pretty good chicken soup

I’m really putting out some winners here, huh. Back with a vengeance! No, no, give this soup a chance. It’s not ginger-scented or full of a million root vegetables, but it’s damn good. Pretty pretty prettyyyyy pretty good. And if you look at the picture and think to yourself “why didn’t she strain the soup and get a nice lovely clear broth?”, then know that you’re dead to me. And know that I bought myself a nice strainer in the aftermath of feeling a little contrite that I was so contrary to myself about not straining it. An epic inward struggle.
Can someone find me a house to live in? I also need someone to find me a car to buy. And while I’m at it, please purchase me some more underwear and socks. That one dresser drawer is pitiful. I’m pitiful. My throat is all dry and scratchy and I woke up in the middle of the night the other night with it all but completely closed up. It’s been a real blast the last few nights! I’m attempting chamomile tea and honey and lemon. Say your prayers that I may make it through to another day to the almightly Jesus above us thou art in heavenly father of the lord and savior, amen. But no, really, I do want to find a little house to rent. One that will motivate me to step it up in life and maybe shop for new underwear and socks. Ugh. Just the worst.

sweet potato fries

Yeah. Hey. Bleh.

All sorts of bullcrap happened this past year. Let’s just let it come out naturally over the course of the next several many posts. Like, oh, look at the pictures – that kitchen looks different, doesn’t it? Interesting! Uh huh.

Also, this recipe is a total joke. Basically, I needed to get myself to post again and in true Julie fashion, my one idea I had for a simple ease-back-into post got thwarted in a last minute effort to obtain the ingredient that actually isn’t all that simple to find and required a special trip to the farmer’s market where the damn rancher didn’t even have it. But posting again has been weighing on me for such a long time and I thought, well, fine. I’ll just use whatever the hell and make a stupid post just so I can get back into the swing of it. So here we are. Sweet potato fries. Like you haven’t ever fucking made stupid sweet potato fries. And it’s not like I even have some sort of secret way of making them that makes them like the kind you get in a restaurant. They’re probably identical to every attempt you’ve ever made. And you’re going to stop reading this blog because why the hell would you bother reading about sweet potato fries and oh wait, you don’t read this anyway because I haven’t posted in like a year.

hot sauce

Hey. Hi. Let’s kiss and make up, okay? Great. I just got back from visiting Denver and let me tell you if I was feeling depressed before, I most certainly still do. Woe is me, I know. I don’t want to complain, but goddammit it’s true. Let me wallow and let me think only of the cons and let me dwell on the negatives and allow me to think only of short term goals. I’m real good at that stuff sometimes. Like listening to Disintegration on repeat until any semblance of a positive life force has completely oozed out of my body, leaving me the saddest sack imaginable. That’s my jam, baby.

sesame summer squash salad

Tired of summer squash? Too bad, time to eat more. Can’t say I’m tired of it, because I don’t have any  in my garden (yet). But if I did, this salad would be a perfect way to plow through those ceaselessly proliferating plants. Or you could not pick them, let them get gigantic, then leave them on your patio table, hoping that they’ll turn into dried out ornamental gourds. I’ve def done that a few times.

tomato and onion salad with curried okra chips

Things are starting to fall into place here, I suppose. After I found out our landlord doesn’t want me planting anything in the front of the house, which is the south side, I looked at a few community gardens nearby. I picked one that seems decent, though there’s always worry that neighborhood brats will steal or ruin veggies from the garden. It’s the best option I have, since the landlord seems to prefer to keep the front yard devoid of anything other than weedy ground crawl and unartfully curved metal edging that edges out the weedy ground crawl in favor of debris strewn dirt. So I’m going to start planting for the fall this week, which is exciting! I’ve already got fall (yes fall) tomatoes planted in pots in a patch of sunlight in the back yard. I guess other than that I don’t have much else in my life in place, actually. I signed up for a month at Joe’s Gym. JoesGym.info. I just don’t know what to do about a stupid Crossfit gym. So in the meantime I’m just going to meathead body building gym, getting major weird stares while I try do my old gym’s workouts. Even my cats are in a funk. They kind of just sleep all day, which is what I want to do. I have to snap out! Have to be productive! My funk is sucking at my productivity and my will to be productive. What a terrible cycle.

