Tuesday, April 28, 2009


I have a lot of my great-grandmother's recipes, including many that she cut from the newspaper and meticulously filed by category in six card files along with recipes she came up with herself and got from friends. This little booklet, "Unusual Winter Recipes" by Harriet Cooke of the Buffalo Evening News, I found with some other miscellaneous stuff in a suitcase we had in the garage for years before the imminent move forced us to open it. There are plenty of interesting recipes in the pamphlet--though what makes them "unusual" is not clear--but the very first one caught my eye for some reason and I made it last night. In this case, "unusual" probably means "meatless" because traditional Philadelphia Pepper Pot generally includes tripe and/or veal. The White Stock called for in this recipe is traditionally made with veal bones, but not having any of those on hand I just used a mixture of chicken and vegetable broths. The soup turned out really well; it's extremely rich, and that was even using much less butter than it specified. I subbed in olive oil to cook the veggies, left out the salt, and increased the onions a bit because I was worried about blandness, but it's quite flavorful. The other nice thing is that it's incredibly cheap: out of curiosity I added up the cost of the ingredients and they totaled $2.81, or about $0.70 per serving. (Click on the image to enlarge.) The soup also goes very well with the bread I made on Sunday.

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Monday, April 27, 2009

I made another loaf of bread yesterday, this time using whole wheat flour and a slightly more involved recipe that was actually easier because it only needed one rise. The bread came out beautifully, and makes what are quite possibly the best peanut butter and jelly sandwiches ever.

This is what the cast iron skillets looked like after going through about 3.5 hours on the self-cleaning cycle in the oven and a vigorous scrubbing with steel wool. Yesterday I coated the insides with oil and left them in the oven while the bread baked and will probably be using the larger one to make socca (skillet flatbread) this week, so they're well on their way to being reseasoned.

My mother expressed some surprise the other day that I can produce a reasonable poached egg. In fact I produced two reasonable (though not very pretty) poached eggs to accompany a warm (or cold) lentil salad loosely based on a recipe from Bon Apétit, but I omitted the parsley and added chopped carrots and celery. You plunk the poached egg on top and it's very tasty, especially if you throw on a dollop of pesto, which I did for the second meal. Gourmet.com had recommended using up the leftover pesto from the pea soup recipe with shirred eggs, but I'd been thinking about the lentil salad already so just decided to combine them all.

Still fighting sinus problems while waiting for the antibiotics to take hold. I've been having some lightheadedness and louder tinnitus caused by the congestion, and just feel really fatigued in general. Trying to stay home as much as possible, though I might have to go to the grocery store today.

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Sunday, April 26, 2009

Somehow I managed to make an entirely green dinner tonight without intending to. For the main meal I made linguine with pesto, asparagus and feta, and a little while later wanted dessert. The only quick thing that sounded at all good was instant pistachio pudding.

This weekend I knitted my first sock which went very well until the very end when I was grafting the toes together. After the last stitch I turned it right side out, and discovered a rapidly growing hole at the toe where a stitch had broken or somehow been dropped. I'll give it a day or two before beginning again.

The last episode of Little Dorrit ran on Masterpiece Theater tonight. There's no way they could have known it when it was put on the schedule, but the collapsed Ponzi scheme that throws everything into chaos at the end bears an eerie resemblance to the Bernie Madoff affair, though in Dickens' story Merdle has the good grace to off himself. "Merdle" and "Madoff" even sound alike...

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Thursday, April 23, 2009

It's not easy, but I'm watching Project Runway as if for the first time, carefully shielding myself from any hint of the eventual results. I kept hearing that season 3 is one of the best (next to season 2), but after the first few episodes I just wasn't seeing it. Tonight I watched all of disk 2 (episodes 5-8) and the drama really kicked in, starting with Keith's expulsion (completely justified). I still think Michael, Uli and Bree-oops-I-mean-Laura are by far the most talented of the group, not to mention the most gracious. Vincent is a whack job, and only the others' egregious sins have allowed Angela's weirdness and rosette obsession to fly under the radar for this long. Jeffrey is a piece of work. I get that he's worked hard to get himself clean and off the streets, but he's an asshole and his knee-jerk self-centered tantrums are textbook addict behavior. I thought Alison was let go too early even though she's really green, and poor Bradley, funny as he was, needs counseling.

