Lobster Ravioli

"This is awfully awesome. These are tasty and good."

-She picked these out herself. Seriously. Her grandma was in town and told her to get whatever she wanted in the grocery store. My daughter was quite adamant; I tried to talk her into spinach tortellini (the kid LOVES spinach, can't get enough of it), but she wouldn't let me put the lobster ones back. "No," she said. "I already said I just want the lobster raviloi. I just want the lobster ones!" And she scarfed them down, without even a drop of olive oil for seasoning.

A New Low, or a New High, I'm Not Sure Which

Last week, we dressed up like cows to get free food. 

Oh, yeah. Head to toe. 

A certain chicken-sandwich chain to which we have recently become addicts had a "dress like a cow, get free food" day. We weren't going to go, but all three of us were hot, cranky, and anxious that day, so I took a white trash bag, a black trash bag, two of my husband's old white undershirts, a pair of scissors, some tape, and, with a little assistance, 20 minutes later we had three cow costumes. All three of us got a totally free lunch, and Piper loved her costume so much she wore it continuously for the next three days. We had to pry it off of her at bedtime, because three-year-olds don't understand that wearing a giant plastic bag to bed is not a good idea. By about day 5 of being loved on, it bit the dust, and we gave her the two decorated shirts to run around with, much to her delight. 

As we cut and taped and fitted, my husband said he thought I was pretty awesome for taking a pile of stuff that most people would throw away and making costumes out of it in less than half an hour, although he was unsure if the fact that we were doing it only for the free food canceled out the awesome part. 

"I'm not sure either," I said, "But I am hungry." 

Also, I think this is the biggest tangible reward I have yet obtained from any sort of crafty endeavor or project. I am not sure what that says about me, or my craft skills, but I can tell you that a free lunch tastes DELICIOUS.

Snapshots: Mid-June 2010

6:00 p.m., on a Wednesday: the thermostat says it is 84 degrees in the house, although, since it is located in a cool, dim hallway, I know the main part of the house is several degrees hotter. My child is running her little Ikea push-cart into the back door over and over, each time causing a loud "THWACK" noise that reverberates in my already-throbbing skull. She is cackling madly, and is, of course, naked.

9:00 p.m. on the same night finds me on the couch, glass of wine in hand. Piper is tucked in bed, happily reading books to a stuffed elephant, and I have the last lonely cupcake from her party. I dug into the tub of frozen leftover frosting and now a mini-mountain of chilled strawberry-meringue buttercream quivers atop the little cake. I boot up the Xbox, flip through our Netflix queue, and put on an episode of The X-Files. Frosting, wine, a quiet house, and the company of Mulder and Scully all combine to give me one of the least-stressful moments I've had in months.

Somewhere along the line, I tripped over or ran into something, injuring my pinkie toes yet again. The right is far worse than the left - putting on my favorite sandals too quickly can cause a grunt of pain. I am constantly breaking, cracking, or bruising my pinkie toes. I'm starting to wonder if I could just have them amputated. I know toes are for balance or...something...that I didn't pay attention to in Biology...but I am not sure lopping them off would make me less of a klutz. At the very least, I could not ram them into things or catch them on stuff, have to hear the sickening crack! noise, then spend ten minutes rolling around on the floor and three weeks babying them.

It's too hot to cook. It's too hot to think. It's 95-99 degrees but the humidity and crap makes it feel like 107. It's too hot to...I don't know what else, because my brain, like our poor, limping-along laptop, tends to fare badly in this weather and can only go for so long before it starts to smell like burning plastic and slows to a crawl. I mean the laptop, not my brain. Well, actually, I mean the laptop AND my brain.

I have 2.5 friends here, and 1.0 of them is moving away. I was okay at first, happy for her and excited for the changes this will bring to her family, but the more I thought about it the sadder I got. She's finally going to get to stay at home with her son, but this will happen hours and hours away, where we cannot hang out all day and watch our kids finger-paint together. She's moving, and unpacking, and will have a whole new place to set up and decorate, but I'll be too far away to go over and help her set up and take her kid to the park for an afternoon so she can get things sorted out. All the stuff we were going to do together - play dates and crafting and helping with years' worth of birthday parties and meeting downtown for lunches and coffees and sharing bottles of wine - is no longer going to happen. And that makes me pretty damned sad.

