Comfort Food:

My mom gave me this gigantic container of tuna fish (seriously, it was like 6 cups of tuna, egads!)... so, it being a fairly crummy, rainy day, thought it would be a good one to make a little comfort food in the form of a huge tuna casserole.
Filled with good ole American foodstuffs such as canned soup, french onions, and cheeeeeze-- it was nothing short of disgusting, yet oddly satisfying in it's cheesy, carby assfatteningness.
I also made another apple cake and a batch of homemade applesauce, so we were plenty set to eat our way through the rain and gloom, however long it decides to last;-)

Speaking of gloom, was a little sad to plod my broke self thru the Aldi's today in an effort to try and save a little $$$. In my years now of stable employment, I've become quite the foodie of late, and am quietly mourning my return to the frugal days of my youth (but mostly grateful that I'm still able to afford my trip to Aldi's; the stuff there isn't *nearly* as cheap as I remember it...). My plan now is to turn the experience of saving money into a game like I used to so I don't get mired in the despair that seems to be running rampant now.
People are freaking out, and understandably so, but getting whipped into a fervor isn't going to help anybody, least of all anyone in crisis.

Got an abrupt wake up call this past week as well; was brought face to face with the notion that I am not obligated to have a relationship with anyone, regardless of marital connection: i.e. just because you're married to someone does not mean that you are married to their family, especially when they are adults and the relationships are still strained after years and years of trying to get along. After this recent encounter I've realized once and for all that instead of beating myself over the head and trying to make difficult relationships work, it's simply better to stop trying to force things and recite the "Serenity Prayer":

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

It's easy to mourn the loss of hope that your family will become close someday, but liberating to realize that some things are beyond your control, allowing you to save your energy for something more productive and move on.
(Maybe now, too, husband will take responsibility for his relationships with his own family instead of counting on me to nag him to call, celebrate holidays, keep in touch with everyone... he is so bad about those things but the bottom line is that it is his choice what kind of relationships he has with people--not mine--and that's a liberating notion as well.)

More Food Blogging/French Food

My 11 year old is becoming a Francophile-- strangely and unfathomably enamored of all things French, especially those things he can put in his mouth.

More specifically, he has developed a fascination with confit, a type of meat that is slow poached in it's own fat (yes, you read that correctly). Kid's been bugging me to make it for weeks... I bought a duck for this very purpose ($9.99/lb!), but found a cheater recipe using chicken leg quarters and olive oil, so mr ducky can stay in the freezer for a while longer while we contemplate his fate.

Never one to follow a recipe, I had to be the knob who has no idea what she's doing and mess with hundreds of years of French cuisine. So instead of just putting the chicken in the olive oil as instructed, I covered it with a thin layer of hen of the woods mushrooms and baked the whole mess for two hours at 300 degrees. Once it was done I made this for dinner, tossing in some of the wild mushroom confit, chopped, in addition to sauteeing some fresh portabellas as instructed. Pretty tasty, I must say. The sauce was lacking a little something in the way of moisture... maybe I need to toss the pasta with a little olive oil, add more pasta water, I dunno. But the dish had a depth of rich flavor that I've never experienced before, and was well worth the effort and/or yuck factor of eating oil poached food.

I am also on a mission to make a tarte tatin sometime this week and an apple cake for Emily's birthday. I also have to make a key lime pie for a co worker who is due to have her baby this week and a strawberry rhubarb apple pie for a party on Saturday.. egads! It's like Christmas baking all over again!
I loves me some tasty pie!

The Final Pig Out:

It seems as if everything lately can be described by what I am preparing, putting in my mouth-- and maybe that's appropriate for this time of year.
It's been a busy past few weeks of working too much, at the hospital and a few days at camp, and I can't even begin to put a recap on it since it was all happening too fast and I wasn't probably paying very good attention anyway;-)

Christmas was quite nice, one of the best parts being the dark chocolate volcano cakes I made and served with espresso bean ice cream (seriously, it was nothing short of dreamy). Camp was also good, despite the suck-o weather (50 some degrees and pouring the day we got there, but it improved pretty quickly. The kids still got to ski and sled, and no one got hurt, yay! And the camp food was ever so camp-a-licious..)
I got called in to work on all the days I was told I wasn't going to, including New Year's Eve, when my wonderful co worker saved my ass by calling me 15 minutes before I was scheduled to start my shift vs the night before as the charge nurse was supposed to do (and believe it or not, I was only 3 minutes late, not too shabby. I looked like a scary hag with major bedhead, but all my patients were sedated and no one complained...). So instead of running up to the Milwaukee Public Market and picking up some sushi grade tuna that day as I had planned (to make this super yummy dish a la "Heaven City"), I ended up running around like an idiot trying to create a new menu from thin air and purchase food after a killer, no-dinner-and-no-potty breaks-nonstop workday.
Since the meat markets were already closed, Jake and I flew over to one of the few places other than WalMart that was still open: a strange little store in New Munster called "Best Bargains" that is an impormptu cross between a restaurant supply company and maybe a Mexican market (sans Mexicans, go figure).
Anyhoo, here's what we came up with by the seats of our pants:

