Category Archives: food

February 10, 2008 · 11:28 pm

Happy Mondays

This post has nothing to do with the band of the same name, with which I am totally unfamiliar. Catching up from the weekend:

If you’ve been here before, you’ve probably noticed that I changed the layout. The old look was appropriate back in November, but I grew tired of the bleak Seasonal Affective Disorder theme, and wanted to brighten things up a bit. I’ll be switching out the header shortly… that photo of the Eiffel Tower is one I’m particularly proud of, but with the narrow crop it looks surprisingly (or perhaps not) phallic. And, if one is to believe the rampant accusations floating around at Alison’s birthday party Saturday night, I prefer boobs. (For the last time, here in black-and-white, THE GUYS STARTED IT. Erin and I were given a choice of topics, and ‘boobs’ was the only one we could actually weigh in on (Tanks and Exploding Dogs being the other two options). I still don’t know how it eventually became blamed on me.) So yeah, anyway: new header coming soon.

Back on Friday, I announced that I was going to sew, or at least start sewing, a new dress. I did no such thing. But I did take a whole slew of photos of items I shall soon be posting to eBay, in an attempt to offset the cost of an amazing, vintage (still with original tags!) gold lamé swimsuit that I hope-hope-hope will fit and be flattering. Otherwise, my diet for the next two months will consist of seltzer and the occasional cup of vegetable broth. And the blood of any innocent bystanders who cross my path when I don’t get enough carbs.

Today’s Key lime pie looks good, but it’s too early for me to cut into it. It needs to chill a bit longer. I went with bottled Key lime juice this time, in hopes of getting some consistency into the recipe. After I popped the pie in the oven tonight, I noticed that one recipe instructs the cook to beat the filling with an electric mixer on High until fluffy. Hmmm, haven’t tried that yet. That specific recipe also says to remove the pie from the oven after 6-8 minutes, or when a skewer inserted in the middle comes out “hot but clean.” Let me tell you, NONE of the recipes I’ve been futzing with would give you a clean skewer after only 8 minutes. Would fluffing up the filling mixture make that kind of difference? Tune in next week for the answer.

Villanovababy has posted a completely new interview with me. I’m pretty sure this will do it for the interviews… at least until after I accept my Pulitzer prize. Har har.

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February 7, 2008 · 7:48 pm

matzoh brei

For some inexplicable reason, my house often smells like roasting chicken when I get home from work. I have determined that it has nothing to do with anything in the trash, or anything regarding my furnace filter (unless there happens to be a succulent chicken IN my furnace), and beyond that, I’m pretty much tapped out of Where Is That Smell Coming From ideas. I kinda figure that one or the other of my neighbors (I live in a townhome, and am attached to folks on two sides) roasts a lot of poultry for dinner.

Tonight, even more inexplicably, I would swear my house smelled of matzoh brei. This is “more inexplicable” not only because I’m not even sure if the supermarkets around here sell matzoh at this time of year, but also because I have Irish Catholics on one side of me, and Hispanic Catholics on the other. Curious. But, because I actually have eggs AND matzoh in the house, I’m taking it as a sign to make some for dinner. I’d post my recipe, but I don’t really have one. I just kinda DO it, so it looks a little something like this:

1. Run 2-3 matzohs under warm tap water so they’re wet on both sides. DO NOT SOAK THEM. Stack on a plate to sit while you…
2. Scramble a couple of eggs in a decent-sized bowl.
3. Crumble the dampened matzoh into the eggs, and stir to coat.
4. Pan-fry in a little butter as you would scrambled eggs.
5. Salt & pepper to taste.

See, the whole THING is done to taste, I mean, the ratio of egg-to-matzoh and the time you cook it and some people DO soak the matzoh (which, to me, is so WRONG) and even though my mom taught me to make it, my own ratio has probably taken a turn away from hers by now, and a whole lot of people are going to tell me that I’M doing it wrong because THEY (or their mom or uncle or whomever) make it like so… but really, it has, like, TWO main ingredients so how different could they all be? I like my farina sweet but my grits salty. To each his/her own.

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February 5, 2008 · 10:22 pm

the minimum amount of flair

Posting for the sake of posting because I promised I would post.

1. The white cake did not turn out. I blame the altitude, which I tried my best to adjust for, but this is a new recipe for me and I should have known better than to trust chemistry to work out right the first time. Also, my baking soda might have lost its fizz. I didn’t even bother frosting the sad little cake layers this morning. I wonder if they’ll compost?

2. Jana slipped out of the office during a medium-scale power outage today, with no fanfare whatsoever. The little sneak. She has to come back to the office at least one more time to tie up some loose ends on this last project of hers, so I’ll get a proper good-bye in somehow.

3. I participated in my first caucus this evening. It was fairly chaotic, and our precinct secretary explained that their last caucus drew seven voters… they expected more this time, of course, and figured on about 45 people. I think we doubled that. Seven different precincts in my district were supposed to be meeting in the middle school’s cafeteria, but they ran out of space and had to shift some precincts to other rooms. And somebody (with permission) had to “break” into the school’s office to make more copies of the straw polls and sign-in/voting sheets. I brought one neighbor with me, and recognized one at another table, and saw another on the sign-in sheet. Howdy, neighbors!

