start choppin'

So, I cooked dinner with Daniel last night in traditional make-this-shit-up-as-we-go-along style. The starting point was Swiss chard. I was convinced it should be eaten over pasta. Somewhere in my recipe sleuthing I came across the idea of chard in bechamel sauce. I thought, "Hey, I have that parmesan-reggiano I haven't used up. Also, I am a sucker for every description of making a roux ever that emphasizes the "nutty" flavor it is supposed to develop while cooking. LET'S DO THIS."

Béchamel Sauce, originally uploaded by .michael.newman..

I know when you add cheese to bechamel sauce it becomes... Mornay, right? But whatever, I like saying bechamel, so. Pull up your pants. My bechamel sauce involved the roux plus heated milk whisked in, part of a bay leaf and one clove (one clove!), some freshly grated nutmeg and the last of some thyme I allowed to go bad, and the all-important addition of salt and pepper. Then I grated some delicious parmesan in, and we crumbled the last bits of feta left over from eggplant in tomato sauce over couscous. I was pretty stoked about the result and kept slurping dribbles from my spoon off my finger. The resultant combination of chard-mushroom-red-pepper with the bechamel/Mornay sauce was not especially photogenic, but stomachs don't care about aesthetics.

Bechamel! Who wants to make mac 'n cheese? We can make it right after I eat these delicious leftovers.

crunchy friends in a liquid broth

12-Bean & Kale v3.0, originally uploaded by Banjo Brown.

I can't post a recipe to go with this photo, because I've never used one to make this soup. It's your basic mirepoix base with a commercial 12-bean mix, simmered with kale and, in this iteration, homemade seitan sausage. I think in the past I've used leeks for part of the onion ratio, and it's best when made with fresh herbs -- thyme, especially.

I like to top it with parmesan/asiago/reggiano and gorge myself on it.

a pot of cabbage. i shall call it "pottage."

Image from 101 Cookbooks.

I just finished off this Rustic Cabbage Soup from 101 Cookbooks. As far as aesthetics go, this soup is not in the running for any kind of prize. And, it's not really glamorous enough to serve on fancy occasions - I find this applies to many things cabbage-related, but perhaps I have a nasty little cabbage bias. (I do.)

However, if this soup is good for anything, it's good for using up a giant honking cabbage head I got in my third of the CSA share from Penn's Corner. I have to admit that my first attempt at using this cabbage was a disaster - okonomiyaki that tasted like sawdust, entirely my fault. But I've come back from my stumble, and now I'm pleased to announced that this soup is worth the hour and a half I just spent slicing, draining, chopping, and testing. I did deviate from the recipe as posted on Heather's (incredibly useful, informative, and imaginitive) site -- I added some dried split peas that have been abandoned on my shelves for an embarrassing amount of time, and I used chickpeas instead of the white beans she suggests. But, as with many of Heather's recipes, I think this one was meant to adapt well to whatever's on hand. It really does reach maximum satisfaction with the Parmesan topping.

In other news, here's what I would look like if I were a cartoon rendering of a typist from the 1960s:(Donald Draper hates my guts, even when I'm bringing him coffee in the middle of the typing pool floor. P.S. You can do this too at AMC's MADMEN Yourself page. You could even be something other than a typist!)

bluhhhhhhhhhhhh

I have had three major activities after work this week:

1) laundry
2) cleaning
3) making food

None of this is, I guess, that alarming, except that it is slightly out of the ordinary for me, since I historically have spent many an evening quality-timing it with my laptop for several hours on the internets. But, I'm tired of feeling bad about not getting things done around here, so this week, for example, I have:

- baked off the last of the Cornish pasty filling with more puff pastry AND a quick gravy concocted of onion + beef bouillon (defeating the "vegetarian" aspect entirely)
- cooked up a vodka sauce + artichoke/red pepper pasta pastiche
- made Thai peanut-sesame noodles with carrot and green onion
- baked a half-batch of banana-chocolate chip bread, which finished off my flour stores
- vaccuumed the shit out of the furniture in the sunroom
- scrubbed the stovetop
- washed a load of laundry
- re-washed that load of laundry
- started altering a button-down plaid shirt into a tunic/dress with pintucking (currently stuck on how to treat the top half)
- ironed a stack of very wrinkly clothes
- probably some other stuff

It feels like more than that because I am currently Ladycurse Exhausted, which means the only activity I truly excel at right now is trudging, and all of my toils seem like a major accomplishment given that they were conducted entirely without the assistance of lower-back-massaging-gnomes. However, my bank accounts are embarrassingly low and I cannot afford to buy lunch this week, PLUS I was an idiot who let her delicious Thai curry sit out and spoil all Sunday night into Monday [actually, this may have been a subconsciously intentional murder on my part, because the vegetables were already overcooked and I never loved that curry like I should have from the start]. At least I sent the lion's share of it home with Brock, who, being a sensible boy, actually put it in the refrigerator. Clever turnip, that lad.

Anyhow, to cut off my rambling, I will just note here that I am equal parts excited and apprehensive about the next several days, as they will involve extended interaction with people whom I love dearly, but rarely see - that alone is enough to make them more draining than usual. The fact that two of the people I will be hanging with are my parents ratchets the stakes up a few hundred tickets. I'm jazzed to see my pal Sara, though, and on the itinerary for parental bonding are GARAGE SALES and WINERY VISITING so I am truly excited for those excursions, too. All in all I expect it will be turn out for the best.

that's entertainment

I made vegetarian Cornish pasties last night, after coming across this recipe at Albion Cooks. Frankly, I was terrified that I'd screw up the dough, because I had never made pie crust or a pastry in my life. Turns out it wasn't so bad. Turns out the rough puff pastry recipe I used totally kicked ass. I am now jonesing for a pastry blender to make the process totally painless (cutting in the butter with a fork was kind of annoying, and I freaked out at one point with the fear that leaving too many large clumps in would ruin everything! EVERYTHING! but it turns out that dumping an arbitrary amount of cold water into the mix was fine, and then dusting it with a little flour and refrigerating it for a half hour while I made up the filling was also okay, and in the end I was so pleased with the results that I have now told Brock and Becca, posted on Facebook about it, and, finding those measures unsatisfying, have brought my glee to this blog. I bet I'll tell anyone who happens into the lunch room today about my triumph, too.) My only qualm is that they weren't that moist in the center, but a) I'm not sure they should be dribbling juices out, looking at all Google's image results, and b) I suspect I could've trapped more moisture in by not venting the pockets as much as I did (three decorative cuts! so fancy!). I have so much filling leftover that I may try to fiddle around with rectifying this situation. Alternatively: gravy.


In other exciting news, last week I spent Thursday night tracking my cat around the apartment with a rag in hand, trying to wipe the crap off his ass where it'd gotten stuck in his long pantaloon fur. The dude is peculiar in his tolerance for bothersome intrusions into his personal space; he'll scoot away the minimum distance - sometimes only moving the body part under attack - to escape my reach, but he seems to forget an instant later (or never realize in the first place) that I am the perpetrator of these acts, and will still come when chirped and gestured at. Even after Becca and I attempted to capture him in a towel to trim off the worst of the crap-matted furs and he spasmed out of our grasp, he merely trundled a few feet away on my bed to observe us, apparently prepared to let bygones be bygones if we'd put away that towel. We were going to put away the towel, right? Ah, scritches.