A Few Announcements. Few meaning 10.

#1. I am SO proud of myself!  Because, I am in this, y'all.  I am so doing this!

#2. My friend Adriana rocks.

#3. I will not, I repeat, NOT be having tacos for Christmas Dinner next year.  I've already got my sights set on a couple of killer recipes that I'm going to start practicing.  Yes, I know its only February.

#4. It is the end of February and I still have long nails.  Do I have any fellow long term nail biters out there?  I never make it out of January with the "quit biting my nails" New Year's Resolution or my nails in tact. I know this is somewhat unrelated, but it didn't seem quite right as a facebook status update so I thought I'd just sneak it in here. Thanks for reading.

#5. I am a resolution-crossing-off-machine because it is the end of February and I have cooked circa 7 times.  Disclaimer: This may be an exaggeration.

#6. I have more low quality iphone pictures of raw chicken in bad lighting than I ever imagined possible when I purchased my iphone3. I know you're now on the edge of your seats....inching closer to the screen... I really wouldn't do that if I were you.  I mean, I want you to read this post, but I'd back up for the chicken pics.

#7. I am serious about my Foibles to Fabulous cooking journey. I am also serious about alliteration and the letter F. To prove to myself the seriousness of my determination to stare down the cooking dragon once and for all this year, I employed the help of my friend Adriana, who I mentioned in my first blog rant.  I asked her to cook with me every Friday night and to the credit of her insanity and devotion to mine, she agreed.

#8. Tonight we cooked "Mild Green Calcutta Curry of Chicken and Vegetables" from Jewish Cooking: the Traditions, Techniques, Ingredients, and Recipes. <--- Hey! look I figured out how to do a link! If I had music on my blog, I'd play Madonna's "Like a Virgin/Linked for the very first time/like a vir..ir..ir...ir..gin...". Ok, anyway, you can click on that link and check out the book on Amazon. You can buy it new for $43 or used for $3. Apparently, it, too, has been a victim of the housing bubble. Not recommended as an investment piece.

 I do recommend the recipe.  Highlights for me were using coconut milk for the first time (vir...ir...ir..ir..gin) and using mint from my garden, albeit withered and ill-kept.  If I had to pick one more highlight, it would be the way the spices and herbs looked so vibrant and colorful just before blending in my magic bullet blender (that my grandma bought for me off the TV). And the way the spices and herbs smelled so aromatic just after blending in said magic bullet blender.  I assure you it was worth every penny of her $19.99.  Actually, my particular magic bullet was free.  Hers cost $19.99.  She had fast fingers and called just in the nick of time to get mine as an additional at no extra cost.

#9. I don't need an inheritance. 

So, what happens when you drag out your magic bullet and mix
six spices, herbs, onions, garlic, ginger,
chillies, lemon, coconut milk,
chicken stock, sugar, bananas,
sultanas (foodie for raisins),
pineapple, mint,
blood, sweat, tears
and a woman two glasses of white wine in on an empty stomach?


#10. Some curry goodness cooked by a light weight. That's what.



Recipe and pictures tomorrow. I'm using "tomorrow" here in the broadest sense of the word.

Here are the two most important pictures from tonight's adventure:

Unashamed and Undeterred

Cereal for dinner last night.

The Food of Christmas Past and Christmas Future

This blog is supposed to be about working through the fact that I avoid food, the cooking of food and the thinking about the preparing of  food. 

I have a new problem.  I now avoid the blog. 

For obvious reasons: blogging on this blog requires thinking about food.  Is that a true "Catch 22"? (Where are you, Jenn Amano, when I need you?!)   I'm still working my way through all the books I was supposed to read in high school.  Maybe I'll stop writing this blog and go read Catch 22.  Yes. Very good idea. Suddenly, I am filled with all kinds of regret for living so much of my life without knowing what that book is about, and therefore have most likely been misusing the phrase "Catch 22."

