There's just no excuse not to eat well.

As most of my friends know, I'm a lawyer but I'm currently refreshing my nursing license as well (in my spare time, ha!). To do this, I am required to work three 12-hour shifts in Macon every week until I reach a total of 160 hours. I'm almost done, but not quite.

What this also means for me, given that Macon is about an hour's drive from where I live, is that I am depending on the kindness of friends and family who allow me to crash with them between shifts. Now, I can do without being at home (though I'd rather not), and I can do without sleep (again, I'd rather not), but what I cannot, simply WILL not, do without is decent food.

The first week, I made a big container of pimento cheese, took a supply of cooked bacon, homegrown jalapenos, homemade chocolate chip pecan cookies, yogurt, and various other goodies, to which I looked very forward every day at lunch and again at dinner. The second week, I stocked my locker with fresh tomatoes from my garden, cans of octopus in olive oil (if you haven't tried this, you're really missing out), avocados, and more homemade cookies - peanut butter this time.

Earlier this week, I made almond chocolate chip flax cookies - not my best cookie work, but not bad. I have a few of those left, but I'm really a little burned out on pimento cheese and octopus. And, despite the fact that my husband smoked a fabulous hunk of pork this weekend, I can't really stomach the idea of eating meat every day for three days running. So here I am, the night before my stretch, with nothing in my lunch bag (which is the size of a generous grocery sack - needless to say, all my friends are quite amused when I walk in with my "lunch," which is almost bigger than I am!)

On the way home from errands this afternoon, however, I had a breakthrough: what about salad nicoise? Great idea for the first day, no doubt, but I've got three bleak days of trying to avoid eating hospital food ahead of me. In the end, I decided to construct a salad nicoise of giant proportions - one that could easily be made to span three days (maybe more).

I ran home from my errands, dug, peeled & rinsed some potatoes and threw them on with a little olive oil to boil under a steamer of fresh asparagus - talk about two birds and a single stone! I have some albacore tuna on hand, and I just happened to have a fresh bundle of romaine lettuce, which I shredded by hand and to which I added a handful of fresh basil from the garden. Meanwhile, I put 4 eggs on to boil and threw together a lovely vinaigrette of avocado oil, white wine vinegar, fresh ground pepper, salt, and brown mustard seeds, a little dijon and a touch of garlic (heavy on the vinegar). A sleeve of crackers, a jar of capers, some fresh homegrown tomatoes, and a little tin of anchovies for good measure, and voila! A beautiful lunch that anyone would look forward to - in fact, the thought of it almost lightens my burden of working three days without pay...well, almost.

Fleas & Bloody Marys

I love flea markets. Anywhere, anytime. We recently went on yet another flea market blitz in New York - not the first & certainly not our last. I'm pretty sure heaven must feel something like working over a good flea. Oh, and by "flea," I do not mean "antique mall." In fact, any use of the word "antique" almost invariably means overpriced goods and no bargains. No, I mean an honest-to-god flea market where you can sift through piles of stuff in search of a true bargain. You just never know what you'll turn up at a good flea, and therein lies the fun.

For example, this morning at our local flea (which we almost never miss unless we're out of town visiting other fleas) I found (or I should say Mark found, since he spotted it first) the coolest grinder ever. As it happens, I was just complaining recently about how much work one has to do to get an appreciable amount of pepper out of a pepper mill. Our pepper mill collection is nothing to sneeze at, by the way. We have quite an array, from William Bounds to the lesser-named mills - I think we may have tried them all. I have my favorites, of course, but all fall short of the ideal grinder for one reason or another...until today.

The grinder we bought today is, in a word, phenomenal. It clamps to the counter in a death grip and grinds pepper as though it were butter - virtually effortlessly. The coarseness settings are extremely sensitive - at its finest setting it will literally put out product the consistency of sawdust. Of course, we won't be limiting ourselves to grinding peppercorns with this baby. After we used it to grind a few trial peppercorns this morning, we threw in some dried bird peppers (which I added to the egg salad I made for lunch - gave it a terrific smoky heat!) and then promptly compiled a list of other things we could pulverize with the new toy: cumin and coriander seeds, nutmeg, whole allspice, anise seeds - you name it, we'll be ready.

After lunch, we were ranging around for a good reason to grind more pepper when our eyes fell on the half-gallon of Svedka we bought this weekend. If you follow me on Facebook, I noted earlier today that it received a 93 from Wine Spectator, putting it into competition with top shelf brands like Grey Goose despite its middle-shelf price. I find it absolutely delightful - definitely worth trying, and a bloody mary is the best reason I can think of to grind yet more pepper!

