I suspect I will be able to write a more interesting post after this weekend as I sit on the bed next to 2 very cranky kittens in a small crate recovering from neutering. They will not be happy with me, but ah well. Hard to explain that to the babies except for mind meld.

Happy Holidays!

Please deliver tacos.

Filed under: fredlet ]]> http://fredlet.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/reason-2-saturday-productivity0/feed/ 0 fredlet http://fredlet.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/why-ive-gotten-very-little-done-this-morning/ http://fredlet.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/why-ive-gotten-very-little-done-this-morning/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:36:31 +0000 fredlet http://fredlet.wordpress.com/?p=6251 ]]>

Why I’ve gotten very little done this morning…, originally uploaded by fredlet.

Filed under: fredlet ]]> http://fredlet.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/why-ive-gotten-very-little-done-this-morning/feed/ 1 fredlet http://fredlet.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/food-things/ http://fredlet.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/food-things/#comments Sat, 26 Nov 2011 03:24:10 +0000 fredlet https://fredlet.wordpress.com/?p=6249 ]]> Apparently I’m turning into a cooking fiend. I still hate exact measurements, I’d rather experiment with a few things than follow a recipe and little piles of fabulously artful flavors kinda freaks me out, but I find myself being inexplicably (and irritatingly) earnest about my feelings on food.
Yeah, sorry.
But when it comes down to it, I love watching what people can do with old heirloom recipes or a few really beautiful pieces of cheese/meat/veggies/whatever and it still startles me when someone likes my cooking (not just in the ‘humor the moron’ way)…
No I probably will never feel like I’m not in 2nd grade.
Anyhoo, I found a nice little trick on teh intarweb about substituting sour cream for oil and made a sweet potato bread. It turned out nicely, kinda spice cake-ish. Not as orgasmic as the banana sour cream bread I generally make but I’m on bit of a sweet potato bender, so I went that direction instead. Not too bad.
Thanksgiving was low key. I’m not totally amused with my life right now and I didn’t make it to the store the days rolling up to Thursday, so I wasn’t all that gung-ho about being too culinarily exciting.

I did make a roast chicken (one of the fabu fancy ones from Trader Joe’s)

Evil cornbread

Roasted veggies (sweet potato cubes, mushrooms, carrots in butter)

Sautéed mushrooms and baby spinach

Peach cobbler

I spent most of the day thinking about my dream kitchen (my dream kitchen isn’t over the top so I should probably call it my “if I could make actual changes to a kitchen” kitchen.) and what I wanted based on ongoing irritation or things that aren’t a priority for me despite other people swearing they can’t live without whatever item it is they are talking about.

It was a nice day and low key. I’m tired and sore but I don’t think it is from standing all day, I’ve been a bit tense lately so I’m sure that doesn’t help. I think something is due to change, but isn’t know if that will good or bad or just be different.

Kittens are cute, furry, messy and due to be spayed soon… I’m not looking forward to that.

Crazy cat

Flying with mama.

7.5 months, originally uploaded by fredlet.

Makes it hard to type, but is nice and warm.

Many of my close friends were in town this weekend and, as we are inclined to do, we went out for karaoke. I don’t tend to make it into the city very often; I suck at finding a parking spot, most bars are too crowded, blah blah blah excuses. Can’t take public transport (I live in Oakland and the closest BART station is about 2 miles away… where I would have to find a parking spot in a bad neighborhood…double whammy.) So I tend ot avoid the city. I’m not much of a bar person anyway. I don’t really drink, even if I did, I’d have to drive home, so I wouldn’t drink, I am offended to pay $5.00 for a diet coke and most people who I don’t know at bars are creepy.
Long story short, I texted a buddy of mine who tends to post on Facebook from a bar in that area, if not the bar that we would be meeting at and wangled a ride.
It is Halloween weekend and I was told to “bring it” so I spent the whole day knitting and in fear of the kittens wising up to the fact that there was yarn, not 2 feet from their little yarnicidal, sleeping heads and made a hat for my outfit: a garden gnome based on this guy:

Fairly easy costume to make. I have a big blue barn jacket, hat was knitted from monster red yarn (based on the Last Minute Knitted Gifts elf hat), I bought a giant black belt earlier this year for this and I bought a baby bib and sewed a polar fleece cutout of a gnome beard on it (I skimped on the beard. Didn’t have time for the quilted/stuffed version I envisioned…another time maybe). I was going to wear my Keen black boots, but I couldn’t find them in the mess that is my kitten-proofed house, so I just wore a black shirt, black yoga pants and  black Keen tennies. (I was not displeased with this set up. I can guarantee I was more comfy and warmer than the 50% of the chicks dressed up in “slutty (insert name of costume here)” outfits out there though I suspect we have different priorities. Ahem. )

