pax
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Posts posted by pax
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My husband's grandmother's cast iron. Not even he is allowed to mess with it.
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Ok, this is month number what? 10? roast chicken and chocolate, topped off with cheesecake.
edit to add because of stupid computer: ever get tired of cravings? I am ready to start craving something different.
Oh, yeah, I am a serial monogamist when it comes to cravings. Weird things that go on for MONTHS at a time, then I drop it, never to eat it again. Pizza Pringles. I knew how terrible were and I just couldn't care and couldn't stop. Went on for ages before my body finally called it quits. There's a can in the pantry that's probably been there 6 months and is probably scary by now.
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I wonder if someone at the Church knows a member of the family well enough to ask if there are any family favourites?
If someone were to bake cookies for my mother's funeral, there should be Snickerdoodles.
I like the idea of pound cake and a bowl of fruit to be spooned over.
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Inside freezer:
Ice, frozen packers of veg/berries that need using up, ice cream, boo-boo kitty, a few frozen bottles of water.
Garage upright fridge/freezer:
All my animal drugs.
All my spices and baking things....flours, butters, nuts, frozen fruit in a various stages (whole, ready-to-bake, etc.)
Frozen veggies in the same various stages.
Extra ice cream, coffee, and butter.
Garage chest freezer:
Meats and poultry, things I've made doubles of like lasagne, dog bones, gel pads that double as either cold dog beds for the working dogs or saddle pads for the ponies, frozen gallons of water, and a frozen gallon of herbal tea, all the extra freeze packs, and two half filled flat back buckets.
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I hereby admit I make really good brownies for my family, and not-so-good brownies for other stuff.
For me, it's superlative dark chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla turbinado sugar, toasted almond or hazlenut slivers, done ala the Katherine Hepburn version, completely organic and therefore, free of calories, because that's how it works in my universe.
For crowds, whatever chocolate I bought on sale last, not always organic, and sometimes *whoa* even a mix. Life is short and it's not my job to educate people's palates at my expense.
I dumb it down a LOT for crowds.
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Anything and everything, doused in garlic butter. Fries. Steaks. Tempura veggies. Popcorn. Pretzels.
Thank god my husband isn't home. I haven't stopped running the deep fryer or chopping garlic for three days now.
I'm going to have to air out the house for a week.
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That's a LOT of driving around and aggro, isn't it? And the mess in car...ugh.
I just order pizza and wings delivered to the practice site.
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I'm sorry it went badly for you, it looks beautiful.
FWIW, I just don't eat any kind of seafood/fish at any party or potluck. One bout of food poisoning from a chef (less conscientious than you are, I'm sure) cured me of craving anything like that at a pot luck/picnic. I don't do mayonaisey stuff, either.
In fact, I kind of hate picnics/pot lucks and generally cook what I want to eat and just eat that.
I guess that makes me the Pot Luck Humbug.
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In the summer time, my grocery bill is huge, if you include my CSAs and my regular trips to the u-picks. I love picking berries at their peak and freezing them to make muffins or pancakes full of sunshine in the depths of winter. I do my own baking in the winter time. I don't bother in the summer time, why heat up the oven when there are so many other good breads at the Farmer's Market? I also feed my family organics, and or local but not certified. We don't drink much, but when we do it's usually very good wine. I don't include it the budget. Our daily extravagance is coffee. Locally roasted fair trade Kenya AA.
So basically, in the summer, it's about $600 a month, because I am buying two months worth of stuff, one lot to eat, one lot to freeze/preserve. I buy meat when it's on sale, and usually it's a chicken or a pork tenderloin, something out of which I can get more than one or two meals. Organic beef I get from a neighbor when we want it, but we don't eat a lot of red meat.
I have a cold store for apples, onions, potatoes, etc.
In the winter, my food bill drops dramatically, because I'm only doing fresh dairy and cleaning stuff, leafy greens and bananas. Also, our local Wegman's has a good weirdo fruit section, stuff I've never heard of, and things we enjoy trying, but not enough to break the budget.
Now, if you want to include feed, hay, effort and property taxes on what it's costing me to produce organic lamb.....hahahahaha. You know how you make a million dollars as a farmer? You start with two million.
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Probably my best deep-fry moment was when I got latkes to work in the deep-fryer.
Would you tell us a little bit more about this?
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I just realized I have my own food neuroses, although I said something about my husband's way up thread.
After reading about Zombie Crabs, I can't touch seafood. I realize it is totally irrational, but I just can't.
Also, I roast a chicken and then use it up bit by bit, you know..but the prep and clean up would make you think I am working with Ebola virus. I'm past AFDA safe and into OCD territory.
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Funnel cakes make me a very happy girl.
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I luvs me some TJ Maxx kitchen steals. I stop in there regularly.
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I'm no real cook like all y'all, but when I couldn't find a decent knife in someone else's kitchen and was tasked with mincing onions, I just about had a heart attack. How do you use a kitchen every day without a decent fraking KNIFE IN IT?
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Wow. I bow down to your superior organizational skills. That is truly genius.
Don't. It's self defense. I used to live 45 minutes from the nearest grocery store, and I have three kids, seven dogs, and a husband who are SURE if they don't get my attention the second I walk in the door after my "vacation" at the grocery store the world might end. None of the important stuff would get put away if I didn't make sure it was noticeably bagged.
