OMG A Food Post, Finally. A Wednesday Night Dinner.

Blah blah blah this used to be a food blog & then I got pregnant & the food stopped, etc. 

I'm tried to remedy that. So here's what we ate tonight. 

Wild rice, sausages, Brussels sprouts, duck stock, shallots, dried Thai chilis from the garden the year before last. 

This is a pretty typical weeknight dinner for us, chipotle chicken sausages that Owen brought home from Fosters, some Brussels sprouts that needed to be used up, duck stock we made & froze when we had a duck last week. 

Some shallots, garlic, white wine, & butter aka the perfect way to cook almost anything. 

Wild rice & brown rice blend because I always get on a wild rice kick on the fall. 

All ingredients into one cast iron skillet. 

Bam. Dinner. 

Eaten in a bowl in bed because I either have to eat with Iris on my lap or laying down in bed next to me. 

Despite the fact that writing about food used to be my favorite thing I'm feeling strangely ambivalent about writing this. Last night I stopped writing to simply mess around on the internet & watch True Blood, & now with Iris napping on my lap I keep picking up my book or gazing out the window or going back to Facebook. 

That's what DustyRose is up to right now. Good old fashioned cat in a patch of sun. 

I don't know why this post is being difficult to write. This day makes no sense. Iris & I got up at 7:30 & it's now almost 2, & yet we just got dressed & still haven't taken the dog for a walk. It's starting to get less sunny & we should really head outside. I sort of feel like I've entered into the mama void today, the haze of the cycle of nursing & diapers & tummy time & books & playing & walking around in circles attempting to entertain the fussy child. If we have a plan we can get out of the house with relatively few problems, but on these days that we are home alone & Owen has the car, sometimes absolutely nothing happens & we have trouble even going for a walk before dark. It doesn't help that when I finally pulled myself together Iris just now fell asleep, on my lap, because I decided to nurse her one more time before going on a walk. When will I ever learn? 

So here we are, Iris napping while I fail to write a post about sausages, & fail to eat lunch today because I keep not planning well when Iris does let me put her down.

Ah well. I've kept a good fire going in the wood stove. We both are dressed. I brushed my teeth. I dashed out to feed the chickens & gather three eggs, two brown, one green. I started a load of laundry. I wrote this. 

And last nights sausages were pretty excellent. 

Ah she woke up. Let's try this walk business again. My goal is to keep it up with the food posts. Thanksgiving is next week, one of my favorite holidays because it is all about a big awesome meal, maybe I'll get inspired. 

Snow Day Nostaglia & General Laziness.

Slightly cheating black & white post (whatever I make the rules here). 

I have a lot of paintings in progress but they are all wet (damn watercolors) & I just felt like writing. 

It's a snowy evening here in Greenfield following a snowy afternoon, & I left work around noon (I am terrified of driving in snow) just in time to see my husband for exactly one minute before he headed for work (he's a better driver than me, & works about 25 miles closer to our house).

I've been at home with the animals all day. Started paging through the old sketchbook. 

I have been changing things around here & drawing less out of my sketchbook & more on paper & shit. Like a real artist. But you'll see little pieces of randomness from sketchbook here & there for old times sake.

So here are some unpainted drawings from a Mini-Vaca taken on an extremely rainy weekend last June.

6.9&8.11: Two Cape Cod Sandwiches.

A post-driving curried chicken salad sandwich & a next afternoon linguica & mustard sandwich, grilled & eaten on the deck overlooking the pond. Then some insane encounters with huge snapping turtles ensued. Damn those things are weird & prehistoric & creepy. Try swimming with one. & huge. Did I mention huge?

6.9.11: BBQ Pork During A Late Spring Thunderstorm.

Another one of Mum's great dinners. Plus the sort of thunderstorm I'm really looking forward to as we approach the end of winter. We had some thunder & heavy rain last week & it reminded me how good that sort of weather is.

 6.10.11: Egg Salad Sandwiches & Vintage Dresses.

Typical Cape Cod Mini-Vaca Sort Of Day. Ate some tasty sandwiches, some chips, purchased one of my now all time favorite dresses at a thrift shop in Yarmouth, & saw some swans on a pond. There were dogs.

 6.10.2011: Cookout!

All Cape Cod trips should include some sort of cookout.

