The Summer of George and Salads

It hit 90 degrees here in Seattle on Thursday and people were FREAKING OUT.  Being from Arizona, I was not impressed, but I guess I can understand in a part of the country where AC is not the norm, that can seem very hot.

We dipped back down to the 70's on Friday, and it looks to be cool for a few days still.  Nevertheless, summer is coming along and I am truly determined to make the most of it. 

It's my first summer in 3 years that I will not have more than one job (although I have kind of turned FreshPickedSeattle into another, tragically unpaid job, hence the lack of posting here). 

I also recently took a trip back to AZ for the first time since moving here 4 yrs ago, and the whole thing felt like a closing of a rather grueling chapter, the hard slog it's been since I've moved here and sort of set about changing my life. 

I was working while I was at home, staying with my folks at their house up in north Phoenix.  But I took one afternoon off, borrowed my mom's car, and took a drive to look at my old hood, the Coronado District down in central Phoenix, and especially the little bungalow I lived in when I moved back to Phoenix, my first solo post-college adult pad.  

I hadn't seen it since I left town in June of 2005, packing up my VW Golf (the car I got after the pragmatic but stylistically incongrous red Nissan pickup pictured above) with some of my possessions, a cat, and a 6'4" friend and driving to Seattle in a kind of weird foggy haze of a late quarterlife crisis.

The challenge with understanding your own life is the near-impossibility of getting a vantage point on it.  You're in it, you can't suddenly shoot up to birds-eye view and see it all.  You can't whip your head around fast enough to see behind you and in front of you at nearly the same time.

But sometimes little things give you a glimpse.  For me, it was seeing that little bungalow with my current eyes, and processing it with my current brains.  I suddenly felt like some significant portion of the cells in my body must have turned over since the last time I looked at it because I just didn't feel like the same person.  In some good ways, and in some not-so-good ways, but what is adult life but continually getting comfortable with the idea that it's not always awesome?

I left Phoenix this time feeling no foggy haze.  And feeling, for the first time in my adult life, like I had actually finished something significant.  What that thing is isn't something I can trot out in a tidy bio or put on a resume. It's some kind of internal shift, some kind of movement towards being on the right path for myself that is hard to describe in the form of a blog post, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it.

But it's something I realize now that I subconsciously set out to do, motivated by some instinctive and inarticulate internal compass.  Since it was subconscious, what it turned out to be is not exactly what I thought I was doing this whole time.  

And that's another lesson for me of adult life: your Big Life is just stubbornly, inexorably, going to do what it's going to do and the whole idea of making decisions about it sometimes can be a bit tilting-at-windmills.

But whatever it is, this untidy and nameless thing that I set out to do without really being aware of it, I did it. And now, by gum, I feel like I deserve a little break!

I'm not going to stop this life-changing process; I somehow have yet more websites I want to start, I'm training for a 5k, I have several other projects I'd like to undertake.  However, I feel like I also just want to enjoy my summer. 

So, I've been saying I'm going to have my Summer of George.  This could all go up in smoke if I don't continue to cling like a barnacle to the hull of employment, but so long as I don't fall prey to the economic downturn and get canned, I want this summer to be about fun.

Rather than planning and scheming and hustling and working towards something in particular, I just want to work my one job and then spend my free time being creative, following my curiosity, exploring new ideas, learning stuff, looking at stuff, taking more pictures, writing, and (finally getting to the point), cooking.

Or not cooking, as the case might be, but cool meal assembly, more accurately.  I mentioned recently on FreshPicked that I usually forget to plan meals for the weather, but I am getting my head in the game for summer.  And that game is: Salads.

So I am on the lookout for more salad recipes.  If you have one you like, I'd love to see it, feel free to email me or leave it in the comments and I will try to make it (and will of course link back to you if you have a blog or site).  I am steering clear of red meat and poultry most of these days, so if it could be vegetarian or seafood-only, that would be awesome.

And here's my favorite salad of all time.  I call it SuperPower because, as I've told my friend a million times, I think all the garlic in the dressing opens up my sinuses and finally being to breathe always makes me feel like I could run a marathon after I eat it. 