Grilled strip steaks with a thyme and Cotes du Rhone reduction sauce (so tasty!)

Alaskan King Crab legs with drawn butter and lemon

Scallops fra diavolo with linguine-- amazing!

Oven roasted asparagus

Wild mushrooms(from the groovy mushroom store) with carmelized onions

and finally, a really yummy chocolate cream pie (and not so hard to make from scratch as the folks from Jello pudding would like you to believe).

Oh! And a Raspberry Tart brew from the New Glarus Brewing Company, so SO good!

And so now I'm done, back to the old grind of low carb/whole grain dieting, to drive the new layers of holiday blubber away that I worked so hard to pile on. The gym has sucked lately, too, since they've been closed a lot with the holidays and all the bad weather we've been having. That, and the spin classes have been PACKED, making getting a bike more competetive than I like at 8 in the morning.
All in all, probably one of the best holiday seasons EVER; low stress (+/- the huge family blowouts we had Christmas eve/day, wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!), hanging out with friends and family (and we need to do MUCH more of that this year, it's a whole heap o fun).

Hope yours was just as nice... and if not, we have plenty of leftovers (if you're sweet, I may even let you have a taste of the Raspberry Tart brew, *maybe*...).

Happy 2009!

March 15

The weather's been quite nice these past few days, upper 40's, low 50's... the massive piles of snow have been melting quickly, turning the yard into these odd, floating, glacier type structures (the water is flowing underneath the ice, never seen that before).
The gardens were finally exposed, and a bit of ground heave must have happened-- some of the bulbs are completely out of the ground, and quite a few are already sending up shoots. It looks like the daffodills were already blooming at the end of this month, but no obvious signs of the daffs coming up just yet.
We lost a chicken a couple weeks ago during our Austin trip; too bad she couldn't hang on for the warmer weather. She was one of the older girls, I'm surprised we haven't lost more of them this year.
Steak and BJ day was a huge success! We went to the meat market out in Elkhorn yesterday at the LAST minute to pick up some localy raised steaks. They were *by far* the best steaks we have ever eaten, bar none! Jake barely grilled them, so they were quite rare, and they cut like butter and tasted divine. I also bought a large bag of meat, burger and etc, I'm looking forward to some juicy burgers, my long time arch nemesis of vegetarianism. I'll have to stop back up in a few weeks and pick up some more; hopefully I can convince Jake to make the leap and get 1/4 cow for the freezer. Otherwise, nooooo more meat for this girl, I'm moving towards a more vegetarian diet anyway... I just can't support such a toxic industry for a product I barely like, anyway.

Yawn!

There just aren't enough hours in the day... I always start each day at an absolute zombie like crawl, and then speed up frenetically as the day progresses if my caffeine doses kick in as planned... and here I find myself at 10:26 pm involved in 6 projects with no end in sight.
Yawn!
I ended up having the entire week off, but somehow didn't manage to get a whole lot done until this afternoon, when I tried to squeeze in every last opportunity to get the weekday stuff done. Yet in spite of all the millions of things I really hoped to accomplish and the inevitable lethargy, I think I've done fairly well:
I got my laptop back last night after a crazy trip to Waukesha, and after giving up in a drunken fiasco finally managed to get it hooked up this morning to the the wireless network I set up a few weeks ago (I forgot to push the "wireless" button last night, and thus couldn't figure out why it wasn't connecting to the system. Der!)
Words cannot express how fantastically cool it is to have my laptop on the counter where I can look up recipes, etc, while I'm cooking.
Tonight, I found out at the last minute that I had to prepare a dish for a brunch tomorrow am, so I frantically started perusing the recipe sites. I located a really decadent looking bread pudding (my favorite!) and started pulling ingredients out, whipping it together while using the laptop as a reference... fabulous! And can I mention for a moment that I loooooove how my kitchen is so well stocked these days that I can look up almost ANY recipe and have each and every ingredient (even if you have to use really good hot dog buns for your bread pudding--oops!), from the coconut milk I used in my curried butternut squash to the 6 cups of heavy cream and 2 cups of pecans for my bread pudding (and almost a dozen eggs-- thanks girls!).
It's been an adventuresome week for cooking, in my week of idle unemployment. We made a pilgrimage to the Whole Paycheck on New Year's Eve, where I bought $250 of "almost nothing to show for it". At the spur of the moment I pulled together an impromptu menu of things I've wanted to make for a long time, staggering their presentation throughout the evening:

