Category Archives: cooking

Yesterday turned out to be a total wash. I got home a couple of hours early but I felt exhausted and fuzzy-headed so I decided to watch one of my shows before I worked on getting my act together. I could barely keep my eyes open during my show so I thought a quick nap might help. Forty-five minutes later I woke up still fuzzy-headed. So much for catching up on things.

Today’s NYT Dining In is pretty good.

I love this article

In July 2007, in Amman, Jordan, he opened Sugar Daddy’s, the shop that brought the cupcake craze to the Middle East.

Cupcake shops have become as ubiquitous as hot dog stands in some American cities, and have spread to Rome; Istanbul; Berlin; Seoul, South Korea; and Sydney, Australia. Now Mr. Jaber has proved that even the Arab world is not immune to such a Western frivolity.

This noodle thing is the kind of recipe I clip every time I see one.

Noodles of all kinds are easy and beloved. But soba noodles, a staple of Japan, are special: they usually take no more than 3 to 4 minutes to cook and — because they’re made from buckwheat — have a slightly firm texture and a nutty flavor.

And I make it one time and it’s never as delicious as you’d think it should be. Here’s the recipe. I’m not sure what I do wrong but the noodles always seem to be starchy and flavorless.

Normally I would skip over something like this coconut barley pilaf because I’ve never made anything called pilaf that I couldn’t live without. But then I read this.

As I dug out the rice, I noticed a crumbled and forlorn bag wedged behind it. It was the barley I bought last winter that I swore I wouldn’t neglect. But after one batch of mushroom barley soup and a pot of pilaf, it had somehow migrated to the back of the cabinet.

And I have barley in my cupboard leftover from the exact scenario minus the pilaf. The recipe looks easy so I think I’m going to try it.

Finally, there’s this article about crowd-sourcing recipes.

Crowd-sourcing recipes — corralling a group of strangers on the Internet to create and edit a bank of recipes — is gaining popularity and investors. The idea is that a thousand cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef.

There are aspects of this idea that I think are good but there are a lot of horrific cooks out there. My cousin found a recipe for pumpkin soup on a website and one of the comments said that the soup was horrible and the only way the cook could make it edible for her family was by adding a jar of Marshmallow Crème. My cousin said, “I’m glad that wasn’t my Mom.”

Dad’s Workshop

I shook off my Saturday funk by making a brilliant dinner. The recipe was in the Oregonian but I can never find anything on their website. I found it on another site but the site had pop-up ads so I’m not going to send you there.

Here’s the gist of it, it’s really easy.

I used one of my pumpkins, I think the one on the far left. Don’t use a jack-o-lantern pumpkin or you will be sorry. Those don’t taste good. I think Cook’s Illustrated did similar recipe with butternut squash.

I chopped it in half and saved all the seeds for the garden. I chopped it into more manageable pieces, peeled and put them in a giant roasting dish. I added some shallots sliced chunkily and some fresh sage leaves. A half handful?

Then I drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with some salt and freshly ground pepper and roasted it in the oven at 450 degrees. Usually when I roast things it takes much longer than the directions say but this time was right on: 30 minutes. About halfway through I shook the pan around a bit.

At this point, the dish is completely delicious but if you want to take it to the next level. Boil up some pasta and crumble some goat cheese. Mix the roasted pumpkin with the drained pasta and goat cheese. I feel like I’m forgetting something but I think that’s it. The recipe said to reserve some pasta water but mine dish didn’t seem to need it.

My sweetheart is really easy to cook for and never says anything unkind about anything I make. If it’s something he’s not thrilled with he’ll say something like, “Maybe this weekend we can try something not so lentil oriented.”

He was a tad skeptical watching me shovel pumpkin chunks into the pasta and said he was still a little full from lunch and why don’t I give him a small serving. HA! He totally went for seconds.

Yesterday I felt a great deal of dismay over something I’ll label: maintenance. It seems like everything is on the verge of breaking. Our landline phone sounds like a crackle storm. The DVD player is persnickety and will only play every other DVD so I have to keep the laptop handy. My cellphone hates staying charged, even with a new battery. My glasses need to be updated.

