Gourmandery

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Again, I cannot access Gmail this morning. I get a 404 page, so there is definitely something going on. It’s frustrating.

Dad, I wanted to email you about your former employee - he pled guilty yesterday, is cooperating with the feds to find the kingpin, and will get a minimum of 5 years and I’m guessing will be deported upon release. Apparently he had 80Gb of data on his home computer, but his ISP turned him in because he tapped into a known sketchy IP address that was on a watch list.

From the Mommy Files, Beau and I were talking about the Duggar family and I said that as much as I love being a mom, if we were 20 years younger and I didn’t get so sick when pregnant I’d totally be up for having 4-5 kids. Not 18, but a nice large brood of kids. That said, I’m thrilled with our 1.3 children because I never expected to have any children at this age. I adore Jesse and I’m falling more in love with the little lemon in my belly every day. Thank you, Lord, for this unexpected blessing.

Nutella = French Vanilla Coffeemate + coffee (decaf) = deliciousness. And it’s way cheaper than *$.

I’ve got a case of the Thursdays.

Friday, October 03, 2008

1. I remembered #5 from yesterday - just a general complaint that my lower back is already hurting after sitting for too long. I fear the pain yet to come as the baby gets larger. Oy.

2. On the debate, I am ashamed to say that we turned it off about 40 minutes in. I was worried because she kept ignoring the moderator questions to discuss her own agenda items. I didn’t think that would work well. Turns out that I was wrong and should have stuck with it, apparently. I think he was completely charmed by her, as well and I like that he openly laughed when she was funny, even at his own expense.

3. *$’s Signature Hazelnut Hot Chocolate is deadly good stuff. Just a subtle hint of the hazelnut with the rich chocolate - it reminds me of Nutella. Which reminds me, Beau was supposed to buy me a jar of Nutella. Honey, will you add that to the grocery list, please? [ADDED LATER] Also, please add hummus and pita bread. Thanks!

4. We get our FIOS installed on Tuesday. I’m very excited!

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

I think I forgot to post the recipe to my Mom’s delicious zuchini casserole a few weeks ago. I made it again last night. This batch was much better than the first. So here’s the recipe, slightly modified by me:

Zucchini Imperial
Serves 6-8

4 cups cooked zucchini (sliced)
1 cup mayonnaise
2/3 cup Parmesan cheese
2 large eggs
1/2 medium onion, small dice
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper

Crumb Topping
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1-2 Tbsp butter or margarine, melted

Preheat oven to 375F degrees. Mix all but the crumb topping ingredients together well. Pour into greased casserole. Sprinkle top with buttered bread crumbs. Bake for 35-40 minutes or until custard is set.

I had bought four large zucchinis over the weekend and sliced them all up. This made two casseroles. I was planning to freeze the second one, but then our next door neighbors gave us some spare ribs that they grilled, so we gave them half of the second casserole.

Aside: We’ve come to really love our neighbors and the one thing that makes me sad about possibly moving out of this neighborhood is losing that.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Spoilers aplenty, so the post is hidden. Clicky the linky…

Saturday, July 05, 2008

... And Jesse decided it was time to par-tay.

We had a good day yesterday. Nice and relaxing. Got a nap in the afternoon.

We attended a birthday party for a family friend in the late afternoon. I took Roasted Orzo and Shrimp, which was super easy to make and delicious. We bought home about 1/3 of it, so I’m happy for the leftovers.

Oh, the sauce for the pork was not used. Mom reported that the pork tasted great, but could have used a sauce. But I bet the rest of the diners wouldn’t have known the difference. So I’m glad it was good. */non sequitur*

We saw The Director at the party, he left shortly after we got there to go par-tay at the White House. Totally cool.

It rained for most of the party, which was a shame. But a good time was still had by all, I think. After a nice lull in the wet, the rains looked to be coming back so we headed home. Jesse was mud spattered so he got a quick bath before bedtime, which turned out to be his normal bedtime.

I have no clue what woke him up, but through the monitor we heard him chattering happily. I figured it had to be around 5am and rolled over to look at the clock. It was 2:12am. What the? So we lay there for a minute and then Beau got up to turn off the monitor. We have no clue how long Jesse played in his crib before falling back to sleep, but he slept hard until about 10 minutes ago (8:00am, by the computer clock). He usually wakes up between 6:30-7:00am. Funny kid.

