I'm so bad at this

The project fell apart around my birthday and hasn't really gotten back on track. I still intend to do 52 new vegetables, but I may have to double up a couple of recipes. Since my last post, I've added butternut squash and fennel to the list. I love both of these. I've eaten them before, but I had never cooked with them. Squash always seems labor intensive. I grew my own pumpkin a few years ago, to make my own pumpkin puree and found the process sort of tedious. I've been scared of butternut because of it, but man is roasted butternut delicious. I roasted more butternut squash than the recipe called for, but it's great finger food to eat while waiting for the risotto to finish. I finished off the butternut squash risotto with brown-butter sage leaves and parm.



Fennel always looked imposing. Bulb, stalk, fronds, there seemed like a steep learning curve to cook fennel. Really, though, it's very easy. I'm sad I was so threatened by it. I love fennel with apple, sort of like cabbage, so I created my own recipe inspired by german potato salad and served it with pork chops. I just sauteed fennel, apples, and onions with butter (thickened with flour) and deglazed the pan with apple cider vinegar. I served this gravy/sauerkraut-ish dish over mashed potatoes and with broiled pork chops. It tasted fantastic, but the dish is brown on brown and none of my 15 pictures really looked pretty. So, by count I've done 8 veggies. I will need to do 44 more this year. I'm on it. I found a recipe for radish and watercress sandwiches which would knock out two veggies and probably be delicious.



I'm still working on my other resolutions. I've been reading a lot of non-fiction (thanks denver library ebooks). I still need to eat mussels, and I've joined an adult kickball league in an attempt to be more outgoing. I've fallen behind in my quest to be a better me, but I haven't scrapped the plan entirely. I guess this is my second wind.

Principles of bistromathics

My parents weren't big on making us try new foods. My father could hardly demand that we try new and exotic foods when he was nearly as unwilling. My father's unsophisticated palate extended to the rest of our family. He was very meat and potatoes with occasional forays into macaroni and cheese. Our vegetables were corn, green beans and canned carrots. My mom would occasionally get fancy, like adding fennel to the christmas pork roast, but often with disastrous effects. My father didn't respond well to alterations. This is a man that eats the same breakfast nearly every day.

Only when I started hanging out with my Korean friends, eating kimche and bean curd, did I start to realize there was this whole other world of food out there that I hadn't tried. When I moved to New York to be a nanny, I was dismayed to find my 5-year-old charge was more adventurous than I was. Since then, I have been working hard to broaden the ol' horizons. It's easier than it would have been 15 years ago. The internet and the food network have made it easier for aspiring foodies like me.

Hence my project.

Save for the brussels sprouts, which I've eaten a few times, all of the vegetables I have cooked with in this project I had never eaten. My opinion of parsnips, chard, and turnips hinged my ability to cook them. This week, I went with beets. Like most children, beets always seemed strange to me.

I was going to save all the salads for the summer, but the idea of eating a roasted root vegetable with a protein and a green or starch just seemed too boring for words this week. Oddly, I was in a bistro food mood. I just wanted soup, salad, and wine with crusty bread. Maybe it's the onset of spring that's making me wish I was eating outside on a little table under an awning, maybe with a view of the Seine?

Instead, I roasted and cooled some beets, sliced them and served them with blue cheese over an arugula salad with balsamic vinegar. Add some crusty bread and my new favorite under $10 wine (an organic, sustainably grown Argentinian Malbec called Vida Organica), and I had my happy little bistro meal. Last night, I made a big pot of onion soup and used up the rest of the baguette for the croutons. My gourmet cheese budget is as high as it's ever been. I used cave-aged emmentaler with my onion soup. Aspiring foody, indeed!



On the chance I may run out of new vegetables, I've decided to add grains (quinoa and bulgar come to mind) and chilis to my list. This allows me to try more Mediterranean and African cuisines, an area I have ignored for most of my life.