This is actually an Olde Timey recipe as I've been making it since I lived in that bungalow, and made my first fumbling attempts at cooking in this teeny galley kitchen. 

Even though I've been making it for that long, I still always forget how fantastic I feel after I eat it, so it's always a happy little post-dinner surprise to feel energized and full of vigor.

So here it is... 

SuperPower Salad

Building Blocks of the Salad (adjust according to your own serving-size needs)

• Leafy green or spinach
• Raw diced tomatoes (optional if you are one of those weirdos who doesn't like raw tomatoes)
• Raw red onion sliced, soaked in cold water for ten minutes and drained (to remove some bite) (also optional)
• Candied Nuts
• SuperPower Salad Dressing

Process: Toss. Since salad-making is the one thing I am good at, you can see my Ideal Salad Dressing Method recommendations from this post.

Bulking Up: Apple Maple Granola

(Just want the recipe?  Click here.)

I'm having some thoughts on changing eating habits, but they are still at the unformed, gelatinous stage.  Ergo, I am going to spare you the working out of them in a blog entry. This time.  Don't get used to it.

I'll just say they have to do with the healthy eating hazard that is a craving for quantity, as separate and distinct from the craving for a particular kind of foodstuff or eating experience, yet not quite at the obviously clinical level of an actual binge.

So more on that once it's a little less of a novella of disjointed thoughts, but in the meantime, I have some recipes that I've come up with around the idea of bulking up.

(Very apple-y Apple Maple Granola)

Serving sizes are too big in this country, of course, and many of us could and should learn to make do with less.  But sometimes you do just want more.  And so one eating trick is to bulk things up with high-fiber stuff like fruits and veggies, so that you still get the quantity craving satisfied while keeping the more calorie-dense food in moderation.

Granola is one such calorically-dense foodstuff that is crying out for moderation.  I do not understand how or where it got the health food label. It's sugary and often has butter.

But it's tasty.  And at least with homemade stuff, you can keep an eye on how much sweetener and/or fat you add.

I put together this recipe for Apple Maple Granola to use up some dried apple rings for my Cooking Resolution #2: Resourcefulness. 

I liked it so much, I gave it as an Xmas present to the Prez of the Debate Club's hubs, a granola fan (a fanola, if you will), and he liked it too.  He was an Apple Maple Fanola.

The recipe I started with was originally based on the proportion of quantities in this recipe for Chunky Date, Coconut and Almond Granola on Epicurious. 

But it occurred to me that if I really upped the amount of dried apples I was adding...well, it's not like it suddenly becomes totally virtuous, but I could eat the same size bowl I would normally have, but the quantity would have more apples than sugary oats or nuts.

So the below recipe gives a range for the quantity of apples.  If you use the lower range (1 cup), it will look more like your usual granola.  If you use the higher quantity, it will seem more fruit-based than grain-based than a storebought, but is still delicious.  But also, high in fiber.  Not quite, but high.  Keep that in mind per the final consideration listed below.

APPLE MAPLE GRANOLA

Yield: 4-6 Cups

Ingredients

• 2 cups old-fashioned oats
• 1 cup chopped almonds or cashews*
• 1/4 cup (packed) brown sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp ground allspice
• 2-3 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
• 3 Tbl maple syrup
• 2 tsp vanilla
  
• 1-3 cup(s) (packed) chopped dried apple rings*
  

Process

1. Preheat oven to 300°F.
2. Combine oats, almonds, sugar, and spices in a large bowl.
3. Melt the butter and maple syrup over low heat. Remove from heat, add vanilla.  Pour over granola mixture and mix well.
4. Spread mixture on a rimmed baking sheet.
5. Bake 20 minutes, stirring occasionally to break up clumps.
6. Add apples and continue to bake, stirring often to break up clumps, for about 15 more minutes or until granola is golden brown.
7. Cool completely.

Advanced Prep Notes: Can be stored for two weeks at room temp.

