Snapshots of meals past

A couple of weekends ago, I made two dishes from some of my favorite food sites - Smitten Kitchen and Simply Recipes. SK provided a recipe for shakshuka, a brunch-ish meal of eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce. You crumble some feta cheese into the pan and serve it all with toasted pita bread. The end result is a surprisingly hearty and delicious meal.

Here are the eggs, freshly cracked into the sauce. I think I overcooked them a touch, but that didn't stop Calli and me from devouring the thing.

toasted pita bread w/ kosher salt

shakshuka

The shakshuka was a pretty solid meal that will probably get thrown into my lazy saturday brunch rotation.

Later that day, I tried a dessert recipe from SR. We ate strawberry shortcake sliders, without a trip to White Castle or a carjacking from NPH.

These were pretty tasty, but I don't think my biscuits rose as much as they should have. I can't figure out why that is...I'm going to go ahead and blame faulty baking powder.

Maybe I'm just not a baker.

Giving up

I've just returned to Wisconsin from a Spring Break trip to Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA. Originally, I had planned to write a week's worth of posts prior to leaving for the southeast, but time ran short. Writing wasn't the only thing that I forgot, either. I remembered that I had completely missed a tux fitting deadline while walking through the Charleston Museum's exhibit on wedding dresses. Thankfully, that appears to have been more of a soft deadline, and I have remedied that mistake.

However, the missing blog posts are a different mess. I set a New Year's resolution to write something here each day. So far, I've been able to accomplish this (albeit with the considerable help of Blogger's feature that lets you post in the past. I've been using 14" of pine tar for this resolution, or HGH, or hair gel, or whatever. I cheat.).

Anyway, I'm giving up the strict one post/day resolution. The vacation set me back too far, and the feeling of having to catch up for those missing days is making me feel less likely to write new things. I can't quit while there are still rules to be written and muppet videos to be watched!

Conflicted feelings

I would write a legitimate post, but right now I'm just not in the mood. The Badger basketball team just got run out of Jacksonville by a Cornell team that couldn't miss their shots, and got way too many rebounds, and got the benefit of the refs, and had a dumb nickname, and...

Sorry. I run-on when I'm upset.

Anyway, my mind is all messed up right now. As a Cub fan, I have a very soft spot in my heart for ivy. However, Cornell is in the Ivy League. My brain! Now that the badgers lost, I'm going to wear my crankypants and yell snarky things at the television for the rest of the night.

Ice Cream 1.0

Today was a very frustrating day until about 10 minutes ago.

I assembled my ice cream maker yesterday and began the process of making David Lebovitz's Vanilla Ice Cream. I stopped at Penzey's Spices on University last week and picked up some vanilla beans from Madagascar, which got steeped in milk and custardized last night. Today, after celebrating Pi Day with Calli, Ann, Tim, and Julie, Calli and I churned the ice cream mixture for ~40 minutes. Then I opened the canister.

Nothing had changed. At all.

At that point, I assumed I had done something wrong with the maker. However, what else was there to do besides keep churning? Luckily enough, the machine came with an electric motor. I plugged it in and started making dinner (I was able to have more immediate success with spinach/sausage stuffed pasta shells).

Anyway, after at least another hour of motorized churning, I opened the ice cream canister and it was still very much a liquid. The troubleshooting section of the manual suggested to take the canister and place it in the freezer, so I did. At this point, I was fairly upset. I don't like to fail more than anybody else does, and I was so excited to try homemade vanilla ice cream. I think that why I dawdled so long in unpacking/assembling/trying the ice cream maker is probably one of two reasons:
1. I do have a long, frustrating trend of procrastination.
2. I knew that there was a fair chance of having things not go smoothly. One thing that I still have to fight in cooking is the fear of failing, even when failure isn't the end of the world.

The lesson here is that when I took the ice cream canister out after dinner, the mixture had more or less frozen into recognizable ice cream, and it was fantastic. Fantastic. I know that vanilla can be seen as a bland flavor, sort of a blank slate...but this had such a pronounced flavor of vanilla, with all of its complexities, that it would have been criminal to drizzle hot fudge over the scoops.

The Joys of March

What is March good for? I just turned on the Cubs spring training game against the White Sox to see/hear these things:

Angel Guzman's MRI results came back with some bad news for his shoulder.

Andres Blanco turning his ankle on a pickoff from catcher to second, eventually leaving the game.

Marlon Byrd 3-hopping a throw from shallow right-center to home in an unsuccessful (surprise!) attempt to throw out a runner scoring from second on a single.

Terrific.

Next we'll hear that Trevon Hughes and Jon Leuer both exploded their knees while getting off the bus in Champaign. Stupid March.

Broomball version 6.0 update

Okay, this is going to be quick - my body is beaten and bruised...and compared to my ego, it's in great shape.

My goals:

prove that bandanas can be worn as broomball attire:
toss-up. I say success, everybody else says failure.

hat trick
FAIL - 0 goals.

no broken bones
success, but failing on this one was unlikely.

deny Joe any goals
FAIL - he opened the second or third game with three straight on me. Yikes.

New Project

So far, this blog has been a medley of muppet videos, slow pitch softball recaps, and pictures of cheese or dogs.

Well, I'm not going to abandon that.

However, I will be starting a long-range project on MtD. I don't want to say what it is quite yet, but it will involve a lot of food...and it very well may be disastrous.


Let us all take this with a (large) grain of salt, because here is a list of all of my other failed grandiose projects, just off the top of my head:

75 sq. ft. wall map (I am not admitting defeat, but I will concede I had thought it would be done about 18 months ago)
learning accordion
learning harmonica
Green Man Group
Cheese Races
Globe Puzzle
Fighting Meercats
Homemade boat