I was finally able to get to the doctor today to get some antibiotics. The bad news is that even though the weather is cooling down a lot this weekend, they don't expect rain which would go a long way toward washing all the pollen out of the air and alleviating some of the dryness (about 40% currently).

The pesto pea soup never really developed any oomph, so for the last bowl yesterday I added more pesto and some greek yogurt and ate it cold with flatbread and red pepper hummus. The original recipe needed twice the pesto.

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

It has been an emotionally and physically exhausting week, so this may or may not be coherent. Cathy's mom was diagnosed Monday with Stage IV lung cancer, just two days after Tim's (Cathy's significant other's) 50th birthday party, the original reason I was down in LA this weekend. I ended up staying an extra day to help out with random things and drive people to and from the hospital. Cathy is an only child, which makes me appreciate Ben and Chris all the more. They're giving Shirley about two months, and she's being released tomorrow. She'll be moving in with Cathy and Tim for the foreseeable future.

Cathy's aunt Barbara gave me a very cute clutch handbag this weekend... without even knowing about my obsession! Photos and explanation some other time, as it's a long story. Suffice it to say, very Audrey Hepburn!

It's also a million billion degrees all over California, so last night I whipped up a pesto pea soup from Gourmet's website that mostly used things I had on hand since I did not want to do major grocery shopping, and sounded like it would be good warm or cold. It turned out ok but not great hot, warm, or cold. For the last of it tonight I added a dollop more pesto and some greek yogurt and that perked it up. If I ever make it again, I'd double the pesto.

I'm trying to reverse engineer the recipe for Sconehenge English Muffins, which are not at all English muffins in the traditional sense but very yummy nonetheless. The exceedingly unhelpful ingredient label just says "all purpose flour, buttermilk, yeast." I have to figure out proportions and if there are any ingredients that don't need to be listed on the label. Grumble, grumble.

The cast iron skillet reseasoning project should be back on this weekend as it's supposed to cool down significantly tonight. Weekend before last I left both skillets in the oven for a three hour self-cleaning cycle and then went over them with steel wool to remove the rust. I'd really like to get on with the next step, but seasoning cast iron when it's over 90 outside just ain't gonna happen. The same goes for bread baking, or vigorous movement of any sort. I've been battling a horrible sinus infection for probably two weeks now, but couldn't get in to see the doctor until tomorrow.

On TV, I finished the second season of Project Runway, and am well into season three. Such a great show: exactly like Top Chef, but with fabric instead of foodstuffs, and with the amazingly adorable and insightful Tim Gunn. Where Tom just looks worried. Tim actually cares--he's not a judge so he can get more involved with each contestant and really act as a mentor. I'm ambivalent about Hell's Kitchen. Lost is backing up 'cuz I haven't been in the mood. Other shows have not been especially comment-worthy. Running in Heels ended, but I'm not quite in the frame of mind to gather my thoughts on that one just yet. Fionla Hughes was a co-producer, something I did not notice until about halfway through the run.

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Monday, April 13, 2009

This video of Susan Boyle auditioning for Britain's Got Talent is making the rounds, but if you haven't seen it yet please watch. I promise you it's worth every second.

(embedding has been disabled.)

Since the link for the tuna curry isn't working for some people, here's the recipe from AllRecipes.com

Tuna Curry in a Hurry
submitted by sal
4 servings

2 tablespoons butter
1 clove garlic, minced
1/3 cup chopped onion
1/3 cup chopped green bell pepper (I used about 1/2 cup peas)
1 (6 ounce) can tuna, drained and flaked
1 cup sour cream (I used greek yogurt)
1 teaspoon curry powder (garam masala would probably work too)

1. Over medium-low heat melt butter in a large saucepan. Add garlic, onions and green pepper. Cook slowly, stirring occasionally, until onions are soft.