The next morning we ate this meal, in the pouring rain we collected buckets of seaweed for the garden, & then we drove home. 

 I'm fearing we won't have much Cape Cod Summer this year.
We really like our new house. We can grill in the yard here. We can hang out outside here. I can sit on top of the hill & enjoy the view of cornfields & the neighboring dairy farm, & draw & read there. We aren't stuck in town in Noho anymore.  We are making the kind of farming-style commitments that make travel complicated. I think we all need to recover from losing a major part of those summers.
That's all. Apologies for the lack of color. It's still snowing. I'll probably be back with more tomorrow.

Butternut Squash #2: With Homemade Sausage In A Lasagna Thing.

As promised, the skipped #2.

10.27.2011: Butternut Squash Week #2: 

 A sort of lasagna, with alternating layers of thinly sliced butternut squash, homemade spicy pork sausage, crushed red chilis, red sauce, garlic, onions, & boursin, burrata (cream filled mozzarella), & parmesan. Served over pasta.

I just made this up. I like making up lasagna type things, or so I call them, they are usually only lasagnas in the sense that they involve layers (remember bacon as noodles?)

But truly, who doesn't prefer meat noodles to past noodles? 

Basically, it is fun to throw a bunch of different meats & veggies into a cast iron dutch oven & bake them & cover the whole mess with cheese. I made a lovely lasagna last fall with butternut squash & homemade green tomato sauce we had canned from the abundance of green tomatoes we produced in our garden in 2010. My favorite vegetarian main course is a pesto & mashed potato lasagna.

On this particular night, we had butternut squash, of course, & we had the same homemade pork sausage that went into this meal.

No recipe. Just layers layers layers. Use what you have-this a great way to get rid of random grocery items in the fridge in a delicious fashion. 

One of the first things I ever learned to cook & still one of my top three comfort foods (eggplant parm, curry, tuna casserole) was my mom's eggplant parmesan & maybe that's why I like layers of vegetables & meat & cheese & sauce so much.

Thus concludes the The Great Butternut Squash Food Challenge Of 2011. 

I think. I know we never had recipe #7, but once we had power & you could buy groceries again, we moved on. Blame it on the power outage. We do still have squash, so maybe I'll do one more, but no promises, since that week is long over. 

Six out of seven ain't bad, though, right?

Butternut Squash #1: Stuffed, With (Homemade) Sausage & Wild Rice.

& now, back to the cooking! Sorry about all that whining the other day. I've pulled it together, i.e. the house isn't so bad, I did some laundry, I paid the bills, I had a lovely night of wine & food with a lovely friend, & I've actually done quite a bit of watercoloring at the kitchen table.
We bought a bushel of butternut squash for our wedding-you know, you are trying to feed a lot of people cheaply & you live in New England & it's fall, you end up with winter squash. Of course, because we have very helpful & food oriented families, we ended up with way too much food & didn't use the squash.
Forward to about a month after the wedding-we are kind of broke & Owen & I have been driving around with both our cars full of butternut squash for weeks. The only solution was The Great Butternut Squash Food Challenge Of 2011, where we made a new meal out of those pesky car squashes every night for roughly a week instead of buying new ingredients.

10.26.2011: Butternut Squash Week #1: 

Stuffed with our homemade spicy pork sausage, wild rice cooked in homemade duck stock, garden shallots, garlic, & rosemary, lots of butter, & raw milk Parmesan cheese.

This is one of my all-time classic recipes. That was another theme of The Butternut Squash Challenge, classic well loved recipes. Winter squash is really versatile, & lends itself to whatever you feel like cooking already. I invented this for a date, once upon a time ago, I made it at my birthday dinner party two years ago, & I made it for the lovely Melissa last night, because we STILL have stray squashes rolling around in our cars.

Obviously, this works with any squash, & I rather prefer acorns, delicata, or dumplings, but hey, the whole bushels of butternuts was cheaper & it's really pretty much the same.

Split squashes, roast with olive oil. Cook a basic wild rice blend, I like the Lundenberg Organic blend but a mix of short grain brown rice & wild works too, preferably in a poultry basic stock (I like duck stock). Meanwhile saute shallots, garlic, rosemary & herbs de provence in butter & white wine. Add sausage (for this we had some of our first ever batch of homemade sausage). Add rice & more stock. Simmer. Add to squash, cover with cheese, whatever you like, but I like parm or gruyere or swiss. Back in the oven, then eat! Fun times.