It seems like we take care of one thing (new gutters, check!) and ten new things sprout up.

I guess this is how it always is but at the moment it feels over-burdensome.

Yesterday I enjoyed my computer free day so much I thought about a computer free weekend. I used to do a computer free day every weekend and I think I might reinstitute that policy.

I read a bunch of stuff and noodled around in the kitchen. I listened to a bunch of podcasts while I made salad rolls, chocolate pudding and collard greens with bacon.

That wasn’t the meal. I’ve had the stuff for salad rolls forever and I’ve never made them before. I thought it would be something good to snack on this weekend. The chocolate pudding was a surprise for Bob and the collard greens were because I had a Cooks Illustrated recipe and I had bacon leftover from something else I made so I thought I’d give it a try.

The photos are of something I’ve intended to blog about for a long time. We call it: The Bucket.

I’m not sure where that name came from but on weekends you’ll hear one of us say, “I’m going to get started on The Bucket” or “Don’t worry, I already did The Bucket.”

I started The Bucket a long time ago, possibly as long as 10 years, when I weighed more than I do now. I used to bring it to the office and then when I wanted a snack, instead of eating Laffy Taffy and Ritz Crackers, I’d have vegetables.

You might think of it as a pain but once you get in the habit you hardly think about it. Every weekend or sometimes weeknight, one or both of us will drag out a pile of vegetables, scrub, peel, cut and pop them into these plastic containers.

During the week we can use it for our lunches or pull out and chop up for our salad at dinner. Bob likes to mix his with pickles or olives to give it more flavor. Cucumbers and jicama go bad pretty quickly so I don’t recommend doing those in advance. The bell peppers can also get slippery so you need to keep an eye on them but The Bucket will usually last at least 5 days, sometimes longer.

The peelings all go out into the compost bin.

I should start a blog feature like “Where’s Waldo?” only call it “Where’s Pam’s wine?” It seems like there’s a glass or bottle in all of my kitchen shots.

Bob is calling me so I’m not going to proofread. heh heh, living dangerously.

Note: I don’t know what to do to make it look less green. Every Photoshop trick in my very limited skill set just makes it look worse.

A week or two ago I made chicken pot pie using this recipe. As we were serving it up he said we had to have a picture of it.

Bob ate very quietly and about every five minutes he would look at me with damp eyes and say, “This is really good.”

I was going to write a quick post about how much I hate baby carrots. I might have covered this topic. I like to peel and cut my carrots myself.

Just out of curiosity I asked my favorite search engine where baby carrots come from. And this is what I learned.

I still don’t want to eat them but I don’t hate them any longer.

Today the Dining In section of the NYT has an article about Recipe Deal Breakers meaning what would make you pass on a recipe.

Most of my reasons are the same as the ones in the article. Things that have crazy ingredients or take a team of people to accomplish or have zillions of steps. “General fussiness” the article calls it. Along the same lines: something that takes too many pans.

When I read a recipe that wants me to blanch something in boiling water and then cool in an ice bath and then put in a bowl and set aside and while that’s cooling heat something up, strain it into a blender and once blended pour into a bowl and refrigerate and that’s only the first two steps in the recipe, I’m ready to move on.

I don’t deep fry. I don’t even like to shallow fry. Too messy and then I have this jug of oil to deal with.

Bob is a good sport and will eat a plate of just about anything but I try to avoid stuff I know he won’t like or won’t agree with him. He has a hard time with recipes that rely heavily on tomatoes. He’s not a big fan of legumes.

One of my favorite things to make is soup and I have one cookbook where every single soup recipe calls for a cup of heavy cream. While heavy cream makes everything delicious, we do like to button our pants so I don’t make rich recipes on a regular basis.

I don’t mind labor intensive recipes but I have to have a whole weekend to plan around and it has to be something will last for more than one meal and will be really delicious.

In my general cooking I don’t like things that take a lot of babysitting. That’s the one bummer about bread-making is that you have be there to do certain steps at certain times so even if you want to run a quick errand or go for a walk you need to keep an eye on the clock.

My favorite recipes are things you can make in one pot or pan and have plenty of leftovers.