curried carrots

The weekly menu planning is such a great success! We were making our list tonight and looking over all of April and were pleased to discover that each week was more enjoyable than the previous. Now we plan a "special" friday night dinner. Last week was spaghetti and meatballs. We were bursting! Brandon seems to be in charge of the ideas for the exciting meals. This week he has taken on a very ambitious menu. Pierogies (homemade) and some manner of cabbage dish. Another reason to anxiously await fridays.

I had another run in with a not quite right Martha Stewart recipe. The Curry Chicken with Carrots and Lime Rice from the most recent Good Cooking magazine. I used half the chicken and carrots but the full tablespoon of curry powder and it was still sort of bland. The pictures in her recipes always get me but then the flavor falls short. Of course, we are having it again this week because the carrots were awesome. Roasted in chicken fat with curry and then doused with lime juice right out of the oven. I am just going to amp up the chicken somehow. Probably just with some salt or a long roasting.

Cake Day

After a frenzied hiatus, we have gotten back to cooking and planning ahead. The ham and 2 huge plates of homemade candies at Easter destroyed my will power for a while. Luckily, Brandon made Chicken of the Taverns from Amy Sedaris' book and it was so amazingly good that I realized that home cooking can in fact still satisfy my insane cravings.

A note on Amy Sedaris' book I Like You. It is definitely funny but there is much more to it than the humor. I think it is a genuinely good, interesting cookbook/entertaining manual. The huge corporate bookstore I work for insists on shelving it in the humor section with books that have pictures of cats doing funny things and books collecting all the Dilbert comic strips. I love those books just as much but I think it is a disservice to the customers and to Amy Sedaris to have her book pigeonholed. There are plenty of cookbook collectors who are missing out and probably just as many humor nerds who just think her book is a joke.

Also, a kid I work with recently organized a "Cake Day" because everyone I work with loves cake. I brought a Nigella Lawson's Mother in Law Madeira Cake. It is my favorite "adult" dessert. A lemon cake with no icing just a hard sugary crust. I always feel very grown-up eating it. One of the older women who really seems to have her life together (because she always looks put together and has a husband who really pays the bills so she can just have a sort of hobby job) said it was very good. Embarrassingly, hers was the only opinion I wanted to hear. I hope I get over this wanting to be taken care of phase because I never used to want to be a woman whose husband paid the bills while I just cooked and indulged myself in hobbies. Honestly, I don't know anything about her life or their set-up but it would be nice to not be panicked about money and the future.

Sloppy! Joe!

I grew up in a pretty healthy house. We ate vegetables and tofu. We didn't have salt and my parents are probably still using the same sugar from 1982. The cooking certainly wasn't amazing but I was also healthy and at a normal weight and also still had a future. But now I am grown up and can do what I want which translates into sloppy joe sandwiches for dinner and then lunch and possible lunch again tomorrow. I console myself with "at least it was homemade, not canned (yet!)" Even if it was, sloppy joes at home is quite possibly the best thing ever. I had chips with it too but just couldn't bring myself to photograph that part because there is still a tiny voice inside me saying, No! Stop! Don't eat that too!

St. Patrick's

Sheperd's Pie. Not nearly as good or exciting as I thought it would be. Many stomach pains.

Nicoise

One of the restaurants I worked in served a salmon nicoise. I always wanted to eat it but never did. We weren't allow to eat or even buy the food at work or after our shift unless we changed clothes and came in a "real" customer. I still have a lot of unresolved anger over that. But anyway. I finally got the chance to have a nicoise earlier this week. I worked late so my boyfriend made it and it was ready when I came home. Then suddenly I was having one of those mind blown open oh! I am older and now I understand moments that your parents insist will happen. No wonder all the customers complained about the nicoise at work. It was almost completely unlike the nicoise on my table at home. Instead of potatoes it had angel hair pasta, and tons of red onions, no green beans, a mustard less dressing or maybe no dressing at all, no greens of any kind, and barely any salmon (to be fair mine didn't either it was tuna). I felt a twinge of guilt over mocking the complaining customers, but I still maintain that you are responsible for reading the menu before the food comes. Our homemade nicoise was tasty. I ate too many olives and woke up puffy the next morning. And I still have a deep craving for the pasta nicoise at my former job.
This was from Joy of Cooking (obviously).

Portions of Pain

So I have been trying to eat the correct portion sizes lately. It is a pretty terrifying experience so far. I read a whole book about it at work the other day. The book was mostly photographs of the huge amount of food I am used to with tiny bits taken out to show how much I should be eating. We went out to eat last night and I held the palm of my hand against my sandwich and felt very sad. I was already totally starving from my properly portioned lunch. I survived the dinner. I comforted myself with the fact that I was going to have my leftovers for breakfast. Which I did (I even got up early in my excitement) and was surprised that it was too much for me to eat!

Tonight we had the always delicious lentils, rice, and caramelized onions from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

fried fish, beans

Not together but separately. I love them both very much. However, my love for fried fish and everything else fried and really, if I'm being honest, every other type of food has more than caught up with me so that I have gained a lot of weight. I even bought a scale to prove it to myself every time I walk into the bathroom. So the fish was a bad choice of food but the beans were not. White beans dressed with red wine vinegar, a bit of extra virgin olive oil, and mixed with chopped onion and some tuna. Spinach was what I had to fill it out. It really was good.


I have just started reading Mrs. Beeton's Household Management (abridged) and came across this intriguing recipe: toast sandwich. A piece of toast between slices of buttered bread. A favorite among the invalids. No wonder they couldn't get out of bed. It is an amazing book. Apparently it is the much overlooked culinary/house keeping classic, but also a fantastic feat of organization and writing. Hopefully that is true and reading it will make up for all the crap mystery novels I have been devouring lately