Yeah by the way, we have been making our own sausages, thanks to our wedding present Kitchen Aid stand mixer & wedding present meat grinding & sausage stuffing attachments. Just week Owen boned an entire turkey (turkeys are real cheap at Stop & Shop right now) & it became variously flavored turkey sausage. Being poor ain't so bad. 

AS long as you use what you have-i.e. turning cheap meat in awesome sausage & making stock from the bones. 

There you have it-Stuffed Squash, liz style. 

11.4.2011: dog & cat. 

Oh, & that's just a picture of my dog & cat.
For good measure.

Hurricane Soup. Or Tropical Depression Soup?

See, I promised I'd be back with some actual food! & what better occasion than Hurricane Irene Sunday, here on the East Coast. After days of Hurricane Drama, by yesterday around here it seemed like just about time to give in, purchase provisions (i.e. wine & beer, food & novels), & get ready to stay home. Last night we got prepared by making a giant lentil soup, the purpose of which was to cook as many things in the fridge as possible in case we lost power today (which we didn't, by the way).

8.28.2011: Hurricane (Lentil & Sausage) Soup.

Into the trusty giant white cast iron enamel pot went chicken apple sausage, lentils, onions, garlic, potatoes, ginger, leftover chicken, chicken stock from the same chicken, the last of our garden atomic red & purple haze carrots, & lots of cumin. Since this took a while to cook, while waiting we also consumed the last of the amazing Stop & Shop frozen appetizers we purchased on a recent late night trip, the silly kind where one might by tempted by such items as mac n' cheese triangles & jalapeno poppers. Then we went dancing in the rain.
All in all it's been a pretty good hurricane. My work was delightfully cancelled, & nothing bad happened other than it was kind of anticlimatic I guess.
But it's very cozy here at home, & Owen is brewing beer in the kitchen while I get reacquainted with my blog & listen to Amanda Palmer in our room. We walked the dog over to check out the rather dramatically high Mill River, we addressed the last of our wedding invitations, & we thought it a perfect occasion to drink wine in the afternoon. Even thought the part of my soul that loves storms was secretly looking for a little action, I learned in New Orleans to not play around with hurricanes, so I'm really very happy with how today turned out. Always marry the guy you can spend a perfect hurricane with, that's what I say.

Memorial Day Weekend Meat Fest.

Look, I finally managed a timely holiday post! EnD, live from Memorial Day Weekend 2011!
I don't generally get three day weekends off, & I didn't this one either, but still I like to be festive. It was 90 degrees almost all weekend & I have definitely been ready & waiting to celebrate a weekend truly summer style, with, obviously, lots o' meat products.

Bacon Many Ways: Memorial Day Weekend 2011. 

Friday night we got old fashioned & grilled burgers in the driveway behind my 1989 Toyota Cressida (homemade bacon sausage cheddar jalapeno burgers using leftover ground bacon sausage we conveniently had lying around). Sitting on the hood of an old car at dusk drinking PBR & cooking meat. Sigh. Good times.
Then Sunday night dinner with Izaac rolled around, & that always means something special. A bacon weave wrapped around ground steak & then deep fried, bacon & collards, & garlic roasted marrow bones & toast, in this case. & the champagne of beers, since it was a holiday, after all.
Besides eating bacon, I cleaned off the front porch & hauled a table & chairs out there, & that's where I did this drawing just now, mojito in hand. The dog & I swam in the river, I planted dragon beans & repotted lots of tomatoes, & I spent as much time as possible in the sun. It's currently Monday afternoon, the dog is passed out exhausted from all the fun (he enjoyed a lot of marrow bone activity last night) & I am going to take advantage of more good porch time.
The drawing happens to complete this particular sketchbook, begun last November with these drawings.
Here's to opening my new sketchbook & another season of eating & drawing.

Remember DnD?

I know y’all do. Home of so much past brilliance.
So... last Friday night Jed of Drinking & Drawing fame made a special appearance back in Noho at the EnD kitchen. & Owen, in Jed's honor, made an insane meat concoction. How insane? Well, he started with sausages & bacon in a cast iron skillet, poured the grease into the deep fryer, ground the meat in our trusty meat grinder (a free pile find), battered them in cornmeal, & deep fried them in our trusty deep fryer (a $2 Hospice Shop find).