Speaking of funny kids ... Jaynee posted the latest adventures of CootieGirl yesterday. I find it hilarious.

It feels like Sunday.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

This is for the 3 of you interested in this meat cook-off thing for my church. The dinner is tonight. I still had to make the accompanying sauce for the meat for Beau to deliver today. So I put it all together this morning before I left for work - in both crock pots - and with instructions for Beau for checking thickness before heading over to the church.

Now, last weekend I needed to make more marinade because we ran out with about 24 tenderloins left. So I made a half batch, of which I used about 1/3 to 1/2 as marinade. The rest I bottled up and put into the frig to use for the sauce. So that stuff sat for about 5 days. One of the ingredients is red pepper flakes.

Beau called to ask if I had tasted any of the sauce. I said that I had not because it wasn’t at that point when I left this morning and I was trusting that it would be OK. He said it was blisteringly hot (spicy). Oh no!

Turns out the batch of marinade turned sauce had infused the heat from the peppers quite well and it is now so hot that it won’t work as sauce. Fortunately, I put that batch by itself in one crock pot. The other crock pot has the fresh batch that I put together this morning, so I had Beau taste it and he said there’s a kick but it’s edible. He’s going to strain the pepper flakes out now before it gets ruined, too.

This means there will be half of the sauce available, but it’s not like the pork needs a drenching. And we’re warning the woman in charge to taste it before using it so that she can determine if it’s too hot for use.

We’re keeping the first batch to try as a marinade. That could be a disaster in the making but we’re talking about a gallon of stuff here.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

For those who are interested…

The Great Meat Cook-Off of 2008 went very well. Mom and I managed to get all of the pork roasted by mid-day on Saturday. And then we stuffed the church freezer full of it all when we got their (I know how to spell - this is what happens when you post and run) there for the Saturday PM service.

The woman organizing the meal was very pleased. The dinner is tomorrow night and my parents are going, so they will be able to give an honest assessment of how it turns out.

I am making the sauce tonight and Beau will deliver it to the church tomorrow - pre-warmed to help the food prep folks have one less thing to worry about in our moderately small church kitchen. Note to self - take home the crock pot that is sitting in your office.

Also, Mom and I loaned our rice cookers to the cause. I hope to get mine back tomorrow when Beau goes to the church. I’m lost without my rice cooker.

Friday, June 27, 2008

The Pork Cook-Off: Mom bagged all of the tenderloins with marinade yesterday. She got 3 tenderloins into each gallon bag with 1 cup of marinade. With 8 bags to go she ran out of marinade. That’s 2 gallons of marinade. So I made a new batch of marinade for the rest of the meat and realized that I’m out of the red pepper flakes that are part of it, so Beau went to buy some for me. Then I’ll add the new marinade to the bags of pork still needing to soak - they’ll get cooked tomorrow so that they have the full day to soak up the flavors.

The cooking of the mass quantities of meat has begun. The first batch is done - 6 tenderloins took 1 full hour to get to temp. Since Mom has the majority of the meat to cook in her 3 ovens (jealous, aren’t you?), we’ll easily get them all done before church tomorrow night.

I will say this - they smell delicious.

The Supreme Court: One really good decision in the midst of some really bad decisions this session. They showed us just how important this presidential election is for determining the course of our country’s legal future. I fear the justices that a President Obama would appoint. I fear the justices a President McCain, too, sadly. We don’t need another Breyer, thank you.

The House: Two things about the house - we are working on a clear division of household chores in order to get things back the way they should be in terms of clutter and cleanliness. We both reached a point of disgust that I hope means we’ll get our butts in gear.

In other house news, I had Beau check on the leak bucket in the attic this morning. Good thing, too. As he headed up the steps, I asked if he needed a flashlight. He said, “No, I’ve got daylight!” What the?

Turns out that during the last thunderstorm that involved significant wind, the flashing thingy that covers the peak of the roof came off. We’ve got an open section of roof right at the peak that’s about 6 feet long and a few inches wide. Landlord/homeowner can’t come look at it until tomorrow AM at the earliest, so Beau is out buying a tarp and weights to cover the hole since we’re expecting thunderstorms this afternoon and through the weekend.

Jesse: Jesse has a mouth full of teeth now. All of the rest of his teeth came in over the past week or so. Poor kid. It means it’s time to make the first dentist appointment for him, too.

