Fat Girl Gone Thin

A few months ago a friend of mine decided that she wanted to make it rich by creating some fabulous contraption that she could sell on late-night infomercials. Like the microwave bacon cooker.

Hasn’t everyone wanted to invent some never-before-thought-of contraption at some point in their life … something that everyone clearly needed but had never realized was missing. Like one of those cup holders that sits on your dash and swivels when you drive so that you never lose a drop of coffee. Yes, capitalism at its best.

Which brings me to cheese foam. Yes, I typed correctly. Cheese + foam.  As in, “apply a liberal dollop of cheese foam to your asparagus.” This is apparently the newest trend in restaurants and cookbooks. It is also, apparently, the sign that people are running out of new ideas for what to make with food.

But the airy, cloud-like cheese idea got me thinking. Everyone has some recipe that is inherently odd. Something that is fantastically delicious to them – presumably because it has a myriad of ingredients that they love and smooshed together in varying combinations, became some sort of personal homage to deliciousness.

This is how I feel about green tacos.

I should point out that when I say “taco” I don’t mean the kind with ground beef. I mean the kind I started making during my brief vegetarian phase in college. The kind with faux-meat. Also known as veggie grounds. Its made with soy and is actually full of yummyness in its mildly nutty flavor… so it only seemed natural that my favorite vegetable, the brussel sprout, would be a valiant addition.

Topped with an onslaught of alvocado, cheese, sour cream and salsa from the garden, I find the meal finger-lickin’ good.

This is the kind of food that tastes good because it’s exactly what you were craving and full of the things you love… the thing that doesn’t really translate as scrumptious to anyone else but you. The kind of dish you eat alone in your kitchen, when no one else is looking.

The joy that comes with the freedom to create something like green tacos, just because it sounds good, is mostly what makes them delicious. But cheese foam – that’s just wrong.

How To Make A Green Taco

Roughly chop a large handful of brussel sprouts and toss them in a skillet with a package of veggie grounds. Add between 1/2 to 3/4 of a package of taco seasoning and a cup of water. Cover and allow to simmer for five minutes. Remove lid, turn heat to high and allow excess liquid to boil off.

Spoon as much of the green goodness into your tortilla or taco shells as you like and top with all the regular burrito/taco goodies. Enjoy! (See, wasn’t that easy…)

I rarely find it as a harbinger of good things when I begin a story by saying, my fridge smells like a small furry creature curled up in the corner and died.

But this is only about half right. The dead things in my fridge are not, nor were they ever fuzzy, small yes, but not fuzzy. And they didn’t crawl into my fridge on their own accord. No, in fact, they arrived from the local asian grocery in a gallon-sized bag. Dried shrimp. Thousands and thousands of baby dried shrimp.

Happy Chinese New Year. It’s the year of the Tiger and I’ve decided to mark the occasion by blockading my fridge as a bio-hazard smell zone until I have time to cook something both fabulously Chinese and New Yearsy.

Until then, I am haunted by the millions of tiny beady eyes starring out at me, trapped behind a curtain of Ziploc plastic. This is why Americans don’t eat things with the heads still attached. We don’t want our food staring at us. Especially as we stick a fork full of it into our mouths. I just want to say “sorry” every time I open the door and there they all are… Watching me.

Also, the peanut butter I put on my toast this morning didn’t have the lid on tight and now tastes like a nutty ceviche. Which is never a good way to start the day. So, long story short, it’s time to use up my fishy little friends and welcome in the Tiger.

In addition to the dead baby fish in my fridge, I decided I should try my hand at making egg rolls. This is a food that can be found on the menu at not only Panda Express but also Jack In The Box, so I assume this will not frighten my culturally repressed friends. It is also a dish that is actually very easy to make but seems to inspire awe in the eyes of the average dinner guest.

A few greasy egg rolls, some shrimp artfully disguised amid some Chinese sausage and shiitake mushrooms. LOTS of rice, and it was a meal.

I had great plans of making turnip cakes as well, but if I had read the recipe all the way through, I would have realized that you need more than the two hours I had allotted my self to make up a batch of those. Something about grating, straining, seaming, simmering, and marinating… no, two hours was definitely not enough time to make those.