Me: "Nope.  Its still January.  I have to at least make it through this month of resolution."

Myself:  "Losers cave on day eleven of the new year." 

I:  "An excellent point.  Then, today is my very own day to cave!" 

See.  Now I'm having a conversation with myself to avoid admitting the fact that I freaked out so hard about the "Christmas Dinner Thing" that I ended up making tacos.

There, I said it. Yep.  Tacos. They weren't even turkey tacos.  Hey, now that I'm thinking about it, that would've been a good compromise.  I'm storing that idea away for next year.  I'll think of that next Christmas when I'm making some amazing french dish that takes two weeks to prepare. I'll laugh sentimentally to myself and say, "ah...ahem...ooo la la....I am so glad I stuck with that silly blog for now I am making "....****something in french****.....". 

I really, really hope I'm not making fries for dinner next Christmas.   Please, little blog, catapult me into culinary greatness.  I'll settle for culinary normalness. Love, Jenny

Ok, its getting late.  My other new year's resolution is to get to bed before 11.   I set up my resolutions to help me rationalize getting out of my other resolutions.  "I'd write more about food, but I need to stick with my bedtime resolution."  If there isn't a loophole, where's the hope, right?

P.S. As soon as I figure out how to put pictures on here, I'll post my pictures from my morning at the open air market in "France" and also the pictures of the damage a person can do when improperly handling an artichoke.  No person in particular.  Just "a person".  

Committed

I am getting up tomorrow morning at 6am.







I wanted to leave that up there all by itself because it looks and sounds more official that way, like someone announced it over a P.A. system.  

Here's the rub: getting up at 6am is like getting up at 3am for me because even though I live geographically on Eastern Standard Time I live my life on Pacific Standard Time.  It has to do with Trey's work and my life choices and a the smallest bit to do with my laziness.

All that to say, I am going to the farmer's market tomorrow morning and I'm getting there when it opens at 7.  I'm going to go to the farmer's market (I know I just repeated myself. I'm trying to convince my own self of my seriousness about going to the farmer's market.  At 7am.) and I'm going to pretend I'm in Provence, France.  I'm going to buy flowers, a plant, some produce and hopefully the honey lady will be there.  A different honey lady than last time, because the honey I bought from the other honey lady tasted like crushed up vitamins. I know this is probably due to my severely under developed palate. To a more refined connoisseur, it probably tasted like... crushed up vitamins.  Ok, I'm not gonna give on that one.  The lady sold me some seriously funk honey.  

Anyway, I'm doing this partly because I really do wish I was waking up in the morning and going to a beautiful open air market in France.  I somehow think I'd be more inspired to cook amazing things and make my life beautiful.  I'm also doing this because sometimes when you've lived somewhere for a long time, you grow immune to the beauty that is right in front of you.  So my little way of trying to see my own little world with new wonder and appreciation is to pretend I'm waking up in Provence.  I will amble non-chalantly and say ooh la la just for authenticity.  I understand this is weird.

But I'm committed. Or maybe I should be.  

P.S. I'm waffling.  And its only been one sentence since I said I was committed.  I wonder if someone can wonder at beauty at the ungodly hour of 7am?  Ok, before it becomes painfully obvious that the whole laziness thing is more than a small part of the reason I live my life on PST, I'm going to bed.  Its only 9pm PST.  I can do this. Provence, France saturday market, here I come.

P.S.S. Yep, I definitely should be committed.

Cooking Shows Need Subtitles

The thought has crossed my mind: maybe I just need to watch more cooking shows.  That's what my foodie friends like doing.  They really do this.  for pleasure.  I think its comforting to them to watch one of their own kind talking in their native language.  Its comforting for them, I imagine, I assume, I conjecture, hearing someone talk about how effortless it is to blanch this, then saute that, throw in whatever you have on hand, add this "to taste"....