5.13.2011: Friday the 13th with Jed & Pabst. 

All accompanied by ample PBR, aka the official beer of DnD. (although we do enjoy others). There was dancing, there was the Deuce, there was an after-party, there were the bizarre snacks Jed brought us back from his recent trip to Korea, consumed at 4am. Sounds like DnD.
Since Owen & I have become tame, early rising, stay at home, dog owning people, this night was much needed & appreciated but required some recovery the next day.

5.14.2011: Rainy Saturday Night Dinner.

 Otherwise known as "Recovery Dinner." When you, well ok, I, am rather hungover from a 4am+ kind of night, & then get caught in the rain on a walk with my hound dog, I like to turn to my comfort foods. This time, mashed potatoes were on my mind. Post-rain storm & soaking wet, I mostly wanted to cuddle on the couch with Walty & read trashy novels all night, so I felt like throwing something delicious into my beloved red Le Creuset baking dish & leaving it in the oven for a while. Third source of inspiration? Being in dire need of a vegetable after last night's fried meat fest, also in need of a touch of flavor complexity.
Hence, Miso Chili Ginger Baked Tofu, Cheesy Garlic Mashed Potatoes, & Kale Sauted with Garlic & Cumin Seed.
It was pretty good. EnD, your source for hangover tips. Three cheers to the whole weekend. Jed, come visit again soon.
& Hey everyone, in case you were wondering, it is still raining here...

Blogging With The Windows Open, & Green Times Three.

We had our first 75+ day here in Western Massachusetts, & it was pretty sweet. There's is just something about being actually hot...outside in the early evening walking a hound dog beside a river with a breeze promising warm rain, wearing a t-shirt & a skirt, bare legs, bare arms (but cowboy boots of course). The water expectant with future swimming, the air carrying smells of grilled meat & green things growing. I can't help it, I love hot weather. Living in New Orleans totally ruined me, I like sweating. 

Having the windows open after all these months of winter is a joyful experience. I slept in bliss last night because there was a constant breeze through the open window. & tonight, sitting in the kitchen after having fed the animals, drawing at the kitchen table with a glass of chilled white wine, hearing the random music from the Community Music Center next door, various conversations on the street, smells, & the feel on my skin of that warm, soft breeze. I love air. The worst part of winter is all that time inside.

Oh & the lack of fresh food possibly grown or gathered by oneself! Hey fresh food, you are almost here! Ramps, lettuces, fiddleheads, morels, oh yes! 

& now it has begun to rain. Perfect. One of life's great pleasures=the sound & smell of warm rain with the windows open.

In a spring mood, although the garden is just beginning & the farmers markets haven't started & fiddleheads will be a while yet, I give you three green moments of early spring anticipation.

Green #1. Spring Sunday Dinner (we love Spring Dinners & Sunday Dinners!)(& dogs & cats): 

4.3.11: Cilantro/Almond Pesto with Hot Italian Sausage & Peperoncini over Pappardelle.

I really love Cilantro Pesto. Very spring tasting, even if it's too early to grow it yet. So what, at least the bundle I used cost a dollar at the Asian Market. But Cilantro Pesto, check it out, made just like any Pesto, use any nuts, any cheese, olive oil, garlic, salt & pepper, a bunch of cilantro, you're there. & like Arugula Pesto, this is a good one to make spicy & add peppers or hot sauce. I wouldn't make it for my Grampa though. 

Green #2: Recently buried in the back of the fridge I found several large Mason Jars of Spicy Green Tomato Pickles we pickled last fall at the end of our huge garden tomato crop. I guess they got forgotten back there in the fridge, but wow I just found them the other night & they are delicious.

We just mostly pickled them like they were cucumbers: sliced green (unripe green, not green heirloom) Mason Jar, allspice, mustard seed, garlic, coriander, cumin, whatever, salt, pepper & vinegar, & added some habaneros we also had in excess from the garden. These guys are really pretty great, also coming in handy for my new project, Bento Box Lunches For Work, inspired by this fabulous blog. (stay tuned).

September 2010-April 2011: Spicy Green Tomato Pickles From Last Year's Garden. 

& finally, Green #3: 

April 2011: A Sketch of Our Future 2011 Garden.