I was so into chipotle-flavored things: chipotle black bean burgers, chipotle hummus, chipotle sauce, chipotle salsa. I think I would've happily slurped on a chipotle lollipop if I found one. Then, just as I made a HUGE pot of this soup, (I altered the recipe sligthtly by adding more onions, because I had a drawerful of them) the very smell of chipotle anything makes me want to yak. Actually, no, wait - the very thought of chipotle anything makes me want to yak. So now I have this giant freaking pot of bean soup (and those baby limas gave me hella trouble, despite what Heidi says, and I feel compelled to point out that I pretty much worship that woman's cooking and this is the first thing of hers that I did not fall madly in love with at first bite) and I am the only one in the house who is going to eat it. Er, um, not eat it, because...yak. So I tried to puree it into some sort of hummus-like bean dip/spread that my husband would eat (and maybe I could put on a sandwich), but it was gritty and full of flecks of crunchy baby limas.

So I stuck it in the crock-pot overnight to try and cook the beans into mush, and now I have semi-gritty bean mush that I cannot stand the smell of. It made my house smell like chipotles, yak, and really the whole ordeal just pissed me off. I hate it when cooking things fail, and I especially hate it when I am left with a freaking cauldron of some inedible concoction. I guess I'll cook it some more and see what happens. My house already smells anyway, how much worse can it get?

Don't answer that.

Sushi

"I like this sushi. It is very tasty."

We're Not Gonna Take It (To The Potluck) Anymore

I usually knock myself out for potlucks.

Pies made from scratch 100% - not even so much as a pre-made crust. Crisp, cheesy Crock-Pot potato recipes that start the day before. Chicken fajita dip that requires warming and mixing just before you set it out so it will be at its yummiest. Cookies that take all day; layer cakes threatening to cover my car interior with homemade buttercream on the drive over; fruit crisps taken out milliseconds before departure so that they are served at a still-bubbling temperature. Complicated transport rigs involving cardboard boxes, silicone potholders, aluminum foil, kitchen towels, and bungee cords. Presentation in my best ceramic or glassware, with hand-lettered signs and decorative ribbon. Big chunks of the grocery budget taken up with quality butter, goat cheese, red wine, white chocolate, imported sugars, organic flour.

For a long time, I did it because I loved to cook, I loved to show off my kitchen skills, and I got satisfaction from knowing that I'd used top-quality ingredients and put my heart and soul into it.

But that was before.  Before this past holiday season wore me down.  It wasn't a horrible, stressful Halloween-to-New Year's run; no more than usual, anyway.  But somewhere in there was the straw that broke the camel's back.

This year was just one too many.  One too many times I'd stood by a long, extra-leaves-added table in someone's dining room, watching as people inhaled Minute Rice and Velveeta while giving my lovingly-made food a wide berth. Too many years of work potlucks where people passed up the pie I'd made from scratch in my tiny, hot-as-Hades kitchen while fighting over the last grocery-store doughnut. One too many times all those expensive, quality ingredients sat getting soggier and sadder in my fridge as I struggled to consume the leftovers I'd had to bring home.  Schelpping my beautiful glass bakeware in its own insulated carryalls home at the end of the night, their weight only marginally less than when I'd taken them out the door a few hours earlier - this had become my own personal walk of shame.

This year, it felt like I spent more time than usual working my ass off on food nobody wanted to eat.  Maybe, if I'm being honest, the seeds were planted last March, when I made, per a friend's request, a chocolate-bourbon-pecan pie (again, from scratch) for his birthday.  He forgot about our plans and failed to show up to eat it (my husband polished it off for him). We re-scheduled and I made my friend another pie...which he also didn't show up to eat (though this time at least it wasn't because he forgot). I made a third one - the third one of these in less than a week - and he finally showed up to eat it, but with just a brush off "Oh, thanks." Three rounds of pecans and bourbon and crust and toiling in a hot kitchen, all in less than a week, and all I get is "Oh, thanks"?

This same friend completely forgot about my birthday a few months later.  He (and his wife) didn't even give me an after-the-fact courtesy "happy birthday" when he asked about my new phone and I said "Oh, it was a present, for my birthday last week." Not a word. Disappointed didn't quite cover what I felt.

Fast-forward to this Thanksgiving, when I was visiting my parents' place and made seven pies in one day.  First there was some whining because I'd only made one pecan, and that was the only pie some of the non-family guests wanted to eat; then, two of my beautiful pies had to be thrown out after a couple of days because nobody thought to refrigerate them.  They were both untouched, the sweet potato's delicate asiago crust uncompromised and the pumpkin's smooth surface unbroken. 