I need to stop here and say:

"to taste" is just...just...stressful.  what does that mean?  to what taste?  mine?  I don't trust mine.  What is it supposed to taste like?  Foodies taste something and then say oh...it needs a little more xyz.  How in the hell do you know that?  Is it a 6th sense I'm missing?  Oh my god.  It is.  Well, that's depressing.  If you know where they're selling those, let me know. I'd like one for Christmas.  I want the recipe to say: "blah, blah, blah to taste (it should taste kind of salty...not quite as salty as a french fry but saltier than 50% less sodium campbell's split pea soup."  I need things to be specific, people.  I'm not comfortable feeling my way.  I need hand holding.  I need help.  I'm going to jump off this downward spiral now.  Where was I before I was blinded by rage against the stress inducing phrase: "to taste"?

Ah yes,  food shows. I believe they should acknowledge they are speaking a foreign language and should, therefore, include subtitles for those of us who do not speak Foodie.  Aside from this oversight, the thing that kills me about those shows is the whole "effortless" tone that drips from every casual wave of their hand, stir of their spoon and lightening fast chop of their beautiful knives.  The toss this in, chat, chop that, chat, stir together, smile, act like they're just going for a stroll through a beautiful meadow picking fragrant wildflowers enjoying the sun's warmth on their glowing skin, confidently knowing all along that they are making something beautiful that one and all will enjoy. It just slays me. 

This is not my experience.  Cooking is a crucible, in which, I face uncertainty, stomach tightness, headache, irritability (and many other things listed as side effects in drug commercials).  I spend half my time reading and re-reading the recipe and then looking up half the words and processes.  Then I realize I don't have a certain ingredient and instead of saying effortlessly, "oh well, I'll just use a bit of this", I stop dead in my tracks and feel like I'm staring up at the 10 foot wall that needs scaling.  Drill sargent children and my hungry stomach are screaming, "Scale that wall, soldier. Now! Now! The dinner's burning!"  Doubt floods in.  If I leave that out, will it ruin everything?  If I add something else will it ruin everything?  Then I've wasted all this food that's already committed itself to this !@$* recipe.  And then I've wasted my little bit of money.  And worse than that, I've wasted my time on that !@#$ trip to the grocery store.  You can see how this can get a little wearing on a person.

It would make me feel better if there was a cooking show that ended with the host looking into the camera and saying (very slowly so that I can understand through the thick Foodie accent):

"you there, with the panic stricken face, the 3/4 empty bottle of wine, yes, you...the woman in the ill-equipped, teeny tiny, two feet of counter space kitchen who has just cooked while the phone was ringing, the texts were binging, the kids were waging civil war XXII, climbing over Mt. Laundry, to wade through the slog of the dirty dishwasher, all the while translating this foreign Foodie language....learning to cook when you're down the 6th sense and out of your element is work, but you can do it."

"Also, just for following along today, here's a little Foodie insider information: the Effortless Vibe is one aisle over from the 6th Sense, next to the Years of Experience and bottled Peace and Quiet.  The Foodie Store takes payment in these forms: Relax Already!, Preparation and Practice.  Warranties on our products are available for the low, low price of not taking yourself so seriously and seeing failing as creativity. See you back here tomorrow for some not so effortless cooking."

That would be my kind of cooking show. 

a necessary rant

ok, you know what?  I'm just really tired of being seriously intimidated by cooking.  I'm sitting here drinking too cold merlot because it was that bad.  It IS that bad. 

I have a bad relationship with food.  Not in the binge sort of way. Or the starve myself sort of way.  More like the its an inconvenient necessity sort of way.  I'm annoyed by food, the preparation of it, the time it takes out of my day, the sitting there eating it while everyone complains.  Oh that gets me....

Anyway, I've been saying for a long time that I need to work through my cooking issues.

Cooking for me = griping, complaining, a bunch of unappreciated work, not having one ingredient, anxiety, way too much time, stress, interruptions, f-word inducing frustration, a lot of clean up, exhaustion. 

