it could be a toasted English muffin with bacon that had been cooked on a piece of paper towel in the microwave. (It was the 80s) . We would eat from bowls on our laps, watching Baywatch in front of a stern bar heater that burned our shins.
We washed dinner down with glasses of milk and a dash of glee from inverting the natural hierarchy of meals. Breakfast! For dinner!
As a real-live grown up, it’s hard to eat a bowl of cereal for tea without feeling like you should be watching Bridget Jones’ Diary in a snuggie and having a sook.
I have fully bought into the slow food movement. I buy all my vegetables at the farmers market and when I can afford it, I buy my meat from either the Farmers market or Whole Foods. It cannot be denied that vegetables you buy from a farmer at the market taste better, but it is hard to pinpoint why. The same goes for meat. We all “know” that local or small farm raised meat tastes better. The question is when it comes to taste what are the specific differences that allow farm-raised meat to out-compete supermarket bought meat?
In homage to the Amateur Gourmet, I thought it appropriate to post a taste test featuring supermarket vs farm-raised lamb on this community blog.
My boyfriend grew up on a small farm where his parents raise Jacob Sheep. The lambs graze on beautiful, green Pennsylvania grass from spring to fall and are slaughtered in early October. They are also fed some grain when weaning them off of mother’s milk and also before slaughter bulk up the fat content a bit.
Tonight was a football and pizza kind of night.
I was able to replace, all of my non-stick kitchenware for under €50 (about $65)! Pictured, are the pans I found at my local Euro (dollar store), bonus – they are made in Italy (the smallest pan in the set was €2.75, and the biggest was €15.50). To stay in the budget, I’m still using glass tops from my previous non-stick set, replaced two baking pans with Pyrex and got a new set of wood utensils!
But, changing the cookware is only the first step. You also need to change the way you use and clean your pans.
My husband doesn’t cook. Which is fine. It’s my kitchen, and it’s much safer if I am alone with flames and knives and heavy pots that might conk an intruder on the head.
My husband, however, is a great taste-tester and an adventurous eater. So I can experiment with different cuisines and odd ingredients, and he’s perfectly happy to dive in and sample whatever it might be.
He also has a quirky sense of humor. So when we were talking about a hot pepper spread that I’ve been experimenting with, his mind went immediately for the pun rather than the taste. “Why don’t you hollow out some cherries and stuff them with the hot sauce and call them ‘cherry bombs’?” he suggested.
I wrinkled my nose. That stuff is hot. Fill a cherry with it, and it would be a culinary weapon. But the more we talked, the more the idea started making sense.
