sometimes you just need...

brownies from a box. there, i said it. i know you think i'm a stuck-up foodie. don't call me a foodie; i'm just a regular girl who happens to like food. "foodie" is a term for people who aren't me: who don't like fast food, who don't harbor secret cravings for wendy's, cakes from boxes, and brownies from boxes. i confess: a little bit of the foodie creeps back in when i qualify my tawdry love for "fake" food with the opinion that i don't consider it to be "real" food, and this is why i can enjoy it as much as i do. anyone who doesn't like brownies from a mix hasn't tasted them when you eat them, slightly undercooked, 15 minutes after they've exited your oven.

because after going for over a year without having encountered this forbidden pleasure (i'm afraid people will see them in my trash - five years ago i was once yelled at for making cookies from a mix), i had one. and then i had another one. and let me tell you: it was gorgeous. i think i died from my hellish week and went to heaven, a heaven filled with brownies and peach cake that's currently baking in the oven.

so these brownies were essentially an appetizer for dinner, which was chicken stuffed with ricotta, apricots, and craisins, and wrapped with bacon and baked; and a risotto (which was actually risotto and barley mixed together) with bacon, onions, peas, yellow bell peppers, and a little bit of sherry. but the brownies ruled the day. i'm going to the kitchen to eat another one.

anticipation

besides sitting at my desk in studio, fiddling with bits of chipboard all day, there's nothing i like better than planning menus. first you think of what you want to eat; then you think of what you have at home in the fridge, since you're a poor grad student, and try to reconcile the two.

contents of my fridge:
bacon.
a couple zucchini.
a couple of red bell peppers.
eggs.
leftover roasted broccoli from last week's soup
a pint of cream.

i wanted to cook this weekend, to preserve my sanity, so rocco and lauren are coming over tonight for dinner. rocco's making the main dish - a japanese chicken and buckwheat noodle dealio - so we thought up some things to go along with it. i'm going to do some dumplings (provided that my dumpling skins defrost in time) with pork, ginger, and garlic - i still dream about that pork-ginger-garlic pancake that i had in china... - and roasted butternut squash with kale, perhaps. i was trying to think of an asian vegetable we could do, and this is the closest i got within the budget. then for dessert, vanilla ice cream with langues de chat (which i've never made before) and a caramel sauce that's infused with star anise. i'm most excited about the dumplings, although it turns out that i have the wonton skins and i'm not at all sure how i'm going to cook them; and then the caramel sauce.

i'm so excited about cooking tonight that i'm going to tell you now what i'm going to do. well, prepping stuff of course, which also involves prepping for brunch tomorrow (more on that later), but mostly i want to see how the caramel sauce comes out. i'm going to get home from studio and straightaway i'll put some cream on the stove on low, with some star anise, and let that go, covered (dairy products absorb odors), until i need it for the caramel sauce.

tomorrow i'm doing a small brunch to use up other stuff we have in the fridge. the broccoli and bacon are going into a quiche, which i think i'm going to cook in the 22cm tart pan and some ramekins, and then i'll do some home fries with bacon and the red bell peppers (which i've also never done before, but my all clad pan gives me confidence), and chocolate-zucchini cupcakes. i'm thinking about putting nutella in the middle of the cupcakes, but really, i don't like the consistency of nutella enough to do it - it's too gooey. i wonder what i could thin it with. cream? hmm. evaporated milk? what really wants to go into those cupcakes is some fruit jam, like a cherry preserve, or chocolate pudding. or, whipped cream. but the whipped cream is definitely too extravagant for a brunch, given the presence of all of that bacon. hmm.

soup without vision

i was feeling kind of blah today after spending several hours in studio; not that many people were there and i missed my roommates, whom i haven't seen much of in the past week. since they weren't around, i decided i needed to cook. rather, to lovingly fashion some sort of food product; i've always found cooking to be therapeutic and this instance was no exception.

i didn't know what i was going to make, but celina was into the soup idea, so soup it was. we had red peppers and broccoli at home, and i thought i'd make something that i could put that in. when i cook for therapy, i like it to be a prolonged experience, so i can take my time. to me that means bacon and rendered bacon fat, or a roast chicken. i ended up making a soup with some stuff i thought might be good (but that i had no idea if it would be good): in addition to the peppers and broccoli i added some zucchini, portabella mushrooms, and sage.

it turned out pretty well. i also bought thick-cut bacon, which was an excellent addition; it was even slightly meatier than normal thick-cut bacon, but not quite canadian bacon or british bacon, so it was perfect for the soup. i cooked the bacon with sage to get some of the flavor into the bacon, then added a whole lot of (old, since they made me cry more than usual) onions to deglaze the pan. there's nothing like my all clad pan for utterly fantastic fond, by the way. other than the bacon, it was a basic soup: add onions, potatoes to thicken the soup (my favorite way to thicken soup), and extra veg. in the end, i wasn't sure how the mushrooms would go over; i thought of them as a meat "substitute" that would add body to the soup, but the more i thought about it, the more i thought it was a mistake. however, it ended up being ok - there were enough other vegetables to tame the strength of the portabellas.

last weekend carrien and i made these fantastic crepes for breakfast: cornmeal-cumin crepes that are filled with a ricotta-ham mixture and then baked, with a corn and scallion relish dealio. they were fantastic - the ricotta ham combo is not to be missed. we bought ham ends from star market because they were cheap, so to give them more flavor we fried the ham in some bacon fat (best thing in the world to cook with) and browned it a little, which to me, made all the difference. god those were good. i think i had more than my fair share of the leftovers.