*Special Considerations:

• Almonds seem slightly healthier, but can be more expensive.  Cashews are a delicious richness and are often a little cheaper.  Both are tasty.
• Recently, I've seen "Sweet Apple Rings" sold in addition to the usual "Granny Smith Rings."  This recipe is geared towards the tangy Granny Smith.  I wouldn't recommend using the Sweet ones, as it's too much sweetness with no contrast, but if you do, I recommend cutting back on the sugar.  (Don't cut back on the maple syrup as you need the liquid to coat.)
• Use the higher quantity of cinnamon if using the higher quantity of apples.
• More apples = more bulky, but also keep in mind they are very high in fiber.  If you haven't been eating a lot of fiber, just expect it might take your system a while to adjust and don't eat it on a day you have a job interview, for example.

Threethiopiques #1

(Your songmelier recommends the below tune by the Sensation Band to accompany this post.)

When it comes to food, my cravings are easily triggered.

In the early oughts, when, as the newscasters always says, tensions ran high between India and Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir, I once turned on the radio midway through the newcaster saying the name of the region. Upon hearing "-shmir" I immediately thought, "Hmm. I'd like a bagel."

So as you can probably imagine, since I started volunteering at the East African Community Services, I have been thinking about East African food a LOT. Most of the folks there are Somali, but I don't know much about that cuisine, so instead, my appetite drifts a little to the northeast and lands in Ethiopia.

I first had Ethiopian food on a visit to Cleveland, and ate it in the traditional fashion of sitting around the basket table lined with injera. That was several years ago, before I'd really started learning about food and cooking, so I went in with no expectations.

I loved it, though. Of course I did: many of the dishes are spicy heaps of vegetarian mush eaten with a relatively plain starch. What's not to love?

I've had it a few times since then, and since I started volunteering, find myself thinking about it quite frequently.

So with this Ethiopian food obsession on constant simmer, a couple weekends ago I took a trip down to Amy's Merkato to find a pre-made berbere mixture and just poke around. The store shelves are somewhat bare for most products but well-stocked with what you would probably go there for anyway: Ethiopian spices and injera.

I always feel a sort of conflict when I go into Real Deal ethnic market. On the one hand, I find the lack of familiar products exciting and full of possibilities. On the other, I don't know what the heck I'm doing, and generally go into my usual retail-induced ADD fog, forget everything I know about the cuisine, and find myself wandering around in the hopes I can recognize a word on a label somewhere.

And that's why Amy's was a little tricky: nothing was labeled. Now that's some Real Deal. Luckily, the woman working there that day (maybe the actual Amy? dunno) was very helpful, and we overcame our language barrier enough for her to show me which one was berbere and how to use it.

She then described using another spice mixture, and to be honest, I didn't actually catch it, in good part because I'm just a little deaf anyway, and after the second repetition, I was too shy to ask her again what she was saying. I know it is something you sprinkle into a dish at the end. I've since researched it at home and think it might be Wot Kemem? (That is what is now labeled with in my house, question mark and all).

Now armed with one key spice component, I set out to make another, the clarified spiced butter called Niter Kibbeh that is the base for many dishes.

My cooking has been improving a lot lately. I had one big improvement that came with the Taste-and-Season epiphany of a while back. But the next bump has come from a mental shift that I am calling Investing in Flavor.

My impatience used to make it impossible to consider the idea of infusing butter with spices for an hour before I even got to cooking the dish.

But my beloved Mark Bittman Roasted Vegetable Stock has made so many previously watery and unsatisfying vegetable soups and stews so much richer and more delectable that I no longer balk at spending two hours to make it before I can even start the dish it's going to go into.

And what underscored my own direct experience was reading the stock section of Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking. His impassioned argument that the home cook use veal stock, "one of the most powerful tools in professional kitchens, one of the biggest guns in the professional chef's entire arsenal" made me feel all...wrapped on the knuckles with a ruler for my frequent kitchen laziness (which usually results in culinary dissatisfaction).

I'm not about to start making/using veal stock, but after reading all that, now when I read a recipe that says "6 cups of vegetable stock or water" where I used to feel a sense of relief that I could just use water, now I'm dragging out my roasting pan and pulling my saved up bag of mushrooms stems out of the freezer to make some stock.

So with this new frame of mind, I was happy to make the clarified butter, hoping this would give me a shot at getting a little closer to the delicious I'd had in restaurants. Itwould also allow me to achieve some Cooking Resolution #2: Resourcefulness by using up some underutilized spices like fenugreek and tumeric.

