Week 17: It starts at home. And ends, sometimes, on the corner of Peterson and Kimball.

A little housecleaning before moving onto Week 17 -- there are two recipes unaccounted for from last week.


Friday night was pizza night, as is our family convention. My plan was to use a couple of bags of whole-wheat pizza dough from Trader Joe's that I had, but I guess I had them longer than I thought, because they were...kinda gross. Unless pizza dough is supposed to be speckled with what looks like barnacles. So I tossed them and sought out a quick recipe for pizza dough -- no time for a leisurely rise, know what I'm saying? Eating was necessary within the hour or heads were going to roll. I found this quick dough recipe on allrecipes.com, but was skeptical that you can just knock all that stuff together and come up with a nice crust. After reading some of the reviews -- occasionally, the people who review a recipe online actually make it the way the recipe prescribes, instead of completely changing/ignoring the recipe and reviewing it based on their totally different dish, and then suggest useful adjustments or improvements -- I let the yeast mixture proof for a bit while I prepped the toppings for the pizza. I wound up having time to let the bread go with the dough hook and then even rise a bit while I finished caramelizing some onions. So, it was more of a half-ass job with the dough than a no-ass job, but it felt good and smelled good, so I went with it.
 

I made four different types of pizza. There a whole pepperoni for AJ, who can be a real bite in the ass when it comes to pizza. There was a whole fig, caramelized onion, and goat cheese, which I'd had a version of at a girls' night not long ago and knew Peter would love. And, one more pizza that was half potatoes, leeks, bacon, and goat and mozzarella cheese -- the other half was artichoke, tomato, olive, roasted garlic, mozzarella and parmesan. The only one of the three "new" pizzas was anything I'd truly never tried was the potato-leek one, but I'd never made the other two types either. (Mark, I'd bought the ingredients for a queso fundido pizza, but then decided that I would rather just have queso fundido, because why mess with perfection?) Peter and I were the only ones who ate the non-pepperoni ones, but we both liked them quite a bit -- I was surprised at how tasty the potato leek number was. Pizza, to me, is tomato sauce and cheese, so it was difficult to think of it as a pizza, but whatever it is in my head it is also very tasty, and came together fast. I think it'd be a nice option for an evening when Peter and I are spending date night at home. All of them would be, in fact.
 

And then Saturday night. I decided to stay in with the kids since I had a full day of fundraising ahead of me on Sunday, while Peter headed out to a poker tournament and later a party. I'd kind of forgotten about my challenge -- I had initially planned on trying a new sandwich recipe for lunch, and then that got away from me. I started getting bellyrumbles late in the afternoon and, having no desire to go the grocery store, I rooted around in the fridge to find a small amount of ground beef, some egg buns, and the chorizo I had just bought the day before. So, I gave chorizo burgers a throw, topped caramelized onions and goat cheese. The beef and chorizo didn't really want to stick together (hmm, is that analagous to anything?) and kind of fell apart in chunks on the grill, so if I did it again I'd probably run the two meats through a food processor first before forming the patties. I wish I'd put more onions and cheese on mine, too. But they were good, if a little unexciting.
 
Sunday was a long, long day. Peter is the titular fundraising chair of the baseball league AJ used to play in (but hasn't for two years) with the understanding that he would go to the meetings and I would do most of the actual work. (He'd always wanted to be a figurehead.) This works fine for me, as the meetings were really the toughest part of the job for me when I was fundraising chair -- the actual work can be done more or less on my schedule, where the meetings can't. Anyway, yesterday was the second annual mixer/auction fundraiser -- we piloted the event last year to great success and thus decided to do it a second time. The event was just as successful this year as last, I'm happy to report, and as both a baseball nerd and a parent who strongly advocates for youth sports, I feel good that I can play a role in funding a worthwhile enterprise.
 