Back to egg rolls. I am saddened to say that I posses only a small hand grater that was acquired at a dollar store during college. Why I have not remedied this situation yet is beyond me. It seems weird to buy a new one when this one still works, and I have a Cuisinart for when I need to get down and dirty, so alas, the sad little grater remains in my collection.

Three carrots and half a cabbage of grating later, my arm was tired but my dried mushrooms were done soaking. Time to cook up some ground pork and get this party started. It’s important to remember here that when preparing exotic food stuffs for friends you must use extravagant hand motions and employ flipping action whenever possible, especially when using a wok. Also, I suggest using many more spatulas then necessary as well as many, many little bowl full of different ingredients – like on the Food Network. This ads to the Merlin like mysticism of the meal as a whole.

When the pork and veggie filling is all sauteed together, drop a spoonful in the corner of those store-made egg roll skins, fold it like an envelope and roll. Literally, it is that easy.

For the final touch, I added some fumi furikake to the rice. This essentially is Japanese for rice seasoning and is little more than sesame seeds and dried seaweed, but you will want to use the fancy name to further entice your friends. Also, use lots of the little bowls here too… for the various rice toppings. This will also make it look like you tried harder than you actually did.

For dessert, I wanted something Valentine’s Day-ish, so I went the red/purple forbidden rice route, cooked it in some coconut milk for added flavor, mixed in some stevia and cooled it in the fridge. Dropped in a shiny martini glass with a splash of cream, it was the perfect combination of creamy sweetness, if I do say so myself.

And this, my friends, is how you make a fancy-shmancy dinner in under two hours. Rachel 30-minute Ray would be proud.

I think one of the things that draws so many people to food – to good food – is how many facets of our life that is touches.

Meals are a sensory parade. Taste, smell, appearance. Few things engage us on as many levels as what we so haphazardly stuff in our mouths three times a day.

In truth, food is the stuff of legends. It has been the cause of wars, of love, of death … It has shaped history in innumerable ways. Think of the lasting cultural changes left in the ruin of the Potato Famine or the way Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle, led to the transformation of working conditions for American immigrants. Food is such a part of our lives that we rarely step back long enough to recognize the ways in which it has transformed the world around us.

Yesterday at the grocery store I stumbled on an interesting package of rice. Forbidden Rice. A great marketing tool to be sure, but this package had more to it than shiny lettering  and glossy images. What caught me was the description.

 ”Legend tells us that this ancient grain was once eaten exclusively by the Emperors.” In fact, it is rumored that this black grain (actually dark purple) was so highly prized that for hundreds of years it was only grown on palace grounds and fed to the emperor and his concubines as an aphrodisiac.

This isn’t the kind of thing you find on the back of the Mac n’ Cheese box.

Back at home I scoured through the fridge in search of something to pair with purple rice and faced with the choice of a jar of green olives, some hummus or half a cabbage – the cabbage won out. A cut of wild Alaskan salmon from the freezer and the meal seemed complete.

Grabbing spices from the cabinet in preparation for some braised cabbage, I lamented the fact that I had run out of the beautiful red garlic from this summer’s farmers market. Instead I was left with the common-place silver variety that adorns the isles of every produce section from here to China. Why? Because it lasts the longest. Perhaps one of the most middle-of-the-road choices one can make when it comes to this world-renown food and yet it is the only one that millions of people have ever eaten.

But like my rice, there is more to the silver garlic story than it’s non-descript packaging reveals. When you love food and you love to try new things, it’s easy to wage war against the ordinary – but there is a reason that a nothing becomes everyone’s something. In the case of the silver garlic, for thousands of years this has been the variety chosen by mothers and grandmothers for inclusion in the family dinner.

Silver garlic was so esteemed for it’s longevity that ancient Egyptians placed bulbs of it in the tomb of  Tutankhamen so that the pharaoh would continue to have sustenance throughout his afterlife. When archaeologists found the cloves during excavation, it was still easy to distinguish the item – some 3,000 years later. This is the same food that Egyptian slaves were fed while they built the pyramids. Each time we cook with an ingredient like this we are unwittingly becoming a part of the past.

And that brings me to soy sauce. Such a demure little liquid and only a tablespoon in this dish, yet the essence of this and thousands of other dishes have been the point of argument between chefs, philosophers and even physicists for more than 2,500 years.