walnut pork butter

I’m in a new-location-malaise. I know, poor pitiful me, what a hard life I have, but it’s true. I feel like a lump, a real sad sack. I think a need a routine and some friends. Thinking about my friends reminded me of this draft I had saved and not yet published, which was inspired by a fun dinner out I had back in Denver. One friend got a vegetarian 3-course meal, and two of the courses had butters of sorts accompanying. A delicious, slightly sweet pecan butter, an onion butter that I didn’t get enough of a taste of to figure out what they did, and…some other butter. Give me a break, I had gone out with other friends before, so I don’t remember too well all the butter details. But what I do know is, is that I had a bunch of walnuts in the freezer and a lot of confit pork bits leftover from making lard. Those little bits are great added to pan-fried potatoes and great, it turns out, puréed with walnuts, onion, and salt.

fermented carrot pickles

Hey. I’m here in Texas. And really all I’ve done is unpack, organize, and hand wash every freaking piece of wool clothing for indeterminately long storage. But I have this kind of brain blockage that prevents me from completing large, important tasks in favor of nagging smaller tasks. Then, the longer I don’t do whatever important task in question, the more I don’t want to think about how long it’s been and I try to not think about it. Take for example, not working on this blog and instead figuring out the best way to organize and store all of my holiday decorations. Or how I didn’t post this here recipe for a month and half because I was too busy getting ready to go to Texas and too busy seeing every friend possible. I had already taken the pictures, I was already completely checked out at my job, you’d think I would have been able to do it, but I just kept pretending like it wasn’t as long as it really had been. Brain blockage. So here’s a recap of my life.
My landlords in Denver were being real pains in the ass about wanting to show the house as soon as I told them we were moving. First, they wanted to show it all day. They were just going to be there all.day. 8 – 6. And they said they were going to do the showings on the weekend “so as to accommodate [my] usage during the month.” What does that mean??? How is it nice to have them there on the weekends? So, I said well it’d be pretty great if you could do the showings when I’m not there, thanks. Then they asked if I could lock my cats in a fucking closet for “10 or so hours” while they would be there showing the place. I didn’t reply to the email for a day because I needed to calm down. I’m so excited I never have to hear from Kathy and Randy Fischer ever again! Did I mention that Randy is a state representative here in Colorado? Rated worst for business by The Denver Business Journal. Thanks, bud. Also, his wife is on drugs, pretty sure. Teamocil probably. But yeah, they liked my garden and my compost pile, so that’s good. Didn’t have to haul off two truck loads of soil and months worth of rotting vegetable and yard matter.

celery root salad

I’m completely smitten with old cookbooks and reenactment cookbooks…well, historical cookbooks, because they’re often not reenactments so much as modern interpretations on historical recipes. I only wish they were reenactment ones; maybe just explained a little more thoroughly than old ones. I have this one interpreted historical cookbook from the City Tavern, which almost makes me cry because I want all of the recipes so badly to be exactly what olde timey Philadelphians would have eaten at that restaurant so that I can taste something exactly the same. But there are some recipes in the book that aren’t too modernized. It’s refreshing at least to see lard used as the fat of choice in some recipes. This celery root salad is one simple little dish that I’ve been eyeing for a while from that book. There are a fair amount of vegetable recipes in it that are prepared nice and heavily. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good, crisp summer salad, but I’m not going to say I don’t really love fat-laden vegetables. I should have been born in Minnesota, I guess.
Celeriac is one of my absolute favorite roots. To eat. Some how or other, though, I’ve avoided it raw. Mashed, boiled, roasted, but not raw. Come to think of it, I’ve also never had raw beets I don’t think. I asked for a mandoline for Christmas and this was the first time I used it to julienne something. Pretty sweet. I’m sorry if you don’t have one and you have to julienne the root by hand. No, I’m not, because I’ve had to julienne everything by hand before this. You can do it. You’ll be a better person for it. You could also use a box grater, though the result won’t be as elegant, but whatever. I’m not really elegant, either.

shrimp scrambled eggs

I’m a total homebody who hates traffic…it’s really hard to get me to go snowboarding on the weekends. Even though I’m doing something fun, if I spend a day up there, I feel like my weekend is thus reduced to only one day. It’s like I need two days of mulling around the house and doing my mundane activities to feel relaxed. Pretty dumb, I know. In any case, I was swayed into going to Beaver Creek yesterday knowing full well that because of all the snow the mountains got over the past few days, the traffic and crowds were going to be awful. We left at 6:15 and 15 minutes into our drive the cars started getting backed up. I almost made Joe turn around to bring me back home. But I made it, the day was gorgeous and sunny and warm, and there was tons of really deep, untouched snow. Great, I was glad I bucked up and went. Then I realized my phone was missing and wasn’t in the car when we got back to it and Found My iPhone revealed an unfortunate result…