My friend Adriana (who likes to cook) told me the other day, "you know what?  The conditions you were under when you learned to cook would make cooking terrible for anyone."  What do you mean, I say?  "Well, you didn't know a thing.  You got married and had a baby right away.  No money and a million other stresses.  That takes all the fun out of it."  She learned to cook while she lived on her own.  by herself.  What in the world is that like?  deep breath...

Anyway, so I think she's on to something, because I had an epiphany right then and there.  What if I were to figure out all the things that stress me out about cooking and try to either eliminate them, overcome them or otherwise work around them?

A couple days after I talked with A, I came across a blog: Tongue in Cheek.  It is absolutely beautiful.  The woman blogs about her experiences living in France for the past twenty years.  I was so inspired.  In France, eating is dining and its a thing of beauty.  I understand that culturally, Americans eat for fuel not for the pleasure of it.  But maybe, I can aspire to the French way?

So tonight...armed with my new inspiration I decided to try to whip something up using what I had on hand.  Something I hear foodies say they do all the time.  I only have a few things on hand because I also hate to go to the grocery store.

Going to the grocery store = making a list, which means I have to make a menu, which stresses me out because coming up with one meal is bad enough, much less multiple meals..., taking 2 wonderful, but rowdy boys to the store, not being able to think, getting home and realizing that I forgot x number of things, which means I need to go back, losing the list that I wrote my menu on, not being able to remember what I just bought all this fricking food for because I'm so stressed out by the whole cooking thing that I completely blocked out the whole menu writing process so I have no idea what I'm supposed to make for dinner tonight.  fishsticks again? 

So tonight, I decided to make a frittata with sundried tomatoes, black olives and parmesan.  I also decided to make latkes because I had potatoes and onions and Adriana had just showed me how to make them for Hanukkah. 

That's when the panic set in.  The boys aren't going to eat this.  Shit.  I can't deal with complaining at 8:00pm.  But then, I caught myself.  Wait.  I think that sounds great.  So, heckfire, I'm making it.  That's when my brilliant plan came into my not so brilliant brain.  I'll make fishsticks for the kids.  I'll make the frittata for me.  I'll make fishsticks and other icky bland, gross food (+ a vegetable, of course) for them every night.  And I'll explore cooking for myself every night if it kills me dammit.

So, I acted on this brilliant plan.  I threw the fishsticks into the oven and proceeded to grate cheese, pit olives and dried the tomatoes in the sun.  I grate potatoes and onions. I add flour and corn meal just because that sounds like something a real foodie would do.  Then reality struck.  The mousetrap game is missing a piece.  (Who made that flipping game? I want to ring their neck).  There was fighting.  The birthday lego airplane has been mysteriously destroyed, wailing ensues.  Too much humming, more fighting.  I can't even beat some eggs.  And I say to myself, "this is why I don't cook.  Right here."  Really.  How am I supposed to pay attention to what's on the stove when there's a riot in my living room?  My visions of happily (fishstick fed) children playing happily while I casually stand by the stove drinking my red wine went up in the smoke of my now too hot vegetable oil in my iron skillet.  What was I thinking?

I casted my face toward heaven and shed a little tear, growled my frustrations and decided right then and there (in a very Scarlett O'Hara fist shaking sort of way), that I will do this.  Even if I have to feed my kids fishsticks every night and scream fiddlesticks because I'm really trying to cut back on the other f word, I will learn how to enjoy cooking.  I don't envision myself becoming a card carrying foodie, but I do want to see food as more than an annoyance to be endured.  I'd like to enjoy the pleasure of all the things that make a meal beautiful: preparing, cooking, savoring even if it means I spend all of my time failing forward.

Now that I've had my little rant, I'm going to enjoy the last bit of my wine that's finally at an acceptable temperature.  Here's to my messy kitchen and the victory that tonight's failure is for me.