A first casualty

This entry is actually for weeks three and four. I cooked the turnips late last week and decided to rock my parsnips tonight. I'm getting the root vegetables out of the way while it's cold enough to roast and broil and make soup. I will save the daikon and watercress for warmer weather.

Both weeks I dragged out a different ignored kitchen gadget. Last week I used the mandolin to slice up the turnips for the gratin. It made very quick work of turnips. Sadly, the vegetable peeler made quick work of the middle finger of my right hand, my soda-can-opening finger, and I'm working sans nail for a while. I worry I may always harbor a deep, subconscious resentment of turnips, treating them worst of all the root vegetables.



On the other hand, I love parsnips. I used a very good recipe for cream of parsnip soup. This recipe called for an immersion blender which I happen to have. Glad I bought all this crap and never used it.



In other news, while I am trying to eat more vegetables, my dogs are trying to get more squirrel in their diets. On Saturday, I went to feed them and Jean-Pierre was nowhere to be found. I have never had to call him more than twice for dinner, so I was worried he was into mischief. I found him patiently waiting out a squirrel in the tree. He came over once to see what I was doing but made his way back to the tree to resume his watch.

Method to the semi-madness

There are two secondary reasons I chose vegetable consumption as a goal this year, in addition to the need to eat more veggies/try new things reasons.

The first reason is my salad-spinner. I started watching food network almost cultishly about 10 years ago. As soon as we had cable that offered it as a network, I started watching. That's back in the good ole days when they still showed cooking shows and everything wasn't a reality/competition/pastry show. Those just get old fast. So, for a few years, I became very immersed in that show-y food culture. I wanted a microplane and a good cast iron skillet and a salad spinner. Salad spinners aren't expensive, but I couldn't bring myself to buy one. Instead, I asked for it as a present.

The first Christmas I asked for it, I didn't get one. Followed by an unfilled birthday wish, another unfulfilled Christmas, and one more birthday. I really should have just gone to bed, bath, and beyond and picked one up, but it suddenly seemed more important than just the salad spinner. It was a test of how much my friends were listening. I began to get defensive about it. I didn't throw dinner parties or the like, so I couldn't do anything subtle and passive-aggressive like serve unwashed arugula for the first course, but I wanted someone, anyone, to give me a damn salad spinner.

So, finally, 3 years after asking, I opened my christmas presents with the hesitation of someone who's known disappointment. Instead, I got three. People finally felt so guilty about the salad spinner debacle that everyone bought me one. Triumph!

Sadly, 6 years later, I've used it maybe ten times and always to wash romaine lettuce. For all of the exotic greens I thought I would be preparing when I asked for it, I've really only graduated one step above iceberg. So, the salad spinner, mocking me on the shelf, was part of the inspiration for the veggie project.

I'll tell the other story another time. The chard went well this week. I sauteed it in olive oil and garlic with salt and pepper, and it's hard to go wrong with that. I served it with some more red potatoes and a mini meatloaf I had made a month ago and frozen. Next week: Turnips. For now, here are some pictures.

I'm determined to get better at this photography thing, too.

Don't let go, Rose

I’m trying to figure out why I’m so pissed about the Avatar/James Cameron thing. I think my issue is that he is continually given awards like best picture for movies that are just pretty. Maybe the academy should create a category called technical director, and James and Sam Raimi can battle it out all day, probably using a lot of CGI. But to me, the best picture should reflect well-rounded characters, plots, themes, and concepts. Titanic is still the only movie to win Best Picture and not be nominated for Best Screenplay. The fact is, James Cameron makes visually stunning movies with very little behind them. Perhaps that is why he is lauded as the filmmaker of this generation. Style and substance have been doing battle forever. Style has been winning handily for the last 10 years. Substance is dying a slow, agonizing death at the hand of the masses.

Are we really going to give best picture to a movie cross-marketed at McDonalds?

