Aw, I’m all verklempt. I’m so glad to have you guys here, cheering me on, balancing things out, telling me what I need to hear when I can’t see past my thighs. (Especially my right one, which is inexplicably two inches bigger than my left one.) It’s silly, isn’t it? The hungry part of my brain easily convinces the part that controls my hands and mouth that life is too short to worry about aesthetics, that I shouldn’t waste my time caring about my hair or what I can or can’t wear and who might see me, but rather seize the day (and the donut) and appreciate what I have. Which is all true. Especially when news comes of the death of someone close to many friends and colleagues, and another old friend is suddenly admitted to the ICU. What better salve than a comforting meal shared with people you love? To obsess about that extra piece of buttered toast with tea before bed seems trite. Lucky me to have such worries as a job as a food writer and too much bakery bread with strawberry-balsamic jam.
I want to do it up right, to live unreservedly, deliberately and without regret, not because life is short, which too often it is, but because I can. I sometimes look at life as if it were one of those little plexiglass booths they have at car shows – the ones a person can win a minute to climb inside of and grab as many fluttering dollar bills as they can. If you won a minute you wouldn’t just stand there, would you? If you had that opportunity to reach out and try to catch as many experiences as possible in the time you had? Would you care who was watching? (I suppose I would, what with all that jumping and bending over and plexiglass.) And what do weight and self-consciousness have to do with it, except perhaps make it more difficult to maneuver in that little booth?
Ah, the bottle of Red Rooster Cab Merlot from the Naramata Bench is doing its thing. You can tell when I start speaking in bad metaphors. I’m telling you, if you had half a bottle of red on board this would all make perfect sense.
So I ate out twice today. We’ll call it research-slash-therapy. It’s far easier to carry out a new years’ resolution to spend more time with friends than to eat food, not too much – mostly plants. And it’s sometimes difficult to follow through with both when socializing so often involves chatting at a table laden with yummy stuff.
This morning was spontaneous lattes and morning glory muffins (they do all their baking from scratch now) at Caffe Rosso, and then after a meeting at the Epcor Centre I popped over to Giuseppe’s Italian Market on 1st St, beside the Drum & Monkey, for pizza.
One Margarita and one Giuseppe’s (spicy pancetta, purple onions and sundried tomatoes specked with red pepper flakes) made from the rolling out of chewy dough to blasting in the wood-fired oven while we wandered the store and ogled giant meatballs, cheeses, homemade sauces, sausages and pastas.
The slab of cake-shaped chocolate ganache wasn’t our fault. The manager showed up at our table with it, having overheard the guy who made our pizza raving about how good it was. And it really was; like a big triangular Icy Square on a thin layer of sponge cake that really served only to keep the giant truffle from sticking to the plate.
After a full two days without chocolate, it went down all too easily. I had help, but not much; she left me to finish the second half myself and I didn’t even argue.
As you know, it’s one of the most well-used small appliances in my kitchen. I’m not a g0-go-gadget sort of girl, but I do love my Crock Pot.
Shauna shares her Beef Bourguignon recipe, and Jaden shows us how to make Jambalaya.
Me, when the slow cooker is plugged in I have a hard time not making pulled pork.
Slow Cooker Pulled Pork
1- 2 to 3 lb pork rib roast or shoulder, or two pork tenderloins (which are leaner)
salt & pepper
canola or olive oil, for cooking
1 large onion, chopped
2 carrots, chopped (no need to peel them – optional)
2 stalks celery, chopped (optional)
1 bottle dark beer, root beer or apple cider/juice
1 cup barbecue sauce (or to taste)
soft buns
creamy coleslaw, for serving with (optional)
Season the pork on all sides with salt and pepper. Set a skillet over medium-high heat, add a drizzle of oil and brown the meat on all sides. Remove from the pan and set aside on a plate. Add the vegetables to the pan and cook for a few minutes, until starting to turn golden on the edges (if you don’t have time for this, you could stick them directly into the slow cooker, but caramelizing them a bit will add more flavour).
Put the vegetables in the bottom of the slow cooker, and top with the pork. Pour some of the beer into the skillet and swirl it around, scraping up any flavourful browned bits stuck to the bottom of the pan, and then pour it into the slow cooker. Pour the rest of the beer the pork and vegetables as well.
Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours.
Remove the meat from the slow cooker and set it aside. Strain the vegetables and keep the sauce (alternatively, you could blend the lot in a blender or food processor for a thicker sauce), skim as much fat as possible from the surface and set aside. Put the meat back into the slow cooker and shred with a fork, discarding any chunks of fat you come across; moisten with the reserved liquid and add the barbecue sauce.
Set the slow cooker to warm to serve from; load onto soft buns and top with cole slaw if desired.
So um yeah, I won this award recently (click on it to enlarge), and it’s one I unabashedly admit I fully deserve. I’d like to thank all the little people for making me look so much bigger.
I guess since this is technically a food blog I should at some point address the first-world shift in priority that comes with the new year; the clamouring to high-dive from marathon consumption of fat calories directly into ultra-lean and healthy everything all the time – an often all-or-nothing approach that bans entire food groups and tosses perfectly good chocolate in the garbage in hot pursuit of A BRAND NEW YOU! (One thing I know: if you can’t resist having chocolate around you won’t be successful in the long term – this is a caramel-filled, chocolate-covered world. Another thing I know: you have to be happy with the regular old you first and foremost. Think of a structurally unsound house to which hasty aesthetic improvements have been made – not one you really want to invest and live in, right? I think they may have done a reality show about that.)
At the risk of climbing onto an already overflowing bandwagon which has been blown up to Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade proportions, it seems the combination of limited mobility (due to my previously damaged posterior – yes my bum still hurts) and a nasty cream habit is pushing me once again to reevaluate my grazing pattern in an attempt to make myself a little less bovine.
