April Foods!

Man, I haven't posted in a while. I guess I've been too busy catching up on Kings, the biblically-themed monarchy drama that is, as my sister so often says, "awesome sauce." And not just because it stars Ian McShane, the voice of the killer leopard in Kung Fu Panda.

Anyway, the Sherbs and I have been making plenty of tasty food. This Saturday we went back to the Book of a Million Zillion Curries (comic book reference explained here) for dinner, and made both the tasty tea and chickpea curry and a curry of French green lentils and too much spinach. Turns out the recipe makes something like eight cups of food, so I'm glad we broke out the big pot; it's not easy to wilt two pounds of spinach in boiling water already full of lentils. Also: it made the water turn really green.

What was kind of interesting about the spinach/lentil curry is that it basically was boiled spinach and lentils with what I'd call a "sauteed pico de gallo" tossed in during the last fifteen minutes. If tomatoes were in season, there would probably be a bit more flavor (also, we ran short of cumin - who keeps track of how much cumin they have?), but the spinach was otherwise tasty and a good counterpoint to the chickpeas, which were spicy.

The chickpea spiciness could be in part due to the serious chopping of the serrano chiles in that recipe; we have an off-brand Slap Chop® (for immature but hilarious parody, click here; for incident involving the Slap Chop® pitchman and a prostitute, click here) that does in fact make short work of garlic, ginger, and serrano peppers, rendering them into tiny bits in a matter of moments. With more pepper surface area exposed to the oil in the pan, we got more spiciness.

Tomorrow's dinner will involve another salad from the Benedictine monks. This one will require me to make carrot matchsticks tonight. Wish me luck; I can never get them small enough.

Cookie Press & Cheese

The saga of the cookie press has come to a close since I finally found one that works.

(For those who may not remember the full story of the William Sonoma Cookie press, the saga begins in July 2007 and goes on through July 2007, December 2008, and December 2008)

But the saga is now over. No more William Sonoma Cookie Press* for me!! I found a new, better cookie press that works from an even funner store, Sur la Table. The cookies came out perfectly and delicious. Very east to use! So happy!

Also, we made the goat cheese and risotto dish for dinner last night as a "reward" for me finishing my first 5K in 34 minutes. It was so delicious and creamy and perfect. But how could risotto with 8 oz. of goat cheese be bad? I'm not sure.

*Note: The cookie press on the website is considerably nice than the one I got. Maybe they figured it out?

Passover Snack

Last night, after coming home from work, I made a snack. A one-egg egg salad (a favorite of mine during Passover) wasn't quite enough (although with real mayo is AMAZING). So I poked around our kitchen looking for something. Except it's passover and the end of passover at that so we had very little. And problem was I wanted something sweet. Except I tend to not buy sweets because I eat them waaaaaay to quickly. So we decided not to buy the wonderful and amazing and delectable treats that come out over passover for the house, but had our fill at the seder and then when friends came over for dinner. But last night I so badly wanted a sweet.

The End Result: Matzah and Honey.
The Verdict: Perfect. (Would have been perfect-er with butter under the honey, but alas, same problem with butter as with sweets. Also goes for mayo. Somehow, half our jar is gone. But real mayo on matzah is a delightful nosh!) I will totally be eating this again at other holidays. Also, not sure why the Teet had Kosher for Passover honey but not the usually kosher for passover stuff, like, cheese or mayo. Oh well. New favorite store to buy kosher stuff had a lot! Cheeses, meats, fishes, etc.!! Normally I wouldn't buy Kosher for Passover honey because it's not like bees are eating leavened bread on the other 51 weeks of the year. I wanted to make sure they got their sale. Same reason I bought Kosher for Passover milk. Because really it soooo doesn't matter. For these people it does (regardless, I want a warming drawer one day - looks awesome!)

Passover

I am one of the few people I know who doesn't mind passover and kosher for passover food. Sure, it's not the best thing ever and I'll take a serving of beans tossed in pasta with no hesitation right now, but in general, it's not so bad. I really enjoyed The Pedant's soup and matzah balls and made a matzah lasagna last night. It was actually fairly tasty. First, I made a fresh tomato sauce from about 5 Roma tomatoes. I chopped up some garlic and sauteed it in EVOO. Then I added the chopped tomatoes, some pepper and parve chicken soup mix for flavor and let it cook until it was kind of a soupy pomadoro. Next, I sauteed an onion in EVOO, added some chopped portobello mushroom and flavored it with salt and pepper. Since the pan was too small, I cleaned it out and sauteed a lot of baby spinach with salt. To finish it off, I threw in some balsamic to give it a punch. Then I ufgafished* the matzah, layered and added in mozzarella cheese. Sadly, the Parmesan cheese was moldy. But, it turned out to be really good! (I bet it'll be fantastic with real lasagna noodles!)

*To Wet the Matzah. I couldn't find a link to it, but my mother used the word and I'm sure it exists. Plus, it's super funny to say. Try it. Haha

Soup Success!

Everyone liked the soup. Which is good. I need a bigger pot, though, as after I retrieved the cheesecloth bundle containing the chicken, the soup was more a chicken/parsnip/carrot/celery stew than an actual soup.

There were also whole wheat matzah balls in the soup. They taste just as good as any matzah balls, although nobody lets me make matzah balls with grebenes anymore. They are tastier.

I Made Chicken Soup For the Second Time

Things I should have remembered from the first time I made chicken soup:

1) the recipe from the internet does not realize that I am not using an eight-quart stock pot, but instead a five-quart pot from Ikea.

2) Gas burners hate overflowing pots.

Things I now learned from my chicken soup adventure:

1) Lydia Bastianich's trick of putting soup meats in cheesecloth is good, but works a lot better if you have a giant stockpot to work with.

2) The grates on my stove are really wobbly and, unless positioned just so, will cause a pot full of hot proto-soup to tip and spill all over the front of the oven and the floor.

3) There is an amount of celery one can chop which will cause one's hands to smell like celery for a long time.