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Kitties!
There hasn’t been much time for fancy cooking lately, mainly because we have a new addition to our little family. A good friend is moving away and cannot take this sweet thing with her, so Handsome and I decided Baxter, our current kitty, could use a friend.
This is Hermione.
Baxter was decidedly not happy. He was quite fine as an only kitty, thank you very much. There has been some hissing, some growling, and a few unfortunate attacking incidents. (Everyone has thus far escaped unscathed.) We’re introducing them slowly, trying to make everyone as comfortable as possible, and they seem to be getting along.
This is Baxter.
In the meantime, I’ve been cooking my old favorites– lots of pasta with tomato sauce, lots of homemade pizza in various incarnations. Nothing too much worth blogging about. More soon, I hope!
But aren’t my kitties lovely?
Handsome is gone this week on a work trip, so I am all by my lonesome. Incidentally, Handsome is on a totally awesome trip: He rode his motorcycle from Texas to California for a conference and drive through rain, wind, and snow (seriously) to get there. He feels completely badass. Sorry if that word offends, but I think it entirely appropriate, and it’s the one he used. He has my camera because I wanted him to document all the sites and critters he saw on his way.
That’s just as well, because while he’s been away I’ve been practicing in the kitchen and the results have been… shall we say… not anything I want preserved for posterity.
I got excited about making pizza margherita again this weekend. I had a craving for it, and I was all alone, so I indulged. I mixed the yeast in with the water and flour. I mixed everything else. I kneaded. I had a beautiful ball of dough. I let my dough rise in a bowl on the stove while the oven preheated.
Since the oven was preheating to 500 degrees, the bottom of the dough ball got all crusty. When I tried to stretch the dough out, it kept tearing. Sigh. Kitchen: 1, Lacey: 0.
I also bought these awesome little bocconcini to put on the pizza, which I sliced first. Bocconcini come in a container with some sort of liquid, and I neglected to dab them dry, so one portion of my pizza kind of liquefied. The crust was dry, but the cheese and the sauce came together in a strange way and the result, while totally edible, was severely unattractive. Score another one for Kitchen, who was apparently working against me.
I also had no basil, and decided not to buy any as I had a metric ton of fresh parsley. I know that basil and parsley are very different, but I also know that one can make a parsley pesto, so I was curious about the results. I did not use any dry basil, and I really missed the basil. I was so sad without my basil. The parsley had a vague celery taste to it, which was off in my pizza.
And I overloaded the parmesan cheese. I never, ever thought I would say this, but once the pizza was out of the oven, I used too much parmesan cheese. All in all, a completely edible pizza, but by far less stellar than my first effort.
To make myself feel better, I made chocolate chip cookies. Nothing special; I just used the recipe on the back of the Nestle Toll House chocolate chips bag. I had some leftover mini chocolate chips, so I used a mix of mini and regular chips.
I usually made these cookies on a whim, so I seldom soften the butter. I just slice it, put it in a bowl in the preheating oven, and let it melt about two-thirds of the way. Then I mix it in. The results are always, always perfect. This time, I thought, I will do these cookies the way Toll House intended. I will soften the butter.
I should not have softened the butter.
I don’t think it was the butter’s fault. It was probably my fault: my oven may have been too hot, I may have overmixed the batter, I may have been off my game because of the pizza fail, but I think it all started when I changed my technique and let the butter come to room temperature all on its own.
I made the cookies in three batches, and I burned the first and last batches. The middle batch was not burned but those cookies looked… weird. Not like my cookies. Sort of oddly puffy, and they didn’t crinkle down the way I like. Le sigh.
A year or two ago, these kitchen setbacks would have sent me into tears. I made Handsome a dish called Arroz con Pollo that I’d never even tried right after we moved in together. I was so overwhelmed by the flavor of cumin, which I have since learned that I don’t like in large amounts or as a primary seasoning, that I could not eat the dish. I found it inedible. I was crushed, and spent an hour in the bathroom crying. Handsome, being the man he is, swore he loved it, finished off three servings, and took leftovers to work the next day. It was about a year before I could use cumin in anything again.
I am not that woman now. I ate my ugly, tough-crusted pizza and reminded myself t0:
- Let the dough rise on the counter
- Use fresh basil, as nothing else will do
- Use the big mozzarella balls, even though they cost more, or at least towel dry the bocconcini
- Be gentle when stretching the dough
I’m also making my way through my strange, burned, crunchy chocolate chip cookies by dipping them in milk. I will lower my oven a little next time, and melt most of my butter.
I’m glad I’m becoming the kind of cook who can make mistakes. My mom told me once that she thought I needed to learn to fail. She thinks that failing once in a while teaches you to get back on the horse, or something like that. Mom: Arroz con Pollo, pizza, and cookies. Check. I ate dinner with a friend tonight, but I have a baby shower to go to this weekend and I think I am going to try and make my own thin mints to take with me. Handsome loves thin mints, so I will save him some, too. I had a bad weekend in the kitchen, but not every day in the kitchen is going to be a good one. But just so no one thinks that any magic happens here, I want to share my failures once in a while, too.
Coming soon: Polenta or Risotto alla Nana, as soon as Handsome is back with my camera and I decide which one sounds the most delicious.
