Cooking

There are 3 posts tagged Cooking (this is page 1 of 1).

Reading the right Dorothy

The Asiago & Spinach Stuffed Chicken turned out great yesterday — it was easily one of the best meals I’ve cooked this year. The hardest part was actually assembling the chicken breasts, which need to be cut into (forgive the terminology) meat pockets so you can stuff in the spinach and sun-dried tomatoes and cheese. Once put together, I seared the chicken breasts in a cast iron skillet and put them in the oven to cook all the way through.

After buying sun-dried tomatoes, though, I started thinking, “I bet I could make those myself,” and, sure enough, it isn’t difficult to do:

It seems like a fun project … if it weren’t the dead of winter. If I try to leave a bunch of tomatoes outside now, they’re just going to freeze and/or get stolen by the gangs of obese city squirrels that roam my neighborhood.

It looks like you can dehydrate them in the oven, but that wouldn’t be “sun-dried,” would it? “Oven-dried tomatoes“ doesn’t have the same flair. Although who wants to wait six months until you can actually try this? Maybe I’ll give the oven-dried ones a shot, then in the warmer months I can … *checks notes* leave fruit unattended outside all day.

Wait, that can’t be right.

Ha — I bought the $0.99 “The Portable Dorothy Parker” off the Kindle store, only to discover that Amazon is selling a mistitled version of a collection of Dorothy L. Sayers’ works. I honestly read a whole chapter thinking, “I didn’t know Parker wrote mysteries. Fun!” before doing a little digging to get to the bottom of things. It looks like Amazon really put the wrong cover on a book and is selling it.

Bearing that in mind … it seems as if I can’t find a digital copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker. I guess there’s not a lot of demand for that one.

A little bit of research tells me that books in The Portable … series were first published by Viking Press in 1944 and were meant to be pocket-sized editions of “selected works” from various authors. (I believe I have The Portable Emerson floating around downstairs somewhere.) So, in keeping with the spirit of this endeavor, I’m just going to read a whole bunch of Dorothy Parker and call it good.

I was able to find a digital version of her Complete Stories, so I’ll check that one out. How different can it possibly be?

She’s a great writer with an interesting history, so I’m sure I can’t go wrong. Assuming I’m reading the right Dorothy this time.

Is goat cheese pretentious

Sarah got me a cookbook for Christmas. Taste of Home: Cooking for Two: 317 Quick & Easy Recipes Perfect for Small Households. I have been trying to branch out into cooking more advanced dishes over the last few years, but my culinary zeal is somewhat tempered by being horribly exhausted all the time. I very rarely want to cook a whole-ass meal when I get home, and when I do cook, I usually make so much that we have leftovers for about two days. Which gets old.

This book, though, has some good options that aren’t time consuming, don’t require a bunch of ingredients, and won’t have us eating chicken curry three days in a row.

This week, I’m going to try the Goat Cheese & Spinach Stuffed Chicken. Except I’m not going to use goat cheese, because WTF. Who uses goat cheese?

“I’m just going to get some … artisanal asiago,” I told Sarah. We were in the cheese section of our local Baker’s, which has a surprisingly large selection, and I picked up a small bag of grated cheese that seemed as if it belonged in Italy. “You don’t think that it will mess with the … integrity of the dish, do you? Not using goat cheese?”

“It’ll be fine,” Sarah said. “I don’t even like goat cheese.”

Right? I don’t think anybody in the world prefers goat cheese, and if they do, they’re probably the sort of people that use a wine decanter because “it needs to breathe.” No it doesn’t. You’re just trying to justify the $300 decanter you bought at Marks & Spencer.

Anywho. The dish is basically a chicken breast stuffed with spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, and cheese. You can’t go wrong no matter what kind of cheese you pick, and I think a nice asiago will do just fine.

I’ll serve it with baked asparagus. (Did someone say bacon-wrapped?)

I didn’t read much Dorothy Parker yesterday. After school, I came right home and did my first week’s homework for this semester’s online class, which is called, “Self-Care for Educators.” A whole class dedicated to tips for fighting burnout! I can dig it.

