Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

The football snacks have arrived. Usually it’s pictures in the Sunday paper, in the coupons, of giant football shaped layered sandwiches iced with cream cheese, football stadium-shaped appetizer trays, football shaped cheeseballs, and that type of thing.

This year I got the pictures in my email from cooking.com – my favorites are the football tater tots on a chip, and football eggs, hard boiled eggs, halved and coated with browned breadcrumbs to be football color, and placed on a pesto-spread slice of cocktail rye, like grass.

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Kale salad

I bought a bunch of kale last Saturday, and I’ve been making these salads to take to work for lunch. I got my knives sharpened on MLK day, and they’re working great for shredding the kale. On Wednesday, the salad had one big leaf of kale, shredded, topped with French lentils that had been cooked and tossed with a little shallot (minced when the knife was still blunt), and a tablespoon of olive oil and a tablespoon of white wine vinegar, a pinch of grated Parm, roasted beets, and egg. Today’s salad was kale, shredded, topped with the last of some Rancho Gordo beans tossed with a pinch of sugar and balsamic, and salt and pepper, some blue cheese, a dollop of creamy herb dressing, egg and almonds. But it kind of backfired on me – that is, although it was a healthy lunch, it didn’t inspire me to eat healthfully the rest of the day. I didn’t eat lunch until almost 2:00, and somebody brought browned butter Rice Krispie treats – the kind of gourmet/junk food mashup I love – so I got home not even hungry. Instead of a real dinner, I had a big cup of hot chocolate, and a few (well, 5 or 6) marshmallows, and then I ate graham crackers and Nutella at quarter to 9:00 when I got hungry again. So much for confining my eating to twelve hours like the NYT Mag said, but they did also say you could cheat a little on weekends.

PS – and tonight – Saturday, Jan 24. – I made my Cheaters Winter Caesar Salad – this version was all shredded kale with garlic croutons, and dressing made from mayonnaise, lemon juice, garlic, and Worcestershire, and even though the recipe as I wrote it doesn’t say so, a touch of Dijon mustard.

Last of the kale Caesar, packed to go to work Monday. The croutons will be soggy but it will still be good. Maybe I’ll eat it tomorrow instead …

I was looking for a way to jeuge up my blog for the new year. I’ve been blogging since 2006, on two platforms, blogger and Word Press. My brother decided to stop blogging at a similar juncture, but in fact, he’s back. I started looking at other food blogs that I like, particularly Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks and Deb Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen. Heidi recently posted some advice on how to maintain a long term blog, the  key piece of which – to me at least – is to try to write something good once a week. Smitten’s Deb does more like twice a week, but what both writers do is feature a recipe with every post.

I thought, ah ha, I can do that. I installed a new word press, and set up Deb’s Lunch … at the counter. The metaphor being that you come to Deb’s Lunch, and sit down at the counter, and something tasty is served up. I thought, ok, each week I will keep track, and then write about – and photograph – a dish that I’ve either cooked or eaten, and include the recipe, and my recipe experiments. Which is a great aim, but unfortunately, the difference between me and Heidi and Deb P. is that I have a day job, and food photography just sucks under kitchen lights at night. Heidi has a kitchen where she does most of her photos, with white marble counter tops, and corner windows where she can arrange food in great light. She’s got a studio for her mail order shop Quitokeeto, that also seems to have great light. Deb is the master of the process photo, series of images showing the process of the dish from ingredients to completion. Even when I’m home cooking in daylight, I get too caught up – I’m afraid I’ll ruin the food by stopping to photograph it. And sometimes I just forget – I eat up, or serve up, whatever it is before I shoot it.