My friend Chris was still up at the resort, about to leave, when I discovered this and he quickly strapped back in, caught the chair with less than one minute left to last call, got 1/3 of the way up the mountain and came to a halt. No more running lifts. He asked around and very nice, no-nonsense ski patrolman Adam offered to snowmobile Chris up to the bottom of the lift where my phone was. But after searching around, they didn’t find anything. I KNEW I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME.

country style pork ribs confit

I thought I had the flu. I self-righteously didn’t get the flu shot. I would have gotten so scolded. Turns out that it wasn’t the flu, but perhaps a case of food poisoning? Or just some weird bug? I had eaten at Jonesy’s EatBar – shrimp, on a Monday. What an idiot. I didn’t have to read Kitchen Confidential to know better than that, but I just forgot. But really, they shouldn’t be serving me fish old enough to make me feel like death. I often knowingly choose to eat questionable food, but thoroughly questionable I’m kinda pissed about. Besides, just because I’m lazy and eat questionable food myself doesn’t mean that I want to go to a restaurant and pay out the nose for questionable food. I will forgo that place from here on out. It was nice knowing you Jonesy’s.
January Whole30: totally failed. The other two times I’ve done it, I didn’t even come close to failing. It was easy, I felt great, I didn’t even want to stop. But this month, I wasn’t in the right mindset and all my excuses seemed really viable in that state. Bleh. At least I’m not worse off for the time I did spend doing it. But still, I feel like the worst New Years resolutioner. At least it’s 60 degrees right now. I feel good about that. But I don’t feel good about the boatload of chocolate chips I just ate. Dammit.

one-pot mustard and lemon chicken

One-rimmed-baking-sheet chicken. Whatever. This is easy chicken. Perfect weekday night dinner. Joe’s sister Louise requested a recipe of her own on here – one that would be nice and simple. This is a good example of what I might do on a weekday night (you know, because I don’t always make ridiculous dinners on a Tuesday). It’s to the point, but not lacking in flavor, and super good. And look, it’s carrots again. That’s another thing I do; obsess over ingredients.
It’s tough for me to settle on a recipe that’s simple like this. Should I have included onions? Other root vegetables? I guess I feel like it has to be like the definitive one-pot chicken and carrot dish. The BEST way to make them together. Or, at least the best way to make them together with a mustard lemon sauce. But sometimes it’s just nice to have a different way of making your normal weeknight meat and vegetables. You don’t want to marinate the chicken overnight, even if will make a wonderful difference; you don’t want to roast the vegetables at one temperature and the chicken at another; and on the other end, you don’t want another dinner of steamed broccoli and boring chicken. It’s shocking how many dinners I eat that are seasoned only with salt. I sure do love salt. Salt and fat. But I’ve got a reputation to upkeep here. I’m fancier than salt. I use lemon and mustard. Watch out.

roasted carrot and caramelized onion soup with caraway

Sometimes it’s the little details that make me happy in a recipe. Like nicely roasted carrots and caramelized onions in an otherwise very simple soup. And homemade chicken broth. And then, anything with caraway seeds in it is superlative in my book. The best seed.

roasted winter squash with tahini and za’atar

I lost the homemade candy contest. 3rd place out of 3. That’s okay, I guess the judges just preferred marzipan squeezed from a tube with shitty chocolate melted on top. Actually…I probably deserved it. I gave my friend some of my toffee and there was a hair in it. Maybe the judges got a hair piece, too. How embarrassing. How am I supposed to make cookies for people for Christmas? I should be in exile.
I’m really not feeling like writing much here. I had all sorts of wonderful things written down, then I accidentally deleted everything and whenever I do something stupid like that, I freak out and make everything worse. So instead of ⌘-Z-ing, I clicked somewhere else on the page to really confirm that I had deleted everything, thus really truly confirming the delete. Idiot. I don’t even remember what I had written. Other than griping about losing the candy contest. And probably Christmas, something, something, cookies. Trying to rewrite what you’d deleted is such an awful feeling. Even when it’s something as silly as a blog post. It makes me want to pull my hair out.