Other than the time, the niter kibbeh process is simple as could be, simply simmer the spices in the butter over the lowest possible heat for an hour or so. Pour through cheesecloth and you are done.

The finished product can be frozen, so you can make a big batch all at once. The recipe can be loosey-goosey with the spices. I saw some with onion, some without, so I opted to not use it. Some include nutmeg, some don't, There is a vegan version using soy margarine.  Basically, don't get too worried if you don't have them all or don't like a spice or two.

Once that was done, I used it to make Yemiser Wat/We't, a lentil dish with brown lentils, tomatoes and peas that are cooked in the flavorful butter, with onions, garlic, ginger and that berbere.

Cooking the onions, ginger, garlic and berbere in the niter kibbeh

There were a couple less-than-ideal issues with this particular version of it that I made. Not enough tomatoes, so it did not have quite the tang I was looking for. But the overall flavor profile was definitely a departure from what I usually cook, and I am looking forward to trying this again with more tomatoes. It was still tasty over some basmati rice.

I just made another batch of the butter today and hope to attempt either it or a spicy red lentil dish called Mesir Wat.

If you are also a fan of Spicy Heaps and haven't ever tried Ethiopian, I'd highly recommend giving some of these recipes a shot. If you don't have access to an Ethiopian market at which to buy some berbere, the pretty-available company India Tree makes a blend, or you could attempt your own.

Cooking Resolution #6: Restraint

I was supposed to publish this sixth and final resolution on Jan 16. The cause of its delay is also the very thing this resolution is taking aim at. Thematic tidiness! Novelistic developments! My faves!

Okay, so this time I was more occupied with a work-a-thon than a cook-a-thon, so it’s slightly less thematically tidy than it could be, but heart of the problem is the same: too much of one thing all at one time.

I have a problem with restraint for some very specific reasons, and a desire to fix it for other, yet equally specific reasons. Why yes, I am going to tell you all about them.

My mind tends to be hyperactive and creative. I have a fairly high capacity for taking in and juggling a lot of information. I then want to process and synthesize that information and spit it back out again.

However, my information input capacity will always exceed synthesized product output capacity. Input capacity relies mainly on eyes, ears and brain, which all work fairly fast. Creative output relies mainly on hands, which are simply slower parts of the anatomy.

What does this mean? Essentially, it means that there will always be more ideas than time to implement them in one lifetime. And this thought is a major downer.

Of course, I’m not that metaphysical on a daily basis. Most of the time, this Shadow of Looming Mortality is stretched out long and thin behind something smaller and pettier, mainly That Which I’m Trying to Shove into One Day.

I’m sure, though, that even if I’m not consciously thinking about it, the reason why I get so stubborn and petulant about shoving it all in is because of that looming shadow. I don’t want to acknowledge it, and instead insist I can work three jobs in the service of starting a new career and maintain five websites and get caught up on the canon of Western literature and have a social life and stayed abreast of current events and make all my meals from scratch and cook 13 things for the party and get fit and learn Spanish and take up dancehall dancing and mail cookies to my grandma and volunteer and wash out all my Ziploc baggies in order to reuse them.

I really want to believe I can, in fact, do it all, and not in some sort of clichéd women-thinking-they-have-to-be-Superwomen-and-be-all-things-to-all-people kind of way, but in the style of a purely selfish, self-interested, self-serving, utter sensualist who just can’t bear the thought of missing out on anything, because it is a reminder of someday missing out on everything and that is just harshing my buzz, man.

But Aesop had it right when he wrote the fable about the Boy and the Filberts:

Fable via happychild.org.uk

(More novelistic tidiness! The brevity of this Aesop’s Fable stands out in sharp relief next to all those extra words I used to make the same point, underscoring the need for me to read the Western canon so I can improve my skillz and hurry this all along for the reader, already!)

This story is only made more appropriate by the fact that I really love filberts, especially when they are covered in an orange-honey shell that makes them taste like Trix cereal.

Oh, greedy filbert-loving fictional boy of ancient time, we are kindred spirits.

So that is one major reason I’m always embarking on cook-a-thons.

