Flotsam. Also: Introducing the Bunny Baking Project

So I got up for work one day this month and saw this by the front door.  Can anyone explain this?

Um, yes, those are pants.  Yes, Mr. D's pants.  Why are Mr. D's pants draped over the back of the sofa next to the front door?  Maybe he didn't want to waste any time when the dial-a-whore arrived.





I am expecting a difficult week at work.  Last week was a difficult week at work, and the one before that, and when I got home, I was a blob.  And Mr. D won't doesn't cook.  So that means take-out.  And that means I've been vaguely ill for two weeks, except for the four days when I was more than vaguely ill.  Enough of that crap.  This week when I get home, I will have decent food that won't make me sick.  The only way that can happen is if I cook this weekend and fill the fridge.

The first step when I do that is to engage my imagination:  What do I like to eat?  What can be made in advance?  What do I feel like cooking?  What will I be willing to eat if I have one of my arbitrary "meat is gross" episodes?  What do I have now that I can use in recipes that meet the above criteria?


Step Two is make a menu and a shopping list.  Then I cross out anything overly ambitious.  Then I add something to serve as an emergency back-up that Mr. D is abl and willing to make (and which usually involves boiling water and/or reheating in the microwave as its major culinary technique).  Then, shopping.  Then, because there's usually not enough room for the new food, I do a ruthless purge:

• No, I'm not going to make a beet-walnut-gorgonzola salad served n a bed of steamed beet greens.  Beat greens (already getting mushy) go in the trash.  Prepped beets go in the freezer.  
• Mystery left-overs of indeterminate age go in the garbage.  If it's been in the freezer so long I've forgotten what it is, then it probably wasn't appealing enough to remember in the first place.
• OMG.  Is that frozen dog poop?  Yeah.  That goes in the garbage.  Ew.

Then I press all the air out of the ziploc bags, and then I pack the freezer and fridge and after all that, it always fits.   I'm usually exhausted so I don't actually start anything until the next day.

And that brings us to today.  It's cooking day.  It's lunch time.  I made chicken soup for lunch.

Half of it goes in th fridge for later in the week.  And I am making a lasagna later, and I don't do half-assed crap lasagna, so that means I have had to make sauce.

 It's simmering away, still soup, but soon it will be sauce.  Then some of the sauce goes into the lasagna and the rest gets stored for spaghetti night.  And when the lasagna is done, that will make me happy for nearly a week.

And next I noticed how tired I am, so I crossed Linzertorte off the list.  I am not dong Linzertorte today.  But I will do biscotti, cos I have Thor to help me with that.  And there will be bolognese for dinner tonight.

I've got my meat ready to go, and I've made my battuto:

But now I need my good Dutch Oven, half-filled with leftover soup, to be emptied and washed.  Bolognese takes 2-3 hours, so I can't wait forever.  *sends telepathic messages to Mr. D*  I'll bet we see some action when Stoke-Man U is over.


Aaaaaaaannnnnnnndddd---


Every year, I get ambitious around the holidays, and every year, the Glutton Place tempts me by prominently displaying certain evil magazines at the checkout.  Every year, I cave in and buy one, and now I have a stack of them taunting me.  Oh, I've already been through 2005 and 2006, but it's time to get real:  Am I ever going to make any of this stuff?  If not, say hello to the recycle bin.  And so, we begin the Bunny Baking Project.  I'm going to work my way through these recipes, decide which to keep, and clear some space on my cookbook rack.

We begin with 2007:

Yeah, those are awesome chocolate cookies, but I've not made friends with my pastry bag, so those sorts of decorations are currently beyond me.

I love this magazine and its associated cookbooks.  The schtick is that they fiddle with recipes until they've arrived at the "optimal" version (What happens if you add an extra egg yolk?  What temperature does the butter need to be so it will whip into the right texture without getting clumpy or greasy?)  And then they explain things.  (Bake the bottom crust of the tart first, then go back and add the sides later, because this dough is too soft and the sides will collapse if you don't have the filling in there holding them up.)  I love it when someone explains why.  There's a whole lot of things in this world that don't make sense to me, and I usually get suspicious looks when I ask why.

Anyway, inside the back cover of every issue is a color photo array of every recipe in the issue after it's been food styled. This is 2007:

No.  I'm not crazy enough to try every recipe.  I winnow it down:

I don't trust anything that a Vermont-based company has to say about sweet potato pie or corn muffins.  I like my corn muffin recipe, and if I want to make a sweet potato pie, or a pecan pie for that matter, I'll go to Southern Living.  Similarly, I don't need any help with quiches, souffles, cream puffs, or cinnamon rolls, and if my amaretti cookies almond macaroons are wrong, I don't want to be right.  Cheese bread is gross, dinner rolls are lame, waffles with yeast in them only add more hassle to what's already a long damn time to wait for breakfast, and Baked Alaska?  Are you kidding me?  Let's see.  Serves.....8.  That there is fresh meringue on the outside, which means it has to be eaten fresh.  Plus, that's ice cream on the inside, so it can't sit on the counter while you have dinner.  Therefore, it is a dish fit only for a dinner party, and only if you don't want to spend a lot of time with your guests (assuming you even have friends you can invite over), and ice cream is plenty good enough on its own without egg whites smeared all over it.

So.  That leaves me with 10 out of 25.  And I've already done some of them.

The sugar cookies and the chocolate cookies are sublime.  Three stars.  The oatmeal scones were pretty good, but not transcendent and I might someday find a better recipe. Worth repeating.  One star.  The chocolate caramel walnut tart was pretty good, but not great, and not nearly good enough to justify the effort (toasting walnuts, making dough, chilling dough, rolling out and shaping dough, baking dough, cooling tart shell, making caramel, coating walnuts with caramel and setting aside, mixing remaining walnuts with remaining caramel, cooling it, pouring it into tart shell, cooling it some more, making egg-enriched ganache, pouring that on top of everything, cooling it some more, decorating it with caramel-coated walnuts, and chilling it for another four hours before you can eat it.)  I stamp it with a trefoil and warn you to approach it only with proper protection.

OK. Now I'm running out of time.  Guess I'll go make a fuss in the kitchen and see if that brings my kitchen porter Mr. D over to do his duty, dirty dishes-wise.