Archive for Feb 2007

Sat Feb 24 13:27:08 2007

Because he loves and listens to me, The Husband has gifted me with a fabulous silver blue Ms. Bento. It's like a short, fat Thermos with two little bowls nesting inside. Comes in a nice traveling tote with coordinating chopsticks and chopsticks holder. It is both adorable and practical. I feel so goshdarn smug when I eat lunch from it. Look at me and my super cool lunch, I want to say.

This week I've been filling the bottom bowl with surprisingly scrumptious "Tarragon Bean Salad" (Better Homes and Garden Vegetarian Cooking, Meredith Books: 2002), while the top bowl has held a mix of fruit and cheese cubes. The tote is just big enough to accommodate the bento, a Snapple White bottle, and a half-size yogurt carton. I tuck a Kashi bar or banana in the front pocket and I am good to go. It sounds like a lot of food, but that's lunch (or supper) plus break(s) and a snack for the drive home.

(Yes, I need a snack for the drive home. Really. I drive much better when I'm not fixated on what deliciousness might be waiting in our fridge).

The problem with owning a super cool and super handy Ms. Bento is that now I want all the super cool and super nifty lunch jar accessories. Like the little fish shaped sauce bottles (I could fill them with vinaigrette and squirt them all over chopped salads) or the boiled egg mold. Yes, I could mold a boiled egg into the shape of a star or a ... cube. Yum.

The only thing that restrains me from going crazy with bentoliciousness, is the fear of censure from my co-workers. It's one thing to have a practical looking Ms Bento. It's another thing altogether to start bringing in little saucy fishes or cube eggs or star-shaped cheese and vegetables. They already find me amusing for reading teh graphic novels and teh manga, for having met my (foreign) husband on the (suspicious) Internet, and for driving the car with the fsck! bumpersticker. I am only just this side of being weird. Saucy fish could push me right across.

Speaking of Thermos ... when I was but a wee kidlet my mother would take me to the shop at the Thermos plant and we would very carefully select my lunchbox for the new school year. Perhaps this was because my mother talked it up for days in advance, but it was all very exciting and most definitely my favorite back-to-school activity. There were lunchboxes of every kind and the Thermoses were sold seperately so it was possible to get combinations like a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox and a Batman Thermos.

Now, of course, the old Thermos factory has been turned into condos and I am surely too old to be getting so excited over a lunch jar.




Mon Feb 19 16:09:37 2007

Last month, I made Dad's cake of the month from a recipe in the newspaper. Not the best idea I've ever had -- the cake was dry and the frosting would not set without the addition of nearly toxic amounts of confectionery sugar. In the end, it was a not particularly special white layer cake with oversweet frosting and jam filling -- on par with something you might buy from the bakery at a not particularly good grocery store. Dad was happy enough (he believes there is no such thing as bad cake), but I was disheartened. Each cake I bake is a gift and I expect the gifts I give to be pretty freakin' near perfect.

I mean, if you're going to eat cake -- a food product with no real redeeming nutritional qualities -- than it had better be a goddamn Good cake.

Anyway, I owe Dad four more cakes and I expect I will need to reconsider my expectations for them. Between new job and <rurallibrary>, I feel like I'm never home. When I am home, I am not motivated to do much aside from sleep. My day off is frittered away cleaning the house, doing laundry, and figuring out what we'll eat for the next week (I'm not counting Sundays with The Husband as a day off). I've pretty much given up Weight Watchers, walking, and quilting. There are projects I want to finish (and, as always, new projects begging to be started), but I can't see when I will get to them. I tell myself that everything is manageable. That all I need to do is let a couple hours aside one week to do x as much as I can and then the following week I'll do some more x or y if y seems particularly necessary. I draw up lists of things to accomplish and I do accomplish most of the things on the list, but there are always things left undone and those things are always the things that most nag at me when I close my eyes at night.

It will be another two Christmases before my mother's quilt is done. My mother-in-law, at this rate, will never get one. The cats are going to need to learn to take themselves to the vet. My cakes are going to suck.

For February, I made Dad a lemon bundt using a recipe from the Duncan Hines Lemon Supreme cake mix box. I dusted the bundt with confectionery sugar rather than use the suggested glaze and we served the cake up alongside a bowl of strawberries. Everyone seemed to enjoy the bundt and had second helpings (My mother liked it so much she told my father he wasn't getting anymore -- she would eat all the cake while he was at work). It did have a nice crust -- golden brown and a little crunchy like a tea bread -- and good form, but was really nothing wonderful. Stridently yellow on the inside and only mildly lemony with a moist sponginess that didn't quite work with the crunchy exterior. It needed a drier, fluffier crumb ...

Oh, I have no idea what it really needed. To not have come from a box? To have been made from ingredients I could pronounce? To have tasted like a lemon and not the idea of one? To have danced its way around the table while singing Frère Jacques?

And March. March is coming. March with its two cakes. Gah.




Sat Feb 03 21:19:48 2007

I made a batch of clam chowder earlier this week using the recipe for "Light New England Clam Chowder" from The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook (a Christmas present from The Husband). Amusingly, the exact same recipe is in The Best Light Recipe cookbook. Indeed, the light recipe section from the Family Cookbook is pretty much just excerpts from the other. Is this surprising to anyone other than me? Was I the only one expecting new recipes?

Anyway, made teh chowdah exactly as directed -- bought Snow's minced clams and juice (with coupon I had saved just for this occasion), used precisely 1 ounce of bacon, and everything. When I ladled the finished soup into my bowl, I was a little worried by the thinness of the broth and the first mouthful seemed kind-of eh. But.

But, by the time I got to the bottom of the bowl, I was ready to eat the whole damn pot right there and then. It was that delicious.

My only regret is that I did not make a double batch as it's nearly gone now and I do not know when I will have time to make more.

One serving = 1½ cups = 4 WWP.




last updated: Sat 17 Nov 2007 08:19:03 AM EST