It’s exciting because I guarantee, at some point this semester, I will be stressed out about an assignment for a class that’s literally teaching me how to be less stressed out.

It’s kind of like having a class called, “How to Get More Sleep” and scheduling it for 5:00 AM.

I’ll be jumping into Dorothy Parker with both feet this morning. This afternoon, too, after I do a bit of cleaning up in our dining room. (It’s been all cluttered since Christmas.)

Mortar & Pestle & Merton

Yesterday was a long one. We had hours of teacher meetings in the morning, a chili cook-off around noon, and then I spent the biggest part of the day getting plans ready, weeping in the corner, hanging up newly printed classroom signs, and three-hole-punching any paper careless enough to get caught. (Mostly kidding about the weeping bit.)

In the evening, Sarah and I sat in our basement listening to records and chatting. As we discussed (mostly nonsense), I told Sarah about this YouTuber I’d watched recently. “She’s Asian-American and…a chef, maybe? I don’t know. Anyway, what she does is get stoned and then cook Asian food.”

While I’m not a huge fan of glorifying drug use, it’s fun to watch because of the crude nature of the channel. Nothing seems well organized, and there are no steps in the cooking process that are overly complicated. “You get the feeling that you, too, could cook these dishes,” I told Sarah. “Spring rolls seem approachable now. Only I’d need a mortar and pestle to make that sauce.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “They’re so useful. You can make guacamole, too.”

“I love guacamole.”

It boggled my mind then that we had, seemingly, just talked ourselves into getting a mortar & pestle. As far as purchases go, that may be the most frivolous, white, middle-class kitchen gadget you could possibly get. Unless you’re a witch or an alchemist, nobody needs a mortar and pestle. But I’m pretty sure we’ll wind up getting one.

One person who would never, ever decide to purchase a mortar and pestle is Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain (#628 on the list). I took a break from Ten Years in the Tub to listen to a reading of Thomas Merton’s “CLASSIC CLASSIC CLASSIC” autobiography.

It’s the story of how a young man grew up in the years between WWI and WWII, traveled around the world, went to school, and eventually became a Trappist Monk in Kentucky.

If you don’t know about Trappist Monks, they’re about as close to what I imagine medieval ascetic monks must have been like. They wear simple robes, shave a strange little crown of hair around their domes, sleep 5 hours a night in rooms with no heating or cooling, pray for hours on end, and take breaks by doing backbreaking labor on their communal farms.

Then they chant in Latin while walking through town square, repeatedly banging their faces with wooden planks. And certainly never cooking anything that requires a mortar & pestle.

Merton is a fine writer, but I find that anybody who tries to write a book about “grace,” they move down a dark and winding path that eventually leads them to right up their own asses. Seriously, nobody can explain what grace is, yet religious authors keep trying.

I mean. This:

“It is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God who chooses to awaken us. We cannot attain to Him by our own unaided strength, for without His grace, the will to love Him is absent. He loved us first. And the greatness of His love lies in the fact that He loved us when we were unworthy to be loved.”

I challenge anyone to explain to me, in practical language, what that quote actually means.

Anywho, despite the Mandarin (read: “flowery”) language, The Seven Storey Mountain was the audiobook equivalent of the feeling you get sitting on a garden bench, drinking a cup of Jasmine tea, and wondering if your life would be better if you were a squirrel or small bird. I’m envious of people who have the will to become ascetics, to throw themselves into such routines, mostly because I don’t think I’d ever be strong enough to do it.

But I really like stor(e)ys about people who are. Merton’s story fits the bill, but most of it is unremarkable. I mean, at one point, he begrudgingly takes a job as a college professor. This was before going full-on Monk, and the job seems greatly bemoaned. “Woe is me! Fate has damned me to a life of teaching rich kids about 18th century literature! However will I cope?”

Not exactly “high stakes.”

Still, it’s peaceful and ponderous and I enjoyed it. Now I’ll get back to Ten Years in the Tub, which is thus far serving as a painful reminder of all the books that I’ll never have time to read.