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.