Baby's Got a Pretty Face

Tom's birthday meal was so lavish and so beautiful, I had to post a few photos here.


These are oysters, cured in a bit of lime juice and some other unidentified, yummy stuff. Courtesy of our friend Carrie, who's a wonderful chef.

My winter slaw, stolen from Shauna and Chef of glutenfreegirl.com. Broccoli, savoy cabbage, raw brussel sprouts, and a tangy dressing starring homemade mayonnaise.

Again to Carrie, whose dishes were indisputably the prettiest. Here, a prawn ceviche featuring a creamy cilantro sauce.

What 30-course BBQ-themed meal would be complete without a mini serving of homemade buttermilk waffles topped with a piece of cruncy bacon and finished with a drizzle of syrup? These addictive morsels were my mom's doing.

My dad is king of the homemade onion ring. Look at these golden, fluffy rings and try to deny it.


The rest of photos can be found on facebook.

Parmesan Crumb Calamari

I had one of those long days today, where the march until lunch seems interminable and the post-lunch doldrums extend to 5pm. The quality of the day was so grey and dull that I had to make something colorful and rich for dinner.

T and I have been living off the leftovers of his 30-course birthday feast all week, which means we have practically no groceries, so tonight I indulged in a stroll through the Whole Foods meat and seafood departments, waiting for dinner to call out to me.

I examined the whole dungeness crabs, the beautiful strip steak, the organic chicken breasts. But what called out to me was the humble tub of raw squid, all tiny purple tentacles and smooth, creamy tubes. By itself squid isn't much to write home about, and I know it makes a lot of people squeamish. But fried up with spices and lemon juice, it becomes a delectable treat that's easy and cheap.

To my mind, homemade calamari is a lot like risotto: ridiculously easy to make well, and yet so rare in the home kitchen that people think it's restaurant fare. I have to admit I rarely make it myself, but that has a lot more to do with the amount of oil calamari requires than the difficulty of making it.

I don't use a recipe per se, but draw inspiration from Nigella Lawson's ridiculously fun Nigella Bites, which has a recipe for salt and pepper calamari (listed under "TV Dinners," which should tell you how easy this is to make). Instead of using her cornstarch, salt and pepper mix, I tossed the calamari rings and tentacles in a Parmesan bread crumb mixture left in the fridge from last week's mac and cheese. I fried the crumb-coated squid in a generous amount of extra-virgin olive oil in a cast iron skillet, and then finished them under the broiler for three minutes for crunch and color. Once cooked, I tossed the calamari with red sea salt, pepper, and lots of lemon juice. T and I ate the golden rings with extra lemon and a creamy-tangy cabbage and apple slaw.

There are even leftovers for lunch tomorrow. Which is Friday. Suddenly, I'm feeling sunny.

The Portobello Project

Sing, O Muses, of the sporous wonder of the edible fungi!

Look at these little beauties! Such globular tops, such sturdy stem legs, umbrellas branching out to shade the surrounding compost. And they're three times the size today than they were when I took this picture. Now the cluster in the corner crowds the box with magnificent brown crowns.

Sure, the mulch, with the myceleum poking through (that's the white, mouldy looking stuff) appears disgusting, but it hides a treasure trove of mineral rich fungi waiting to be turned into a lasagna (something like this, though with a layer of creme freche instead, fried sage and no chicken: http://www.gourmet.com/recipes/2000s/2009/03/cheesy-chicken-and-mushroom-lasagne). Or, if the crops yields more than currently promised by the five mushrooms in the box, I'm going to try drying them for risottos. What could be better than your own home-grown dried mushrooms, sitting in the pantry like a promise of self-sufficiency and comfort meals to come? (So many people think of risotto as a company meal, but it's just a savory rice pudding; stir until creamy and indulge. T and I love it at the cold beginning of spring, thick with asparagus and lemon juice.)