za’atar

Spice mixes are fun. Making spice mixes is fun. You learn so much! Oh that’s how they get that flavor! Plus, if you make them in advance, as opposed to just adding spices to a dish as you’re making it, you’ll have a little jar with which you can now have a real nice way to impress people. No one is impressed with individual spices. Everyone is impressed with a jar of homemade za’atar. Well, you won’t be, because you’re going to make it and it’ll be old hat then.
Advent has begun. Every single day a Christmas activity must occur. I’m currently making cinnamon and clove scented pinecones. They’re sitting on the stovetop making the kitchen smell so wonderful. I also made cinnamon ornaments. Lots of cinnamon here. Also on the agenda is getting our Christmas tree from the wilderness, paper snowflakes, watching He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special, talking a walk to peer at fancy Christmas light displays in a fancy neighborhood, etc. I’m not in the mood to make Christmas cookies this year. Not like last year. I’m sure it’ll hit at some point, but nothing much this year. I might have gone overboard last year. I am going to make some sort of toffee concoction for my department’s Christmas party at work on Wednesday. Toffee almond salted something. It’s a homemade candy competition and I better freaking win. I should have made it this weekend because I tried making it last night and all was going well in the pot until it just separated and then it crystallized and now I have like one more chance to try it and I’ll probably ruin it again and cry.

savory spiced nuts

My aunt Suzanne made some wonderful spiced nuts one Thanksgiving she came to our house for when I was little. I remember thinking they were the absolute most wonderful things – and this coming from the string-cheese-for-dinner-girl – and how the herbs just smelled so, so wonderful. I forgot about them for a long time, but then when I started getting into cooking for myself in college, I remember each time I would use thyme I would think of those nuts. I don’t have too many nostalgic food memories, if anything most of them would be traumatizing memories anyway, reminding me of all the ridicule I’d get for only eating bread and butter at Thanksgiving, but man those spiced nuts still stick in my mind. Probably good I don’t have too many childhood food attachments. Otherwise I’d still be eating frozen Eggo waffles, just the edges of frosting-less strawberry Pop Tarts, Tupperware bowls full of Better Cheddars, and ohhh man sour cream and cheddar Ruffles. My poor mom. Totally just gave up with me. Worst kid ever.
Tomorrow I’m going to make pumpkin pudding, I believe. My friend Samantha had been listening to me with my nose stuck up in the air about the necessity of making a pumpkin pie with fresh roasted pumpkin purée for the past like 4 years so she finally did it in a Thanksgiving practice run. They turned out terribly, apparently. I’d like to blame it on her and say her palate just isn’t sophisticated enough…but that’s not true at all. I feel like I let her down. And what a let down. All this time, leading up to this one stupid pie, and the two pumpkins she’d gotten were crap. I must convince her to try again! It’s okay, you’ll get a nice pumpkin!! Nature is good! So, I thought I’d make one from scratch and send her pics along the way, just to show that indeed she somehow picked the two worst sugar pumpkins in the whole store. If this pudding is any good, perhaps you’ll see it later. I’m thinking it’s going to be with coconut milk and cardamom.

polish cabbage rolls

I can’t call this gołąbki because I felt like I sufficiently interpreted these such that I might get chided by a Pole. Namely, in that I didn’t include rice. Next time I will, I swear (but these are so good I’m not sure I want to change them…). I’ll try to make my grandma proud. I also feel funny because I’m no expert in Polish cuisine – it’s not exactly the most popular ethnic cuisine, with hipsters flocking to little holes-in-the-wall to debate the best pierogi in town. There are actually kind of a few restaurants here, but I haven’t made my way over to them yet. Most of them look kinda crappy. Like, trying to be cool when it’d just be better to be a no frills, oblivious to modern tastes kinda place and have really good, all homemade food. Ugh, that reminds me of a Mexican restaurant nearby that has an ADA-certifited heart-healthy menu or some junk. Stay the hell away from that place. Growing up, my mom used to make gołąbki all the time, but I was a kid and I was picky and I didn’t eat anything that wasn’t Polly-O string cheese. So, I’m kind of starting from scratch here, with nothing much to compare to. I’ve mostly seen these little pigeons (that’s what gołąbki means) with a tomato sauce, but both Polish cookbooks I have seemed to be sauce-ambivalent and said you could serve it with a number of sauces. So, I picked a mushroom sauce because I’ve been in the mood for mushrooms lately. Again, it’s interpreted – I didn’t want to use cream. If you happen to be Polish (or another Eastern European) and make these – what sauce do you like to make for them?