Simplicity.

I've had lots going on in my life lately, and none of it has been conducive to spending hours in the kitchen (relaxing or otherwise). Still, I found myself in need of eating at home this evening - or maybe it was just a need for the comfort of familiar surroundings (even after a pretty damn comfortable trip to Florida this past week). All this struck me late in the evening, so rather than chaining myself to the stove I elected to zip to the market in search of some snacks.

I have to inject here that I continually lament the closing of my favorite Publix on Jonesboro Road. Yes, there are other Publix groceries in the vicinity, but I don't like any of them nearly as well as I liked - no, make that LOVED - my old Publix. Nowadays I usually just hit the Super Target if I'm staying local, but this evening, despite my extreme dislike of Kroger, I gave in to Mark's suggestion to shop there. I must admit Kroger is coming up in the world (but just a little, let's not go crazy with the credit here). They have a new olive bar with a fairly varied little selection of unusual olives and a few other things as well - it's not exactly Whole Foods, mind you, but it's pretty good shakes for Kroger.

We snagged some Peppadews, large green olives (maybe Spanish? I'm normally pretty sure of what I'm getting, but their signage was severely lacking so I'm guessing here) which were perfectly brined, not too salty, some finger hot peppers, dolmades, gigantes, & caviar. When we got in from shopping, we poured ourselves some wine & homemade beer & snacked outside while we smoked chicken livers on the Green Egg & discussed the many merits of The Road Less Traveled, a book which I think EVERYONE over 30 should have already read at LEAST once.

As those who follow my Facebook rantings already know, I'm reading this book for the third time in 20 years. Even though it was originally published in 1978, it hasn't lost its edge. Peck posits that there are three choices available to us during our time here: we can choose to live fully, we can choose to live less than fully, or we can choose not to live at all. Me? I'm choosing to live more fully these days, and the budding knowledge that a full life is a life full of pain gives me an even greater appreciation for pausing to enjoy the simple things.

Charro Beans & Mexican Brownies

As soon as my feet hit the floor this morning I knew I would be in the kitchen all day. My cooking urges come in surges - kind of like mood swings, only much more productive (and infinitely more pleasant). Persistent rain is almost always an omen.

My first urge was to make some charro beans. I thought these would be a nice addition to the chicken we're smoking this afternoon.



My favorite Mexican restaurant serves a pretty good version of the charro beans, yet somehow I feel (as I almost always do) that I can do it better (et voila, read on!). As usual, I perused several recipes on line, then ventured off down my own path. I started with pintos, unsoaked. I never, ever soak my beans. It's a complete waste of time and you can get the same tender results in a couple of hours if you just stick to water (with a little bacon fat in this case) and refrain from adding any salt until the beans are tender. Once the liquid in the beans boiled out a little, I replaced it with a bottle of beer rather than adding more water - this imparts a really nice flavor (remember, beer makes it better). At this point, as long as the beans are tender, salt away. As my beans were heating back up after the beer addition, I fried up a few slices of bacon (hallelujah, say amen) and sauteed a big chopped Vidalia onion with a chopped serrano pepper in the pan drippings. I added the crumbled bacon, cooked onion & pepper, and a can of drained diced tomatoes back to the beans, popped in a few drops of liquid smoke & simmered everything once more for good measure. After I pulled the beans off the heat, I finished them off with bunch of chopped cilantro (and I literally mean an entire "bunch" - most people either really love it or really hate it - there is usually no middle-of-the-road where cilantro is concerned). The beans are, in a word, divine (and far superior to the restaurant's version, as expected...).





The next wave of inspiration that hit me today was Mexican brownies. I started with two packages of Valor pure chocolate, to which I added a stick of salted butter over heat until both were melted. I then added about a cup of brown sugar, a generous tablespoon of cinnamon, and a big pinch of smoked sea salt. I'm embarrassed to say that, while I am usually fastidious about keeping a wide variety of dried peppers on hand in my freezer, I found myself fresh out of chipotles today (damn it). After a short cursing fit, I remembered that I had recently purchased some chipotle bouillon which, while not optimal, would have to do (and just one of these cubes actually worked very nicely - they are surprisingly strong). Moving right along, I whisked in 3 eggs, one at a time, and about a teaspoon of almond extract. Finally I threw in about three-quarters of a cup of whole grain spelt flour, which I find works much better in baking than refined flour, with the possible exception of cake baking...











