Food In The Fort

Okay, after six to nine months of threatening, I finally managed to buy an oven thermometer. Guess what? My oven, which I had been figuring was about 25 degrees hotter than the little dial claims, is actually a bit more than 50 degrees hotter! So my failure to properly bake crescents, lemon bars, pound cakes and giant chocolate chip cookies can be explained – at least in part. I shall celebrate by attempting the Hershey’s Perfectly Chocolate cake again tomorrow for Susan’s birthday. Huzzah!

Rest assured, you’ll never catch Catherine or me separating eggs this way. Even if we’re making something complicated*, we’re firm believers in the KISS method. I’ve always been one to do the shell-to-shell toss method, and for all I know, Catherine simply plops the eggs in a bowl and then scoops out the yolks. It’s true that if you get yolk, which is mostly fat, into your egg whites then you’re not going to get those pretty Eiffel Tower-shaped peaks out of your meringue, but believe me, cooking isn’t this unforgiving. You don’t need to wear one of those white bunny suits and make all your meals in an isolation lab to have really good results.

This is really old, so forgive me, but I thought that it was kinda cool: our lumpy garlic mashed potatoes recipe got linked to by the WBlog. They did a post on Ross’ from Friends fondness for having his potatoes lumpy and linked to a couple of recipes, ours among them!

At this point I must confess that it is part of my vast ignorance of popular culture that I have never seen an episode of Friends. I have only watched bits of Seinfeld (although I like his wife’s cookbook), haven’t seen the X-files (although agent Scully and I both have an ouroboros tattoo) or the West Wing (sorry, no clever parenthetical for that one). But I have certainly heard of Friends and I even recognized that Ross was a character’s name. See? I’m not hopeless.

So this is sort of like knowing a relative of someone famous. Like the time that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sister babysat my daughter…

The upgrade of Food In The Fort from WordPress 2.3.3 to WordPress 2.6.2, including the Freshy 2 theme and all plugins (at least those I planned on upgrading) is now complete. Overall, this was a pretty smooth upgrade. Not at all as nightmarish as some of the Drupal upgrades I’ve done. There were a couple of problems which I’ll note below, and there’s some further backend stuff I want to do, but for now I’m calling it quits.

The first problem of note is that the WP-Print plugin is not displaying the little “print me” printer icon anymore although it upgraded successfully. If I recall correctly, when I first installed this plugin I had to make a small modification to the Freshy 2 theme in order to get it to work correctly so tomorrow or sometime soon I’ll go ahead and take a look at that. Read the rest of this entry »

July is a pretty good time to get the hell out of Fort Wayne and seek out cooler, less *&%$ humid climes, and that’s just what me and the kiddies have done. We’re in NY; they’re down in the city with their dad and I’m upstate on the farm with my brother and the ‘rents. We’ll be meeting up tomorrow in the Big Apple and then it will be all about spoiling the grandkids: Macy’s fireworks, the Cloisters, a Broadway musical, shopping for Rachel and a restaurant that only serves variations on the cheese toastie for Jack. But until the kids steal the show, I’m enjoying some serious spoiling of my own: sushi last night, mussels and clams two nights before that, and a chocolate cake from Wegmans, the best supermarket on earth. It’s been good.

But I’m not one to keep all these good eats to myself. No, dear reader, although I’m not going to invite you come over for dinner,  I am going to send a few scrumptious recipes your way for a little taste of what life is like on the farm (where the only animal is my mom’s bratty dog Emily). Here’s what you can look for in the next week or so:

• “Surprise” Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
• Pork Fried Noodles direct from the heyday of Wo Hop
• The Perfect Pancake
• An interview with the brewmasters of Butternuts Beer and Ale

Hope to see y’all soon!

Okay, that’s probably a gross exaggeration; all right, it’s an outright lie, but sometimes I wonder if I’m just doing it all wrong.  It happens like this:  dinner is either a quick, rushed meal in between work and some other obligation or a more involved affair which I come to with no appetite since I’ve eaten so much of the raw ingredients during prep. I can’t help it; I’m starving after school and it’s impossible not to snack while I cook.

So what’s a girl to do?  I end up liking all the wonderful things that I cook with Leo better the next day as lunch – the pasta with hummus, for example, was an entirely different experience when it wasn’t prefaced by preparation (but it still needed hot sauce).  Should I throw in the towel and only eat leftovers?  If I only eat leftovers, when will I cook them?  They will have to be un-leftovers at some point…so confusing.

Dear reader, please offer your helpful suggestion to a girl in trouble. How do you deal with the dinner time crunch and still enjoy what you’ve cooked?

Would you know your fusilli from your orecchiette? How about the difference between linguine and fetucine? Maybe not, but I’d be willing to bet that you’d know pasta is delicious no matter what the shape. Still, if you’d like to impress your friends and family with your command of all pasta, great and small, then this fun and informative quiz is just what you need to shore up your shaky knowledge of pasta shapes. Alas, I only scored 71% but you can probably do better. Let us know in comments. Hat tip goes to Slashfood for this enjoyable time waster.

Photo credit: Rachel Been, AOL.

You know how sometimes you plan ahead and think you’ve got all your ducks in a row and all that but things still go south, way south? It was an experience like that for me on a Friday evening a couple of weeks ago. My daughter was having friends over (well, it turned out to be “friends;” it was advertised as just “friend,” but that’s another rant entirely). I was going to make this Thai chicken thing that sounded wonderful – peanut-crusted chicken with dipping sauce – and thought I was going to be so clever by chopping everything up for the breading the night before. Big mistake. Nightmarishly big mistake. Read the rest of this entry »

I loathe bus stations – terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls.

— The Doctor

I’ve always loved that quote from Doctor Who. Having traveled by bus a fair bit it certainly rings true for me. The thing is though, it could apply equally well to supermarkets. Well, not literally but the spirit of the quote applies I think. You see, I enjoy food and I adore the time I spend with Catherine cooking but I really detest supermarkets. It’s a bit of a running joke in our relationship how much I hate going shopping. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mexican Marshmallow Mire

A little bit of backstory is necessary here: I live in a dumpy apartment with a pathetic kitchen and insufficient cooking implements. How bad, you ask? Let me see: I don’t have a wooden spoon, I have this thing that looks like a paint stirrer, and my stove has two temperatures: “boiling over” and “is that on?” You get the picture. This set-up leads to a lot of improvisation on the occasions when I do attempt to cook there and, more often than not, culinary disasters of an amusing, if inedible nature. Read the rest of this entry »