In my teens and twenties, I lived at Ikea. Ok, in my teens I begged my mom to stop there whenever we were anywhere near Elizabeth, New Jersey, but in my twenties I lived close enough to a different Ikea to get there fairly regularly and I did just that. I loved Ikea. I can walk into your house and name your Ikea pieces. Who doesn't have a Poang chair or a Billy bookcase floating around?
A few years ago, I moved and now there is an Ikea at the end of my street. Seriously, right there.
I make a lot of "quick breads." I try to always have banana bread or blueberry bread in the freezer for a quick breakfast. Blueberry bread is just blueberry muffins without the worry about whether they'll come out of the tins properly. I buy extra berries in the summer and keep them in the freezer for as long as I can stand it. I keep whole bananas with their skin on in the freezer (stash them just when they're too brown to eat raw). But sometimes, the season catches up with you and you're out of nanners and blueberries and you're *so over* things like pumpkin and apple. What then?
Cranberry bread. Cranberry orange bread. Seasonal but not squash.
So I make these Norwegian cookies. I told you all about them last year. Krumkake. They take over my kitchen for two weekends each December. There's smoke and fire and grease and burned fingers and spilled batter and in the end, lacy, crisp, amazing sugar cookies. Still, a huge mess.
Well, this year I figured it out. No, this doesn't prevent small kitchen fires and burned fingertips, those are going to happen either way, but oh does it save on cleanup.
Sure, you don't make krumkake. I understand. Maybe you make pancakes, or pizzelles or something else with a drippy batter?
This is a bag clip, but a standard binder clip would work too. Clip it on the edge of your bowl and your spoon won't sink down into the batter. Everything is right with the world.
It's not like we don't eat, but I realize it's been a good while since I've posted a recipe. When something awesome strikes, I'll write it up for you, but we've been eating stuff you'll find in past posts, mostly.
This is a recent stir fry with an illicit fall red pepper. It was awesome, but not super-different. I usually just stir-fry the tofu, but this time after I drained it, marinated it (mirin, soy, fish sauce, sriracha, onion, garlic, toasted sesame oil, rice vinegar) and drained it again, I tossed it in corn starch and shallow fried it (like the banh mi recipe). I stir fried some chopped up veg - broccoli, onion, carrot and the aforementioned pepper - and added some of the marinade. That's really it. Dinner.
No pictures, but this is not a post for the super-squeamish. Just a warning.
Like everyone in the mid-90s, I was a vegetarian teenager, which meant that I ate a lot of grilled cheese and zero beans or nuts. I didn't eat tofu and had never heard of seitan or tempeh or any other vegan protein. I was also once so anemic that I had to routinely drink the water spinach was boiled in for the iron (not recommended). So when vegetarianism wasn't working for me, I went back to meat. Sort of.
I'm the kind of meat eater who isn't looking to expand my horizons. I have a friend who loves rabbit and duck, but the cuteness factor gets to me (my mom grew up with a pet duck). I've never been able to eat anything on a bone, and this means Sous Chef Brian has used a fork to take meat off a chicken wing for me.
So I don't eat a ton of meat, in overall quantity or in range.
I'm also pretty upset about factory farming, so I try to buy meat from local farmers and feel like I have a sense of where it came from. This is easy, with beef, we have great farms we can buy it from. With chicken, the real limit is that at the farm stands and similar locales, most of the time you're getting a whole chicken.
So in reality, while I say I "make food out of food," what I actually do is make food out of vegetables. I don't take meat from a non-food state and bring it to the table. The meat I'm working with has generally been all fooded up before I see it.