It was the Greek philosopher Democritus who first asked - what are flavors? It was also Democritus that decided that sweet, sour, salty and bitter were the only options out there. He believed that taste was based on the shape of the food molecule. Salty foods, when chewed, broke down into tiny isosceles triangles. Sweet foods became large and rounds atoms. Aristotle and even Plato agreed with Democritus and so for thousands of years, it was common knowledge that there were four, and only four, flavors.

In the early 1800s, a French chef (it’s always the French isn’t it?), Auguste Escoffier, the lead chef at the Paris Ritz, developed a veal demi-glaze that he said emboddied a taste all it’s own – not salty, sweet, sour or bitter. It was a fifth flavor. At the same time, a Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, proclaimed that the tongue had receptors for another flavor – one that was umami, or “deliciousness.” The taste of dashi, a seaweed based soup, was deep and rich and could not be described by any of the other four flavors. Ikeda was mocked for his findings and his ideas were never accepted by mainstream chemistry.

Fast forward to the 1990s when researchers discover that the human tongue does in fact have five distinctly different flavor receptors – the fifith being a flavor reaction to the presence of glutamate, a substance that is present in almost all living things but which is transformed as it begins to die and the molecules begin to fall apart … think here of grilled meat or aging parmesian.

The fifth flavor has since been officially recognized and named umami (sometimes “savory” in the U.S.) in honor of Ikeda. One food that displays one of the strongest umami characteristics? You guessed it, soy sauce.

It was a simple Monday night dinner. No muss, no fuss. Salmon, rice and vegetables – but altogether amazing when you consider how it landed in one place, at one time, on the plate of a girl in a small town on the west coast of America.

I find myself in the midst of a sassy, if not wildly sarcastic, book at the moment. Alone In The Kitchen With An Eggplant … also known as: confessions of sad single people who don’t know how to cook and are too scared to eat alone in a restaurant.

This is the kind of book which I: (a) enjoy reading if for no other reason than the time it allots me to commiserate with my twenty-something cooking homeys, and (b) pretend I don’t enjoy reading so that others continue to believe that I spend my off-hours indulging in Thoreau and writings by dead philosophers.

Irregardless, I found the sumptuous photo of an eggplant on the cover drawing me to the hearty veggie. The one-eyed, one-horned, giant purple people eater of the grocery store. But what to cook with it?

Having already fully embraced the hackneyed reality of being an X-generation gal with both a blog and an obsessive interest in food, I decided it was best to fully embrace the beast and go the extra mile. And what better way to do so than cook Ratatouille … while watching Ratatouille.

And let me say, I think this might be why the French hate us. The fact that Disney can systematically reduce hundreds of years of French culinary innovation into a 90-minute rat-themed film, in which the country’s best chef turns out to be under the control of hair-pulling kitchen vermin.

But it’s a cute film and I’m out of dinner ideas, so there you go. Besides, why be young and single if you can’t decide to just swing into the store and drop $25 on imported anchovies and herbs in order to make a meal based on a kid’s film? My only hope is that the cashier didn’t make the connection between the ingredients in my cart and the 99 cent rental from the movie department.

Thirty minutes later I was in my kitchen, knife in hand, ladybug slippers on my feet – gracefully chopping one eggplant, three zucchinis, an onion, garlic, an armload of cherry tomatoes and some very teeny-tiny fish.

Now, I don’t believe I have ever followed a recipe straight off the page. I’m more of a “dash of this, splash of that” kind of girl – or more appropriately, a “do you think I could use protein powder instead of eggs in this, because I forgot to buy those” kind of girl.

That being said, I highly recommend you follow this one to the T. Doing otherwise will cause an irreversible tear in the space time continuum. Ok, not really -  but it will taste like a plate of inappropriately mixed poo from the community college cafeteria if you don’t. Ok, that won’t really happen either.

Whatever. Bad stuff will happen.

The instructions say to remove the pan from the heat, add a splash of balsamic vinegar and let it cool to room temperature. Which is impossible to do, especially if you missed lunch. I mean, literally, it’s impossible to wait that long. The smell is…..

So you’ll drive in fork first, devour the first few bites and think – meh, not bad.

And then you’ll saunter away, watch some bad Thursday night cable, then come back an hour or so later to make a cup of tea or what have you. And while you’re waiting for the water to heat, your fingers will find themselves picking up a bite from the pan.

