NaBloPoMo: Day 4

I don't know what it is lately, but I can't seem to miss with new recipes lately. Could just be luck, or maybe the reduced amount of time for cooking has made me more discriminating about the recipes I'm willing to try. In any case, I had another success last night with simplest cinnamon lamb stew (made with some beef stew meat recovered from our deep freezer). This one even gets the R seal of approval, so you know it has broader appeal than just my ow taste buds.

NaBloPoMo: Day 3

Apparently I'm not the only one whose fancy turns to apple crisp at the sight of the fall's new crop of apples. Smitten Kitchen turned her fantasies into a breakfast apple granola crisp which, I'm not surprised to say, turned out delicious when I made it yesterday. Also not surprising was the fact that I ran into the same sort of baby-related cooking hitches as the recipe's author (always the extra-long feeding whenever we have any sort of deadline). Still, extremely well-done apples and slightly blackened granola didn't ruin the dish. I'm actually thinking of making it for breakfast sometime during the big family gathering at Christmas. All of the cousins together for the first time!

NaBloPoMo: Day 2

Although I wasn't hit hard by the nesting bug, towards the end of my pregnancy I did have a lingering urge to use up those items that have been lingering in the pantry for years. You know, those half bags of chopped nuts, ignored candy, impulse purchases, and boxes of Kraft mac and cheese that my sister gave me when R and I first moved in together, six years ago. So, when I saw Loobylu's recipe for her mother's boiled fruit cake, I instantly recognized an opportunity to use up the several packages of dried figs I had somehow acquired over the years.

I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting to happen when I cooked the resulting blob of fruity dough, but I think some rising was probably in order. Maybe the substitute for self-rising flour wasn't quite right. An hour or so later, the cake looked much as it did when I put it in the oven, only cooked.

Still, the resulting cake didn't go to waste. It was pretty tasty, and seemed like the sort of thing one might want to bring if setting off of a long journey. R made some references to dwarf bread, but the reason this cake would be good travel fare is because it is nutritiously dense (a little bit will fill you up), sturdy, and won't go bad at room temperature (which is saying a lot in San Diego, land of mold). I ate slices of it for breakfast for weeks with no noticeable decline in quality. Plus it finally got me to eat all those figs.

NaBloPoMo: Day 1*

My mom visited recently (nothing like a baby to get people to visit), and I happened to mention that my father-in-law makes the world's best stuffing, and that I didn't even like stuffing previously. This rather annoyed my mom, who defended her own stuffing. To be honest, though, I can't even remember her ever making stuffing, which is why I felt it was safe to mention my general dislike of stuffing. What is it with that dish? People seem crazy for it.

* Seriously, I can't believe I'm doing this again. I haven't been able to make it the last few years and this time I've got a one month old. Perhaps I'm just trying to reestablish the habit of blogging. I've been rather slack of late. I keep composing posts in my head and then never actually posting them.

Food, glorious food!

I mentioned a bit ago (you know, before all this baby excitement) that I'd been checking out cookbooks from the library. It turns out that this is only a good strategy if you only like a few recipes from a cookbook, as is generally the case for me. If, however, you come across a great cookbook, you will be forced to buy it.

Hopefully this won't happen too often. I've got way too many cookbooks already.

As it turns out, How to Cook Everything is everything I've been wanting in a basic, all-purpose cookbook. An alternate title could be "Simple-ish Recipes That A Would Like to Cook." Sure, I've got ye olde standard Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, but most of the recipes in there are of a distictly midwestern sensibility. I mostly wind up using the conversion tables and looking up how long it takes to steam broccoli.

Actual cooking has slowed down for the moment, at least until we eat through the glorious quantities of food people provided us with to help us though the first few weeks of the little one's existence. Still, I've got plans. I think I used up an entire pad of post its on this book.