For example, this week, I’ve been eating oatmeal for work breakfasts, and roasted beets and egg, and rice pudding. I thought maybe I’d write about the roasted vegetable salad I had on Tuesday for lunch at work, but it was too mushy and jumbled. I had an almost life-changing realization, that instead of boiling over oatmeal in the work microwave, and eating underdone oats, I could cook the oatmeal at home, and then take it to work in a nice glass microwaveable container. I’ve been cooking the oats with dates, and enjoying them with a blob of local Greek yogurt, and one day, some jam, but didn’t capture any part of that process. The yogurt has a cream top that is just yummy with the oatmeal & dates. My creamy rice pudding recipe is a compilation of a couple, and deserves to be written up, and I even packed a dish of it, and some beets and egg, for my drive to Chicago yesterday. But by the time I got here, it was too dark and late for a good picture, and I figured I might as well eat. So all I’ve got is empties.

Oh, well, I’ll keep trying.

Empty containers & cups that once held beets and egg, rice pudding, and coffee

I think my brother is right, winter break is boring. The problem I have is that I go from being ridiculously too busy with work, and cookie season, and general holiday preparing, then the holidays are over and I get some free time, and I don’t wanna do the stuff I should do. And this year, I think it’s been especially acute because we’ve had fewer people in the house, so no cooking adventures – or limited anyways, plus everyone’s starting to feel surfeited with rich food from the holidays. I mean, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day there were only four of us, New Year’s Mark and I went out, and Megan and John made steak frites in, and on New Year’s Day morning only me and Mark for brunch. And no more School Woods brunches. So I can’t get too carried away with elaborate meals.

So yea, like the bro says, thoughts of all the things you should do don’t really have the power to get you off the couch. I’ve been reading a lot, and watching TV, and the last couple of nights have gone to bed on the early side, around 10:30 – 11:00, with a book, and then slept in, 7:00 AM or even later. I’m reading this, by Michel Faber, and a book about Alex Chilton, with the same title as one of his records, although I have to admit I skimmed a lot of the section where the author detailed how the Chilton family got to American in 1660 (even though Alex himself did the genealogy), and didn’t really pay attention until the 1930s, when Chilton’s father Sidney was playing jazz. Funny coincidence, when the obit for John Fry came on the radio this morning, and I’d just been looking at his picture at Ardent studios in the book. I’ve been watching the Sopranos – I’m up to season 3, and almost to where I started watching last winter, when HBO was running them at 10:00 PM weeknights. But it’s spotty – it must be a combination of me falling asleep, plus some episodes get played more than others.  I watched one yesterday that I swear I have never seen at all, but the next one up, Pine Barrens, I’ve seen multiple times. I started watching Lillyhammer, and got Mark started, and we’ve also been watching The Honourable Woman. And of course, Downton Abbey Season 5 premiere tonight – can’t wait.

I think mostly, I just feel guilty. And worried that I’ll get fat, or fatter, because I’m not exactly thin – during cookie season, I spend so much extra time on my feet baking into the night, that I am sure I burn more calories than my post-holidays couch potato life style. Although I did shovel snow yesterday morning and this morning. Mark and I walked to the downtown indoor farmers market yesterday, and today I went for a little walk after the snow shoveling – and I’ve been doing pretty well at keeping my resolution of 10 minutes of yoga per day. Another piece on NPR reminded me that I’m not doing as well at daily meditation. I kind of stopped sometime last fall, when I got up to 20 minutes and couldn’t fit it in as easily in the morning, and exercise, too. Maybe I could meditate as soon as I get home from work …

Yesterday I made granola (see above, and below) and roasted vegetables, and was planning some kind of dinner featuring leftover black-eyed peas – but we went to a movie – The Theory of Everything, so ate our separate dinners. At least, I ate some of the leftover black-eyed peas, with the last of the greens, and some of the vegetables I had just roasted. Not sure what, if anything, Mark ate. I had tea, and we shared a few of the last jam cookies when we got home after the movie.

Almost the last of my winter share CSA box roasted: carrots, sweet potato, parsnips, green & purple cabbage. Still have a big bag of beets & half a celeriac in the basement

Apricot almond granola. It has pumpkin seeds & ground flaxseed in it too, and maple syrup instead of honey

I did finally do one of the things I’m supposed to do, today – sort and recycle papers and magazines. Yay! I guess I can get a little more couch time, now. And it’s back to work tomorrow, anyways.