The crowd in one quarter of the cafeteria. More, unseen chaos surrounds us.

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February 4, 2008 · 10:19 pm

Jana.

Wow, so, like, in order for me to post 5 days a week, I need to have 5 interesting things to write about. Well, that may be an issue. Okay, what’s on my mind?

Jana.

Jana is a freelancer at the The Company that I work for. Having freelanced for us for 10 years, she’s actually the second-longest-term “employee” in the division. The only person who has worked there longer is the VP. I come in next in line. Not only have Jana and I shared years of work experiences, but we’ve also been in adjoining seats the whole time. In fact, in our newest office space, Jana and I share a cubicle. And a phone. Yeah, we’re tight. ;)

Jana likes animals, particularly cats. She likes to play tennis and Centipede (I only found this bit out when we went to Lyons Classic Pinball together this past weekend). She likes fine wines, good beer, and Starbucks iced green tea with soy milk and no melon syrup. And she likes wedding cake. Not any kind of cake, white wedding cake. WHITE cake. Not yellow, white.
A couple of years ago, Jana and her partner bought a condo near the beach in Newport, OR and they’ve recently decided to chuck the whole long-distance-landlords thing and go move there themselves. Tomorrow is Jana’s last day in the office.

I’m baking her a WHITE cake tonight. I hope it comes out half as good as Jana.

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February 4, 2008 · 8:35 am

Leaves. They are new.

So far, my secret plan to post consistently on Sunday-Thursday nights has been less than stellar. Or rather, the plan is fine, but my execution of it… not so much. I also haven’t yet added the smaller size personalized ID tags to my storefront. But before I spin myself into Negative Nellie… I did get through a few features in my Netflix backlog, I washed another load of laundry, I took all of the recycling to the municipal center (which is a short, dull story in itself), I baked experimental Key lime pie #4, and I spent time with a handful of friends, which is always worth a little schedule altering.

Recycling: I’m for it. The town I live in offers curbside pickup to individual residents, but I live in a Condominium Complex. And my Neanderthal Homeowners Association won’t pay for pickup in our complex (yes, I’ve asked nicely, and offered up sparkling statistics that show that our very own city planners estimate that our trash pickup needs would diminish by 30% if we began a recycling program, but it all fell on deaf ears). So I collect my own recycling, and when it reaches the point where I’m in danger of being crushed by bottles and cans and junk mail oh my, I haul it all out to the car and take it to the local municipal bins. The location that I’ve used for the last few years closed in November, but there’s another set of city bins at the courthouse about 4 miles away… but OH LOOK AT THAT THEY’RE FULL. Crap. Crap crap crap, now what do I do? I know there are more city-sponsored bins, but I don’t know where they are and I don’t have a fancy iPhone so I can’t go online from inside the car with my sexy widescreen and GoogleMap them… so I drove back home, went to the city’s web site, got the list of addresses, mapped them out… and realized that there is another set of bins at the firehouse that is tripping distance from the courthouse THAT I JUST CAME FROM. Well, feck. I hope all this recycling is offsetting the GAS that I’m using to drive back and forth. Yeah, I know, it’s only a few miles… but I hate obvious inefficiency. At least I managed to combine the recycling drive with a trip to Safeway so I could get more Key limes…

Key Lime Pie #4: Can I have pie for breakfast? Screw it, I’m an adult and I can do what I want. Okay, let’s see… It slices nicely. The consistency of the filling is finally exactly where I want it. As for flavor; the eye-squinting tartness is missing again (how? I almost had it right with the last pie!), which means I’ll have to risk the texture to get the flavor right. That’s okay. What isn’t okay is me juicing any more friggin’ Key limes. They are tiny little buggers and not actually very juicy, which means I need most of/all of a bag for a single pie, and even with my new countertop reamer, my hands get sore. The seeds are small enough to go right through the seed/pulp catcher, so I wind up picking them out with a spoon anyway. Also, it’s possible that some of my tartness issues are stemming from inconsistent fruit. With all that in mind, I’ll be switching to bottled Key lime juice for future pies. I won’t have the zest to add, but now that I’ve made two pies each with and without the zest, I can safely state: it makes no difference to the flavor. In a recipe that isn’t already this limey, it can add a nice zing. But the large ratio of lime to the other ingredients in a pie really doesn’t benefit from added zest. (Now! With added Zest! Dude, that should SO be my new tagline. Erin, can you whip me up a lime-themed page? Instead of this dark, S.A.D. page? Okaygreatthanks.) Yeah, so anyway, the biggest problem with this particular pie is the meringue. What the heck happened? Oh, right, THIS time I went to a cookbook and FOLLOWED DIRECTIONS. Usually, I judge the whipping of the meringue by eye, and it’s been beautiful. The best part of the pie, in fact. This week, I pulled out BH&G and whipped the stuff for FOUR MINUTES on HIGH which I thought was borderline insanity but that’s what the book said to do. Those folks in the Test Kitchen cook a whole lot more than I do. And you know what? It looked great going in, and it puffed up coming out, and then it SANK LIKE CRAZY when it cooled. I have the meringue equivalent of fruit leather on my pie. Hello, BH&G Test Kitchen? Yeah, are you guys HIGH?

And here I am, still in my pajamas, eating pie, well on my way to being late for work. Thank you all for coming, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.