Filed under: Life
Over the past month, I was interning in DC again. Unlike the summer when I was in a dorm, this time I had a room in a condo with a real kitchen. That made the eating situation marginally better, but still not great. Not a lot of spices to work with, no pantry stash, and cooking for one. I basically cooked 4 times while I was there – one big meal that I would eat leftovers from all week long. And because I couldn’t make anything too complicated, the meals were really boring:
- Pasta w/sauce of tomatoes, onion, garlic, spinach, blue cheese
- broccoli chicken rice casserole thing
- pasta w/jar sauce
- frozen veggie burgers w/turkey bacon & the rest of the blue cheese
Breakfast was cereal or toast, lunch was always boring homemade sandwiches. The rest of the dinners were filled in by eating out, or my bosses taking me out for happy hour and I’d fill up on the cheap happy hour food.
By the time I got home, I just wanted to be back in my own kitchen and make a real dinner. But I was home for almost a week before I got that chance. Groceries were low and we were eating out for the first few days*. My palate was tired from over a month of restaurants and processed foods. (We were traveling around in December as well) When Brian asked me where I wanted to go for dinner the other night, I really just wanted a home cooked meal.
Finally made it to the grocery store. Last night’s dinner, my first self-cooked, real meal of 2010. It wasn’t very elaborate: frozen cheese tortellini w/lima bean sauce, roasted carrots. The lima bean sauce is interesting – lima (or fava) beans simmered w/stock, thyme, and a few spoonfuls of cooked rice. Then pureed and grated parm is stirred in. Recipe is from Food 2.0, a cookbook that I love in theory, but for some reason never cook from.
I served it with roasted carrots. This was the first time I ever tried roasting carrots. Probably the first time even serving carrots as a side dish because I used to think I hated cooked carrots. (But I always ate them if they were covered in demiglace next to a steak, lol) Anyway these were awesome. They were farmers’ market carrots, so they were already very sweet – they made the kitchen smell all sweet when I was cutting them. I just cut them into chunks, tossed them in a tiny bit of oil, roasted for 15 mins while I cooked the rest of the dinner, and sprinkled parsley & sea salt on top. SO good.
Tonight, I have a craving for bibimbap but I can’t find that sauce anywhere – you know, that magical smoky stuff they give you on the side that transforms a bowl of rice & vegetables into the best hangover cure ever. I’m going to marinate tofu in some bottled “Korean BBQ Sauce” that I found from Whole Foods, throw it together with the last of the carrots and frozen spinach for a korean-inspired rice bowl. I’m so happy to be back!
** One of our regular Providence restaurants had a special: head cheese tacos. A rectangle of head cheese, battered & deep-fried, in a taco. Brian ordered it and I had a few bites, but only after I worked myself up. It was actually good. (good thing it’s dark in there so you can’t see what the head cheese looks likes) We found out that the place made the headcheese themselves.
** Also, we visited my mom the day after I got back and she made a Lao chicken soup with thick udon-type noodles. The noodles (homemade; my job was to slice them) are made with starchy tapioca and rice flour. When you cook them in the soup, the starch from the noodles turns the clear chicken broth into a thick porridgy stew. (oh look, found a picture)
Filed under: Shopping Day
I have a new favorite kitchen toy:
It’s a Bialetti stovetop espresso maker. You put water & coffee in the bottom black part, milk in the glass part. Here is what it looks like before:
On the stove, it heats up and builds up pressure until a valve releases the coffee and shoots it into the milk, creating an awesome cappucino or latte at home. (It was on the latte setting in the photo) We got some fresh Caffe Umbria beans in the mail, so sipping the coffee reminds me of our espresso days in Seattle. It’s sooo good.
I’m obsessed with this thing. It’s got a steep learning curve as you can see by the overflowed milk in the first picture, so I keep wanting to make more coffee in order to practice.
I got it at a trip to the Williams-Sonoma outlet store. They were on clearance for $30 (orig $100). Unfortunately, we got home, opened the package and saw that there were grinds in the filter – someone had used it and returned it. Thanks for telling us! But I decided to try it anyway, treating as if it were a thrift store score. And now I like it so much it doesn’t matter.
Other gadgets I got at the outlet: handle cover for my newish cast iron skillet, mesh strainer, and a Microplane. I say this every time I buy another kitchen item: I’m really starting to run out of room for it all!
Filed under: Shopping Day
Could this be… the first week since the start of the semester that we don’t eat out?? I think it is really the first time I’ve got a week’s menu all planned out. It’s been a crazy semester.
Monday – frozen pizza, sauteed kale (it took me 3 hours to get home from work, so I was not in a good mood!)
Tuesday – goat cheese-stuffed chicken, sweet potatoes & kale
Wednesday – same
Thursday – tofu pot pie
Friday – same
Saturday & Sunday – squash lasagna, roasted brussel sprouts
And surprisingly, all of the stuff for this week came out to about $50 at Whole Foods.
Filed under: Recipe
I’m still here.
This fig & goat cheese tart was made on a whim and looks totally fancy. The figs were on sale because they were getting soft, the pita bread had been in my cabinet for a little too long, and the goat cheese was leftover from making roasted beet salad. It’s a little burnt because I heard my Tweetdeck chiming with @replies and I stepped away from the broiler for a minute. Oops!