Met my pals, introductions all around (now I have a nice cross pollination of local and remote folks friends) and had a good time. Mike, a troublemaker, (or possibly Barrett, also a troublemaker) put a bug in my ear that I should do some Britney Spears song in full gnome gear (the hat and beard were mostly sitting on the table because it was hot.)…he wanted Toxic, but I don’t know that one, but I do know “Baby One More Time” it was ganky enough to go with a decidely unsexy looking gnome costume. I liked the dichotomy so I did it.

Haven’t done karaoke in a while. Mostly because every time I have been in a position to sing, my voice was wrecked by a cold from the previous several months.  So I got that weird kinda weak in the knees thing, which usually evaporates once I am actually on stage. People were pretty lively at this point and I think I was on key (we shall hope because I couldn’t hear myself). I vamped and spanked my gnome ass, pretended I was in a school girl outfit which probably translated pretty well to the gnome outfit. I actually got several high 5′s from random people in the crowd and of course my lovely friends. Fun.
Loved the absurdity.

I got home at 3 in the morning and then couldn’t sleep til 4, woke up at 9 and have been a bit of a zombie ever since. I was pondering some sort of vegetable soup with clear broth with dumplings in it (trying to avoid flour ones) but it went badly at first (burned some veggies and wasted a bit of chicken stock-gah, I hate waste), then the corn meal dumplings I attempted in the salvaged soup just melted so I scooped what I could out and pretended that the blue cornmeal left in there was a roux. I added chicken later and then let it sit  for a while with the significant carryover heat from my monster enamelware cast iron pot (well, I passed out for about an hour). When I got back to the soup, the chicken was silky and completely fabulous. The stock, thankfully wasn’t purple (I only had blue corn meal on hand ;) ), just slightly thickened, the veggies didn’t retain any burnt flavor (I test drove some before I added them back in to the new pot of stock/bacon/onion/wine deglaze). So I resigned myself to a somewhat boring, but still good soup.

So I handed a bowl to Tex with the allowance that he could put whatever he wanted in there to jazz it up. He added some cheese (but he puts cheese on everything anyway) and then demolished the bowl. Second bowl, he used Tostitos Scoops to eat the soup and pronounced it perfect.
Sigh, but ok.

Recently I had a hankering for a cookbook, which I never buy because there is usually only one recipe I like and the rest are icky so  a book hangs around gathering dust and being deadweight. Instead, I looked online to see if there was a magazine that might fill the need. Found Saveur on Zinio and the first issue had a bunch of soups (Hungarian, German) in it. Just drove home the point that I am a peasant food fiend. (I’ve said for a while that I cook “trailer park with Trader Joe ingredients”.) A couple of the Hungarian soups  looked really nice…aside from the recent spate of soups I have made, I’m not really a soup fan. But I’ll be cooking more soups in the coming weeks… and test driving some yummy stuff I found in this month’s issue.

I still might buy 1 or 2 of the cookbooks I saw out there while I was snooping around. They have a kindle versions which will satisfy my less crap rule. One of them is the new Paula Deen cookbook. She and I seem to work well in terms of taste. I think it is because the influence of where I grew up in West Texas is from Georgia settlers. I used to be able to place a Texas accent within 50 miles (though I am out of practice and its more like 150 miles now) but when I heard someone talking and I asked them “Where are you from? You sound like home.” they said Atlanta. This makes sense after I read an article on Texas accents in Texas Monthly a while back. Anyhoo, her recipe collection was standards and handed down recipes. I like this kind of thing. I’ll do my own variations on those.

The other one was one I sort of wanted to do my own version of from my family A recipe from a daughter/granddaughter/niece etc from a relative and a story behind it/sketch of that person. (I’ll have to find the link again.  Stay tuned.) Maybe I’ll get a gift certificate for xmoose and get those. For now, I think I’m ok with my normal web based search for recipes/techniques and the new magazine subscriptions. (Though I do see that the Julia Child Mastering the Art of French Cooking is on e-version… mmmmm. That could be good, too. French cooking is a profound yes for me despite all my trailer park. Don’t forget that a lot of French are basically farm/rural folks with simple, but rich food.)