Tossed the brownies in the oven at 325 for about 30 minutes, and while waiting on them to finish I decided to whip up some dulce de leche icing (and on this I cheated somewhat, both in terms of ingredients and time). Just took a can of condensed milk & cooked it over medium heat until it had caramelized a little bit - I really prefer it to be very dark but didn't have the time or the inclination to fool with it any longer so I cut it short. One resource I found made the interesting suggestion to leave the milk in the container, punch two holes in the top of the can & simmer the whole lot in a water bath on the stove top for about 4 hours on really low heat to get the richest result without all the pot-watching. I'll definitely give that a try next time - especially since it's rather difficult to whisk constantly with one hand and text constantly with the other hand - I came dangerously close to caramelizing my Blackberry. In my distracted state of mind, I also decided that testing the smoking hot dulce de leche on my finger would be a good idea - remember I said this was a recurring problem? And yet I'm completely surprised by the pain EVERY time. By now I wanted to be done with the whole project, so I did a fairly sloppy icing job, but who cares? The finished product has just the right amount of sweetness followed by a very subtle warmth from the chipotles - a nice complexity of flavor that is nothing short of sublime.









And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off too muddle some lime, mint & sugar so that I can make myself a wicked little mojito to reward myself for all my effort (though I have to say that blogging is far more work than cooking)...cheers & happy Memorial Day - remember to kiss a solider (or at least thank one)!

In Search of Haute Cuisine...

I recently returned from New Orleans, aka NOLA, aka N'Awlins, aka The Big Easy, etc. Although I'm generally leaning toward featuring my own cooking endeavors on this blog, I feel that I must at least give a nod to some delightful meals I had there, not the least of which included fabulous eats at Acme, Delachaise, Emeril's Delmonico and a five-course wine pairing dinner at La Cote Brasserie.

That being said, today is my first day home. I'm happy to be back, don't get me wrong, but I've been standing in my kitchen for hours waiting for someone to bring me something magnificent to eat. I'm not having much luck with that, in case you're wondering. To make matters worse, I was gone for almost a week, so there are no groceries to speak of in the fridge. My husband is infinitely happy with abominations like canned tuna melts, so he rarely bothers to grocery shop if I'm not here.

Since the only ingredients I seem to have on hand for dinner are eggs, spinach, a half-eaten tomato, and some wheat bread, I've decided to take the fallback position and poach again. Not all that exciting, you might think, especially since I just posted about poaching in my last blog. I, too, was somewhat uninspired by those four sad little ingredients until I came across the oil of gods as I was reaching into my icebox.

Let me explain. A few months back, my husband, who can be surprisingly adventurous in the kitchen for someone who is so fond of white trash cuisine, decided to concoct a hot pepper oil. He started with an entire package of dried Thai chilies which he proceeded to grind up in the Cuisinart. He then heated up a large quantity of peanut oil to around 165 degrees in a deep pot (and the deep pot is important because there must be plenty of room to accommodate the violent flare-up that will result from adding the chilies to the hot oil). Once he added the chilies to the oil, he cooked it for about one or two minutes and then cooled it before bottling it.

Now you'd never suspect that anything so simple could be so good or so addictive, but just a touch of this stuff can make even the most mundane food worth eating. I have to add here that a SMIDGEN of this oil is all you need unless you have a titanium gastric system. Unlike what you'd suspect, however, the first sensation you get from this oil is NOT heat, per se. The first kiss leaves you tingling from the tip of your tongue all the way down into your stomach. After the second kiss, you begin to appreciate a little of the actual heat. On the third kiss, as you're really starting to fall in love (and feel your tongue again), you are rewarded with the most pleasant smoky aftertaste - and this, my friends, is the point at which you become utterly and irreversibly addicted.

So giving nods where nods are due, my hat is off to my husband for this simple, yet brilliant, additive. In fact, I have warned him that he must never, ever allow us to run out of this oil. I have cautioned him that, on days like today, when times are hard and in-house haute cuisine just can't be found, this oil may actually save my life (not to mention his).

Preoccupied with Poaching

Blogging again so soon after my last post is probably not a good sign. Other than my undying love for food (and a few other rare exceptions), I tend to be crazy about a thing until I'm not anymore, at which point I drop it like a hot potato. I wish I had the ability to distribute my enthusiasm more evenly over time, but it's my understanding that a person's personality is fully formed around age 12. A good thirty or so years of cultivating an abbreviated attention span probably doesn't herald an epiphanic transformation any time soon...