Filed under: Uncategorized
Many families and cultures have their own Sunday dinner traditions. For me, it’s either Sunday dim sum or pho, eaten in the early afternoon and leaving you stuffed the rest of the day. Then 8:00 rolls around, I’m sort-of hungry, and I haven’t touched a vegetable all day. On those evenings, I like to whip up something quick, light and green. Dinner salads, fruit & cheese plate, and bruschetta are popular choices.
Last Sunday, we had giant bowls of pho at my mom’s house around 3:00. Later on, I started to get hungry during our long drive home so we stopped at the grocery store because I knew the fridge was empty. I’m usually really lost unless I have a recipe on me, but I managed to pick up some ingredients for a tomato salad. Instead of the usual bruschetta, I got home and decided to try it as panzanella.
I knew what panzanella was, but the thought of soggy bread seemed strange to me. But lo and behold, it was actually really good! I made my own recipe, but it was really similar to this one. Also, I only had fresh bread, not stale, so I “express stale’d” it. Cut the bread into cubes, put it in the microwave for a minute, stir, microwave another minute and let it cool. Instant stale. There are other panzanella recipes where you actually dunk the bread into a bowl of water, squeeze the water out, and crumble the mushy bits over the salad – now that just icks me out.
It was yummy, fresh, and the soggy bread wasn’t as scary as I thought. I even had the leftover for lunch the next day and the bread wasn’t much soggier than it was the night before, which surprised me.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I never had a bloody mary before. I ordered it just to see what this Shark Week-themed drink was all about.
(subtitle: or, How I Might Have Hepatitis)
Hello class. I have three lessons to share with you today:
1) When is it ever appropriate to ask a complete stranger for some of their food?? Unless you are homeless, or someone is holding a sign that says FREE FOOD FOR STRANGERS, the answer is NEVER.
2) Walking across town with a pizza box is like wearing a sign that says PLEASE START A CONVERSATION WITH ME.
3) Based on my lifelong research, I conclude that going out alone only turns out good approximately 20% of the time. The other 80%=having to talk to creepers.
For the first few weeks of living alone, I didn’t go out much but I’m finally started to try and venture out more. But yesterday I was reminded of why I don’t go out alone. Many times this summer, I’ve thought about sitting at a bar to have a drink, but then always chicken out at the last minute. Yesterday I had some time to kill in between errands, so I went to this restaurant/bar where people also hang out with laptops. I sit at the bar and order a mojito. A man 4 seats away from me tells me that it looks good, and I politely smile and say yes it is. Then a few minutes later, three sips into my drink, he sneakily ambles over to me and starts talking to me, then picks up my drink and says “Can I try it? Can I try your drink” and then drinks it through the stirry straws as I fumble incredulously.
Filed under: Life
I finally went to the Tactile Dinner performance that I talked about last week. The Tactile Dinner is a play that is part of the Fringe Festival, a theater festival of experimental, postmodern, anything-goes performances. It was less of a “dinner” and more of a play with audience participation.
I won’t say anything the deep intellectual meaning of this experimental art project, but I can say that as an amateur cook the it raised my curiosity about experiencing food without eating it.
I’m a little torn between giving everything away and sharing the experience with people who can’t go. Eh. I don’t have a lot of readers, so option 2 wins. Read on for the details: (more…)
Filed under: Uncategorized
The new half-season of No Reservations starts tonight, and I don’t have a TV to watch it 
I wonder if they’ll put it on Hulu. Tony kicks it the season by going to Chile.
Latin food is my new obsession, and I’ve already used past episodes to guide my food journey. My first intro to the world of rice and beans was Puerto Rican food, which I ate a lot I was working in non-profit in a PR community. Then I moved to Providence and craved it all year long. I finally started branching out and trying other types of latin food that Rhode Island had to offer and wasn’t disappointed. I ate Peruvian for the first time two weeks ago (wasn’t too excited by it), and the other day I had Salvadoran tamales, another thing I missed from my non-profit days. Anyway, my motto “WWABE – What Would Anthony Bourdain Eat” hasn’t failed me in picking adventurous things to eat.
Unfortunately, the new San Francisco episode airs the day after I get back from San Fran.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I like to do weird things. Check out this absolutely insane-sounding dinner/performance that I’m going to this weekend:
You are cordially invited to celebrate the passé-ist glory of Futurist degustation: a tactile seven-course meal of gastronomic revolution. Those without suitable tactilist garb will be loaned one upon entry.
That didn’t quite give me enough information, so I looked into what the heck tactile dinner parties were like. They’re based on The Futuristic Cookbook, written in 1931, by F.T. Marinetti. Here’s an exerpt from the book’s instructions for a tactile dinner party:
Polyrhythmic salad: the waiters approach the tables carrying for each guest a box with a crank on the left side and a china bowl. In the bowl, undressed lettuce leaves, dates, and grapes. Without the help of cutler, each diner uses his right hand to feed himself from the bowl while he turns the crank with his left. The box thus emits musical rhythms: and the waiters dance slowly with grand geometrical gestures in front of the table until the food has been eaten.
I’ve only been able to read articles written about the book, but it’s amazing how similar the food sounds to what I would consider today’s futuristic and modernist foods (French Laundry and Alinea most obvs). And it was written in 1932! Futuristic then, still futuristic 70+ years later.
If it sparks your interest, read some more passages from the original book.
Anyway, I’m excited to be witness to this crazyness and I even convinced two of my classmates to go with me. I’m not sure how much they’ll be into it, but they’re generally adventurous and it’ll make a good story to tell our friends back at Brown.
