In absentia…

Two words for you: Travel Hell.

If I ever get back in the kitchen for more than long enough to make coffee, I’ll write about it.

Meanwhile. You ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em please go to Rockville.wholefoodsmarketCooking.com/contests and vote for my boeuf bourguignon. And make it. It’s good.

Versatility, thy name is chicken

Consider the supermarket rotisserie chicken. Resplendently golden brown in his hermetically sealed plastic carry bag, he basks beneath the heat lamp awaiting the busy meal-provider who is looking with varying degrees of desperation for something s/he can put on the table in relatively short order after the day from hell which really leaves him/her wondering how much protein and vegetable matter they must provide the fam before they can legitimately forego dinner in favor of a good stiff drink.

At this point, the supermarketa rotisserie chicken is your Very Best Friend. Because you can do any number of things with the  flesh of that bird, particularly if you are, as I am, getting ready to leave the youngsters  to their own devices for three or four days.

In this instance, said bird became the makings for a dozen chicken enchiladas and a chicken pot pie, which will standbetween the  heathens and starvation while I am in Florida eating Cuban food.

Here’s how you prepare for four days out of town when you’re me. You stop by the grocery and pick up a chicken and a bag of frozen mixed veggies. You already have pie crusts and cream of chicken soup at home. You shred up a leg quarter and about half of one breast to make a cup or so of chicken, mix it with the soup and the veg and the cheese, dump it in a pie crust and top it with another one. Wrap that in foil, stash it in the fridge,and there’s one meal.

Then you can shred the rest of it and wrap it up in tortillas with diced green chiles and cheese, cover it with Las Palmas enchilada sauce,  then sprinkle that with more cheese, and you’ve got another dinner. Then you lay out two pounds of ground beef to thaw, so you can make chili at oh-early-thirty in the morning, and with a Stauffer’s lasagna, voila, the urchins are fed for the duration.

They are on their freakin’ own for breakfast and lunch. Somehow, I do not believe they will starve.

Meanwhile, I will be enjoying some lechon asado and some picadillo and some plantains in Orlando. You and y’mama ‘n ‘em check in on the kids while I’m gone, ok?

Simplicity itself

The photo below has nothing to do with the majority of this blog. It’s huevos rancheros with farm-made chorizo that I made last weekend for breakfast. Farm-made chorizo rocks, I might add.

Chorizo, eggs, ranchero sauce, cotija, tortillas. What's not to love?

I wish I had a picture of last night’s dinner. But the SD card for the camera was still in the laptop at work, and my phone has decided it doesn’t want to take pictures any more, so we have none. Nor did I take any today when I had the leftovers.

White beans, tuna and tomatos. Now, I love each of those ingredients, but I’d never considered combining them until I commenced reading food blogs and seeing that the combo was a common one, and in fact, a classic Italian prep. Warm, as a pasta sauce; cold, as a salad.

Paving the road to hell

It’s been a weekend of incomplete projects. The road to hell being paved with good intentions, ‘n all that, don’t'cha know.

I think I'll call it "A Study In Brown." Also, I'll call it good.

I did at least complete this dinner. It’s a very monochromatic dinner. No matter. It was good.

I’d ordered a nice pork shoulder roast from the PJF people, planning on braising it in apple juice in an attempt to approximate the flavor of that marvelous pork shank I’d had at Murphy’s in Atlanta last month. I didn’t quite get there…but it was a pretty doggoned good way to cook pork roast, I have to admit.

Breakfast!

A fitting and suitable breakfast upon which to go gambling for the afternoon.

You lucky people are getting two posts in a row here, because I just posted the one I wrote early this morning on the iPad, which pretty much sucks for posting, not least because I cannot download photos to it (or if I can, I can’t figure out how), and because I cooked a damn fine brunch today and I am killing time waiting for the confit duck legs to come out of the oven so I can put the pork roast in.

The dark specks are bacon fond, which makes the latkes Methodist.

This morning, we had Methodist latkes, country bacon and over easy farm eggs with apple butter from the community market.

Honey. I am replete. Two Sweet Baby Jesus meals in a row. I may not can play the horses worth a diddly-damn, but I can surely cook this weekend. Or am batting 1,000 at it right now, in any event.

Pancakes with a twist

Make you some of this. It's Sweet Baby Jesus good.

Who’d a thunk it? You take a pancake, and you add tasty things like shredded cabbage and chopped green onion and shrimp and assorted Far East condiments. And you replace the syrup and butter with a spicy mayo. And for good measure, you cook some rice and add some Japanese pickles that have been residing in your fridge.

And, et voila, or the Japanese equivalent thereof, you have okonomiyaki, a 30-minute dinnner which has the advantage of being Sweet Baby Jesus good.

Here’s the bouef

Chuck roast; underappreciated, but the best thing that ever happened to winter.

I continue to have a love affair with chuck roast. It makes the most delectable wintertime dishes, and it heats up your house so nicely on a cold, wintry, rainy day. And it just yields itself to whatever preparation you want to do to it — pot roast, carbonnades a la flamande, vegetable beef soup, stewed up in some kind of chili- or goulash-style prep.

Or bouef bourguignon.

Soup to….soup

Yum. Do you good with a grilled cheese sammich, it will.

I love tomato soup. There’s a restaurant here in town — Cafe 1217, of which I have waxed eloquent more than a few times — that makes a marvelous one. Mine is just about as good.

My version is loosely based on the Pioneer Woman’s sherried tomato soup. And as long as you have el cheapo cooking sherry — I suppose you could sub white wine, but as I never have white wine, I’m going to stick with sherry — and tomatos, you can make it. It’s a bonus if you have homemade chicken stock. The only other ingredients are salt, pepper, onions, garlic, heavy cream, and a little basil to finish it off.

Feels like a short weekend

Breakfast. Yes, sir. This one will stay with you a good portion of the day.

 

Particularly when you pair it with this. Pumpkin bread, sweet potato butter. Yum.

Jeez. What is this just-having-Saturday-and-Sunday-off business? You’d think we were getting back to a regular work week, or something. It just ain’t natural.

Yesterday seemed to be taken up with all sorts of busywork — farmers’ market, grocery shopping, laundry, etc — up to and including sitting on my happy arse for two hours, shut out of my kitchen, because the plumbers were installing my new dishwasher. The old one had breathed its shuddering last on New Year’s Day, and this house ain’t gonna be without a dishwasher, no sirree.

So I have a new, quiet dishwasher that scours dishes marvelously clean, and I am a happy camper. But it did cut into my cooking time yesterday.

This gluten-free thing…

…is seriously weird.

I have been off gluten for a full week today, excepting the one “oops” when I bit into what I thought was a peanut M&M only to find out it was a pretzel one.

So I’ve had a quarter-inch of pretzel worth of gluten. If that kills me, well, I just die, I guess. We all will, if we live long enough.

I guess my system is adjusting. You’d think, sans gluten, that I’d be hungry, looking for things to make up for the missing carbs. ‘Tain’t so. The only evening I’ve come home hungry was yesterday, when circumstances conspired to make me miss lunch, and I grabbed a praline on an empty stomach, and that made me thoroughly queasy, so I wound up not eating anything anyway.