As Christmas time rolled around, I got invited to a cookie exchange.  I figured I'd better bring my A-game, so I got my mom to give me the recipe for a family favorite, small butter thumbprint cookies with a creamcheese & candy-cane filling.  They were a real pain in the ass to make, but delicious.  I also made a pan full of these, a clone recipe for Starbucks White Chocolate Cranberry Bliss Bars. I figured if my fellow exchangers didn't like one, they'd like the other.

When I got to the cookie exchange, I discovered that not everyone thought a cookie-exchange party meant "bring something really cool." There were plywood-tasting slice n' bake cookies, break n' bakes that had been baked in their original squarish shapes, and at least 1/4 of the entries were plain old chocolate chip. One or two people brought bakery cookies, and at least 1/3 of the participants left without taking anything home. I pushed some of my peppermint & cream cheese drops on people as we were filling containers at the end of the night, because even though I knew I'd have no problem eating up the leftovers, I couldn't bear to take a box full of my own cookies home. I already had to take home the cranberry white chocolate bars, which had turned out too crumbly to dish up, not that it mattered because I and the hostess were the only ones who tried them anyway.

Dejected, I soldiered on, readying myself for a friend's Christmas-Eve potluck.  This would be our second year attending, and I think we were the only non-family people on the guest list both years.  I decided not to do anything too elaborate, but I knew that my friend adored both sweet potatoes and goat cheese, so Heidi Swanson's Sweet Potato Spoon Bread (from Super Natural Cooking, the book that changed my life in the kitchen life) seemed like a slam-dunk.  I also brought an apple crisp, for which it was no picnic finding decent out-of-season apples. Both items were made the day of the potluck, and transported fresh from the oven, so they would still be warm for serving.

Which would've been great, had anybody actually eaten them.

Since this crew is all family, everybody pretty much brings the same thing year after year, and I overheard a lot of "Oh, you brought your rice! I'm so glad" or "Did you bring that mac & cheese?  I was hoping you would!" I have no problem with this...but they don't even try anything else. As I filled my own Chinet plate with items I could easily feed to Piper, I watched as spoonful after spoonful of fluorescent yellow macaroni and cheese or greasy Lil Smokies disappeared, while the perfect golden-brown, cheese-flecked surface of my spoon bread remained untouched.  I eventually grabbed a spoonful for myself, since it is delicious, and my friend said later that she did try it and liked it. But we were the only ones who even gave it a second glance.

My apple crisp fared only slightly better. When I went in for a round of desserts, I at least found I wasn't the first person to broach its crispy surface with the spoon (although I'd wager I was the second, and only other person that night who did). At the end of the evening, as I packed up my dishes and my now-cranky child, I felt like crying. I had a moment of deja vu, and realized that this was the second year in a row I'd left feeling disappointed in this way.  The previous year, I had made an apple pie and, because I know there are people like my husband who don't like fruit pies, I had bought a frozen Oreo pie from the store.  All night I'd watched as the store-bought one disappeared, its peaks of chemically-solidified whipped cream being cut into again and again. Meanwhile, my hand-made love letter to Washington apples sat in its glass dish, with only one piece gone. I had apple pie for breakfast for the next week.

I decided right then and there that I wasn't going to do it anymore. No more pies for people who wouldn't eat them, no more food-from-scratch for work potlucks or places where it hadn't been appreciated.  From now on, I will bring plates and cups as my contribution.  I will bring drinks, or napkins, or help clean up afterward.  But I'm not going to break my back cooking for people who don't appreciate it anymore.  If they'd rather have Velveeta on Minute Rice...well, let them. I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. 

Snapshots: Mid-February 2010

Last week I had an astonishing day of kitchen clumsiness that started with a case of the dropsies and ended with me accidentally dumping macaroni and cheese into a potted plant. No kidding.

It wasn't an entire pan of macaroni and cheese or anything, but still. A potted plant.

***
I am into the Olympics right now.  I sat raptly watching the opening ceremonies while my husband brought me snacks and told me the intensity of my joy made me "incredibly cute."  Piper woke up to go potty (oh, yeah, she wakes up and takes herself to the potty bathroom at night now, with little to no supervision) so we let her sit on the couch and watch for a while, until she got tired and asked to go back to bed. She was out cold before a lot of the really cool stuff (like the giant bear made of lights), but she was dancing right along with the First Nations dancers and making comments on all the flags during the Parade of the Nations. She was so delighted with the dancing and music, in fact, that I'm now hunting for video footage on YouTube and wishing this area had an annual pow-wow to take her to.  The town Ryan and I went to college in had a big one every year and I'd love to take Piper if one of our Michigan visits ever falls at the right time.