With the California trip coming, I was looking for a child-wearing carrier similar to the Ergo we borrowed from the Sleepys since they need the Ergo back for their own travels next month. I love the Ergo, but it’s out of our price range. I found this, which I’m hoping will work well enough with Jesse and then any future babies we may have. (No, I’m not pregnant.)

Monday, June 23, 2008

1. Sad news of George Carlin’s death. He was a funny man.

2. I watch Babies: Special Delivery on Discovery Health at 5am. I was addicted to this show when I was pregnant. This morning’s episode was at Inova Fairfax Hospital, which is where I was cared for and had Jesse.

From the high-risk maternity ward at Inova Fairfax Hospital Women’s Center in Virginia, five women wish to deliver successfully but must face placenta previa, an emergency c-section, low amniotic fluid, advanced maternal age, and gestational diabetes.

The perinatologists in the episode were the ones who took care of me - they are top notch and I’m so glad they were featured on this show.

3. Product Endorsement: I bought a Praise Baby DVD for Jesse a couple of weeks ago. The one I got is My Father’s World. Anyway, they are a rip off of the Baby Einstein DVDs, but with praise and worship music instead of classical music. I love it and so does Jesse - what I love is that the music is well done, sung by good singers (Christine Dente is one of the vocalists) and with kids. You have the option of listening to the full vocals, just the kids vocals or just instrumentals. So far we’ve only played the full vocals - maybe when Jesse starts singing I’ll let him listen to the just kids vocals so that he can sing along with his peers. I plan to buy others as well as a couple of the CDs for the car. And I think I’ll start including one with baby gifts.

4. The cold is much better. My sinuses are still clogged enough that I can’t smell anything and there’s still the hacking cough. But I’m not as miserable or worn out.

And now I’m going to start working because I’ll be taking a break to make a BJs run for the marinade ingredients that I need for the big pork tenderloin cook-off this weekend.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Remember the pork cooking I volunteered to do for the big church dinner coming up?

Mom and I just did the calculating and it looks like we’re talking about 44-46 pork tenderloins that need cooking. We figure I can maybe cook 4-6 at a time in my one oven. She can triple that amount since she has three ovens, one of which is convection. So Mom is going to help me do the roasting.

I just did the calculations for the marinade recipe. The original recipe makes 1 cup of marinade. Factor 1 cup needed per tenderloin and we’re talking about nearly 2 gallons of marinade needed. So using the conversion formula for increasing recipes (it’s not a simple thing, actually, especially for the math challenged like I am), it looks like we’re going to need 2 gallons of orange juice alone. The recipe is an Asian-ish citrus marinade.

I have not done this level of mass cooking since I was in culinary school and even then I never cooked this amount of food by myself. At least I don’t have to do the side dishes, too. I’m nervous about screwing this up, but I’m also kind of excited for the challenge. And I’m grateful for my Mom’s help.

[Added Later]: I’m also doing a sauce for the meat, which is basically the marinade but I’ll add some marmalade and cornstarch to thicken it. So I need to triple the marinade ingredients (figuring 1/2 cup servings of sauce).

Yikes.

1. Dog Watch: Annie slept until 5am this morning. Praise the Lord! I managed to get a good night’s rest, which was much needed for my increasing cold.

2. I left work early yesterday and immediately upon my arrival at home I went to bed. Slept for a solid 2 hours. Then went to bed early. Sleep good.

I plan to leave work early today, too, for another nice nap. Because…

3. We’re going to dinner with my parents tonight - a belated Father’s Day outing since Jesse was sick over the weekend. We’re going to Texas de Brazil, which will be great except that I have a raging cold so I know I won’t enjoy the food like I would otherwise.

I’ve got nothing else. Brain is fuzzy and I need to save what I’ve got for the work today.

Monday, June 16, 2008

For Father’s Day, I made a batch of Lemon-Poppyseed cookies for Beau.

Lemon-Poppyseed Cookies
makes 2-4 dozen, depending on the size of your cookies

1 lemon flavored cake mix
1 to 1.5 cups quick oats
1 Tbsp poppyseeds
1/3 cup oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs, slightly beaten

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Mix all ingredients together until a soft cookie dough forms. If dry, add up to 1 Tbsp water. If too wet, add slightly more oats.

On a parchment paper lined cookie sheet, place cookie dough balls about 1-2 inches apart - you should be able to get 12 on the sheet. With a greased flat-bottomed glass, press each cookie flat to about 1/4 inch thick.