Another reason is pretty basic. I have trouble holding myself back because I simply and genuinely like to have a good time and share that good time. If I think of a bunch of treats I think someone would like, I have a hard time scaling back just because it might be inconvenient or time-consuming to make them.

And the final major contributing factor is that having a lack of self-restraint is self-perpetuating. Spend too much time on one thing, get behind on another thing. Race to catch up on the other thing, postpone something else. And so on and so forth.

I do this all the time. No, that’s not the right way to describe it. “Do this all the time” communicates that it’s a sort of periodic episode. It’s more accurate to say I live and breathe in a constant state of this. Play too much, get behind, work too much, get burnt out, play too much, get behind, and so on and so forth. It is a vapor that expands to fit all my waking hours.

Instead of exercising my culinary creativity a little bit at a time, I’m hunched over a laptop for 13, 15, 17 hours a day for days in a row, eating haphazardly because I can’t break away to make even the simplest of meals.

Then all my pent-up physical creative energy explodes into a 2-day cook-a-thon on the weekend, which results in another half day of clean-up, which makes me too exhausted to do anything else. This means I start out the week behind, vacant-headed because I never just relaxed. My spaciness makes me less effective at work. Things pile up, and the natural busy-ness of work becomes a giant semi that jackknifes into that pile.

This is just not a sustainable way of life, this see-saw from excess of indulgence to excess of duty and back again. Or hell, I guess I’ve been sustaining but lordy it’s really starting to be a bad time overall.

I need my days to each be more like a mullet: business up front and party in the back. Or vice versa. Just not too much of one or the other.

I tried things out today. I’m caught up for the moment at work, so today, I took an actual proper lunch break. This never happens. I never ever stop to eat lunch. I’ll eat, but I’ll answer 15 emails with the hand not holding the sandwich. (I don’t think I’m unique, mind you. There are a lot of us out there eating like this. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is why so many of us feel challenged with our weight. It’s hard to ever feel satisfied and like you’ve eaten enough when you can so rarely actually focus on what you’re eating. So we just keep eating because our brains aren’t registering it.)

Although I had emails continuing to pile up in my inbox, I stopped and stepped away. I made a spinach and goat cheese frittata-sorta thing (more spinach than egg so it was more of a pile of greens with some egg bits mixed in; I was using up some almost-bad spinach in the spirit of Resourcefulness). I even washed up once I was done.

I did stop to take a work call halfway through chopping the onion. And the dish itself wasn’t exciting enough to be satisfying to the part of my brain that needs novelty, and it’s precisely that part of my brain that I need to get on board with this new way of structuring my time or else it’s all going in the crapper.

But it was a start. It was a placeholder of a lunch, the wobbly foal steps of a creature unused to doing this new activity.

What I am hoping to achieve through this structure, this restraint, is something like a time management methadone. If I can commit to making space for the mild juice of small and regular creative sprints, maybe I won’t feel the need as much for the periodic giant adrenaline jolt of the work/life see-saw.

We’ll see. I do, unfortunately, tend to really want a lot of filberts.

Cooking Resolution #5: Reward

This rather indulgent resolution was supposed to come last...but sometimes I don't save dessert for last either, so what?  What are you going to do about it?  You're not the boss of me.

I was going to move this one up anyway as I realized the (now) last one is sort of more important to me as, like, a human.

But it also appropriate to be posting about this today as it’s about booze and I had the kind of work day that makes one think “I need a stiff drink,” even when ice cream is usually your vice of choice.

I went to bartending school, and was a bartender at a nondescript restaurant* in the Village in NYC for a little while after college.

(This is not the restaurant, this is a much cuter-looking place now inhabiting the same space and I am showing it to you just to break up the text.  Okay, vacation's over, back to words now.)

But I’ve never really been too much of a drinker myself, and when you work days at a nondescript restaurant in the Village, you don’t serve a heck of a lot of mixed drinks, so everything I learned at bartending school quickly slid out of my head.

I served shots of well vodka to some jerky artist dude who came in after being up all night painting, and whiskey shots with breakfast to a couple of young guys who worked the night shift at the 24-hour Kinko’s around the block.

