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Somewhat
Mar. 9th, 2008
06:49 pm - The price of hubris
Yesterday I noted the absence of my usual drumbeat of failed recipes. Naturally, then, today's dinner was overcooked steelhead under a balsemic reduction, served with the wrong salad and some pesto pasta.
Yeah, I overcooked the fish. Fish and I have serious differences vís-a-vís broiling times. Broiling fish is my personal kryptonite.
And the wrong salad! I had meant to do arugula and roasted pecans with a raspberry vinaigrette. But I get home from shopping only to discover that the raspberry vinegar in the pantry is so old and so off as to be utterly useless. I ended up tossing some store-brand Italian dressing on the arugula.
The saving grace, to the extent there was one, was some Cresti di Gallo pasta with pesto. There's a local specialty foods store, Capone's, whose pasta Whole Foods is now selling. Their Cresti are big floppy oddly shaped pasta half-torus-with-a-wattle things. They are a perfect canvas for thick, flavorful sauces like pesto because their weird shape guarantees that the sauce won't be uniformly distributed, giving a good contrast of sauce and not-sauce that serves to draw attention to flavors.
Overall Rating: Poor
Lessons Learned:
+ Still can't broil fish reliably, just like the last like nine flillion times
+ When brainstorming dinner at the store, do not rely on ingredients that you dimly remember having in the pantry somewhere: Even if you remember correctly that they exist, they're probably bad by now.
Fun Facts: Lillian Harman and Edwin Walker married in 1886 and were imprisoned in 1887 for the crime of... well, it's not quite clear. In the words of anarchist historian Roderick Long: "Judge Valentine...raised the question whether the couple's crime was a) living together as a married couple without actually being married, or b) getting married but in an illegal fashion." Harman and Walker, you see, had used irregular wedding vows in which Harman did not cede all of her rights to Walker, and Walker repudiated any legal but immoral rights the law might grant him over Harman (such as spousal rape).
At the time any couple eligible to marry in Kansas who lived together were automatically married in the eyes of the law. Only those who professed equality and denounced rape, it seems, were criminals thereby. Walker naturally received five times the sentence of his bride.
Mar. 2nd, 2008
07:13 pm - Cheap eats
McKinnon's had hanger steak for $3/lb. Mmmm, cheap eats.
Salted for an hour, then marinated (balsemic vinegar, worcestershire, dried anaheim chilies). Broiled, served under onions, peppers, and mushrooms.
Overall Rating: Very good
Lessons Learned: None. I flipped the coin on hanger steak, and it came up heads this time. Good luck teaches no lessons.
Fun Facts: Voltairine de Cleyre became an atheist as a result of her being forced into a Catholic convent as a teen. Her first escape attempt from the convent -- which involved swimming a mile across a freezing river and then hiking, waterlogged and hypothermic, for seventeen miles -- resulted only in her being captured and sent back by friends of her family. Her second attempt succeeded, however. Later in life she would have her son stolen from her by the state because of her political views opposing marriage. Unlike many of her anarchist contemporaries, however, the only assassination attempt against her was by an insane friend of hers, whom she forgave.
Feb. 20th, 2008
05:13 pm - Lame-out
Too tired to do proper meal-planning, so I picked up some boneless chicken thighs on the theory that I've always got something lying around to do with them.
Unrolled them flat, seasoned each side generously with salt and spanish paprika, rolled them back up, let them sit. Then roasted them over carrots, onions, and garlic (400 degrees, 15 minutes just the veg, then 45 minutes chicken and veg). Sliced the chicken, served plus the veg over warmed, oiled pita.
Overall rating: Good, might have been better with rosemary and sage, perhaps a lemon slice wrapped up in the thighs.
Lessons Learned: None -- this was a lame-out meal of boring ingredients interacting in known ways.
Fun fact: Individualist agitator Ezra Heywood was imprisoned five times and died at hard labor in prison for publishing articles critical of marriage laws. As soon as his judicial murder was complete, the same Attorneys General attempted the same against his intellectual successor Moses Harman, who however managed to survive years of hard labor sentences despite being in his seventies.