On Sunday’s full moon, Daphne had just made some fried rice and cooked some collard greens chinese style. I was taking some bits out to the compost heap and I saw my first firefly of the year. I guess summer is now here for me.
The kitchen is about done. The counter came in yesterday, when I come home today the sink should be up and the dish washer working again. The down stairs bathroom is about done too, and useable. The last part, and the smallest of the three changes, the upstares bathroom. Demolition started yesterday, led paint flakes flying everywhere. So much so that Zoë spent last night at my parents house, and is likely to do so again.
The best part about tonight, I get to start moving back into the kitchen. I’ll be moving pots and pans out of the living and dining room and into the new cabinets. Just in time too, next week the Cherry Grove Organic Farm pickups start, at least a week earlier then last year. It’s so exciting.
Well, it will be here tomorrow on the fourth of May. We have all been living in a haze of dry wall dust for the past month and I feel we are about to hit the halfway point. I think Daphne, Zoë and I will be eating out for a week or so, but we are going to have a nice new kitchen.
For over a week now we have had work going with our house. I’ll try to put up some pictures, this is harder then normal since my computer went on the fritz. The useful part is that we should have use of our front door again when this is all over. The fun part is we will have a new kitchen, new bath, and new back patio too. Months from now. Still waiting for one more permit from the borough too. In the mean time I’m living in a not so baby safe work zone.
Today’s adventure: make dinner.
Sounds easy. Wasn’t. Cause as I sit in my comfy couch this afternoon, I see happy Vera walking by. She pops in, says, “I’m going to the doctor to see if I need stitches.” She *sliced* her thumb on a ham tin. I mean sliced (dude, if you’re squeamish, please don’t look. I warned you). Like, I’m never using a key to open any of those silly kinds of cans ever. She didn’t believe that she needed company, but I convinced her otherwise. Thank god, too, cause we were there for like 2 hours waiting. Then they finally saw her, had her put her finger under the taps, and then *glued* it shut. GLUED. /shakes head. I had that in the back room….we coulda avoided the 2 hour wait!
So after she let me to go Tesco to get the few things I needed for dinner. Basically leeks, since it’s chicken and sweet leek pie. Now, this is a Jamie Oliver recipe, and it’s one we’ve done before (tho no comments written in the book, so that should worry me…), but it takes forever. First you have to skin and debone the chicken legs (thank you for teaching me technique, Alton Brown), then cut up the leeks, carrots and prep the thyme. (Does anyone else get thyme all over the place when they strip the leaves? I got some in my hair.) Then cook for 15 minutes, add wine (we used apple juice instead, as I had no vino), water and soymilk, and boom. Stir, and bubble for 45 minutes. Then put in pie dish and then top with puff pastry.
Sounds easy. Can take a while. Was it good? Ummmmmmmmm….yeah. Filling. Hopefully the puff pastry will last til lunch tomorrow. We’re having a massive leftover lunch, since almost every plastic container (and that’s saying a lot) is being used right now.
P decided that he wanted to make something from the leftover puff pastry. So we did. All together now…awwwwwwwwwww.
[tags]altonbrown, cooking, jamieoliver, vera, p[/tags]
Just read this in a newsletter that I get. I can’t be the only one who sees this, can I?
Parents Against Junk Food (our effort to improve school lunches around
the country) is being launched April 1. The Web site address will be
www.parentsagainstjunkfood.org . The site will offer a variety of ways
for you to get involved (including contacting your representatives in
Congress), and we will be asking you to send us letters, photos, and
information on the lunches in your local schools. Please help!
Down in the test kitchen, the editors of our sister publication,
Cook’s Country, just came up with a great recipe for oven-fried onion
rings using ground potato chips for a coating and the heat of the oven
(no frying required) to do the cooking. Click here for the recipe.
[tags]cooking, cooksillustrated, junkfood, lunch, irishblogs[/tags]
Just a quick quote from Meat color treatment draws fire:
Hormel Foods and Cargill Inc. are selling raw pork and beef that’s sealed inside packages containing carbon monoxide. It’s a new technology that keeps meat looking bright red, even weeks after it would otherwise age to a dingy brown.
I just shelled out over $500 for my summer vegetables. An investment I will not see return from until June, but from then it’s mountains of organic vegetables until November. While I could of mailed in the check, the farm is just a short detour from my evening commute, so I stopped by. Farmer Matt, and somebody I hadn’t met before, where drinking Yuengling while picking seeds from a catalogue. I pushed lima beans, something they lacked last year. This is will be my second year at the Cherry Grove Organic Farm, I am already anxious.
It was just past 8pm, and I went into the kitchen with P following close behind. Next to the sink was our wine decanter, almost empty of its well-aired bottle of 1997 Château Musar, a truly gorgeous red wine made in Lebanon. As I set my glass down on the counter, P’s voice spoke up behind me.
“You have to finish that,” he instructed. As I turned around, the expression on his face made it clear I shouldn’t question this.
Trying my luck, I asked, “Why?”
“So you can grow big and strong,” he said, then paused for a moment, choosing his next words carefully. “So you can run.”
“Run? Where?” I asked, puzzled.
He gave me his family’s patented eye-roll of contempt and replied, “To the park, Dad.” Oh.
Putting the remainder of the wine into my glass, I asked,”Would you like to taste it?”
My sommelier gave it a gentle sip. “Yuck!” he proclaimed, his face scrunched up like he’d found red wine vinegar. “The rest is for you.”
I just looked at him for a moment, trying to hide my smile.
“Really,” he insisted. Nodding with a brief “yes,” he dismissed me and returned to the livingroom.
Over on
waiterrant.net there’s a checklist, from a waiter, on how to order wine without looking like an idiot (well, he used a different word, but you get the drift).
Well put, almost all of it. I always thought you were supposed to smell the cork tho….someone correct me?
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