But back to the Olympics.  I've been watching a little of everything.  Ryan has been schlepping off to bed early, so I have the TV to myself for a couple hours each night, and I'll plop down with some knitting or the computer and a stack of paperwork and multi-task.  I find some of the interview bits hokey (Montage! We need a mon-tage!) and they seem to play "The Funeral" by Band of Horses under every piece, but I guess that's to be expected.

***
Text conversation with a friend on Sunday:
A: Ahh Valentine's Day.  The 15-year-old inside me gets her little hopes up every year.  And unfortunately gets disappointed almost every year.
Me: I am almost-ironically into the kitsch of it all now, mostly as an excuse to do silly craft projects with my kid. But I wouldn't say no to a hotel room, a hot tub, and champagne.
A: Exactly. It's hard to feel romantic in my dog-hair-covered bed, toys strewn all over the floor bedroom. Hmph.

I didn't "get my hopes up" this year.  I don't, about Valentine's Day, ever, really, because I don't like heart-shaped things and detest pink so it wasn't my holiday for a long time. Then I spent a number of years with someone whose birthday was February 14th and who hated chocolate in all its forms, so it wasn't like he was going to be going all-out on the day o' love. Ryan is a romantic but our budget is small and we are pretty easy to please - an awesome night for us is getting pizza delivered and watching as many DVD episodes of Mad Men as we can stay awake for. But this year I found myself making decorations, buying valentines to give to the kids in Piper's preschool class, creating a centerpiece for our table, and generally getting into the spirit of things.  A lot of holidays that sort of dropped off the radar are more fun with a kid, and I've started to remember all the silly things my mom used to do for Valentine's Day that we loved so much - heart-shaped pancakes, a small gift, class valentines, sewing us new outfits or putting out a dish of candies.  That kind of stuff is fun again, now that Piper is old enough to join in.

***
My Valentine's Day was vastly better than my mother's this year, from what I gathered.  She apparently worked on Sunday, and came home at 9:30 pm exhausted (she's a nurse) to find the first words out of my dad's mouth were not "How was your day?" or "Happy Valentine's Day!" but "You didn't bring home any food?" She replied that since he had been "sick" and lounging around the house all day, she should be asking that question of him. My dad, in true my-dad fashion, stopped at Costco the next day and bought a huge pork loin, an even bigger pork roast, and a ham.  "I brought you some food," he cheerfully as he set them in front of my mom. It's true; he basically bought her a giant pork roast for Valentine's Day.

***

Reading: Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, "America's Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine"
Knitting: Another Milo for P, handwarmers for R, brown linen/cotton wrap for my mom, hat for a friend's little boy, hat for R (to match handwarmers).
Cooking: Well, I wish I was cooking these Cinnamon Bun Pancakes...maybe tomorrow.

Little Boxes (Of Vegetables)

Three weeks ago, we picked up our last produce box of the season. They're still doing the boxes for a little while longer, just not at our usual pickup spot. The logistics of getting all the way downtown (sorry, I mean Uptown) once a week have recently gotten quite complex, and as much as we love the boxes, we have not been able to figure out how to get to the other drop point at the appointed time.

This means that for the first time in several months, I have to go to the grocery store. It's not that I didn't go before; we needed bread and milk every week or so. But this? This roaming the aisles, half-assed list in hand, struggling to figure out what I'm supposed to be buying in order to keep us from eating our shoes some time during the week? It's HORRIBLE.

I had gotten used to starting with ingredients first - looking at our weekly box and going "Okay, I have 6 ears of corn, 2 butternut squash, 4 tomatoes..." and figuring out what to make of them. Now I have to start with an idea or (worse yet) a recipe, tracking down ingredients and trying to use the stuff I bought before it goes bad. Which, since it's no longer the super-fresh local things we had been getting, means I have about ten minutes before it starts to grow fur and bite my hand when I reach into the produce drawer of our fridge.

I find the produce department at the grocery store sort of revolting now - all those piles of over-waxed apples, irradiated avocados, sickly, pale tomatoes, strawberries the size of ping-pong balls (with about as much flavor). All that stuff which seemed tolerable before but is utterly disgusting now that I've had the real thing. All that stuff that has traveled so far to get to us, sprayed with God-knows-what to keep the bugs out, all picked far too green yet it still spoils a day or two after I get it home. It's one thing to be making do with tasteless, grainy trucked-in produce; it's even more irritating to have it rot practically on the drive home.