2. Stir in tuna, sour cream, curry powder, salt and pepper. Heat until warm and serve.

The main thing is not to heat the onions too fast so the cream doesn't curdle when you add it. That's all.

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The other day I was reminded of a lunch my mom and I went to at her friend's house in Jakarta where the woman served us tuna curry and we listened to a Naked Vicar comedy album, and she told us a story about getting locked out of her house and heaving a transformer through the window to break in. (Transformers back then were not cool alien robot toys, but freaking heavy green bricks that allowed us to use some of our Western electrical appliances in our Jakarta homes.) Looking back now it's kinda weird that she had to break a window to get in, because most houses in Jakarta were astoundingly easy to break into, especially as most had those glass louvers that you just slide out. I also wonder where her servants were.

Anyway, the point of this is that we had tuna curry for lunch, a dish that is super easy to make with pantry staples and really cheap. A lot of my little Australian friends ate it because it's very mild and only a curry in the sense that you dump in a tiny amount of curry powder. I used this recipe as the base with a few changes: swapping about a 1/2 cup of frozen peas for the bell pepper, and using greek yogurt for the sour cream. I found out too late that there was a lot less yogurt in the container than I thought but it came out fine. In the future I will also use canned tuna instead of packets because the packet tuna is a little too dry. I ate it over rice but it's also good over noodles or wrapped in naan. The cats were, needless to say, fascinated by this dinner.

This weekend I also made bread from scratch using an extremely basic recipe, which turned out pretty well. It came out of the oven at about 5pm and I ate three slices and then did not want the lentil soup I'd planned to make for dinner.

I picked up some Pepsi Natural at Target on Friday. It's "natural" because it's made with cane and beet sugar instead of HFCS. Pretty good. I thought it had a kind of coffee-ish flavor, though the ingredients don't indicate anything that would explain that. Apparently the Pepsi Raw they introduced last year in the UK has coffee leaf in it.

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Thursday, April 09, 2009

Food Detectives this week has a fascinating segment on eating bugs. I've also been watching past seasons of Project Runway on DVD. Great show. I suspect Padma studied Heidi Klum closely when she was first named host of Top Chef. I'm not sure whether or not to be excited about the upcoming Top Chef Masters.

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Monday, April 06, 2009

The tree pollen count around here is at insane levels. I wake up every day with burning red eyes, my ears itch way down deep, and the tinnitus is especially loud. We've stopped saying "Bless you," and "Gesundheit," at work because we're all sneezing constantly. They're predicting rain soon and even though the weather's been beautiful, I really want it to rain to wash some of the pollen out of the air.

Anyone remember this game, Master Mind? We played it a lot in the 70s. I found this one at a used bookstore this weekend and was very excited. The "deluxe" version isn't my favorite (it forces you into matching the key pegs to the colored peg holes because otherwise there would be so many possibilities you'd run out of board space), but it's still a great game, in spite of the creepy box. I guess I found it less creepy living in Jakarta where lots of supercilious old bearded guys hung out with gorgeous Asian women (the original game box had different models).

This was talked about before on Facebook, but here's a photo of the labor-intensive teatini (in a PS2 glass, natch). I managed to remember to get sweet vermouth at the store and it improves the drink immensely. Dry vermouth mixed with the orange bitters is just too overwhelmingly tart and kills the tea flavor in the vodka.

Last night I reduced the balsamic vinegar before pouring it over the strawberries, and it was good--the thicker balsamic holds onto the fruit better. There's a controversy over whether to add sweetener of some kind to the vinegar as you reduce it. I did not, but would probably add a squirt of agave syrup or honey in the future if I'm going to put it on fruit.

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Sunday, April 05, 2009


The cloche is done. For those of you who are unclear on what this is all about, this is what I was going for:












Image from the American Girl website.

