A Million Words

Yesterday was my birthday, and I thought I'd celebrate by cooking up a whole mess of things I hadn't tried before. I spent most of the day cooking up three different salads. I was particularly excited about Octopus Salad . Copping up the octopi was strangely fun, but I was sadly disappointed when they came out of the boiling water 45 minutes later at about half their original volume. It was fairly tasty when done, but much, much smaller than I'd hoped for. My mother was supposed to make this tomato and mozzarella salad , but she had strep throat, so she couldn't cook. I think I probably had the strep the weekend before we left Ireland, and chances were she caught it from me. Anyway, I wound up making this, too, with some last-minute help from my cousin Jethro. We had a huge load of green beans from the local CSA, which went into this salad: The recipe called for hazelnut oil, but I couldn't find it at any of our local shops, so I just used olive oil. It was still ...

When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that...

When Mike was working full-time at a miserable, hazardous job, I thought it would be a good idea to celebrate every Friday by buying or making a cake.  So far, I've made chocolate cakes, carrot cakes, and miscellaneous cakes.  By the time we went into unemployment a few months ago, I had become quite attached to the idea of the Friday Cake. Last week, I decided that it would be fun to try to make a Battenburg Cake.  I'd spotted one at a friend's house, and thought it was interesting. After all, we don't have Battenburg cakes in America.  A week later, and on Saturday, I've finally gotten around to it.  The process was messy.  I used this recipe except that I bought the marzipan rather than make it from scratch.  The batter was gloppy and had to be thinned with lots of milk, and I didn't get it quite even in the pan. The cake came out all lumped up in the middle and didn't look like it would make two neat checkerboard cakes in a million years.   Well, a ful...

For four weeks, from February to March, I stuffed all of my grocery shopping receipts into an envelope behind the i-pod on the bookshelf.  At the end of the four weeks, I tallied them up in a spreadsheet to find out how much I'd been spending and where I'd been spending it.  I wrote about the experiment here . My analysis led me into a lot of mumsy internet forum discussions about budgeting, meal planning, comparison shopping, etc. I moved into phase two of the experiment: creating a menu plan and organizing my pantry.  I started off by making a list of all the things I like to keep in stock in the cupboards, refrigerator, etc.  Well. I ended up with a list of about 150 items, including actual staples, baking supplies, spices and sauces for a variety of cuisines, cleaning products, medicines, etc. I could make a shorter list, but it wouldn't come close to including all the things we get from the grocery store.  Having made the list, I never look at it, but the process of ma...

I expected that we would go up to my mother-in-law's for Easter dinner, but as it turned out she was going away for the weekend so I wound up doing dinner here.  I made deviled eggs (no recipe, though I looked at a few), asparagus (sauteed in butter), pot barley, and a half shoulder of lamb with this marinade .  I also threw in a few baked potatoes, because it's not a real dinner in Ireland if you don't have potatoes. I cooked them according to the directions on How to Bake a Potato.com . Amazing, the things that have their own websites. I found the results excellent. The lamb also came out well despite the fact that I didn't start marinating it until an hour before baking, and didn't have a food processor so the ingredients weren't as mashed up as they're supposed to be.   When my mother was here for a visit, we went out to more fancy restaurants than usual, including Sheridan's, which is just on the corner. There, my mother ordered something that in...

For the past month, I've been keeping track of my grocery spending by keeping receipts and writing down any miscellaneous expenses like market purchases and take-away meals. Yesterday, I tallied it all up and found that we've been spending a bit less than €150/week.  I'd hoped it would be more like €100. Oh well.  I wondered how this compared to what other people spend, so I posted a poll on one of the Irish forums.  44% of the respondents (over 100 so far!) claim to spend in the 100-150 range.23% spend less and 30% spend more.  I don't know the demographics of the respondents, but I'd guess that most of them are stay-at-home mums, and because they're looking at the finance forum they're probably more budget-conscious than average.  In the discussion of the poll, I learned that some women with six or more children spend less than we do, while I'm sure some couples with only one child spend even more.   Am I over-spending, or are we doing just fine?  I do...

I have been sinking altogether too much creative energy into cooking lately.  The past week featured pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, a re-heated lasagne, a not-very-good aloo gobi, and finally a " Shortcut Pork Cassoulet " which we brought up to my mother-in-law's for dinner on Friday night. Cassoulet is a big project, even the shortcut version.  I would really like to do a full old-fashioned version, but I wasn't sure where to get duck confit and I wasn't ready to make it without being assured of a very appreciative audience at the end of the process. I would make it again, but only in cold weather, with a lot of guests, and using a slightly bigger casserole dish.  It didn't make me homesick, exactly, but it did make me wish for a better-equipped kitchen.   Last night I made Irish Beef Stew and One Hour Shrimp Paella .  The paella was a bit of a disappointment.  I used basmati rice instead of arborio, which didn't do the texture any favors, and got the cook...

Last night, Mike came home thinking that it was Pancake Tuesday, which is what they have in Ireland instead of Mardi Gras.  He asked if we could have pancakes for dinner just as I was rolling out the pizza dough (I tried to spin and stretch it out the first few times, but I've switched to rolling lately).  I felt bad about missing the opportunity to participate in an important cultural observance. The good news is, yesterday wasn't  Shrove Tuesday.  The big day is next week, so I have plenty of time to prepare and stock up on eggs.   As a result of this pancake scare, I just spent about an hour looking at pancake recipes on epicurious.com.  I wonder, is this too obsessive?  Have I gone over into the dark side of competitive housewifery?  Will I suddenly take out a subscription to Martha Stewart Magazine ?  Shouldn't I be writing instead?   But just think of the food that could be made!  I want to make Turkish Zucchini Pancakes and Buckwheat Pancakes with Smoked Salmon in ...

I haven't done a lick of writing since the beginning of December, being consumed by the usual holiday busy-ness plus an ambitious succession of crafts and baking projects.   At the beginning of the month, I used the leftover fabric from my baby-carrier making to make bags for my mother, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law, plus a few small ones to wrap cookies in because the only tins I could find cost about 8 euro a pop.   For Mike's relatives over in Ireland I made the following: Aunt Big's Gingersnaps,  an old stand-by of mine, and two recipes that were new to me, Rugelach and Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies .  The rugelach I will definitely make again, despite the fact that it was a two-day process with a bit of fiddling.  The candy cane cookies were very yummy, but it is next to impossible to find striped peppermint candies in Ireland, even three weeks before Christmas, and I found the peppermint filling a bit much. The chocolate cookie part, however, was delicious. Then I ...

Nova's birthday was this Saturday, and despite the chaos of roommates moving out and in, and the kitchen being in complete disarray, I was determined to make Nova a cake.   It is an orange chiffon (sponge) cake with chocolate ganache between the layers and huge amounts of ridiculously sweet white chocolate buttercream icing all over.  We took it to Mike's mother's house for a small birthday party that night, and a good time was had by all.   At one year old, Nova is never still except when she's asleep.  She walks at breakneck speed, honing in on anything sharp, dangerous, or electronic.  Her favorite teethers are mobile phones.  She enjoys exploring the far reaches of her range.  In the library, she will stay and play in the children's section for a while, but then she'll get restless and wander over to the computers in the reference room.  She can make my computer do things I didn't know it was capable of.  She's a very sociable baby, but with all the ...