And God help you if children are present when this happens because inexplicably and with no warning the words, “Oh shit, that’s good” will fall from your mouth. Honestly. Verbatim, you will say this. So keep the kiddos in the other room for this one.

It’s been a long while since I’ve licked a plate … and the pan, but I must be honest and admit defeat on this particular account.  Just another reason it’s good to be a single gal that loves to cook.

The recipe.

I don’t do frustration well. Whenever I encounter something  that I can’t figure out, that I can’t get my head around, I become so inexplicably frustrated – in a manner of minutes – that I can usually be found sobbing, somewhere in a dark corner or nestled in between the freezer door eating spoonful after spoonful of ice cream.

Not really. But you get the idea.

So try to imagine the scene in my kitchen the first time I tried to make curry. If you have ever tried to make this dish at restaurant-standard quality, you know what I mean.

It was the summer of my senior year of college. I had spent a delightful afternoon walking to the grocery store and spice market, collecting all the necessary ingredients to produce my very own home-brewed Indian meal. Some $20 later, I was in my kitchen toasting fresh cumin in a pan, drinking a glass of wine and rather enjoying the idea of impressing my friends with a delicious dinner.

Two hours later, I was dumping $20 worth of disgusting slop into the trash with one hand and calling for take-out Chinese with the other. This, I discovered, is why chefs tell you to taste your dish as you go. This is why you don’t just serve your crazy concoction up with a side of rice and watch while your friends start to look back and forth at eachother.

Recipes be damned! Just because it’s in a book doesn’t mean it’s worth a peanut butter-frosted donkey.

That was four years ago. So I have no way to explain why, with absolutely no prompting, I decided to try my hand at making curry again this week. Wandering down the so-called “exotic food” isle at the grocery store, searching for dinner-time inspiration, I found myself staring face-to-face with a small jar that simply read, ” curry.” Not red curry, green curry, Indian curry, Japanese curry – just curry. And just like that I felt the stirrings of a challenge.

I think what I find most frustrating about this dish is not that I have fallen flat on my face while attempting to make it before. I think it has more to do with the fact that my former roommate could make curry like a Tibetan master … This from a man who’s dinner often consisted of Campbell’s condensed chicken soup – eaten directly from the can. And chili. From a can … Even he would admit on occasion that it closely resembled dog food. And yet, with little effort he would arrive at the perfect pot of Padang curry.

Some things are just so unfair.

Back at home with my jar of curry, I pulled out my pots and pans and began my journey. Nearby, I kept my emergency fall back – a can of spaghetti sauce and a bag of noodles.

The origin of curry is a curious thing. Some scholars believe it was devised in India, while others believe it was an invention of the English. The debate centers mostly around the fact that an English cookbook from around the time of Richard II included a recipe for the spicy dish. Though cuneiform text with references to ”a spicy dish with meat that bread is dunked in” was discovered on clay tablets dating back to 1700 B.C.

It seems it’s usually these time-honored dishes, the ones that have been around so long that no one even remembers where they came from, that throw me off the most. That throw most people off. It’s like pho. Have you ever met anyone that can make a great homemade pho? No. It’s just the way the cookie crumbles. And for me, my cookie is all crumbled up inside my curry.

A half-hour of onion chopping and sauteing later, the house smelled great – which is always the first step to success. Next was the chicken. I dropped in a few tablespoons of my industrial curry mix along with just a pinch of fresh garlic and ginger, a can of crushed tomatoes and coconut milk, cauliflower and mixed the whole shebang together. Then I turned the stove to low, hit the Pilates mat, and waited with baited breath for 45 minutes as my sauce bubbled away.

All in all, I must admit it didn’t turn out that bad and it was definately edible. (I think the jr of pre-mixed curry spices lent a hand) Then again, it wasn’t nearly as good my neighborhood Indian restaurant. But they’ve got a secret ingredient I can’t buy at the store - grandma. Grandma who’s been making this stuff day after day for 80 years. And given that this was only my second try, I was content with the results. Content enough to eat it again for dinner the next night.

The theme of the New Year seems to be vegetables at my house – or more specifically, finding new ways to incorporate them into my meals. I’ve been on a pretty heavy vegetable kick for about two weeks now, ever since my body threw up it’s white flag of surrender after Christmas.

After about a week, though, you begin to realize that the variety of glorious greens at the local market is less than abundant this time of year. You have broccoli, asparagus, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, maybe sweet potatoes or turnips. That’s about it.