It's a pure self defense mechanism.
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I am compulsively early. My husband is compulsively late. Oddly enough, we do not cancel each other out. We just randomly trade off. It's so freaking frustrating.
And I can't stop saying "Thank you" any time a service person does something. Anything. Once is probably enough. I tip awesomely, so it's a nice big "thank you" for real at the end.
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See now, I always thought Toad in the Hole was sausages in a Yorkshire pudding, and we call your dish "Eggs in a Nest".
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Smoothies are hot here, if you'll pardon the ......uh...is there a word for that?
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One of the smartest things I ever did back when I has disposable income was order a dozen LL Bean canvas bags. All different colours. Black has "CLEANERS AND SOAPS" monogrammed on it. Green has "FRUIT AND VEGETABLES". Yellow is "BREADS and EGGS". Red is "Dairy".
And then I have a boatload (no pun intended) of regular canvas bags.
First, I shop backward. Heavy stuff first.
Secondly, I set the bags in my trolley, open, pack right into the bag.
When I get to the clerk, I send the heavy, unbaggable stuff through first and as that is going, I unpack each bag onto the belt, setting the empty bag down in FRONT of all the stuff.
I love that Wegman's produce bags, the plastic ones, AND the labels, are biodegradable.
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I find their customer service phenomenal, compared to other grocery stores.
Our Weggie's is HUGE and has at least four aisles devoted to different ethnicities, I live in Ithaca, home of Cornell University. Cruising those aisles is a lot like going on a mini-holiday.
They have the best produce during the winter (during the summer I go to the farmer's market.) In the summer to compensate for the Farmer's Market, they bring in a lot of exotics, which is kind of fun. Not so much in the winter (which is odd, don't you think? Because aren't those things growing in our winter time? Wouldn't they be cheaper then? Sorry, I digress...)
Some of their breads are great, some not so much. I like their bagels but either eat them or freeze them RIGHT AWAY because those suckers get rock hard in two days.
One thing I don't like, they keep their "Health Food" ie, organics, etc, segregated in a couple of half aisles. Since so many normal companies are also producing organic versions of their products, and those are shelved with their other products and not the natural ones, it makes it hard to comparison shop on those kinds of thing.
I also love that I can dump my husband and kid at the food court (with a vegetarian bar!) and shop by myself. I hate it when they trail me around interrupting my dreams of fantastic Indian meals and things I could do with X, X, and X.
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So all winter long, I craved chili. I chilied my little heart out. Diana Kennedy. Rick Bayless. Jane Butel. I hunted down obscure peppers and rare beans. I tried different meats, cut different ways and combined variously. I pounded, pasted, minced, diced, simmered, skimmed, didn't skim. I tried the Marcella Hazan Ragu Bolognese method with Mexican inspired spices and beer. Chocolate, no chocolate, cinnamon, no cinnamon, cloves, no gloves. I tried adding my just soft peppers and onions and garlic at the end, for fresher taste, I tried the long gentle simmer in a crock pot with all the rest of the ingredients, I tried both together.
Turns out what I have been craving all this time is the chili off the Lipton's Beefy Onion Soup packet, with a hefty dose of Penzey's Chili Con Carne spice.
I am such a dork.
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Having loads of rubbish on the kitchen table is one of my personal crazy-makers.
After many discussions and debates and agreements and pacts, my husband is still completely incapable of NOT piling huge amounts of crap on the kitchen table.
I keep a laundry basket free, and at dinner time every night, I sweep all his shite off the table, into the basic, and dump it on his desk. Not gently, I might add. With malice aforethought.
This works better for me than actually balancing his plate on the piles,which I tried for a while, because occasionally they'd slide off and the plates would break.
So what's on the table? Pretty place mats, an absolutely gorgeous flowering African violet, a salt shaker and a pepper mill, and a basket of cloth napkins.
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My kid will not eat breakfast foods. She eats whatever is leftover from dinner last night, whatever it is, cold.
If there isn't anything left over, she eats things like pickles or tomatoes, right out of hand like an apple.
My favorite leftover is a Grand Marnier Cranberry Trifle which I make for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I make two bowls, one big enough for the family, which can be 20-ish people, and one bowl for 20-ish people that lives in my fridge for a week afterward so I can eat it cold and increasingly alcohol soaked constantly, one luscious bite at a time.
I never make lasagne or meat loaf or chili and serve it the same day. I always do them the day ahead of time.
Leftover baked potatoes make fabulous french fries, so I always bake about ten extra. French fries are a food group unto themselves, especially once you add the other vegetable, ketchup.
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Wow. For months and months it's been salty, greasy, cheese or red meat, and often all of the above.
But now that my iron levels are near normal again, it's sugar. Cinnamony, buttery, vanilla-y sugar. I just leaned over the counter and ate two giant cinnamon rolls. WITH ICING. Warmed iced cinnamon rolls. With BUTTER pats on top, melting all over the sides and down my chin.
If you'll excuse me now I will go sleep it off. My stomach is as tight as a drum.
Urban pigeon -- safe to eat?
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
I hope you are a good shot, or there won't be much worth eating. Picking through three pounds of bird for a pound of shot could be a big downer.