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Saturday, April 04, 2009

Sorry for the weird lighting, but I had to work fast because the batteries in the camera were dying and I don't have any other AAs on hand at the moment. This is my awesome dessert tonight, courtesy of Mark Bittman: fresh strawberries drizzled with balsamic vinegar and seasoned with black pepper. Dinner was a scrambled egg with feta, green onion and Italian parsley. While Mr. Bittman doesn't really dwell on the same plane of existence as I do when it comes to food, I happened to catch this strawberry thing on his Best Recipes in the World show which happened to be on when I was busy doing other things, and it's really good.

I ate this fine meal tonight while watching the first installment of Little Dorrit on Masterpiece Theater, one of the few Dickens novels I've not read. It's not cool to like Dickens, but he's one of my favorites.

Serious procrastination today avoiding a smog check, cleaning the apartment, and finishing my taxes. I managed to finish knitting the Kit Kittredge-style cloche I've been making for Amanda and also make inroads to finishing the messed up handles on the shopping bag I started months ago. I hand felted the cloche in the kitchen sink and am waiting for it to dry before adding a green ribbon. I gave Amanda her Crissy doll last weekend, by the way, and she loved it. Wednesday night I went to see Jon in his second grade school play, so Auntie Kate is top of her game this week.

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Friday, April 03, 2009

The last few weeks have been insanely busy, and the next few weeks will also be insanely busy. I'm kind of in the eye of the storm this weekend, the quiet part where you scramble around to get a bunch of things done before the chaos starts up again.

I've tried to not shop very much this week and eat what I can out of the freezer and pantry, especially since it's been so hard to plan ahead amidst all the activity. Tonight's dinner was a pantry type meal, "drunken pasta" from the Serious Eats blog. I used less liquid than it calls for to cook the linguine--I usually cook my pasta in less water than normal people do anyway--using a $3 bottle of perfectly reasonable merlot I found last night at Big Lots while I was picking up $1/pouch tuna for the cats. It turned out well; a nice switch from the usual pasta-with-butter-and-cheese-and-maybe-some-herbs-or-lemon. It'd likely work well with rice, too. In fact, it was somewhat similar to the rice starter/risotto I had at my friends' dinner party a few months ago.

The main reason we're so busy at work is that we're about to launch a search for someone to be the next Duke Nukem, an initiative companies with normal budgets would hire production companies to handle. That's not the case here. We had an extremely successful GDC, so I guess all the sleepless nights and constant level of near nervous breakdown was worth it, but we're only halfway done with this nutty plan. At GDC I got to do a few things I've never done before, including scouting good places near the Moscone Convention Center to drop urinal screens, and serving up Popeyes chicken and biscuits to well over 100 people at our client's party (arranging the chicken was a lot more work than the company website would indicate, but that's a long, boring story for another time; let's just say the crew at the Fillmore Popeyes deserve a medal). This is why I got a Master's degree, folks.

When I have a quiet moment or two, I've been reading Salman Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning (twice!) novel Midnight's Children, which is fantastic. It never would have occurred to me to read it, except that I heard Rushdie on City Arts & Lectures a few months ago while I was puttering around town, and he's absolutely hilarious (he was also going through a bitter divorce from our Padma when she started hosting Top Chef). New blog reading includes yet another look at trying to live frugally by W. Hodding Carter on (of all places) the Gourmet magazine website.

I'm behind on a lot of tv, but have pretty much stopped watching Hell's Kitchen, and am sustaining only slight interest in Survivor (although I am surprised about the last vote--99.9% of the time you can bank on men keeping the hottie around over the smart chick, but this time I was wrong... yes, me). Running in Heels continues to fascinate, but I watched the episode in which they mainly whinged about having to work a chaotic sample sale right after GDC was over, and it made me want to hunt these girls down and hang them up by their overglossed lips.

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Was planning on trying the new BK Breakfast Shots this morning, but they only come in packs of four and that's too much food for one person, so I got the Cheesy Bacon Wrapper instead, the only breakfast food I like at BK and what I usually get if I stop there for coffee. (As you are all sick of hearing me say, BK pours a fine cup of coffee.) However, Serious Eats jumped in and saved the day. They say you can get a pack of two, but that wasn't an option at the Crow Canyon BK drive thru.