Of course, there are always green beans that are in the “fresh” section, but look like they arrived sometime last June and taste like it too. There are tomatoes, eggplants and mushrooms - but who’s going to make a side dish out of just that? Everything else, in my opinion, is just a bag of bread with more fiber and different vitamins.  When it comes to corn, potatoes, peas and the like, I prefer to steer away – save my carb-loading for my late-night chocolate weakness.

There are also, I’m sure, any number of exotic veggies that would make a delightful addition to the table – and to be fair, there are a good deal of kale and bok choy-lishous dinners that take place at my house. But if we are going to be practical here, I want to talk about what I can find at the corner grocery when I’m dragging my tired patootie home from work.

Sitting down to a bowl of sauteed cabbage just leads to awkward gassy situations for days on end – where one is forced to devise clever ways to slip away from social situations and “clear the air.” No good, and I mean none, can come of this.

Alas, I am left to devise new and clever ways  to revamp my trusty ol’ vegetable friends. Mixed together, seasoned and sauteed – I’ve been racking my brain the past few days to imagine the unimagined – to devise new ways to enjoy them without negating the point of them entirely by adding butter or bacon or something else equally delicious.

Last night, I decided to spend a little extra time making one of my favorite dishes – curried cauliflower. It takes about 40 minutes to bake, so I rarely find myself willing to cook up a batch for dinner after a long day at work. And yes, I have tried baking a batch ahead of time so that it will be ready when I walk in the door, but this stuff is like catnip on a kitten. One sniff and you can’t bear to pull yourself away from the cookie sheet. Rarely in fact, does it even make it to a plate.

If you never thought you would eat a whole head of cauliflower in one sitting, then you’ve never tried this.

The only problem - and as problems go, this is pretty nice one to have – is that the recipe is heavy on seasoning and so when it comes time to add some sort of protein to the meal, I rarely want anything more than a side of cottage cheese. Odd, I know. But the simple flavor and saltiness are just what my taste buds love when curried cauliflower is on the menu.

So much for a healthy diet of  ”vegetables rich in antioxidant rich colors.” When it comes to this meal, white is what I want.

Just a drizzle of olive oil on the sheet, a head of cauliflower cut into small pieces and several large shakes of curry with a pinch of red pepper. Forty minutes of drooling later and its time to eat.

I guess you don’t need to stress over new recipes when you’ve already got something this good.

Last Friday was our department’s first all-staff luncheon, which of course meant spending most of Wednesday and part of Thursday discussing our possible dining options. American, Thai, Italian… It was easier to narrow our choices by country than actual restaurants.

If there is one thing I am definitely not, it is a picky eater. I can count only two times that I have actually revolted against a particular food option. The first was stone ground raw tuna served by my host family in Japan. The second is too horrific to expand upon here, but I will tell you it involved pig intestine.

That being said, you can image my utter horror when my cubemate announced during our collective brainstorming session that she refused to eat Mexican. That she hated it … I know. I felt a little faint myself.

I can understand hating over-priced designer coffee. PBS programming on Sunday afternoons. The propagation of income disparity in capitalist nations … But Mexican? That’s just not right.

So of course, like a pimple-faced rebelious teenager, I immediately wanted a fajita.

Then again, I’m still in the honeymoon phase of my “get skinny” New Year’s resolution, so I headed to google to find something deliciously south-of-the-boarder that didn’t involve me running on a treadmill all night as a form of retribution.

What I found was a recipe from Kalyn’s Kitchen for chicken stuffed with green chiles and cheese. Scrumptious sounding if you ask me.

On my lunch I hightailed it down to the grocery store to procure the necessary items for my fiesta. Chicken, cheese, chiles and some plain greek yogurt (someone please explain to me why this store had 12 types of plain yogurt but no low-fat sour cream).

By 5:30, I was at home, comfy slippers on, pounding my chicken with a hammer as my cat watched, bemused.

And yes, I do own one of those meat-pounder-thingys but it was called into commission this summer to secure my back door after the lock broke. Ya … It’s as weird as it sounds. And given the sanitary implications of pulling it out of the door jam and then slamming it repeatedly against raw meat, I decided using a Ziploc bag and hammer was probably the better choice.

