Most of us have had a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast at some point in our lives. Many of us may have even had some super-glitzy wild rice as a side dish. But not everyone has partaken of a big, steaming bowl of spelt. We haven’t all had the pleasure of tasting a delicately mushroom-flavored barley risotto. To me that is a shame.
I have a particular friend that I eat lunch with every so often, and it has become our pattern to choose The Steeping Room for our midday meal and caffeine fix. We each say that it’s because the other is the only one who will go with us, but I’m pretty sure it is because we are both too lazy to try and find something else that we can mutually agree upon. (Plus, he truly is the only one who will go have tea with me!)
I am firmly of the opinion that you can run yourself ragged trying to cook from scratch for every course of every meal you eat throughout a given week, and I don’t believe that kind of effort is necessary to put quality food on the table. One thing that I like to do for quick meals is prepare some kind of packaged filled pasta with a sauce of my choosing. Generally speaking, I get more satisfaction out of making these sauces myself, though even that can sometimes be a very drawn out affair. As an antidote to the tomato sauce that requires a two-hour simmer (save that one for the weekend!), here are a couple of quick and easy pasta sauces.
I had been wanting to eat at Flip Happy Crepes for a while. I don’t remember how I stumbled across the place exactly, but it always looked interesting. Sweet and savory crepes are made-to-order and served out of what is apparently an old Avion trailer (thanks Food Network, I thought it was an Airstream) to adoring fans that sit around outside on plastic chairs and picnic tables happily enjoying their food. This is the kind of place I love - low key, small menu, unpretentious. Despite the oppressive Texas heat, this is where we decided to go for lunch today.
Do you ever have find yourself in the middle of an evening after a long day of hard work, and it’s nearly dinner time and even though you have plenty of food to prepare in the refrigerator, you’re just too tired to care? On those evenings, do you sometimes also find that you don’t have the interest in devoting an hour or more to sitting in a restaurant, but also don’t feel like stomaching fast food? When situations such as that arise, we have a handful places from which we order reliably good takeout. Bombay Bistro is one of them.
This week’s project was to refashion the clothes closet in my husband’s converted bedroom of a studio into functional shelf-based storage for his ever-growing assemblage of audio and photography equipment. To get ahead of the game, we procured most of the necessary items for the project over the weekend: paint, a few tools, wire shelves and the necessary infrastructure to mount them on the wall. On Monday, we began.
Today I made marshmallows. Yeah, like from scratch. The secret is, while time consuming, they’re really not all that difficult to make.
About a week ago, I wrote up my review of a new seafood cookbook I had just picked up called Fish Without a Doubt: The Cook’s Essential Companion
It all started with buttermilk. I had leftover buttermilk in the refrigerator, and whenever that happens, it always makes me think of biscuits. I am an absolute freak for biscuits. A properly executed biscuit may be one of my top ten favorite things to eat. So it was settled - I’d make biscuits. Then it occurred to me that I had strawberries in the freezer, and that it really doesn’t take that long to whip up a small batch of jam. And that’s how lunch today became buttermilk biscuits and strawberry jam.
About two years ago, we purchased a pair of rocking chairs and a small table for our front porch. They were made of unfinished eucalyptus. At the time, to treat them and make them look nice, I had applied a couple coats of tung oil to the chairs. I have done nothing to maintain them since, and they were looking pretty rough.