Boxing day, but January 4th, and the papers are going into a kitty litter bucket instead of a box

I think I have the Christmas blues this year. Or at least I felt blue on Christmas day – not feeling Christmas-y, regretting the presents I’d given, the foods I made. Like I didn’t make a stollen or a Danish for breakfast, and nothing flaming for dinner. We had planked salmon, and roasted vegetables: squash roasted with the elusive Korean chile paste, Gochujang, that I’d been thinking I’d have to go to the Asian grocery store for, but found at Sentry on Christmas eve day; broccoli roasted with salt and pepper; and mashed potatoes with celeriac. We were too full to eat the trifle – Mark and I didn’t dip into it until the 28th, but we ate it in front of a Downton Abbey marathon, the last three episodes of season 4 back to back to get us all ready for season 5, next Sunday, so that must count for something. And of course, the UN-snowy, UN-Christmas-y, weather’s not helping.

On Friday, John and I ordered his new computer. I made Senate navy bean soup from the bone of the ham I’d had at the cookie party – and it came out too salty. Because I’m an idiot. I usually make ham bone stock, and then cook the beans in that – but this time, I just stuck the bone right in with the beans, the more traditional method, and didn’t taste before adding the two teaspoons of salt prescribed by the recipe. We had a big plate of leftover cookies out, and I  kept eating them, so by dinner I had a bad cookie hangover, and the too-salty soup was not tempting. John and Megan went out – had a nice dinner at Pig in a Fur Coat, similar to, and better than, they said, the dinner we’d had at the Bristol in Chicago – and I sat with Mark while he had soup and salad. Then I think that’s the night we watched Love Actually, since it had been banned from Xmas Eve.

On Saturday, John and Al both went back to Chicago, and I finally did the decorated gingerbread, and baked the slice & bake fig swirl cookies that I’d made from the leftover nukhorn dough and cucidati filling. Megan went out with the ladies – the girlfriends of John’s gang – and Mark and I had pasta made from the leftover salmon. Then I think Saturday was the night we watched the Kate Beckinsale/Mark Strong Emma on DVD from the library.

On Sunday, I sent a big pan of cookies to the homeless, and boxed up a selection of the gingerbread, remade springerle, and other good leftovers for my brother & Jen & Mimi,  and Worcesters, to get them thru cookie withdrawal. Mark and I had fried potato cake made from the leftover potato-celeriac mash, and a broccoli cheese egg scrambler, and toast. We went for walks – I walked to work to get a book, and to check for the green coffee cup on my desk (I think it must be at John’s apartment in Chicago) – and then, as above, had trifle, and Downton Abbey.

On Monday, I went out and mailed my boxes. I came home and did a bit of email catch-up, then showered, made a cookie box for Jane, and went to meet her for coffee at Starbucks. We had a nice chat, and I got back home in time for a phone call, planning the teaching academy winter retreat in January. I worked until about 4:30 – all I could stand. I watched a Sopranos, and then Mark and Ethan and I had dinner: the too salty soup, with scoops of rice in the bottoms of our bowls, that seemed to help a lot, and a roasted vegetable salad with parsnips, and leftover broccoli and squash, and hazelnuts, and a cooked vinaigrette with shallots and garlic and lemon juice and honey – based on the guidelines for such salads, in my new Fine Cooking mag, and in lieu of a crazy too-many-ingredient roasted parsnip salad in Saveur, with hazelnuts and blue cheese, and a wheat beer dressing, that I thought I might make for Christmas dinner. And little mini-biscuits. After dinner, I finished the last three tiny fruitcakes in front of another Sopranos, and now all the cookies fit in the basement fridge except the puppy chow (chocolate coated chex) and rice krispie scotchies from Megan’s mom, that are out in the vestibule.

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