lamb tagine

After what I feel was a pretty damn decent representation of Ethiopian food, here we have what I think is maybe a bit of a misnomer. Not that this isn’t good, of course. It’s just…that there is no tagine involved. Like tandoori chicken with no tandoori. What other foods are named after their cooking vessel? Casserole. I don’t know. Aside from that, and maybe aside from the sweet potato, this is still a nice, long-cooked dish with lovely spices and tender meat. I didn’t take a lot of liberties. Though, I had also told myself that the next time I was to make Moroccan food I was going to have made preserved lemon. I didn’t. And I made this anyway. I’m such a let down. Lamb tagine…Moroccan lamb? Sure, whatever. Just make it.
I just realized that I thought I had only posted two African recipes in my blog’s existence. How incredibly embarrassing to admit that it was because I sometimes forget to think of Morocco when I think of Africa. I’m a bad person. Egypt, too. I don’t even know much how to differentiate Egyptian food from other Middle Eastern cuisines. I would like to be more cultured! Maybe that area should get their shit together so I can go visit and eat their food. Idiots. Oh and visit the Egyptian pyramids. Ohhhhh man do I want to do that. I used to be obsessed with Ancient Egypt. I had a Learn to Write in Hieroglyphics! set when I was in elementary school. Pretty, pretty, prettyyyyy cool.

doro wot

I hurt my wrist again. The other one. Double gimp. I am so mad about it I don’t even want to talk about it. I relive the moment and my head tightens up and I want so bad to redo it. Not be such a total spaz. I slipped off a pull up bar. At a competition. That I should have kicked butt at. I’m giving up on fitness. Resorting to the safe, comfy couch. Injuries SUCK. They’re so frustrating and my right wrist still isn’t fine from last year’s stupid fall. I don’t want to deal with this stufffff. GAH. Hey look, the last time I hurt my wrist I posted about African food. My only two African posts. I should stop planning on making anything from that continent. Is that racist? Prob.
So Denver doesn’t have quite the amount of ethnic diversity pockets as other cities might have, but the amount of Ethiopian restaurants here surpasses Boston by about a ton, so that’s good enough for me. I first had Ethiopian food my first year in Boston at this funny little hole in the wall near my apartment called Fasika. I’d just tell them to give me a sampling of all of their veggie dishes. Those are still all my favorite. I like the meat dishes, but oh man the vegetables. And the lentils. But for some reason I chose to make this for my first foray into Ethiopian food. I really should have made gomen, using the never ending amount of swiss chard I have in the garden. But I couldn’t muster the thought of prepping all of those leaves with one hand. Plus I was still so crabby about it. I’m still crabby about it. And the stupid splint I’m wearing.

spaghetti squash and caramelized onion cakes

fallfallfallfallfallfallfallllll!
In other news, I might move to Dallas. I am not happy about it. Joe is looking at a company down there for a job. I don’t know. We’ll see. But I can bet you their fall sucks. What the heck am I supposed to cook down there besides bbq (oh that could be good…). Do winter squash even grow? DO THE LEAVES EVEN CHANGE THERE. It’s just a hot, humid, flat wasteland. I’m too afraid to look back at my blog posts around the time of the Denver move. I think I didn’t want to leave Boston, either. I’m apparently inflexible. It’s hard to even get me to go out at night.

coconut milk indian chicken

Oh how I wished to be able to call this tandoori chicken, because I love tandoori chicken. I based it off a recipe that called it tandoori chicken. But it’s not. And since I’m a self-professed food jerk, I could not call it such. First, no tandoor was involved. Never could be. Who the f has a tandoor. Second, this chicken is marinated in coconut milk. Tandoori chicken demands yogurt. And boy do I love yogurt marinated…anything. But I’ve been craving something with coconut milk for a while. And actually, for better or worse, you can’t tell it was marinated in coconut milk. It just tasted like it was marinated in the most godly substance on earth. Seriously, it is so good.
So since this is kind of an interpretation recipe, or something, guess what – I used all ground spices. Gasp. I did not toast and grind whole spices. Generally if I make Indian food I feel absolutely compelled to do this. It’s like this OCD side of me. The same side that likes to make my own butter, my own fermented pickles, my own bacon, all that crap. But it was hot this weekend. And even though I bought new boots, fall isn’t here. It was bathing-suit-all-day weather. And ground spices sounded nice. This recipe, despite a ton of spices, is real easy. It was a perfect lazy weekend recipe. And you know what? I bet you could use some curry powder and garam masala and be pretty darn well off – but just know that this combo of spices is really damn good.