Apple & Pumpkin Pocket Pie Molds

I NEED THESE. RIGHT NOW.

Look what I could make! Don't they look delicious?
Think of all the time I'd save! I could just roll out the dough and presto! Mini-pies all ready to go in the oven.



I like to make hand-size pies, because I mostly make fruit pies and my husband only eats pie if it has cream or chocolate in it. Well, that's not entirely true, he has willngly eaten my fruit pies on a few occasions, but only because I made him feel guilty. The chocolate-bourbon-pecan pie he has no trouble demolishing, but the blueberry or the pear with asiago-rosemary crust is all mine. So I like to make little ones, freeze them, and have them for breakfast. But it's such hard, time-consuming work, and requires that I not be interrupted for at least 35 minutes while I roll and cut and fill and crimp. That is impossible in this house. Someone always needs something, and they always need it when I'm in the middle of something else. But with these molds, it would go so fast, I could easily knock out a dozen mini-pies in between disasters.

Originally found at The TumTum Tree.

Hazelnuts and Avocados

I used to hate hazelnuts.

I hated anything even remotely hazelnut-flavored. It made me gag. I thought it tasted like wet basement. I had no love for nuts in general (even going so far as to pick individual walnuts out of my chocolate-chip cookies and macadamia nuts out of chocolate pinwheel filing), but I found hazelnuts particularly repulsive.

Then, three or four months ago, I suddenly found myself eating hazelnut things. All the time. It started innocently enough: I was ordering a latte and felt a rush of desire to make it a hazelnut one. Bewildered but ready to try anything, I ordered it with hazelnut and vanilla, just to ease myself into the flavor. It was delicious. I was confused - I hated hazelnut, right? - but sucked down the whole darn thing. And then next time it was only hazelnut. I even went out and bought some hazelnut syrup to put in my coffee at home. I couldn't get enough of the stuff.

The same thing happened with avocados. I had always disliked them, even after living in California, where they are ubiquitous. Something about the oily taste and odd smooth-but-slimy texture put me off. I picked them out of salads, took them off my burgers, and rarely ate guacamole. I could only stomach that avocado-based condiment if it was homemade, very very fresh, and very very garlicky.

But one day I started thinking about guacamole. And then I wanted some. So when my husband (wonderful man that he is) brought me home some fajitas for dinner, I tried a bit of the ice-cream-scoop-worth of guacamole at the edge of the plate. And it was delicious. I slathered the stuff all over my steak fajitas. And then a couple of weeks later I ate it again. When I saw a "guacamole kit" at Trader Joe's, I didn't even hesitate before I threw it into the cart. I went right home and mixed up the avocados, lime juice, garlic, tomatoes, and onions. And when it was done, I shoveled it into my piehole at an astonishing (and somewhat alarming) pace. I got out the Alton Brown DVD's I bought my husband for Christmas and learned Alton's tips for making good guac. Now I make it, and I eat it. One avocado's worth of guacamole doesn't last a day in my fridge.

At first, I was disturbed by these new developments. The desire for both hazelnuts and avocados was so strong I feared I might be pregnant. Cravings for foods I had previously disdained were, after all, my first and best indicator that I had a bun in the oven. But that turned out to be untrue. I guess I just really like avocados and hazelnuts now.

Weird.

Advisory

I just made vanilla-cinnamon biscotti from scratch, and while they were baking I made Chocolate-Bourbon-Pecan pie, which is in the oven right now.

I'm pretty sure this is what heaven smells like.

I'm also pretty sure that next time I make biscotti, I should have another adult around. Someone more observant and verbal than a 15-month old. Someone who can, say, point out that I have eaten nearly 1/4 of the raw biscotti dough and I am going to make myself ill if I don't stop shoveling chunks of it into my mouth.

Someone who can also remind me that fresh-from-the-oven biscotti may smell like heaven, but they are very hot and trying to eat them will result in a blistered tongue.

Someone logical enough to point out that if I didn't make myself ill snarfing up raw biscotti dough and gratuitous amounts of freshly-baked biscotti, topping the combo with a large handful of pecans and the dregs of my morning coffee would be a good way to guarantee that I feel sick by the time the pie is halfway done.

If you'll excuse me, I need to go make myself some peppermint tea...