I'm teaching a class on dystopian literature, so the ideas of gardening, foraging and drying, canning, pickling, etc. are on my mind. (Of course the apocalypse makes me think of food. Other people are hording guns and machetes, and I'm wondering what's for lunch.) I'm reading Into the Forest with my class, and while I'm not sure I find Hegland's essential argument of returning to the hunter-forager lifestyle appealing, I do like all of the narrative about home canning and the like. It's inspired me to at least three projects this summer:

1) Can my own tomatoes. Sure, I'll have to buy them by the bushel at the market, but what the heck? It's the only time of year you can buy that many organic tomatoes without going bankrupt. I might even be able to convince Whole Foods to sell me their banged up, mushy tomatoes at a lower price at the end of the day.

2) Make some fun pickles. Pickled carrots? Okra? At the very least, I'll be stocked for cold weather bloody marys.

3) Create a sourdough starter. Or, even better, attract my own yeast from the local environment. By this summer, Kate, Glenna, Jonathan and I will have completed our informal course in artisan bread baking (courtesy of Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice) and I'll be ready to start a yeasty science project.*

*By the way, we invite you to follow our bread making travails at http://www.themerrybakers.blogspot.com/. No posts as of yet, but we're making our first bread this weekend!

Damn. When did it get to be 8:09am? I better water the mushrooms (in the instructions, I am told to sprinkle them like the morning dew) and get to work.

Wouldn't it be lovely to cook and write all day?

ihatemyjob.com

We're switching to a new computer network at the bookstore, which is a massive undertaking. Basically, we have to rewrite every buying, selling, storing, transferring, reporting and accounting process that the store utilizes, and there are a lot, because I work for a giant company. As part of this procedure, we have to wean every employee off of our antiquated system and train them to use a Windows-based operating system with entirely new rules. It is expected that management and trainers (that's me!) will locate bugs in the new system and invent ways of utilizing the current system regardless of dysfunctionality. It is also expected that managers and trainers will do this without one iota of formal training themselves; as I noted to my boss this afternoon, this kind of technological autodidacticism isn't in my job description. He wasn't happy.

Maybe he doesn't understand the word "autodidacticism."

I hate my job today. I'm never entirely thrilled with it--the pendulum swings from complacent to bored--but never before in my life (excepting student papers) have I been confronted with such illogicality! In one week I'm to train people to use a system that I haven't been trained on. And when I had the audacity to politely express my discomfort to the powers that be, I was hit with a barrage of the following:

1. You're a trainer. (Oh really? Is that why my job title is "trainer?" Thank you so much for enlightening me. I can cancel my visit to the Dalai Lama now.)
2. You're supposed to know this stuff. (Yes. I realize the discrepancy between your expectations and my reality. That's why I'm here requesting training.)
3. If you don't know something, ask me. (Hm. I'm in the process of following this directive, and it isn't going so well.)
4. You're supposed to be finding bugs in the system. (Yes, but how do I differentiate between a bug and the limitations of my own knowledge when I haven't been trained to use the system?)
5. We don't expect you to locate bugs in the system. (DO YOU LISTEN TO YOURSELF?)
6. I'm really nervous about your network abilities. (Yeah, me too. That's why I want some more f**king training!)
7. I think you do an amazing job. (I hate you.)

When I mentioned to my boss--again in a polite, controlled manner--that I was feeling nervous about asking questions because each time I do, I'm met with a wall of hostility and impatience--he defended his anger and then apologized. I think my boss was having trouble being decisive today.

Maybe he doesn't understand the word "hostility."

He's not a bad man. I kind of like him most of the time. He has sparkling green eyes and a nice smile. And he's smart, despite my snarky comments about his vocabulary. And no one taught him how to use the program, either. He's just had a year to play with it. I have two weeks. Somehow the discrepancy between his readiness and mine has been overlooked in his zealous desire to make me feel like an ass. Plus, his apology was insincere. He feels as angry as I do--the difference is that a) I tactfully hide my feelings and b) my anger is valid and his is a retarded response to the even more retarded company decision not to train trainers.

I know. Next week, when I meet with my class, I'll quiz them on the end of the novel, even though they'll only have read the first 80 pages. They're supposed to know that stuff. They're students. I think they do an amazing job.