Mushroom mania

I need to learn to moderate my ambitions. One complex recipe is enough for a meal. Two or three just lead to stress and mistimings.

Thankfully, Antonia stepped up and offered to be my sous-chef. She did a marvelous job, other than putting the tarragon and parsley in the wrong dish. Oh well.

I didn't look at the cooking times closely enough in the beginning, so I started with the four vegetable soup. I had to make the broth first -- carrot, celery, onions, shallot, leek, garlic, thyme, pepper, parsley. Rather than the canned chicken broth that the recipe called for, I used some of Darien's homemade vegetable broth made from leftover trimmings from various meals. After the broth was made, I added the potatoes, leeks, peas, and spinach. I had to cut up some more tarragon and parsley, after my sous-chef's misappropriation.

Antonia actually did most of the preparation for the main dish, a mushroom risotto. It called for over a pound of crimini mushrooms, in addition to a dried porcini (which Darien couldn't find, so she found a nice substitute). I should have started on this dish first, since I had to keep adding liquid, stirring, and cooking until the Arborio rice was plump and tender. The Parmesan and fresh parsley at the end were nice additions.

The last dish was a fresh broccoflower salad. What really made this dish was the tart dressing -- oil mixed with a yellow hard boiled yolk, garlic, and sherry vinegar. The broccoli was tossed with watercress, scallions, celery, pimento olives, capers, parsley, and the remainder of the egg.

I didn't have everything ready to go at once, so some things had to sit while the rest of the dishes caught up. After having eaten spoonfuls of rice as it was cooking, I was no longer in the mood for bread, so I dropped that from the menu. I also realized that rice in the risotto and potatoes in the soup was probably not the wisest decision. The meal was still tasty, however, and afforded us plenty of leftovers.

Peter's special meal

Peter was coming home for spring break, so I decided to try and make him something. I initially wanted a crock pot recipe, but wasn't coming up with anything that appealed to me, so I settled on a shish kabob. I selected lamb since we don't have it often, and built the rest of the dishes around that.

I diced the lamb and then marinaded it for 24 hours in yogurt, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, cilantro, minced garlic, curry powder, and ground black pepper. But before the meat was even ready for grilling, disaster loomed. Peter's ride to South Carolina got complicated, and he decided not to come home. Like any good chef, I improvised. I invited the Speckled Bird over instead and the dinner proceeded.

The next evening the rest of the meal went together fairly easily. I started with the cucumber salad, since I had to leach much of the liquid out by salting the pieces and weighting them down in a colander for three hours. The bismati rice pilaf called for cardamom pods, which I didn't have, so I substituted powder, the only real variation I had to make. The cloves and cinnamon stick that I cooked in gave the rice an unusual flavor. While the pilaf cooked, I finished up the salad with a yogurt dressing, adding oil, mint, cumin, and garlic. Antonia cut up some fresh vegetables I had purchased. I rubbed oil on them and added some mint, then grilled them in a basket next to the lamb. I had some mini whole wheat pita pockets that I wrapped in foil and warmed up in the barbecue to complete the meal.

After dinner, the band broke the silence of the lamb and practiced in the front room. I think this was my best meal yet, both for the food and the company. Next time, Peter, you better come home when you say you will. I only have a few of these up my sleeve.

Darien Defaults

I think I might have missed a week or two somewhere. But anyway ...

I flunked the bedtime last week. Totally. But that inspires me to do better this week.
On the gym front I didn't do too well either ... only two days.

On the Good News front I totally rocked with my new, New Year Revolution, which is to throw out one item a day. I have achieved this goal for the past three weeks, and have pictures to prove it.

Week six tackled by Darien

Ok, I kind of failed on the early to bed routine last week. Just one or two nights out of four. I'll do better this week ... starting tonight!

On the exercise front, I made it to the gym four times. My session with fitness coach Camille was really worthwhile, and I'm finding that forgotten muscles are talking to me.

As far as my Valentine's Day Revolution, a picture is worth ... how many words?

 

So, for Valentine's Day I made another "revolution" and "gave" it to John.

My new resolution is to throw out one item a day. I start a new pile each week, adding to it each day and documenting it with a picture on Sunday. Then, everything gets sorted into three piles in the staging room: Goodwill, consignment, trash. Some weeks there is a give away to family members pile too. Staging room, you ask? That's the advantage of having a house that is too big. My goal is to get rid of enough stuff to enable us to move into the Condemnation Plantation--yay!

Linguine and sausage

My foray into the kitchen continued, this time with a meal built around whole wheat linguine and sausage.The original was going to be a mushroom and dried tomato mix, but Antonia offered me some fresh Italian sausage from her dinner of the previous evening. She had picked it up at Belmont Butchery, so of course I had to use it.

The meal went together pretty quickly, and the timing was not too bad. The most fun was shoving the tenderized fennel to the edges of the skillet to make a crater, then sauteing in the middle some oil, garlic, and red pepper flakes. I wanted to use a recipe from Karen's cast iron cookbook, so I did a simple sauteed zucchini dish, tossed in a Parmesan and garlic mixture.

There were two major mistakes with this meal. The first was a result of me not paying attention enough to the recipe, and when it came time to prepare the spinach salad I just dumped the oil and minced shallot on the leaves before I realized I was supposed to be sauteing them. I had to pick everything out to try and salvage things. The other issue I had was with timing. I got everything ready pretty much at the same time, but that meant the salad just stood and waited for us to get through the rest of the meal. Next time I will try serving and eating in stages, saving the final prep work on a dish until right before we eat it. It will interrupt the meal more, but the quality should be better.

We resolve to babysit in Minnesota!

John's first Valentine's Day present was a 110-piece puzzle that he had to put together:

It features names of people and places that we will visit when we travel to Minneapolis/St. Paul in May! Yay! It took John exactly two hours and ten minutes to put this Wordle picture puzzle together.

Next John opened something which pertains to this blog. "Trashy Girl"--a promise from me to get rid of clutter and items we don't need, on a daily basis, in a public manner. That's right ... you, the reader, get to see the results! One item per day gets put in the Goodwill, Trash, or Consignment pile; these piles will be photographed weekly. Here is just some of our trash:

As far as last week, I got to bed on time for only one of my two work-nights. I got to the gym only twice, but I did shovel some snow ...

From the one who washes dishes

 

It was worth it!

(and this wasn't all the dishes, by any means)