Bake for 12-14 minutes. Leave on cookie sheet for 1 extra minute after taking them out of the oven before removing to a cooling rack.

They turned out great - subtle lemon, soft texture, yummy.

Last week we used leftover pork roast to make BBQ. It was delicious because I made this homemade BBQ sauce - way easy and yummy. I didn’t have apple cider vinegar, so I used apple juice with 1 Tbsp distilled vinegar added. Next time I make it I’ll use my small crock pot, which is currently sitting on the floor in my office at work. It’s still there from the last luncheon we had.

Since I had more leftover BBQ sauce, I used it on these country ribs in the crock pot yesterday. Also delicious. We were left with more than half of the ribs leftover and since they didn’t have many bones, I shredded all but two of the leftovers for BBQ sandwiches and covered the meat with the sauce in the crock pot.

Today, Beau started the dough for homemade hamburger buns in the breadmaker. The buns are now rising prior to baking. We’ll be feasting on BBQ sandwiches tonight. Can’t wait!

Friday, June 13, 2008

1. Work: I ended up getting a few invoices in the late mail drop yesterday. So I have a little bit to work on while at home. Since my boss and the Chief are out today, I’ll wait to do them on Monday so that they can do their thing to get them paid without the invoices hanging in the ether over the weekend. Confused? We pay most of our bills by ACH anymore.

2. Play: We are making a trip to the used bookstore today. We’re hunting for books for Jesse - Beau wants large picture books for teaching purposes; I want Little Golden Books.

3. Church: Our church is hosting a large homecoming, of sorts, for our overseas missionaries next month. It’s a week-long event and they have asked folks to step up to help with the logistics of hosting such a big thing. I volunteered to cook for some of the meals they have planned - group meals for planned events during the week, not the regular meals they will receive with whomever they are staying at other times, like breakfast.

I initially signed up for a couple of weekend day events since it’s tough for me to participate during the week with my job. And then I got a heads up that the leader of the food team was thinking about asking me to cook the meat for the large dinner where they’re expecting about 250 people. At the time I thought she meant that I would cook some of the meat for that dinner, but I got the email from the leader of the food team yesterday asking if I was up for the challenge of cooking all of the meat (pork tenderloin roasts) for the dinner. She’s estimating 10 large roasts - I told her that might feed everyone if the roasts are huge - you might be able to feed about 12 people from a large tenderloin. Any experienced cooks out there who can verify that quantity of meat will serve 250 people? Will we need more?

The problem is that the dinner is on a Thursday. I can’t take that day off. I proposed pre-cooking the roasts over the prior weekend (it will take the whole weekend) and then freezing them in the interim days before the dinner and then reheating them before slicing for serving. It’s the only way I can do it. She agreed that no matter what, it was probably going to have to be done that way. So it looks like I’ll be cooking a lot of pork tenderloin in a couple of weeks.

The good thing is that I can take advantage of my teleworking on Friday to start cooking then. I figure to get half of them roasted and into the freezer on Friday. Then I finish the other batch on Saturday before we go to church that night and I can take the lot of them to the church with us to put in the freezer there. At that point I have completed my task.

Now I’m working on a plan to cook 10+ pork tenderloins in my regular sized oven when I only have one roasting pan. I may see if I can borrow my mother’s roaster or I may just buy some of those aluminum roasters. And I’m hoping I can fit two roasts into one roasting pan and then two roasting pans into my oven at the same time.

4. Friends: My bridesmaid’s youngest daughter is graduating from high school next week. When I met Scot and Joanie, their baby girl was 9 months old. I remember her as this happy, adorable little girl with white baby chick fuzz on her head that stood straight up. Too cute. She is now a very lovely young lady. I know her parents are proud of her and I am, too.

5. Jesse: He’s teething again. I think he’s got multiple teeth making their way. I don’t know how they endure the pain of it. Poor little guy. Even with that he’s still way too happy. He’s amazing.

Thursday, June 05, 2008

At Epcot, I bought spice packets in Morocco for seasoning meat and chicken for kebabs. I’m excited to experiment with them. The one for meat, I think I’ll try to do with lamb, but I may wuss out and use beef. And then there was a separate packet for chicken that I bought as well. I need to read the packet directions to see what I need to do and also what other odd ingredients we may need that we don’t keep on stock regularly. And I also want to read up on Moroccan food to see what side dishes/bread would be good to serve with them as well.

Also, I wonder how they’d work in the crock pot?