In general, I will help out when asked. I figure I'm pretty shitty at managing my time anyway, so why not add more to the mix? We were sort of recruited for this board, in fact, by someone who will remain nameless but whose name may or may not be used as a curse word in our home as a result. But working for fundraising at work, although tangentially, and at home, has gotten me thinking about how many small charitable entreaties I pass up in my day-to-day life. I ignore most panhandlers -- including those horrible eco-panhandlers, as a friend smartly put it, that used to stalk in front of my building when I worked downtown. (The Save the Children guy shouted after me one day, "A child is dying right now of hunger, and you won't help because you have to talk to your husband?!" Fuck off, dreadlocks, and shove your sanctimony up your scrawny vegan ass.) I don't generally buy candy or Streetwise or whatever from guys on the street, not out of any enmity but because I'm just not interested in what they're selling. Like the guys who sell water bottles on street corners -- they might be enterprising but they're not getting my cash because I try not to drink bottled water.

 

I admit that there's also an element of discomfort when it comes to panhandlers in particular. They're, well, disturbing and sad. I don't know what's worse -- when panhandler scoffs at the offer of the 75 cents I have in my pocket (I really don't carry much cash at all), or when they ogle my boobs, or rant and froth about crazy shit, or when they're terrifyingly grateful for my pocket change. It's all very sad, and it's mentally much easier to walk on by.

 

Fortunately, panhandlers are not the only people you can do charitable things for, and charity isn't only about money. (Discussing this with Peter last night, he suggested what I had already been considering -- doing a charitable thing every day. I asked if he meant, like, fucking an ugly guy. He didn't. THANK GOD. I don't have that kind of time.) And it takes a certain open frame of mind, I'm finding, to look around for opportunities to help people, even in small ways. I know that the times strangers have helped me out, even when it's just holding a door when I'm loaded down with bags and babies, have honestly and instantly made me feel better about life. I think I'm a pretty nice person, all things considered, and am as kind and polite to strangers as I can be most days. But I don't go around actively seeking ways to help strangers. So, what happens if I do?

 

Well, I don't know yet, but Sunday, I goaded upper-middle-class families into buying gift cards and signed baseballs. I felt pretty accomplished, I'll be honest, at the end of the event. Today, I bought five lollipops from a guy who sells them on a street corner near work and he was absurdly grateful. And, I helped an elderly lady load her grocery bags full of bran cereal and prunes into her into her ancient Chevy today at Dominick's. Small things to be sure. But, I felt good about it. I even feel good thinking about it now. Is that selfish?

Stuff it...with sausage

I might be a little hosed for tomorrow, it just now occurs to me. Friday is traditionally pizza (or takeout) night in our household, and AJ would certainly protest if we didn't have pizza. Sometimes I make pan pizza at home on Fridays, though; maybe I'll make one experimental pan to fulfill the challenge and one of pepperoni to fulfill the AJ.

Anyway. Like I said, last night I noted that for the second day in a row that AJ didn't seem to eat much, so I wanted to make sure that today's dinner was something he would eat. Not that he's at risk of wasting away or anything, but I just hate seeing food thrown away. I really didn't want to go to the grocery store today, so I did a little scavenging in my freezer. Turns out I had two links of Italian sausage, so I searched on allrecipes.com for something that used chicken breasts and Italian sausage, and came up with this fancily-named sausage-and-cheese stuffed chicken, Poulet a la Saucisse. I mean, it's not like, revolutionary or anything, but it was something I hadn't tried before.

And it was pretty good. AJ ate it all, as did Peter and my mom. It was awfully rich -- two kinds of cheese will do that, I guess -- so I feel like it could have used a little acid, maybe a little lemon zest or something. The side of whole-wheat rotini with roasted tomatoes helped offset the richness some -- the tomatoes might have worked better as a topping for the chicken, actually. A little tweaking and it'll make it onto my permanent roster, I think, which is all a chicken breast could hope for, really.

