The Bruce fam has decided to do a white elephant Xmas this year, and Chef and I have been wandering around the house trying to decide what to wrap up as our presents. Tonight Chef had a brilliant idea, “I know! Your degree!”
It will do as much for them as it has for me. Fa la la la la! Ha!
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Posted with apologies to my mother.
I haven’t done one of these in forever, but my mom gave me a REAL LIVE iPod while on drugs post-surgery last month, so I suppose it’s time.
Don’t think I took advantage of her or anything. She has an iPhone in addition to her iPod, and who needs both, really?
1) Swell Maps — Adventuring Into Basketry
2) Murder By Death — Theme (for Elmo Morricone)
3) The Kickdrums — Walking Dream
4) Jens Lekman — Bringing on the Sweet Nectar
5) The Fall — God-Box
6) Heartless Bastards — Had To Go
7) The Besnard Lakes — Cedric’s War
8) Junior Boys — When No One Cares
9) Golden Animals — My Friend Bill
10) Those Poor Bastards — You Belong To Me
Those Poor Bastards are like what would have happened if Nick Cave and Johnny Cash had a goth baby.
And Murder By Death are bringing this Gothic Americana thing home via Bloomington, Indiana. Woot.
While getting ready to go to yet another holiday party, I’ve realized that although I start with every intention of getting really, really dressed up, I almost always end up dressing down. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I’m totally excited about this party though. Chef has spent the last two weeks planning, and the last three days executing what should be a fancy little wine and amuse-bouche soirée. My mom is my date.
The cats bargain and fight for prime napping real estate under the Xmas tree. The spot also appears to be a great place to stalk and surprise other cats, which is why it is valued with such esteem.
I decided I am going to get some and I am baking some damned Xmas cookies. Where am I and when did I turn into Martha Stewart’s inept cousin from Indiana?
The recipe is from one of those ancient wire-bound cookbooks in my mom’s collection that is covered in splatters of sauce from holidays past. This stuff has reached legendary status in my mind as part of my mom’s culinary repertoire, the one thing I can never get enough of, and the one thing I will fight for at the dinner table once the cheese grits are eaten and gone. Now that I reflect on it, this is probably the most passive-aggressive of holiday dishes, in that if you resent your family you can just feed them cornbread stuffing until their arteries harden.
I made it this year since Mom was down and out after knee surgery and my sister was kid-wrangling most of the morning, and frankly, because I wanted to claim ownership of the dish this year. It was the one piece of Lauren’s Thanksgiving Bake-Off that was successful this week, wherein FOR WHATEVER REASON I peeled pearl onions instead of buying them canned*, crafted a batch of yeast rolls that cooked up hard and tasteless**, cooked up some cheese grits that while pretty didn’t manage to set***, and forgot all about green food on the Thanksgiving table. But the stuffing: it was good.
First you bake off a large slab of unsweetened cornbread, think a 9×12 dish. Melt ONE STICK OF BUTTER in a Dutch oven. Fry up about one half pound of sausage and one pound of ground beef in the butter. Dump in a chopped onion, several cloves of chopped garlic, and a couple sticks of chopped celery, and cook them with the meat and butter mixture until they’re tender. Then add ANOTHER STICK OF BUTTER, 12-ish ounces of chicken broth, and a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, and let this simmer for a little under two hours. Crumble up the cornbread into this mixture gradually while stirring, and season with salt, black pepper, red pepper, chili powder and paprika to taste. If it looks a little dry add more chicken broth to moisten the mixture. SERVE.
So basically, make a meat and butter soup and add cornbread. It’s ridiculous. And delicious.
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* I’m going to do this more often since I love onions so much. Buy a little bag of fresh pearl onions and boil them in water for about 3-5 minutes. Strain them and wait until they’re cool, then you can cut off the root end and squeeze the edibles out the bottom. So good sauteed.
** I don’t know what I did wrong, especially since the dough itself was perfect.
*** Two eggs, not one. Next time remember to bring the recipe.
I don’t know what my problem is, but I’m recently obsessed with baking things. The cooking blogs, they don’t help, with their delicious cookies, the chocolates, the gingers, the vanilla beans, the glistening sugars, icings piped along the edges of pastel petit fours. I pass special edition, holiday-themed cookie baking magazines in the grocery store and have to stop myself. No, Lauren, it’s just another fancier version of the same old sugar cookie, you can buy those decorative silver balls anywhere, stop it.
