a visit from the mother-unit

my mother stopped by today, bringing supplies as well as various bits of her own cookery. while always welcome, the refrigerator is filled with little items bearing my intials all over it. among the supplies were: a head of lettuce, four pounds (yes, four pounds, not four sticks) of good butter, stuffed pork loin, broccoli quiche, some lunchmeat from the deli...i am well-cared for, and, it seems, unreasonably pampered here in the heated confines of my room.

she also brought me some butter cookies, made from a dough i made back during christmas (yes, it was frozen). they are surprisingly good : i generally do not like sugar cookies, but these are actually quite excellent. they're very crispy, which is something i seem to be unable to achieve; i have no idea how she got the cookies cut out and shaped normally, given the thinness of the dough. i'll have to try that one again. if you're looking for a good recipe, it's on epicurious - search for butter cookies and it's the second or third recipe that comes up (it's the one where you're supposed to make logs and cut off 1/8" thick rounds).

notable food exploits of the recent past

last week : tea lollipops. sure, it might sound funny, but they were good if you're not a tea purist nazi. the lollipops are really just sugar and water, so i replaced the water with two different teas (for two different flavors of lollipop) : raspberry earl grey and vanilla-peach-apricot from tealuxe. i used about 5-8 grams of each tea and simmered the water after it had steeped, in an attempt for the tea to release more flavor. the universal winner was the raspberry earl grey.

this week : ah, the leftover. rather, in this case, leftover ingredients, and what you can do when walking outside means walking into a blizzard. lunch, the day before the storm, included cheese tortellini (the four-cheese barilla brand, which i quite like) with onions and spinach sauteed with balsamic vinegar and some rather old red wine, halved grape tomatoes, and crumbled goat cheese. it was quite good, actually; i may make it again sometime. dinner on the day of the blizzard, when most people hopped a ride to 44 columbia, was short-grain california rice and onions steamed in homemade chicken broth. mmm. it was a bit bland so i added caramelized onions with sundried tomatoes, which i had been making to use up my onions. that was also quite good. i'm a big fan of this particular brand of rice - the grains are slightly plumper than arborio rice and they're as much fun to eat as shell or wheel shaped pasta.