I sometimes served beer and wine, but really my greatest bartender challenges centered on not humiliating myself when I tried to open a bottle of wine or trying to dredge up what's in a Greyhound from hazy bartending school flashcard sessions when some Stern School of Business student inexplicably brought some girl into the place for dinner. 

Most of the time, though, I was too busy with other activities to really work at being a Mixologist, a word I’m not sure existed in 1998. I was trying to deal with the kind of insane cheap regulars the place attracted (though some were nice, like this dude Neil Cooper, who realized it was me playing all the dub reggae all the time and brought me in a bunch of free CD’s from his label ROIR records)...

Or scrawling out a thoroughly confusing bill for the Europeans who had only ordered espresso (the place attracted them like flies to carrion) so that they wouldn’t be able to decipher that I had added on a gratuity. You know, in case they forgot...

Or attempting to figure out how to get the Easter Island-headed busboy Doro to actually bus tables.

Point being: not being much of a booze drinker, even with this bartending blip, I don’t really know much about cocktail making.

Over the past year, though, a little spark of interest has been growing

It started last winter with a couple of visits to the Oliver’s Twist up in Phinney. I’d met owner Dan Braun when he taught at the cooking school, and I loved his food and concept so much, I made sure to take a trip to his spot. I wasn’t disappointed – the food was great – and the care put into the cocktails intrigued me.(Le Petit Hiboux pic from Chow.com)

I then had a little experiment in the spring, making this recipe for Le Petit Hiboux – a wine cocktail with Lillet and apple juice – for a dinner with Sarah.

Then there were two Good Food features from earlier this year (repackaged into the New Year’s show)...

...one on the Michelada, a Mexican beer-based drink, and another on the history of cocktails evolving from punch, that also piqued my curiousity.

And Carolyn’s husband Will likes digestifs, so he’s introduced me to some interesting flavors of those (and got our server at Poppy to bring over basically the bar’s entire store of them for us to sniff).

But I think it was actually that delicious St. Germaine sexy cough drop cocktail that Carolyn ordered at Poppy that tipped the scales: I want to make some drinks like THAT.

So with this resolution, I’m prioritizing learning about cocktails – for no other reason than the fun of it.

I think cocktails appeal to me the way ice cream appeals to me: the idea that the end result is always texturally identical (frozen/liquid) and so the creativity is all in the flavoring. Much like my love of doing side-by-side tastings of various foodstuffs and beverages, I enjoy having one constant in things so that the other variations can be really highlighted.

Booze is pricey, so I don’t know how much experimenting I can do, but I do know this: I probably won’t mind mistakes in cocktail mixing as much as I do in ice cream making.

*I guess it wasn't entirely nondescript.

Cooking Resolution #4: Readiness

In 2009, I would like to be prepared.

Photo via NoelZiaLee on Flickr

I have so far resisted the urge to buy Carolyn and Will's extra deep freezer, but I nevertheless want to keep my regular freezer well-stocked over the next year.

Over the holidays, I had two sets of houseguests, and reaped the rewards of some pre-planning I’d done. I had taken advantage of being housebound with the freak Seattle snowstorm to do some make-ahead cooking.

When my guests were here, I did, of course, still wind up in the kitchen longer than I should have, but significantly less than I could have, had I attempted to come up with the same volume of output without that pre-work. 

And in addition to being prepared for out-of-town visitors or planned dinner parties/book clubs/etc., I still entertain some fantasy that I will once again have a people-dropping-in kind of life. I had that back in Phoenix, but not here. I’m newer to Seattle, super-busy with multiple jobs and projects, and have friends who are super-busy themselves with jobs, partners and new babies. But I miss what it was like in Phoenix with friends nearby who would swing by for a glass of wine, and aim to get back to it at some point. If might sound silly, but for me, having breadstick dough in the freezer feels like I’m making some tiny step back towards reclaiming a lifestyle that makes me feel happy.

I don’t only want to stock my freezer for entertaining purposes, though. I want to have quick and tasty meals for myself, too. I work from home, and it seems like I should be able to stop and take the time to make myself a lunch from scratch every day if I wanted.