What’s most disturbing about this meal though, is the fact that Santa brought me a tin of Cougar Gold cheese, Crimson Fire (their version of pepper jack), but due to my finely honed skills of forgetfulness, it’s still in the fridge at my mom’s house. If you haven’t tried this stuff, I insist you purchase some immediately. It is made by students from Washington State University’s School of Food Science. This stuff is magic in your mouth.

Usually when it comes to things like rolled meat, I do a better job of spilling the insides on the outside – at which point it just becomes a pot roast of sorts – meat haphazardly topped with some sort of creamy vegetable concoction. But this recipe was surprisingly easy to execute. Twenty minutes in the oven and out came my stuffed chicken, cheese and chiles securely locked inside. The light Shake-n-Bake coating even gave it a tortilla-ish taste.

I think it’s safe to say I’m going to be the envy of all the left-over toting lunch eaters tomorrow. Ole!

By 5 a.m. I already smelled like a wet dog. And the thing is, my alarm doesn’t even go off till 6:00.

I think it was somewhere around 3:30 when I woke to the sound of a pounding hammer, or a slamming door. I had already gone to bed late, took an hour to fall asleep  – so when this sound, or whatever it was, woke me from my deep drooling slumber in the wee hours of the morning it took more than a moment or two to figure out what exactly was going on.

It’s one of those things where the sound is reminicent of something you know, but not exactly like it.

Like I said, it sounded like a slamming door, but came fast like a hammer driving a nail.

Regardless, 20 minutes later I found myself in my front yard, in my pajamas and some flip-flops holding an umbrella staring at the tree by my bedroom window. And to be fair, I did stand at the front door, like a normal person would, for several minutes trying to desipher the sound. But when I couldn’t figure it out and it was too loud to fall back asleep, I trotted out to the front yard.

And of course it was raining. Pouring really. And there was a woodpecker, busy at work up in my tree. So I’m thinking to myself, are woodpeckers nocturnal? And if it’s 3 in the morning, does that count as nighttime or is this guy just an early riser?

So I went back inside, and by this time even my cat was doing the ears-pointed-back, “Your annoying me” face… though she was dry and still curled up on the bed, so it seemed to me she still had a good deal going for her. Sometimes playing grown-up homeowner isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Rain rain, go away all afternoon. It poured in buckets to the point of street flooding by the afternoon. By the time I got home from work, all I wanted was something simple and filling for dinner. Fresh, clean flavors. Something warm.

I had no desire to treck to the store, so I tried to pull together something from the fridge. The bag of snow peas was getting old so it seemed as good a time as any to put them to work. Same with the broccoli. I felt an Asian dinner theme building in my mind. Soba noodles, check. Tofu, check. And some miso to pull the whole thing together.

Ok – in all honesty, the miso paste is close to three months old, but let’s be honest here folks – a bag of miso is pretty much just a giant flavored salt lick, so I’m pretty sure the life expectancy on it is somewhere in the neighborhood of a can of SPAM. I figured it was safe to use.

A bit of chopping, boiling, a swish, swish in the wok and tada! It’s dinner.

Sometimes at the end of a crazy day, a big hot bowl of noodle goodness is just what the doctor ordered. Now it’s time for a nap.

Utter exhaustion is the only thing I can think of to describe how I felt this morning. I haven’t felt that way since finals week my junior year of college when my Japanese final got moved up three days.

I got a call last night from one of my vendors for a last minute holiday order of my soaps – in a scent I was entirely out of – which meant many many hours of unplanned melting,stirring, mixing, drying, cutting …rather than running to the closet to grab some of my pre-made stuff.

It wouldn’t have been as bad if I hadn’t stayed up till the wee hours the night before (and I do mean wee, like 3 a.m. wee) and if this order hadn’t been needed by 9 a.m. the next day. Days like today are why I could never be one of those oh-so-healthy folks who refuse to drink coffee. I heart coffee. I heart it very very much. And I heart Starbucks for opening at 5 a.m. even on the weekends.

I tinkered with the idea of taking 15-minute naps while each batch set but I thought better of it in the end. The only thing worse than being tired is then sleeping just long enough to remind your body how great sleep is. Anything under 2 hours is usually always a dangerous proposition for me.