I started with pan seared garlic infused scallops, followed by curried butternut squash soup (please o please do NOT use more than 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes), and then ended the night's meal with a *perfect* medium rare rib roast, potatoes topped with mushrooms sauteed with a sherry reduction, and seasoned brussels sprouts. After we shot off some fireworks at midnight, I served up Ghiardelli fudge brownies with vanilla bean ice cream, and then waddled off to bed, fat and happy.
Since becoming a new subscriber to Cooks Illustrated, I have really become even more intrigued with the science of cooking and have been waiting to try out a few of their recipes.
To get started with the recipes I chose, I needed to pick up an enameled cast iron Dutch Oven (a la Le Creuset, a $250 pot I've fantasized about but never knew could be found SO MUCH cheaper). Since I was a little slow on the uptake, almost every dutch oven in 50 miles was already sold out, and after about a half dozen phone calls, daily visits to the Wal Mart website, and a pilgrimage to a store far, far away (thank you, Garmin! you make scary adventures for a wimpy girl like me possible...) I finally got my hands on the 6.5 qt Tramontina Dutch Oven they recommended. Whew!
I then eagerly whipped up their "Best French Onion Soup" and served it with the Swiss gruyere they recommended....

But... nobody liked the soup, and we had a ton left over:-(

Even though the soup wasn't a winner, Jacob and I were still able to marvel at the process of reduction, the development of the "fond", and how deglazing built up the body of the soup. I think Jacob was a little sad that our first genuine attempt at "French" cooking wasn't so tasty, but I'm pretty sure he's still holding fast to the notion that French food somehow is his favorite (and why? was it the Alton Brown Coq au Vin episode?).

Since the prep was a wee bit of a pain in the arse, and the ingredients somewhat costly, I strained out the mass of pulpy onions this morning, fed them to the worms, and froze the broth for future use as soup base.... maybe it'll enjoy a second life as a tasty beef barley soup.

I made their "French Chicken in a Pot" tonight, with (separately, in the 3.5 qt dutch oven I got) oven roasted new potatoes, carrots, sweet potato, and onions, roasted with the strained and de-fatted jus from the chicken. The chicken was *beyond fabulous*-- tender, juicy, and flavorful, and well worth the scary Wal Mart trip.
Many of the recipes in this month's issue seem to be pretty time intensive, so I resolved to get a jump on tomorrow's dinner of roast beef and no knead bread this afternoon so it would be all ready to go when I got home from my party. Oh! If I could always be this organized... makes staying home to be the family domestician seem somewhat less mind numbingly dull when my meals have an 18 to 24 hour prep time.
To be honest, I know that I'm just trying to keep myself entertained during these (hellish) cold months. Being off work doesn't help in these 8 degree days either, even tho it really *was* nice to get a break after the chaos of the holidays, surgery, camp, and root canals (and then another flippin holiday!-- couldn't they space these out a bit and give a girl a break?)...

On a completely unrelated note:
I had a job interview yesterday, which I'm sure may come as a shock to some of my readers (please don't get mired in the heavy sarcasm).
In painful retrospect, which keeps playing over and over again in my head since it ended, it seems soooooooo odd to me that a 10 year, decorated veteran of serial interviewing would commit such a slew of interview faux pas....
Tell me honestly:
Is it really so bad to tell a prospective employer that you take criticism well because you make so many mistakes at your current job?
Really? You think that's bad?

I've gotten sooo many jobs lately without interviewing, maybe I'm getting a little rusty...

I think the flubs happened because, in spite of the later shift hours and low pay (and farther location), I *reallyreally* want this job and thus had to jinx myself, adding more angst to an already angst riddled experience. I have job interview #2 next week for a job I completely *don't* want. I'm guessing it'll go off brilliantly, without a single foible or stupid slip o the tongue, making me look like the perfect candidate for the wrong job. Shit.
Completely irrational, I know. But if you're expecting anything in my life to make sense, you really haven't been paying attention.

An oldie but a goodie. And me in a nutshell (no pun intended...)