Project: Veggies

So, the veggie project got off to a slow start as my attempts to find swiss chard at my area grocery stores was a bust. I think this project will be sending me to whole foods, sunflower, or sprouts for my vegetables. I just don't think I will get 52 weeks of variety at king soopers. So, I swapped out brussels sprouts for this week. Learning in the process that brussels sprouts are named after the city of brussels and, therefore, should have the s on the end of brussels, which should be pronouced. It sounds strange to me, but at least I know. I ended up roasting the brussels sprouts with baby red potatoes, garlic, salt and pepper. It was very tasty, but I'm looking forward to swiss chard next week.

Last night some folks from work tried to go to Lala's on 7th for happy hour. After 40 minutes of drinking wine standing up, we finally agreed to leave. I consider any happy hour where I get one glass of wine and drink it standing up a failure. Boo to you Lala's.

My pictures of the brussels sprouts turned out awful. Food photography should be done during the day.

Project: Veggies

I'm sort of stealing from Leslie's love letters to the city in picking a project to blog about, but I think having a forum and expectations probably extends the life of any project I take on in the new year by at least a month.

So one of my new year's resolutions is to get my 5 a day veggie servings, as recommended by the government. I won't lie, many of these servings will probably be baby carrots, celery, cucumber, and other familiar crudite with dip. But each week, I will prepare one vegetable I've never made before (even if I've eaten them, like beets). I'll try to make 'em pretty and tasty and let everyone know what I think.

I'm starting off easy this month with swiss chard. When the girls at the book club started talking about swiss chard, without me even bringing it up, it felt like veggie fate, karmacorn? No, that's awful. Well, keep you posted.

The resolutions

New Year’s resolutions are the same for everyone; bad habits need to broken and good habits need to be formed. You’d think, after all my years of practice, swapping vice for virtue would be something I’d get better at. The problem, I think, is one of motivation. Moving the pieces around isn’t the hard part. Keeping them there is. Every year I claim this is the year that I keep it all together. And each year I have the evidence that I didn’t. The next year’s resolutions become even more grandiose to compensate for the failure of the year before and pretty soon it’s “discover a diamond mine and marry a movie star.” This year, my first resolution is to forget past failure. The less time I spend dwelling on the person I could have been, the better.

My other resolutions are:

Exercise more and in more ways. Take hikes, go roller skating, get off the treadmill and get out into the world.
Buy a bike and actually use it.
Eat more fruits and vegetables.
Read more non-fiction.
Try new things (restaurants, clubs, movies, events, parties)
Gather the strength to sever ties in unhealthy/stagnant relationships.
Walk the dogs more.
Floss more consistently.
Never open the second bottle of wine no matter how much you want to.
Keep the book club up and running.
Host more dinners.
Cook more meals than you eat out.
Smile at people; be more approachable.
Listen to lots of new music.
Volunteer more.
Eat mussels.
Finish your short stories, don’t just re-edit what you’ve written over and over.
Take up tennis again.

Okay, that’s it. I’ll give this a shot and see where it takes me.

Lazy but hopeful

I need to start writing again. Really writing, not just posting updates to facebook. I’m getting that short attention span that Americans are famous for and find myself unable to read long magazine articles without my eyes jumping off the page from time to time. I blame this on the lack of real writing I have done since I graduated. I don’t regret the mental vacation I’ve taken in the last 7 months. Finishing my BA in 4 years while working full time took a lot out of me, and I was entitled to some down time. Now, I am feeling relatively recovered. It’s time to get back to better pursuits.

Writing more will be one of my new year’s resolutions, along with eating more vegetables and drinking less wine. I probably won’t create terribly quantitative resolutions; they’re too easy to break. Instead my resolutions will be more like guidelines, things to keep in mind when ordering food at a restaurant or deciding to play Gears of War 2 instead of finishing The Elegant Universe. I’m going to spend the rest of this week and all of the week after new year’s solidifying my resolutions and coming up with a plan. My resolutions won’t start on the first. I’m on vacation that whole week and will be as lazy and lowbrow as possible. I’m daring myself to get bored with the crap I’ve been reading and watching and listening to. We’ll see. So maybe, I’m back.

So beautiful