By 8:30 I’d packaged the last of the bars and loaded them in the car when, in one of my most brilliant moves ever, I ran back to the house to turn on my electric blanket. I was so tired that when I got to the store it was still 5 minutes till opening and I didn’t even wait to hand the product over in person. I just wrote a quick note, said I would give a call later, and tucked them in the front door alcove.

Pulling back into my driveway I actually toyed with the idea of just turning off the car and sleeping in the driver’s seat for a few minutes instead of running in the rain all the way to my front door and then my bedroom. Those 50 feet felt like 5 miles!

But I am oh so glad I decided to muster my strength and go inside because I cannot possibly describe what a beautiful thing it was to kick off my shoes and crawl into the warmth of my buttery-soft flannel sheets. Nothing, and I mean nothing, feels quite as good as being tired and knowing you have nothing to stop you from sleeping for as long as you want.

I think it was somewhere around 1 p.m. when I final emerged from my cave. The day already sufficiently shot, I decided to stay in my pajamas and make myself an exquisite dinner to make up for my calorie-free coffee breakfast and lunch. I perused my cookbook collection but the only thing that seemed right for the occasion was my new copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking  – my latest must-have purchase after watching Julie and Julia.

I decided on the beef bourguignon from the recipe that was so predominately featured in the film. All in all, the recipe is not that bad as far as guilty eating goes in the world of french cooking. A tablespoon of butter here and there, a couple slices of bacon, but the dish serves 6, so it didn’t seem all that bad.

What really caught my eye was the part that called for a 3 cups of wine. A whole bottle when you count the glass I poured for myself. A whole bottle! How could this recipe go wrong?

In all it took 5 hours to make. There was boiling of bacon (have you ever heard of such a thing?), then frying of bacon, followed by browning of beef in said bacon fat. Then browning of vegetables in – you guessed it – the bacon fat. But after that things straightened up and it was time to add the wine! A little of this, a little of that, and the whole thing went into the oven for 3 hours.

I thought I could use that long reprieve to wrap presents or do something productive, but a closer look at the recipe had me browning onions for an hour and sauteing mushrooms for 40 minutes and by the time I had done that and washed a few dishes the beef was ready to come out.

The smell in my kitchen was indescribable. It was the smell of developed flavor that only comes from an evening of laboriously preparing a meal. There were about 8 more steps to finish off the dish after it came out of the oven, but I will save you the trouble of reading through all that. Suffice it to say that the dish turned out like perfection, just like Julia Child said it would.

I served it up with some Le Sueur peas. Peas because that’s what Julia recommended and Le Sueur because that’s the brand Samantha describes in Sex In The City, season 4 as “the best” – so naturally, I’ve been curious since. All I can say is, they tasted like peas.

Dessert was a deliciously sweet and fresh pomegranate. The perfect ending to a perfect evening.

I am in love … In love with a cast iron Dutch oven by the name of Le Creuset.

My mother has been trying to get me to buy one of these for years and I have always fought the notion. Sure they make perfectly moist stews and roasts without use of any added oil or butter but in these post-college days where I still find myself moving every two years, the idea of another thing to pack was just too much.

In my defense, anyone who owns one of these will agree with me when I say they are anything but light. My curiosity got the better of me this afternoon and I carried mine to the bathroom scale where this 5.5 quart beauty weighed in at no less than 27 pounds. Twenty-seven! But oh the wonders it can bestow on the cook blessed with the budget to buy one. Indeed, any food connoisseur worth their snuff wouldn’t be caught dead without one of these in their kitchen.

These pots start in the $200 range, so imagine my giddy excitement when I saw a commercial for 50 percent off at Macy’s. Plus another $10 if you downloaded a coupon … And so just like that I found myself wandering the isles of mall parking early this morning in search of my next great bargain.

Long story short, I am now in possession of a beautiful red Le Creuset all my own. It’s been mine for less than 8 hours and already I have broken it in with a simple dinner of chicken and root veggies from my garden. How have I lived this long and not owned one of these!

As for my dinner, I will say that I still need to work on my browning technique, but as a whole my first meal went quite well. One free range chicken from the farmers market, a handful of onions cut in half with another handful of carrots and potatoes and one hour later DELICIOUSNESS!

I can’t fathom why one would use butter or sour cream to top a potato when you could have one steamed to perfection alongside its onion and carrot brothers and sisters. A little chicken juicy goodness on the top and the flavor nearly explodes from your mouth.

So like I said, I’m in love.