Since I started this blog, I’ve had a couple of emails from family members to the tune of, “If you like, here is my recipe for ___.”
All I can say is, yay. In the past week, I have been offered recipes for jam, polenta, risotto, and bread, to name a few. This has made me think of recipes that I have made with family members: mom’s lasagna; my stepmom’s peach cobbler that, if I recall, has only four ingredients; Dad’s deer jerky; other Dad’s sesame chicken.
My great-grandmother on my father’s side passed away just over a year ago, and she was famous in our family for her ways in the kitchen. In particular, she made chocolate pie that would make you drool just to see it. Thankfully, a cousin of mine was interested and geographically close enough to learn many of Nanny’s recipes in her own kitchen before she passed. My grandpa has sent me a couple of her recipes, and I will be hounding him for more as the years pass.
My mom, I know, has expressed frustration in the past at not being able to reproduce some of her grandmother’s recipes. She tells a story about being on the phone with her grandmother, who was narrating her recipe for homemade biscuits. She instructed my mom to add milk to the mixture, and when Mom asked, “How much?” her grandmother replied, “Oh, just until it looks right!” For me, this highlights the ephemeral nature of recipes and of meals in general. After my great-grandfather passed away, my dad gave me one of the last jars of pear jelly he made. It’s been in my fridge, unopened, since he passed, because I feel like I should do something special with it. It shouldn’t go on toast while I have my coffee in the morning. Or should it?
I have a unique family. I have a mom, a dad, and a stepdad. I have six siblings, three to whom I am close, and only one of whom shares my last name. By extension, I also have more grandparents than a lot of people. I have family members whose only link to one another is me. In my stepdad’s family, there are five of us with four last names. I have a grandmother who lives thousands of miles away, but with whom I email pretty regularly. I learned at an early age that family is not predicated on blood, or geography, or nomenclature. Your family are the people who welcome you at their dinner table, no matter how long it’s been. I once heard my grandfather say, “If you claim us, we’ll claim you.”
Recently, Esquire magazine did a feature on Roger Ebert, who you may or may not know has, due to illness, lost the ability to eat and speak. In the article, Roger Ebert tells the interviewer about how he and his wife continue to go to restaurants for meals. Friends stop by and everyone converses, in a fashion. In discussing this article with a friend, she quoted another Ebert article, this time from his blog: ”for me, unless I’m alone, it doesn’t involve dinner if it doesn’t involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, ‘Remember that time?’…. You don’t realize it, but we’re at dinner right now.”
Food not only facilitates conversation, but is often the occasion for conversation itself. We get together over pasta, coffee, dessert, queso, homemade cookies, frozen pizza, Chinese takeout, and the best sushi in town not to eat, but to experience each other. The food is good, sure. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t converse over it. But the food serves a greater purpose: it brings us together.
In much the same way, I am in conversation, or “at dinner,” in the words of my friend, with relatives who had no idea that I was a foodie, whose shared love of food was unknown to us both, and with whom I am not frequently in conversation. I am happy to have these recipes passed on to me, so that I can pass them on to you. I hope, as they get posted, you can enjoy them as much as I am sure I will. But even more than that, I am happy to be virtually “at dinner” with so many of my family members, and happy to take the time to share this blog like a dinner table. I can’t promise to make your recipes in anything resembling a timely manner, but I would love to try them, if only to share some time with you.
Handsome and I spent a lot of time during the week in the house. I work from home at the moment, so I am home all day, and when he comes home at the end of the day we usually stay in. If we leave, it’s to work out.
We cook a lot. You don’t see the evidence of that because the best photos are taken in daylight, which is hard to come by late in the evening. Tonight, for example, Handsome made dinner. He sauteed some asparagus that was about to die, fried some bacon, and tossed it all together with spaghetti, canned artichokes, the “spice,” and some parmesan cheese, and it was delicious.
So we don’t usually go out during the week. It’s a money-saving thing partly, but I think honestly we would rather relax on the sofa together in our pajamas than do the work to go to a restaurant. I have friends who go out to eat almost constantly, and it just sounds stressful to me (though, as far as I know, they love it that way). To each her own.
When we do head out for dinner, it’s usually on the weekend, and it’s usually not very expensive. Even if we go someplace nice, we tend to share an entree. We’re not large people, and we don’t have insatiable appetites, so it works better this way.
One of our favorite places to drop in for a good burger is Phil’s Ice House in Austin.
It’s a cute little burger bar next door to an Amy’s Ice Cream, which makes it nearly impossible to resist. But my favorite thing to order from Phil’s is the sampler basket of mini burgers. Three tiny burgers come topped in different ways (I always get one with just cheese, pickles, and mustard) and are served with a mix of regular and sweet potato fries.
With three burgers for two people, Handsome and I get a nice, filling snack… and he always lets me have the sweet potato fries. I love this man.
It’s our third Valentine’s Day together, and I think it’s the best. No fancy restaurants, no stress. Just you, me, French toast, coffee, the little cat, and some sparkling red wine.
I did not make you a big cookie cake like Bakerella’s.
But that doesn’t mean I love you any less.
I love you, Handsome! Won’t you be my Valentine?