So now back to the issue of pizza. I have tried pretty much every kind of pizza topping combination there is, I would think, at this point. I have eaten a lot of pizza. The only thing I haven't tried is anchovies, and as a person who doesn't really care for fishy fish (I've tried gefilte fish, so I know) that's not a path I'm interested in treading. Any thoughts for imaginative toppings I can try?

But of course

I had this flank steak burning a hole in my fridge today, and beef sounded like a good bet, so I decided to give steak au poivre a shot. I know that it's traditionally made with beef tenderloin, but I'll be damned if I'm going to ruin $10/lb meat with a first pass at a recipe. Besides, I like flank steak, and I didn't want Asian or Mexican, which is the direction I usually go with a flank steak.

I loosely followed this Epicurious recipe except I grilled the steaks instead of pan-frying them. I had a ton of dishes from the night before to deal with, and I didn't want to dirty up another pan. Seriously -- I don't remember those dishes all being there last night, so I'm forced to believe that either the dishes are somehow reproducing or AJ is taking Ambien and engaging in very couth, flatware-intensive sleep-eating, and also maybe some sleep-souffle-making. Also, I wanted to try roasting some potato wedges in garlic and olive oil on the grill rather than in the oven -- I try to forget the oven exists in the spring and summer.

Anyway. I was mixing up the ingredients for the sauce when I realized we're out of dijon mustard, so I had to sub in spicy brown. (Ever try asking a dude in a limo for spicy brown? Very different from the commercials, let me just say that.) Then, Hannah asked me to help her read Are You My Mother? so I decided to dump the sauce on the steaks to let them soak a bit while we read. There's a word for that, isn't there? Soaking food in a flavored liquid? Whatever, I'm not a brainiac chef. I threw the prepped potatoes on the grill for a nice slow roast and we read about the adventures of a lost baby bird and his borderline negligent mother. We finished up (spoiler: he finds his mother) and I tossed the steaks on the grill and put the salads together.

A word about making salads in my household: it gets a little stupid. Peter doesn't like cucumbers or hardboiled eggs; AJ doesn't like tomatoes, olives, or mushrooms. Neither likes onions. I will eat whatever. Isn't that what salads are about? Throw all that shit in there, it's all good. There's no point to this; I just wanted to make a stand for the garbage salad lovers out there.

When Peter walked in the door, the steaks were resting comfortably and I was working on the sauce -- boiled up what became the marinade and added the cream. While it thickened I sliced up the steaks. Mine: nice and rare. Theirs: medium. The sauce was a little funky tasting in the pan, so I served it on the side rather than risk it on the meat. But when I tried it with the potatoes and the meat, it was much, much better -- especially on the potatoes. Peppery and beefy and yum. I imagine it'd be even better with, you know, good meat. And real dijon mustard.

A note: I have no idea why the photo keeps rotating 90 degrees, but you get the gist.

I don't know how Peter felt about it -- he ate it, so I guess he liked it -- but AJ wasn't a fan. I'm thinking he's not enjoying this week much because he was far from a member of the clean plate club with yesterday's chicken, too. I guess I'll try to find something he might like for tomorrow's dinner, lest he waste away. Or lest he sneak-eat a frozen pizza.

Baby, don't be sad

The human breast causes great joy for so many. Nursing infants, Girls Gone Wild viewers, bra manufacturers, plastic surgeons. So, too, is the chicken breast. A lean source of protein, yes, but also a nearly-blank canvas for your culinary desires. You can pound it into a paillette; you can cut a pocket it in it and stuff it with other meats and/or cheese (or vegetables, if you must); you can poach it, broil it, grill it, bread and fry it; you can use it as a handy stand-in for push-up pads as long as you're not going anywhere terribly warm or buggy. And most of all, you can marinate the shit out of it.

