Have Fork, Will Eat

Fancy title, isn’t it?  Anyway, I have all these pictures that I take throughout the week of various meals I make.  Some meals I blog, some I don’t.  Some pictures go up on the site, some don’t.  I figured that since I’m recovering from a brief bout of illness just now, I’ll make myself feel better (and make you feel hungry) by looking at some of the delicious food photos I’ve collected over the year so far.  Some are for posted recipes; if you’re interested, just use the search bar on the top of the page to find them. Some were just from experiments here and there. Let me know if there’s something you’re curious about. Happy Friday.

Josh sent me this and I have to share it.  Manatees need their veggies, too:

Well, it’s done.  We closed on our first home and moved in.  Seriously, in just two days.  Closed on the house on Friday, moved in on Saturday, kitchen up and running on Sunday.  That’s how I roll.

Anyway, I learned three very important things during this whole process:

1.  I have a lot of kitchen stuff.  A lot.  You might think some of it was unnecessary.  It’s not.

2.  A clean, neat kitchen is a happy kitchen.  In fact, getting the kitchen neat and clean sort of set the happy tone for unpacking the rest of the house.

3.  Eating out three times a day every day for any length of time sucks.  I mean, really, seriously on a Hoover-esque level sucks.

4.  Hardwood floors are rough on the feet.  Wear slippers.

That’s four things.  I promised three.  Consider that last one an extra tip on me.

While I did love my apartment dearly—fantastic cathedral ceilings, roomy, just a block away from Whole Foods and a great little Chinese restaurant—I am deeply smitten with our new house, I won’t lie.  I also greatly enjoy the opportunity to start out with a fresh, clean blank slate of a kitchen—especially a bigger kitchen where I can really spread out as far as my little gourmet heart desires. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh. My. Bacon.  It’s a whole new year.  It’s a new decade.  How awesome and weird and terrifying is that?  And all over the intarwebs, I keep coming across articles and tweets and posts celebrating the fact that you (yes, you), never again have to utter the extra syllables required to say “two thousand and _ [enter number here]” but can instead shorten that puppy down to “twenty ten” or “twenty eleven” or “twenty you get the idea,” even though, really, isn’t that so last century? But whatever.

Me, I myself am less concerned with how many syllables are required to pronounce the current year and more concerned with a grave and serious question that I’m certain perplexes even the gods themselves: should I make brownies or cake?  I’m really leaning towards brownies here.  Partially because I’m feeling fudgy and partially because cake really requires there to be frosting and I just don’t feel up to frosting right now.  I have a hit-or-miss relationship with frosting.  It always comes out okay but never great and I think that’s partially a result of my blasé attitude towards frosting all together.  I really prefer ganache or simple whipped cream and somehow, frosting seems to pick up on that and it gets a little offended and then I just can’t do anything with it.

Of course, that’s not all I’m concerned about, whether to make brownies or cake (and by the way, it would have been a chocolate cake because I still believe that real desserts contain cocoa).  I’m also concerned about making crepes that don’t stick, roasting chickpeas (will I really eat them like a snack?  Or just say,” aww aren’t those cute” and store them in jars as a purely decorative element in my kitchen?), using up the four puff pastry sheets I’ve managed to build up in my freezer, global warming, this year’s (that’s 2010, btw) strawberry crop, which photos I want to blow up and frame as art in our new home—oh, and we’re buying a house, did I mention that one?  And will hopefully be closing in…oh two weeks.  Hopefully.

And on top of all of that, there’s the simple question of: what to do about this blog?

Now don’t be alarmed.  Step away from the fire extinguisher.  No sudden moves.  No hasty decisions.  Do not panic.  I am not ending my blog.  I actually want to focus on it more.  So what I’m wondering about is the direction in which I want to go–what else do I want to say?  What do you want from me?  Why are we here?  Why do people insist on putting nuts in brownies?  It’s all very confusing.  But I will sort it out—except for, perhaps, that last one.

In addition to content, I’ll be updating the design too, particularly since I’ll be moving to a self-hosted version of WordPress and will have more freedom.  So all the time design ideas dance like sugarplums in my head.  Doing the Charleston, specifically.  Those crazy sugarplums.

I may be a bit quiet for the next couple of weeks.  I’ll try to post things here and there, so that you know I’m still conscious, thinking of you and most importantly, eating.  And after the next life change is done (seriously, after what it takes to buy a house, I am honestly going to live in this one until I die, and then I’m going to haunt it.  Mostly the kitchen), the blog changes will commence.

It’s a new year and we’re moving forward.  Mostly because it’s hard to get your computer’s calendar to run backwards.  Unless you’re Superman and you fly in reverse around the earth, forcing everything to move back in time.  Which I would totally do.  Except it would, of course, tear a giant hole in the space-time continuum, throw the world off its axis, destroy the universe as we know it and, most relevantly, keep me from getting my brownie.

I’m hungry.