I’m refraining from making yeast rolls tonight. Maybe.
Because my mom isn’t feeling well, my sister and I are taking on the Thanksgiving cooking at Mom’s house this year. I put myself in charge of the stuffing (my family’s cajun cornbread stuffing, I die) and cheese grits, and made the executive decision to pass up on a brick of green bean casserole in favor of sauteed green beans. Green bean casserole is the asshole of the dinner table.
Thanks, Chef. Thanks, Rock Band.
Most substantial blogging is going on at Feministe, or rather, Feministe in Exile, while we figure out the database issues from this autumn’s hack.
The holiday season is coming on, which means many of our weekends are full of parties, some of which Chef has to work. Tonight, a private charity dinner at Kokoro for local players which I’m only invited to because I married the help. Soon, Beaujolais.
I’ve recommitted myself to exercise, for the first time seriously since I graduated from college. I used to be a runner, way back when, and I was a relatively solid athlete for most of my youth. I think I just got so used to the decadence of really great food and wine available at arm’s length that I forgot that if I’m going to regularly indulge myself I’d better balance it with a more active lifestyle. I’ve been at it for about a month, and already my clothes fit better and I’m sleeping well for the first time in about five years. I’m still not buying a scale.
This is probably the last nice weekend we’re going to have this year, weather-wise. I’m set on enjoying my Sunday.
Tonight Chef’s obsession with getting to his foodie roots has reached a level that I am COMPLETELY UNWILLING TO ENGAGE.
THERE IS A DEAD SQUIRREL IN MY REFRIGERATOR.
Since Chef and I got married, I’ve basically quit cooking. And grocery shopping. And cleaning the kitchen.
Last week Ethan and I agreed that we should be cooking more often, not only to give Chef a break here and there, but because I’m a decent cook and Ethan loves to help in the kitchen (and regale you with food facts and food reviews later). I want it to be kind of an event, kind of a big deal, family-dinner-at-the-table with NAPKINS AND EVERYTHING at least once a week, with a full-on meal instead of the usual one-pot concoctions I usually dream up.
Tonight is our first official night Giving Chef A Break and I’m torn between two recipes. One is standard cold weather comfort food fare and the other is potentially beyond my skill set and would require Chef’s help, thereby negating half the point of this project, not to mention that I would have to touch raw meat.
Your advice, please: Spinach and Pesto “Green” Lasagna (from The Silver Palate Cookbook) served with a simple salad and homemade garlic bread OR Vietnamese-Style Banh Mi Burgers served with homemade sweet potato fries (from the most recent issue of Food & Wine)?
So I finally watched “Observe and Report” and I take back any and all defenses I ever made of it (I still defend “Eastbound and Down” as a critique of macho manhood, and a far more effective critique than the Apatow-Rogen arrested development flicks). It’s a thoroughly bad movie on all levels, with no point, no takeaway, no laugh out loud moments, and no deeper meaning. The first forty-five minutes had potential as the Travis Bickle revisitation that Hill tried to make, but it went to shit from there and never recovered.
I’d planned on writing a longer review while it was still fresh in my memory, but a week later all I can remember of it is the resulting anger that I’d wasted five bucks, two hours, and a lot of brain space on such an exceedingly crappy movie.
We spent Ethan’s birthday eating a huge breakfast and dinner out, playing with his rockets in the front yard, and explaining why slingshots should not be used against people, animals, and houses. Also, bitching about the student neighbors tailgating (from 11 A.M. to at least 6 P.M., when we left to do things other than listening to Kid Rock and beer pong through the bushes) for the Notre Dame v. Purdue game.
I still can’t believe he’s ten years old. I think the only other thing I’ve committed to for about that long is blogging, but that’s sad, so I won’t mention that.
I got a phone call from a stranger asking if I was related to George L. Surname, because he’d just found original paperwork while repairing an antique piano and thought it might be neat to see the old instrument appreciated by the ancestors of its original owner. Alas, I am not related to ol’ George, but mentioned some of the other Surnames in town our piano repair person might call. Instead of thanking me and hanging up the phone, PRP proceeded to fill me in on the history of piano restoration for the next twenty minutes and got annoyed when I tried to interrupt to get off the phone and put Ethan to bed. At the end of his history lesson, he apologized for “getting so off topic,” then hung up on me!
What the hell?
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