The 2L tub of MOCHA FUDGE ICE CREAM WITH CHOCOLATE COVERED ALMONDS that my sister bought on a whim and stashed in my freezer because she doesn’t have one yet did not help one bit. And because my freezer has also reached maximum capacity, the overflow is in my barbecue – an advantage to living in a part of Canada where winters dip to -20 and below. (The disadvantage being when a chinook blows in and you suddenly have to use up everything that thawed while sitting out on the back deck.) Also, the neighbours start thinking of me as the crazy lady with the bad hair (the thought of sitting in a stylist’s chair for an hour still makes me cringe – think I could bring in an inflatable swimming tube with Nemos on it?) and flannel pants who comes out onto her back patio about every five minutes with a spoon and dips into something beige stashed in her barbecue.
Welcome to my pity party; if you’re still here, please pull up a chair. I haven’t complained yet about not getting enough sleep – not for any legitimate reason, like breastfeeding twins or waking up early to perform brain surgery or run my 10k – but the dark seems to turn up the panic level in me, and I lie awake worrying about everything from W and everything bad that could possibly happen to him (and is he going to be an only child after all and what will I do when he’s too big to crawl into bed with me anymore and then he grows up and moves away), to knocking on the door of 40 (HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?) to financial security and what the hell I’ve done with my life anyway, and on top of it all being just too rotund for my own comfort. I have no illusions that I don’t fully deserve this; I know I do. I eat too well and too much, and in some ways think I’ve used food as a sort of buffer – a slow-release full-body airbag – from what I’m not sure. Or maybe I do. I used to think fear of success was the most ridiculous concept I had ever heard of, like fear of love or money or ice cream, like the grown-up babysitter I had as a kid who said candy was too sweet (she loved naps too – weirdo), but if I pulled a chair up to Lucy’s Psychiatric Help stand and dropped 5ยข into the jar she’d likely tell me I have a bad case of it. I’d like to trade for arachnophobia, please.
So last night a shiny new worry showed up at my party: the sudden realization that I have to address a sold-out Jack Singer Concert Hall in less than a week – with Anthony Bourdain among the thousands watching and listening – and nothing fits without making me look and feel like I just came out of the Spolumbo’s display case. If you don’t hear from me over the next week it’s because I’m curled up under my bed, breathing into a paper bag. (Epcor organizers: don’t panic. I’ll be there. Probably.)
Right – dinner. I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the menus as of late; Monday night was steak, requested by E to celebrate her tier 1 U-12 soccer team’s gold medal win over the weekend (!) and Ben’s first day at a brand-new school. We grilled them and threw baked potatoes into the oven and made Ichiban salad. For dessert the vote was for Black Forest cake; W and I baked a chocolate cake, found a can of cherry pie filling in my sister’s cupboard to spread between layers, and finally got rid of the last of the whipping cream (good riddance! I miss you) to glob on top. I took a picture but it was out of focus – you’ll have to use your imagination.
And tonight-well there was so much left over we’ll be eating it tomorrow night too; I’ll fill you in then.
One of my New Year’s Resolutions (or – thoughts I tend to get more of at this time of year regarding what I’d like to do more or less of) is to eat more soup. It’s important to have achievable goals. And to eat more vegetables.
Here is yet another extreme leftover makeover wherein the sloppy seconds almost trumps the original: any soup started from a meaty ham bone, particularly one containing black beans or lentils. This ham first made its debut while the family painted across the street – a great easy meal for a crowd that costs less than ordering pizza. Honestly. (Ham – $15. Biscuits from scratch – $1. Having your sister move in across the street – priceless. Although that really doesn’t have much to do with the ham, but it sounds nice.)
Also – do pizza leftovers take care of dinner another night? I didn’t think so. Pizza crust soup is nowhere near as appetizing.
Ham & Lentil Soup
1 ham bone, with lots of meat left clinging to it
+ 1 chopped onion
+ 3 chopped carrots
+ half a bunch of celery, chopped whole from the leafy end, including the leaves
+ 2 cups dried green or brown lentils
+ 1 L beef or chicken broth
+ 1 L water
+ bay leaf
+ large soup pot or slow cooker (6 hours or so on low)
= happy gut.
(Sorry for the abbreviated post – I was working late on one relating to weight and the new year and all that, and it became apparent closing in on midnight that I wasn’t going to finish it proper-like. And I didn’t sleep at all last night, panicking over the sudden realization that I have to address a sold-out Jack Singer Concert Hall in less than a week and nothing fits.)
Are we really being sucked back into the cold reality that is January 4th tomorrow morning? Although the holidays have been wonderful and busy, I feel like I haven’t spent quite enough horizontal time on the couch in my flannel PJ pants surfing food blogs and watching The Office and Flight of the Conchords on DVD. What I love best about this time of year is that no one expects anything of you – to answer your emails, even – for the week between Christmas and New Years’ Eve. Of course I was back at work last week anyway, covering traffic for the provincial shows on Tuesday and Wednesday – but any work done during the last week of December seems extra-productive somehow, sort of like working on a Sunday.
I also feel like I haven’t quite kept up with my end of the bargain here – over the past few weeks I let a good half the festivities slip through the cracks without keeping you abreast of what was being consumed, where and why; my synapses dulled by butter, cream, wine and Robaxacet. And now it’s not timely anymore. Spinning the tale of my gingerbread trifle the week we all get back to work is about as appealing as spinning some Bing and Bowie on Easter weekend. I do have paragraphs written (that truthfully sound more like an uninspired letter home from summer camp) – I do believe I’ll just go ahead and hit delete and get on with it. Out with the old and all that. continue reading »
