{"id":242,"date":"2010-01-21T13:36:39","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T18:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/?p=242"},"modified":"2010-03-05T13:05:43","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T18:05:43","slug":"cooking-into-the-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/cooking-into-the-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooking into the night"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tonight is the second one-dish dinner<\/a>. The menu is chili mac, vegetarian moussaka, coleslaw<\/a>, two kinds of corn bread – plain and Marion Cunningham’s custard-filled – and ice cream with butterscotch & chocolate sauce. I was going to make raspberry sauce too, but I got tired, so instead I am taking along a jar of maraschino cherries and one of home made granola for more toppings.<\/p>\n

Getting tired is sort of the theme of this post – I was going to make a double batch of the chili mac, but as it got later in the night, my ambition waned. So, instead, I upset the carefully calculated hamburger meat to macaroni ratio given in the recipe – 1 1\/2 pounds of meat to only 1\/2 pound mac. I used about 3\/4 pound of the noodles, and put some cheese right into the mix, instead of only on top as the recipe directs. I stashed the extra 1 1\/2 pounds of hamburger in the freezer for later. Just a minor revolution against the prescriptiveness of the recipe, which is from Cover & Bake<\/a>, a Cook’s Illustrated<\/em> book, that I got on a deal to us subscribers, in which every recipe is preceeded by lengthy explanations of how the recipe was tested.<\/p>\n

The moussaka recipe is\u00a0 entirely different, since it’s from Tassajara Cooking<\/a>, a cook book that I’ve always loved, for giving guidelines for cooks to improvise on. I’ll have to take a picture of the cover of my ancient and splattered copy. I remember making this recipe my first fall semester at Beloit College, when I was 19, and I rediscovered the dinner party. During most of high school, I risked my Dad’s wrath by declining to join my family at the dinner table. I still remember the look on his face when I told him how fun those dinners were, lingering, eating, talking, drinking a little wine … fortunately I grew up enough to enjoy dinner with my Dad a lot more times before he died when I was 43.<\/p>\n

My cats were so trying to get the hamburger meat – I had to keep putting things out of their reach.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Chili Mac cooling on shelf above the oven<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tonight is the second one-dish dinner. The menu is chili mac, vegetarian moussaka, coleslaw, two kinds of corn bread – plain and Marion Cunningham’s custard-filled – and ice cream with butterscotch & chocolate sauce. I was going to make raspberry sauce too, but I got tired, so instead I am taking along a jar of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[39,24],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recipes","tag-casseroles","tag-dinner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":544,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debslunch.com\/debslunchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}