The truth is, though, that some days I don’t change out of my pajamas out of busy-ness, not just sheer laziness. On those days, I don’t have any more time for cooking than I would if I were in an office. I’d rather not resort to processed or packaged food, or worse, eating sweets mindlessly because they’re faster to get at than a salad. So a full freezer will help me stick to a healthier routine between houseguests, too.

Here are the items I want to make sure I always have one variety of available at all times:

Savory Little Breads - I made the Rosemary-Thyme Breadsticks, Parmesan Black Pepper Biscotti and Buttermilk Biscuit with Green Onions again, and they all worked well.  The breadsticks and biscuits can be frozen in dough form and baked, and the biscotti I froze already made and let thaw, with a quick warm-up in the oven.

Sweet Little Breads - I made this Lemon-Lavender Tea Bread from Epicurious and it was delicious! I baked it in a six-mini-loaf pan, froze it, took one mini-loaf out the night before I planned to have it with breakfast, and added a quick lemon juice/powdered sugar/crushed lavender glaze right before serving. It was tasty alone or with some Pear Butter I’d also made.

Soup - I’ve noted before that my family is not a big food family, but we do have a few food traditions, and one is my mom makes a really nice vegetable soup in giant batches, which she freezes. I now do the same with my favorite soups, which came in handy with this set of visitors.

My two successes this go-round: the spicy Red Lentil Soup and a Mushroom-Potato Soup, which I will post a recipe for soon. I made the mushroom soup before the first guest arrived, froze half, and served the second when the second set arrived. The Red Lentil Soup came in handy on a night we needed to eat something a bit less sinful than all the eating out we’d been doing. My guests actually requested it another night, so it’s not just me that likes this soup. I was able to just hack another block of it out of the freezer and was able to – gasp – actually make dinner on the fly for once.

Spiced Nuts – A jar of Chipotle Spiced Nuts came in handy for a quick snack my guests could help themselves to.

They were also a good quick last minute take-along thing for holiday parties or little gifts.

In addition, they can bring a little interest to a salad, and lord knows I need all the help I can get encouraging me to eat more salads. I exist in the tension between my natural ambivalence about eating salad and my grandma-like insistence that eating adequate roughage is like a folk remedy for nearly all disease.

Salad Dressing – Obviously this is a fridge, not freezer item. I also have a grandma-like insistence about the healing properties of my SuperPower Salad Dressing (recipe forthcoming). But it’s sort of annoying to make, so I need to make sure I’m making it at my leisure, instead of at the last minute before a meal when I’m already suffering from low blood sugar and on the verge of losing patience with the whole cooking process.

Food Celebrity Beans or Lentils – This is more for me than for entertaining. Having some tasty cooked Black Beans a la Russ Parsons or Tom Douglas Green Lentils in the freezer at all times means I am halfway to a good salad or beans and rice without too much effort during the week.

Rice – I’m pretty good at keeping frozen rice on hand already for quick stir-fries or topping with lentil dals and such, but I’m putting it here so as to ensure I remain vigilant with the rice level in my freezer.

Cookie Dough – Easy to freeze! Slice off and bake a few cookies at a time! In a toaster oven, even! Fresh-baked cookies for yer guests! Simple!

Dessert – I don’t want to eat more dessert than absolutely necessary, so it seems dangerous to keep it in the house. BUT...I’d rather eat something I made myself than some junk I buy when I’m jonesing for sugar. So in addition to the cookie dough, I’d like to keep one ice cream or something on hand for myself.

And here are a few things that I don’t need to make, but want to be sure to keep on hand for entertaining purposes:

• Cheese
• Bottle of wine
• Couple bottles of beer
• Bubbly water
• Stuff for one solid cocktail (what cocktail, I’m not sure yet)

Cooking Resolution #3: Research

This one is short and actually sweet. 

While I do want to get better with the savory side of cooking, it's dessert making that really interests me. 

And frustrates me. 

I'm challenged enough with my equipment (questionable stove, questionable ice cream maker), I shouldn't be further handicapping myself with ignorance.

I have two textbook-y types of books (On Food and Cooking and the Culinary Institute of America's Frozen Desserts) that delve more deeply than a cookbook into some of the science and chemistry behind food, and I'd like to ensure I spend some time this year - dare I say it - studying.