We have an additional plot there this year, so if all goes well, twice the food (If only we could somehow fit in chickens & a goat, maybe a sheep, maybe a cow, we could realize our dream of not buying food). We have tiny radishes, beets, & cabbages growing there. Chard & carrot seeds are planted (Bright Lights for the chard & Purple Haze & Atomic Red for the carrots). A gentle spring rain is falling on them right now. 

We will be eating radish & lettuce salads from the garden before we know it. & drawing them, & swimming. & sleeping with the windows open all the time. 

Winter 2010, In Random Dinners.

I'm still in a similar mental place to my last post, still feeling archivey, still hiding out in our room, still digging around in the old sketchbooks & rediscovering memories through drawings. Winter is still totally kicking my ass, so my motivation for complicated projects & exciting new recipes is low.

What has been keeping me going throughout these last (hopefully) weeks of horrible snowy icy slushy winter (spring! gardens! soon!) has been just the appreciation of our everyday life here, that we make time to cook & eat dinner together even when it's complicated, even when we hate each other, that we collect objects we like & live in a space that however cluttered & messy looks like us, that we have sweet sweet animals, good kitchen stuff & a cozy home.

Last winter was our first few months of really living together, so these pages of my sketchbook are especially sweet to me.

It is really feeling right now that Winter 2011 is never ever going to end, so to give us hope, some moments from Winter 2010, which did end eventually, becoming this.

1.11.10: Black Bean Chicken Chili.

1.13.2010: Scallops & Noodles.

1.19.10: Sausages & Peppers & Spinach & Whiskey Shots.

1.12.2010: Thyme & Shallot Salmon Fillet, With Broccoli & Cheese.

3.7.10: Weird Curry Stir-Fry.

Sometimes I just want to leave the pictures here by themselves, because to me, the specific details alone mean so much.

We ate this on this date, & it looked like this. That comforts me, when life seems bizarre & overwhelming, I guess just like actually cooking food does.

Would anyone care about that? Does anyone care anyway? When I was in art school I kept a very specific food I ate journal in my sketchbook, maybe I should just start posting those.

But I love those pages, when I look back, even as I laugh at how pretentious I was. Sometimes I can feel the specific moment, smell it, taste it, just from reading those lists.

Damn this blog is getting verbal!

I'll try to dig myself out of this hole soon, the potential of this sort of meal will help, but I have a few more of these style posts planned for the next month or so, then it's garden time.

Dinners at 133 #2: Spicy Sauce & Sausage.

The next installment of the winter dinners series.

11.30.2009: Spicy Spaghetti Sauce with Sausage, Over Cappellini.

The last day of November, a day I did not work, it was a classically damp chilly November day, & I walked a lot in the mist, & as a remedy for the crap weather, on my way home I went to Deals & Steals & Serio's Market & State Street & acquired cans of tomato paste & cappellini noodles & fresh italian sausage & garlic & shallots & jalapenos & red wine & made this & Owen came home earlier than expected & we actually got to eat dinner at a normal hour. & I used my Christmas napkins for the first time, in honor of the arrival of December.

As Summer Draws To A Close...

...some drawings from an early August trip to Cape Cod that never got posted due to pre-DnDnD2k09 excitement. (Family, Friends, Food, & all the complications that ensue.)

First night leftovers dinner in the guest room at my mom's house, when that sort of thing was still comforting.

The next morning, a classic trip to the sparrow & what was formerly new york bagels, followed by even more classic cape cod church thriftstoring. Oh, Joanie's.

2nd night of the visit, when the leftovers all alone in my room thing gets angry, & way too reminiscent of high school.

But then, a fabulous lunch with gramma the next day at Clancy's.
"It's too early for a martini so I guess I'll have a margarita."
Yes! & a FRIED SCALLOP PLATTER.
& then we went to job lot & the astonishingly good dennis marshall's.
heart heart heart, gramma, guess where my personality came from?
OH, RIGHT, YOU.

Followed by a much needed dinner party with jed & melissa back in noho at my then brand new apartment. First shared meal at the new apartment, in fact.
& I believe jed drew us both bending over a lot while unpacking books in short skirts, & then we all went to the 11's to dance, cause it was wednesday.

This brief moment of summer 2009, brought to you by my current need to remember the more innocent times.