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home_and_away(or When the Squeak's Away, the Adults Get Brave)
We've decided to try cooking our involved, somewhat experimental meals on the weekends when Dae's not at home, especially if it's the recipe's debut.
Our reasoning is this: it's not that we don't want to expose Dae to new tastes...we just don't want to expose him to the mad cursing weaving dance that invariably happens when we each try to create a dish for the meal in two large pots on the same stove/oven, using the same counter, cuttingboard, stool, and knives.
Maybe if the first run doesn't go to hell, we'll try him out on the second one.
When we have a clue what we're doing.
But not the first time, with the sharp knives and the boiling or frying hot pots and the yelling to locate a spice. (note for next time: the spice you need is in your partner's hand. Always. Unless it's the salt, in which case it and the windex may be wherever the last spill was. Which is why we need to buy more tomorrow.)
Also: It's 19:28 now, as I type; we've got 45 minutes to go before this is food. So something like 20:15, we'd all be sitting down to dinner. What do you do if the baby tries it and hates it at thirty minutes to bedtime? Yes, we could've started earlier, but then we wouldn't've had a diningroom table to sit at to eat. Not that we *will*; just that we *could*.
(It's been a busy day, you see; we've been de-boxing the diningroom and livingroom and coatcloset. It may not sound like much, but you've got to imagine what happens when the years-of-accumulated-boxes-of-shyte of two and a half packratty people move into the same apartment. It was madness. But it's getting better. Soon, there'll be room for more than two people to come over and maybe even game. And a table to do it at! This is nothing short of seismic, my friends. Be in awe. "It wasn't *that* bad, was it?" says Mark, reading over my shoulder. This is bull; he knows it was every Troy ounce that bad. ~snicker~)
So.
For the next time we try this concoction:
* Buy the parsley and the chicken fresh the day you cook.
You get prettier parsley that way (no chance for the Mead-jacking Refridgerator of Doom to freeze it solid) and you save an hour by not having to defrost the chicken.
* When Monk says, "the freshest and best quality you can afford" when talking about the garlic, HEED.
Or else lay in twice the garlic you expect to need to compensate for how much you'll have to toss as too old.
We bought four heads of garlic in the neatly packaged boxes (it was what we could find) and when we broke it apart, three of them gave us 42 cloves. Swell, right? Then we started skinning the cloves...and found a full half of them green at one end and spotted oddly at the other. So we picked apart the remaining head, which, thankfully, was in good health... Final count of cloves? Thirty-seven. ~sigh~ Which reminds me:
* Either set aside a half-hour or so to break and skin garlic, or find a faster/better/neater way.
If you happen to be the keeper of that Way (remembering that the cloves need to stay whole and un-squished), I'd be in your debt if you'd let me in on the secret.
* I don't know how it'll taste yet (two minutes to go; Mark's put our cooled mashed potatoes into ovensafe bowls in the oven to warm; I'm typing and drooling like one of Pavlov's best.), but for the white wine in question, we've followed Justin Wilson's advice ("When in doubt, cook wit' a wine you LIKE.") and used a Louis Jadot Macon-Villages Chardonnay 2003. It smells divine.
...
Okay.
I hear flatware and plates in the livingroom.
It's time.
~grin~ If you're interested, I'll post my mashed potatoes mix later. Hate to call it a recipe when not one damn thing gets measured.
But right now, I've got the chicken of love to devour.
Here, look:
Bonne nuit, mes amis. :D
We've decided to try cooking our involved, somewhat experimental meals on the weekends when Dae's not at home, especially if it's the recipe's debut.
Our reasoning is this: it's not that we don't want to expose Dae to new tastes...we just don't want to expose him to the mad cursing weaving dance that invariably happens when we each try to create a dish for the meal in two large pots on the same stove/oven, using the same counter, cuttingboard, stool, and knives.
Maybe if the first run doesn't go to hell, we'll try him out on the second one.
When we have a clue what we're doing.
But not the first time, with the sharp knives and the boiling or frying hot pots and the yelling to locate a spice. (note for next time: the spice you need is in your partner's hand. Always. Unless it's the salt, in which case it and the windex may be wherever the last spill was. Which is why we need to buy more tomorrow.)
Also: It's 19:28 now, as I type; we've got 45 minutes to go before this is food. So something like 20:15, we'd all be sitting down to dinner. What do you do if the baby tries it and hates it at thirty minutes to bedtime? Yes, we could've started earlier, but then we wouldn't've had a diningroom table to sit at to eat. Not that we *will*; just that we *could*.
(It's been a busy day, you see; we've been de-boxing the diningroom and livingroom and coatcloset. It may not sound like much, but you've got to imagine what happens when the years-of-accumulated-boxes-of-shyte of two and a half packratty people move into the same apartment. It was madness. But it's getting better. Soon, there'll be room for more than two people to come over and maybe even game. And a table to do it at! This is nothing short of seismic, my friends. Be in awe. "It wasn't *that* bad, was it?" says Mark, reading over my shoulder. This is bull; he knows it was every Troy ounce that bad. ~snicker~)
So.
For the next time we try this concoction:
* Buy the parsley and the chicken fresh the day you cook.
You get prettier parsley that way (no chance for the Mead-jacking Refridgerator of Doom to freeze it solid) and you save an hour by not having to defrost the chicken.
* When Monk says, "the freshest and best quality you can afford" when talking about the garlic, HEED.
Or else lay in twice the garlic you expect to need to compensate for how much you'll have to toss as too old.
We bought four heads of garlic in the neatly packaged boxes (it was what we could find) and when we broke it apart, three of them gave us 42 cloves. Swell, right? Then we started skinning the cloves...and found a full half of them green at one end and spotted oddly at the other. So we picked apart the remaining head, which, thankfully, was in good health... Final count of cloves? Thirty-seven. ~sigh~ Which reminds me:
* Either set aside a half-hour or so to break and skin garlic, or find a faster/better/neater way.
If you happen to be the keeper of that Way (remembering that the cloves need to stay whole and un-squished), I'd be in your debt if you'd let me in on the secret.
* I don't know how it'll taste yet (two minutes to go; Mark's put our cooled mashed potatoes into ovensafe bowls in the oven to warm; I'm typing and drooling like one of Pavlov's best.), but for the white wine in question, we've followed Justin Wilson's advice ("When in doubt, cook wit' a wine you LIKE.") and used a Louis Jadot Macon-Villages Chardonnay 2003. It smells divine.
...
Okay.
I hear flatware and plates in the livingroom.
It's time.
~grin~ If you're interested, I'll post my mashed potatoes mix later. Hate to call it a recipe when not one damn thing gets measured.
But right now, I've got the chicken of love to devour.
Here, look:
Bonne nuit, mes amis. :D
