Yummy Yucky

Lightning Cake

Recovering from my eating out kick, I started cooking again this week. Dinners have been nothing elaborate - chicken sausage with rice and peas, sausage-stuffed ravioli (pasta post coming soon) - but I also had to make a dessert to take to the women's group I'm in (don't ask). I turned to my ultimate baking source: "Classic Home Desserts," by Richard Sax. The book is a baking bible. It's touted as "a treasury of heirloom and contemporary recipes from around the world" and I'd have to agree. It's a huge 700 page book with more than 350 recipes. And really, it's got everything in it -- all the basics, everything your grandmother ever made, fancier stuff. I've made pear pandowdy from this book, a flourless chocolate cloud cake, shoo-fly cake (wonderful take on shoo-fly pie), gingerbread, brown-butter coffee cake. This week it was Lightning Cake (recipe below) - mostly because of the promise that it would be quick ("Quicker than a mix" -- almost true) and that I had all the ingredients on hand (OK, except for the lemon zest, which I just left out). The thing is I'm not a big cake fan. To me it's just a vehicle for icing, and this cake didn't even involve icing. And yet, it's delicious. Very moist and the almonds and sugar add just the right amount of sweetness!

Julie/Julia

OK, it's not a cookbook ... there aren't even any recipes in it (as of page 95, anyway). But I'm reading "Julie & Julia" -- the blog turned book about a girl named Julie who decided to cook everything in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (all 524 recipes) in a year, in her crappy kitchen in the outer boroughs of New York. The site is defunct now, but the book is friggin' hilarious. Plus, I'm pretty sure that Julie and I were separated at birth based on these two key fact:
1.  She is married to her high school sweetheart, but finds that incredibly embarrassing.

Please understand - I love my husband like a pig loves shit. Maybe even more. But in the circles I run in, being married for more than five years before reaching the age of thirty ranks high on the list of socially damaging traits, right below watching NASCAR and listening to Shania Twain. I'm used to getting questions like "Is he the only person you've ever had sex with?" or, even more insultingly, "Are you the only person he's ever had sex with?

2. She uses the word "kattywhompus." The only person under age 85 I've ever heard use that word  is FS. 

OK, the similarities may end there, but still, there are misadventures being had with bone marrow -- how can you go wrong?

No repeats

For Christmas, my brother got me Rachel Ray's "365: No Repeats -- A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners." The thing is I've got a bit of an anti-Rachel thing going on. She's so damn perky. Luckily it's not an audio book. I finally got around to making something out of it. I've got to admit, she's good. I made her "juicy thighs" (OK, I can't remember the title of the recipe and I'm writing this without the cookbook near, so bear with me). It goes something like this: boneless skinless chicken breasts, onion, garlic in a white wine sauce with peas, thyme, parsley and potatoes. Except I didn't have thyme or potatoes, so I made it instead with Trader Joe's squash-filled pasta and rosemary. It turned out great. And the squash-filled pasta was a great compliment to the white whine sauce (and yes, it was ready in 30 minutes). Now, if they could only get her to do a silent TV show ....

Steak and Potatoes

About once a week the hubby and I have a "date night." It's "date night" in quotes, being that we do not actually leave the house or get a sitter. We just wait till the little one is in bed, eat a leisurely dinner together with a beer/glass of wine, and talk/play board games/watch a movie together. This provides me an opportunity to cook a good meal that does not involve nuggets. I love it.

On last night's plate one of my favorites -- Mark Bittman's pan-fried steak from The Minimalist Cooks at Home. Last night I fried the steaks in butter, soy sauce, garlic and onions. Homefries and lima beans on the side, as well as some manchengo cheese. Bittman's book is a must-have. He offers substitutions on almost every recipe -- don't have garlic, use ginger; no butter, go with olive oil, etc.