Fat Girl Gone Thin

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.

I am officially two days into my new job as a government employee and I have to say as a former private-sector girl, this new world of public-sector living is a bit perplexing.

Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t really know yet, but I get the feeling that the public sector is like that kid with hand-me-down clothes and a bad haircut that always sat in the back of the classroom. You’re not sure whether to feel bad for them or shun them entirely.

Take for instance my first staff meeting.

In the private sector, everyone would arrive no later than 15 minutes before the designated start time and would be greeted with a lavish spread of assorted catered goodies, fresh coffee, etc., etc. In the public sector, if you arrive 15 minutes early, the lights are still out and the janitor helps you find the conference room. Food comes in the way of a lovely box of oranges that your boss bought on the way into work and coffee can be found in the percolator in the break-room. At five after, everyone starts to arrive.

In the private sector, you spend the morning in training and the afternoon learning the ropes from your colleagues. In the public sector, you go to the supply room where they hand you one pen and tell you to share your stapler with your cube-mate. Damn budget cuts.

This is why at 6:00 last night I found myself perusing the isles of Fred Meyer, filling my cart with highlighters, pens and whiteout. This is also about the time I began to have an appreciation for teachers that have to buy supplies for their own classrooms.

More importantly, this is why I found myself at the Fred Meyer Starbucks drinking my third caffeinated beverage of the day.

This is a special time of year when we start to approach the last few days of egg nog availability. And yes, I am aware that there are two distinct camps when it comes to eggnog: those who love it and those who, as my sister so eloquently put it, “fight to keep the bile down.”

As for me, I fall squarely in the LOVE LOVE LOVE eggnog category and find myself desperate to enjoy every last moment of deliciousness. By the first of the year, it’s usually gone from the grocery store and is making its way out of most coffee shops.

I’m sorry, but nothing signals the holidays like a sweet latte with a hint of nutmeg. Yum. But I will be the first to admit that in order to indulge in this drink all December long, you have to pre-plan with a crash diet that will render you 5 pounds thinner at the start. Otherwise, the extra calories this bad boy packs on will leave you grabbing for your stretchy pants by New Years.

Luckily for me, one of my co-workers is an ex-Starbucksian and taught me the secret code to ordering a low-cal version of the eggnog latte. It’s called an Eggnog Coffee Misto and it is one of the few things in the world that is both richly delicious and not that bad for you. It is also an off-the-menu item which makes you seen extra cool when you order it.

Unlike it’s 400 calorie latte counterpart, the misto is a a delightful mix of two-thirds drip coffee, one-third steamed eggnog. In short, its the perfect drink because you retain all the great flavor of the full-fat drink but without the thick and super creamy consistency that turns a lot of people off.

It depends on who makes it (some baristas go so heavy on the coffee that you can’t even taste the milk), but when done correctly the eggnog misto only pushes about 120 calories and five grams of fat. In case you’re counting, that’s the same as a regular grande 2% latte. I know – it seems almost too good to be true.

Alas, I know I have shared my vast wisdom on this matter all too late in the season, as there are only a handful of days of eggnog remaining … but better late than never.