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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…

Related posts:

1. About Food In The Fort
2. Upgrading Food In The Fort
3. Our favorite lumpy garlic mashed potatoes

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.

The other problem, perhaps a much bigger issue for me, is that the Flexible Upload plugin has a not insignificant bug. Luckily, I found via the Flexible Upload developer’s forums that nerdTainment has provided a patch to correct the problem until the Flexible Upload developer can roll it into the official release.

Oh, there was one other thing… Apparently because the way WordPress handles attachments (like images), the old CSS styling for the image thumbnails no longer worked. Leaving my old CSS rules in place I simply added the following rules to style.css in the Freshy 2 theme’s directory. This will probably work just fine with whatever theme you’re using, although I can’t promise it won’t blow up in your face.

.attachment { margin: 10px; padding: 5px; border: 1px solid #aaa; }
.alignright { float: right; }
.alignright { float: left; }
.aligncenter { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }

Well, that’s it for now. I think I’ll go reward myself with hot dogs, chips and cheap beer.

Related posts:

1. Upgrading Food In The Fort
2. I can haz upgradez?

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!

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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?

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1. Suckling on the glass teat for dinner

Photo credit: Rachel Been, AOL.

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So I failed at this recipe completely, but I think it’s worth another try. If you’d like to give it a shot, here it is:

Peanut-crusted chicken with dipping sauce

Chicken breading:

• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 1 inch piece fresh gingerroot, peeled and finely grated
• 1 lemongrass stalk, outer leaves removed, finely chopped
• 2 Tbsp chopped, fresh cilantro leaves
• scant 1 ⅓ cups salted peanuts
• ¾ cups flour
• 2 eggs
• 4 Tbsp milk

• 12 chicken drumsticks, skin removed

Dipping sauce:

• 1 fresh red chili, seeded and finely chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
• ½ cup white wine vinegar
• 2 Tbsp dark brown sugar

Chicken prep:

1. Preheat the oven to 350˚
2. Place the garlic, gingerroot, lemongrass, cilantro leaves, peanuts and 2 Tbsp of the flour in a food processor; blend until finely ground; transfer to a shallow dish
3. In a bowl, beat together the eggs and milk
4. Spread the remaining flour on a plate
5. Dip the drumsticks into the flour, then the egg mixture and finally the peanut mixture; arrange them in an oiled roasting pan
6. Bake for 30 minutes, then turn and cook for another 30 minutes; pour off any excess oil and bake for another 5 minutes or until very crisp

Sauce prep:

1. Grind the chili and garlic to a paste using a mortar and pestle
2. Put the vinegar and sugar in a pan; heat gently until the sugar dissolves; bring to a boil and simmer for 2 minutes
3. Stir in the chili-garlic paste and transfer to a bowl
4. Drain the drumsticks on paper towels and serve with the sauce.

————————

Notes:

1. The amounts of garlic suggested are, of course, ridiculously scanty.
2. I don’t know what lemongrass looks like or where to find it, so I ignored that bit.
3. The cooking time and temperature may not be spot-on; the temp is reduced and the time is increased from the original (since the original resulted in chicken which was burnt on the outside and a health hazard on the inside).

Related posts:

1. When Good Foods Go Bad – Part 1
2. Friday Night Fish Fry at Ya Boy – The Way the Good Lord Intended
3. East Meets West Chicken

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.

But I can’t help it. Supermarkets are dreadful, dreary places and everybody there seems to want to be somewhere else. Which is kind of odd considering how so many people can be found parked in the middle of the aisle having endless cellphone consultations about what sort of ketchup to buy. And then there’s the whole organizational thing. I understand why supermarkets are laid out the way they are but I can’t help but think of it as a personal affront that I have to traverse the entire length of the supermarket and back again just to get a quart of milk. I won’t even go into the numerous indignities to be suffered while waiting in line.

Thus Marketing Daily’s report on a new study that shows people will be increasingly choosing to shop at a number of smaller, specialized grocery outlets comes as no surprise to me. As Susan Reda, executive editor of the industry magazine Stores says,

“Grocery retailers answered the call to build bigger, more efficient one-stop shops where their customers could buy merchandise and groceries in the same place. Now, the pendulum seems to be swinging back, as consumers are saying they prefer more intimate, smaller, customized grocery stores.“

Unfortunately, large grocery retailers are responding not with more logical, compartmentalized layouts but with amounts to in-store fast food restaurants as they add separate entrances and dedicated checkouts for prepared foods.

Fortunately though, Fort Wayne has a large number of smaller ethnic grocery stores servicing our large Hispanic and Asian communities. These are great places to not only get that hard-to-find ingredient for that special Thai dish you’re making but all around nice places to shop in general. And let’s not forget Three Rivers Co-Op. I might wish they didn’t sell homeopathic remedies, and they are on the pricey side, but their food can’t be beat. Why not give one of our smaller grocery stores a try? You just might discover something new and you’re almost sure to avoid clueless drones phoning home from the ketchup aisle.

In the coming months Catherine and I hope to profile some of the smaller grocery stores (and some of the big ones too) in the area and let you know what we find. Keep on reading or subscribe to our feed to be notified of new posts.

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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.

Last week I decided to win points with my daughter by making her rice crispy treats. My son, the same child who won’t eat any cereal that does not have the word “cocoa” in the name and who argues for the existence of “breakfast dessert,” doesn’t like rice crispy treats. Go figure. So I opened up the cupboard and pulled out the package of pink and white marshmallows (be sure to read the description) I had recently bought at Los Lagos, which is the Mexican grocery at Fairfield and Creighton, and got busy. Unfortunately, my one and only pot had dinner in it, so I cast about for a way to melt the butter and marshmallows. Of course, my 200 year old microwave should be just the thing!

Okay, if you’ve ever put a marshmallow in the microwave, you know that they puff up to ten times their normal size. I knew that; everyone knows that. But I figured that if I just kept a close eye on them and beat them down with the paint stirrer every 30 seconds or so, we’d be in business. How wrong I was. After cheerfully watching the marshmallows balloon up – it was really cool – and squashing them down for a couple of minutes, my enthusiasm began fade and I started to realize that this just wasn’t going to work. Plus they were sticky, really sticky; they were threatening to suck the paint stirrer in and never give it up. I quickly switched tacks. Since I didn’t have another pot, I decided to give a metal mixing bowl a try. Seemed reasonable. No, no it was not reasonable. Those things are not meant for stovetop use. As the pinkish lump of marshmallow began to brown on the bottom, I knew I had to cut my losses and compost the entire mess. (The dog couldn’t believe that I wasn’t slopping the whole sticky lump into his bowl.) I bought my daughter off with candy and ended the evening a wiser, if sadder person.

Related posts:

1. When Good Foods Go Bad – Part 2