That was the advised method for making Grilled Fusion Chicken here. The ingredient list for the marinade/sauce base was intriguing -- what with the Worcestershire sauce, lime juice, chipotle, and ginger, it sounded vaguely Asian, vaguely Mexican. Asican, I guess. I figured it'd be great or it'd be a disaster, but the peppy reviews on the website made me think it'd be great. So, I whipped up the marinade, pounded the breasts (heh) and let them soak while...

Actually that sounded way simpler than it was. I am as distractable as a toddler on meth and once I got past the first three ingredients I was halfway to dumping it in the dish when I spotted the limes on the counter. Oh right, limes. Mixed it up, dumped it on the breasts, and then thought, oh right, ginger. Oh right, fucking CHIPOTLE. I must have drained the dish and refilled it four goddamned times. I guess I was in a hurry to get to putting climbing roses up on the trellis Peter just installed.

45 thorny minutes later I headed back in to cook. Chopped up the broccoli and got it started roasting in the oven, and started water boiling to cook the pasta. Once all that was going, I cranked up the grill, slapped on the chicken, cooked the sauce, and we were ready to go.

The result was decidedly meh. The ginger and lime didn't really come through; they were way overpowered by the chipotle. But roasted broccoli and Trader Joe's lemon-pepper pappardelle dressed in a little olive oil are always welcome in my belly, so they made up for the chicken's meh-ness. Oh well, two out of three ain't bad.

How in the hell is it already after 8?

Since I had two post-Hannah-pickup errands to run -- one to Supercuts to get her self-barbering from last night fixed, and one to the grocery store -- we didn't get home until almost 7 pm, and everyone was starving. I had a lineup of a few new recipes I wanted to try, but all but two called for marinating. (Note to self: might want to rethink the lineup.) Bitch, I ain't got time for that shit! Marinating, while lovely and amazing, requires night-before or morning-before planning that most days I just don't have in me.

Anyway, one of the two recipes was this sort-of pork kefte, which I simplified even further by replacing the spices with a hefty dose of ras al hanout instead. Then for the starch, this Moroccan pilaf came together very quickly -- I didn't have the currants, sadly, but everything else made it in there. I added a quick spinach salad with supremed oranges, red onion, and bacon dressed with rice vinegar and oil, and that was that. It all got done inside of half an hour -- while the rice cooked, I formed the kefte and grilled them, and while those cooked I got the salad together.

The rice was so-so -- good, not great; I imagine the currants would have made a big difference. But the kefte were YUM -- the ras al hanout worked really well with the sweetness of the pork. I got 11 skewers out of 1 1/4 pounds of ground pork, and I wish I had made more because they would make kickass sandwiches on pita for lunch with some harissa and red onions. This one's definitely making a comeback.

Week 16: What's cookin'?

Well, turns out weeding and swearing, while the makings of an excellent party, are not much for blog fodder. Or maybe I just needed a bit of a break from the keyboard. Either way, I need to get back in the swing of things.

There's really not much to tell about weeding. I weeded. There are still a lot left. And more keep coming. The dandelions are all over the lawn, which I don't really mind, but in a couple of weeks when they set seed, I'ma be hosed. I keep putting off putting newspaper over the veg beds but since they're full of loamy fertile soil, I better get on it or it's going to be all dandelion seedlings come May. I know dandelion leaves are edible and all, but I'm just not that far down the patchouli path of hippiness yet. I did take a bunch of garden photos on my phone, but my phone is dead tonight so they'll have to wait.

I decided today while watching the Cubs snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at Wrigley that this week is going to have to be something fun. Weeding, as rewarding and productive as it is, is not fun. Especially when it's only 50 degrees out. But eating is. And I really like to cook.

My mom used to complain that she made the same dozen things for dinner over and over, and I used to think, so? As long as one of those dozen wasn't that heinous hamburger "stew" she inflicted on us every so often, it was cool. My mom was, and is, a really good cook. In fact, it was when she'd try something new that things would go poorly. But I still can't make a roast beef and gravy that's anywhere near as good as hers is.

