Miriam and Dan left this morning to visit San Francisco. They abandoned a fridge full of things nearly rotten. I have to eat as many of them as quickly as possible. It’s a food race!
On the plus side, their food is fancier than my food has been for a while.
This is a breakfast-stuffed-pepper on a bed of fried tortillas. It’s stuffed with scrambled eggs, peppers, onions, cheese and mushrooms (and butter and heavy cream, of course).
The bagel is sprouted grain and has a hand full of baby spinach on it.
I scrambled two eggs with mustard, cooking them on low heat so they became creamy.
After simmering down a cup of wine I poured in some cream (gotta use up the heavy cream before it goes bad), then sauteed a few fancy mushrooms (I really don’t know what to do with these mushrooms) in the mixture. It was too sweet to compliment the sandwich but it still tasted good. I ate the bagel halves separately.
Overall a success, but not a routing. The picture is a close up of the mushrooms because they look weird and I’m still working on food photography.
Since August cooked Italian last night I decided to be a follower and cooked Italian tonight. This is one of the few (maybe only) recipes I’ve created and enjoyed and reliably repeated. The original recipe came from The Best Skillet Recipes.
The recipe was a method for cooking pasta in a sauce directly, instead of in water, cooking it all in one skillet. In the recipe, meat was cooked in the pan, then tomatoes were fried in the fat and oil from the meat. I tried cooking this without meat (after enjoying it thoroughly with meat) and it wasn’t great. I realized this was because the tomatoes needed to be fried in fat. I tried to think of fat vegetables. I couldn’t come up with anything but olives.
I now make the sauce with Kalamata olives, putting them in at the same time I would’ve put in the meat. The olives come from a jar in my fridge and have pits. I squeeze them out over the pan. They make all the difference.
I cooked the tofu separately, spicing it so it became interesting tofu-meatless-balls. Cooked in the sauce it absorbs the flavor and so only adds a weird texture.
This sauce could be vegan. I used heavy cream at the end—partly because I didn’t have any almond milk, mostly because I love heavy cream. Forgive me Adrienne.
Sweet potatoes and regular potatoes mashed up (they were made by Rachel). They have butter and heavy cream and soy milk. This is my favorite use of my kitchenaid mixer. In fact, this is one of the few things I have done with my mixer so far. The asparagus was roasted with garlic and oil in the oven
Pork chops marinated in an excellent sauce by Jeff and cooked with onions, celery, garlic, mushrooms, carrots and cabbage. The resulting vegetable mixture with pork juice was used by some as a sort of gravy in a pit in the potatoes. This tasted good but looked sloppy—and as I am attempting to improve my food photography, is not depicted.
I had a beautiful endive heart salad. The dressing was excellent even though Jamey left the egg shell in the sink and it hid there until it got gross:
1 Egg yolk
¼ cup olive oil
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
1 tsp mustard
a pinch of
Salt, pepper and celery seed
Maple syrup
Sesame seed oil
Balsamic vinegar
Garnished with:
Pepper flakes
Parmesan cheese
I made some 100% whole wheat bread. It was tasty. The recipe came from Peter Reinhart’s whole grain breads. I ate it before I took a picture though. But this is a picture of the creation process which makes me look professional.
Peach cobbler. It was a little gooey, sort of like it wasn’t baked the whole way though even though it was. It had too much cream. I didn’t want to leave that little bit in the carton in my fridge.
This is what Jamey termed “rustic” cuisine because it isn’t too concerned with presentation. This was a small dinner party with Jeff, Rachel, Jamey and August.
Appetizers toasted Ezekiel bread with olive oil and various cheeses. Boar sausage is from Spain via Jungle Jim’s and is one of the best, richest things I have ever tasted.
Hand made pasta from semolina flour and eggs. Spinach for the green clumps, sun-dried tomatoes for the red ones. The sauce is a bit of lard (one of my favorite ingredients, despite the fact that I store it in the freezer and so only can chip off negligible bits when I use it), bacon, ground beef (all meat from Dishman’s), onions, a large can of peeled tomatoes, 3 chopped up fresh tomatoes, wine, pepper flakes and heavy cream. Salad was some local greens and an excellent dressing of mysterious composition. I think it had hot sauce in it.
Brownie is a recipe from a cookbook that is only eggs, flour, vanilla, brown sugar and chocolate and makes the densest and tastiest brownies imaginable. Cream cheese in some weird variety I found at Jungle Jim’s.
Drink is rye whiskey, sugar, bitters and a bit of mango. The mango was rotten and didn’t impart a nuanced or positive flavor so we put in grapefruit. This made it taste like grapefruit, which is good.
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