Over the past few days I've been looking for an excuse to poach an egg for myself. I dearly love a poached egg, although those near to me want no part of it. My mother says it makes her upper lip sweat to think of eating raw eggs, and Mark comes dangerously close to retching when I puncture the albumin to gratify my need for liquid yolk. I live in the hope that their tastes will mature, but there's that pesky personality-formed-at-age-12 concept again.

The leftover asparagus from last night's dinner was a perfect vehicle for my latest obsession, so after my 7-mile bike ride this afternoon I promptly set in to do the deed. First I added a touch of salt and way more than a touch of vinegar to some boiling water. I cracked the egg into a long-handled ladle to give me more control and to minimize the chance of inserting parts of my hand into the water. I mention this because, while cooking, I frequently reach a nirvanic state in which I believe I can put my hands in boiling liquid and touch hot objects bare-handed without incurring any damage. It's an optimal state of mind, really, but it can quickly turn hellish at the moment you realize it's not working out all that well from a physical standpoint.

Anyway, slipped the egg into the boiling water, but the yolk defied me by detaching from the white and slipping to the bottom of the pan (amazingly, even though I broke the yolk accidentally when I cracked the egg, the white solidified quickly to seal the break, so no ugly result). After watching the yolk wallow around at the bottom of the pan for about 2 minutes, I decided it was time to reunite it with the rest of the egg, so I used a slotted spoon to fish it all out. I very nearly became frustrated with the look of it until I liberated it from the water and realized it really hadn't turned out all that badly. And the timing was nearly perfect - rather than clocking it, I used the scientific approach and gauged the degree of doneness by the jiggly factor, agitating the spoon at intervals to be sure the yolk wasn't overcooking. Sprinkled a bit of goat cheese onto the heated asparagus, topped it with the poached egg, and finished it with a bit of freshly ground Himalayan salt (I'll save my recent salt kick for a future blog...)and cracked pepper - it was truly divine.

Firing up the Eggs...

I'm devoting my first blog to the meal we grilled today - our first outdoor event of the season, by invitation only. Grilled chicken, asparagus, and poblano peppers stuffed with goat cheese - all washed down with Harpoon Hefeweizen to the very hip music of Pearl Bailey on our vintage console stereo phonograph (pics below).

What is it that makes food eaten outdoors taste so good? More to the point, what is it that makes food from a Green Egg taste so much better than it tastes from a run-of-the-mill grill?? Before we got our first Egg, I steadfastly refused to buy into all the hype - a grill is a grill is a grill...or is it? My husband (Mark) was constantly regaling me (or should I say aggravating me) with tales toted from friends who raved incessantly about the superior taste of food cooked on an Egg. While I didn't need any convincing to agree that charcoal grilling was superior to gas grilling (of ANY kind), I just could not fathom that a big, ugly, green hunk of terra cotta (with an even bigger price tag) could do anything that a $99 Weber Kettle couldn't do.

After months of debating, I finally relented. Although there are only two of us, we just HAD to have the extra large Egg (he said). After all, what if we suddenly had the urge to entertain? Yeah, like that'll ever happen. Let me interject here that we've been down that road several times and it's so uninviting that I hope never to travel it again. It's always the same scary scenery: I invariably end up planning a meal of gargantuan proportions and get so stressed out trying to make sure everything is perfectly perfect that by the time the guests arrive I'm highly likely to remove someone's head with a single blow. Regrettably, my mother happened to witness one particularly bothersome meltdown that involved a failed something-or-other and what I believe was a poorly constructed metal pan - otherwise I could not possibly pinpoint why any pan worth its salt would fail to stand up to repeated bashing against the corner of a countertop during a violent cursing fit induced by a failed culinary endeavor. Manufacturers should really be ashamed to produce anything that flimsy for kitchen use. I'm just saying.

Anyway, I'm sure you've guessed by now that my initial meal off an Egg was love at first bite - in that instant I realized that the hype was NOT, in fact, hype. Quite simply, I had never tasted anything that lovely off a grill before. After a year of grilling everything but the pine straw in the yard, I had become almost as obnoxious as the Egg fanatics whom I had once disdained. My husband promptly took advantage of my newfound pliability and proceeded to convince me that our Egg seemed lonely without a companion. In my weakened state, this made perfect sense to me, and thus we acquired our second (albeit somewhat smaller) Egg - in case we ever get the urge to entertain, of course.