Still, I understand where she was coming from now that I'm doing the cooking. I'm a fair cook with a mildly adventurous palate, but I have a standard repertoire of thirty or so dishes that I go back to frequently. Most of these things I cook without referring to a recipe because I've made them so many times. And while all those things are good to eat, you do begin to get a little bored. Most times when I consider branching out a bit and trying something new, though, I talk myself out of it because if it turns out poorly it's a big ol' waste of food. It doesn't happen often, but the lemon-artichoke chicken debacle of '06 is still a subject of discussion in this household. Damnit...it SHOULD have been good. I'm still bitter about that.

Anyway. Rather than continue to wallow in a sea of bi-weekly steak taco nights (not that I'm complaining...I never get tired of Mexican food) I'm going to venture boldly into the culinary world and try some new shit. And when it crashes and burns, I'll make another batch of macaroni and cheese with ham and the kids will love me again. And we always have bologna if things go really wrong.

Tonight's new recipe: Korean Barbecue Burgers. My version is pictured here. Y'all, I love me some Korean barbecue, and I also love me some burgers, so this was like the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of recipes. Plus, I didn't actually drag my carcass out to the grocery store until like an hour before dinner time so I needed something quick to throw together, and this fit the bill. Simple, fast, and really tasty, and most of the stuff I had on hand. On the side is soy carrots with almonds, which made a nice side dish (not one that I made as much as heated; it's a Trader Joe's purchase.) I wish I had radishes on hand though; the crunch and mild spice would have been a nice addition. It's not the big schmancy Sunday dinner I like to make, but on a night when nothing was getting done fast enough, it was great. Yay! Food! It's my favorite.

You can put your weed in it

We don't have a lot of yard by suburban or country standards, but by city standards, our double lot is big. It's sort of u-shaped, wrapping around the house. On the north side is a driveway with a narrow planting strip; on the south is a side yard. And in the space that's there, lots of weed seeds have found purchase.

We currently have a lot of projects in the works with regards to the yard -- we're putting in a small stone patio in the side yard, lattice on one side of the house plus skirting around the deck Peter built a couple of summers back, reshaping and edging the borders, and lots of containment of various plants I hastily put in the ground (like the raspberry brambles.) I guess home ownership made me ambitious. So, when I head out to the back forty, there are a lot of directions for me to go in.

But I learned the hard way that weeds can get out of control in a hurry. There are these giant colocasia-like (but ugly) leaves in the south border that are, as best as I can tell, unkillable. I tried digging them up last year but apparently the smallest bit of taproot will grow a new plant. I thought I had hit the mother taproot, but since it was seriously like nine inches across and punched down straight to the bowels of hell there was no way I got it all. And did that bastard ever come back with a vengeance. All these baby hell-plants are currently threatening my cherry bushes, like those little skittery parasite things in Cloverfield. And I have no idea how to get rid of them without scorching the earth. A couple of weeks ago I tried spraying them with vinegar and covering them with black plastic to solarize them, but between you and me I think I just pissed them off. So I'm hoping that this early attack on the rest of the weedy garden will avoid problems like that in the future.

The last couple of days of quick-hit weeding have been interesting (to me, at least) in that while I'm only clearing out small areas, I'm looking ahead to decisions I will have to make. Dandelions are a no-brainer in the beds, of course, but do I bother with them in the lawn? Up to this point I had claimed to subscribe to the "freedom lawn" concept, that being the one that allowed me to pretend to not care about the lawn. I don't want to use chemicals if I can avoid it (thus my feeble handwaving at south bed devilweeds) so the ol' weed-n-feed approach isn't one I'd like to take for the time being. But...there are a lot of dandelions in the lawn. Like...a LOT. And hand-pulling them would require setting aside a decade to do. Still, leaving them means that some of them will, inevitably, set seed, and that seed will spread as far and wide as Wilt Chamberlain's. Maybe it's time for some protection. For all of us.