Cookbook stories
Dana and I are on our way to Missouri for the Grand Prix right now. Hopefully nothing more eventful than our upgrade to first class (I had some e-upgrades that were going to expire) will happen on our way. I am fairly prepared, with printouts of flight confirmations, hotel info, rental car reservations, and several different sets of directions. Still, we have a connection, one of those little puddle jumper flights, and then a two-and something-hour drive, so anything could happen.
Since I don’t have any huge events to write about I will tell you about a cool new cooking thing that Greg and I have taken up recently. For the past couple of months, cooking at my apartment has been uninspiring and repetitive. I think that this is mostly a result of overextending myself with cooking a while ago and I still haven’t yet recovered.
In 2006, I made a family cookbook and passed it out to my family at Christmas. I’m still thinking about getting it rebound and selling it. Maybe I could market it as the type of food you should be feeding your kids to make them into Olympians or something. Although truthfully, making some of those dishes really freaked me out because I learned just how much fat and salt and sugar went into them. Potato casserole has been forever ruined for me.
Anyway, while I was putting this cookbook together I made almost every recipe that my family sent me. The theory was that no one actually wants to cook anything in a cookbook unless they can see a picture of it first. So for months I was making dish after dish of wonderfully tasty food just to get a photo of it. Greg was really benefiting from this since I wasn’t going to eat it all myself. There was a huge push towards the end in which I was hosting parties and brunches just to get people to eat the all the food that was left over after the pictures.
After the cookbook era ended I sort slipped into this cooking slump in which the only things I could bring myself to make were egg and turkey quesadillas, peanut sauce tofu, or spaghetti squash with a jar of pre-made sauce thrown over it. It lasted for way too long and even Greg, who is pretty much happy eating anything that won’t make you sick, was struggling with it.
Fortunately, one of my friends, Katy, who didn’t even know about the dire culinary state of my kitchen, came to the rescue this past Christmas. She sent me a yearlong subscription to Bon Appetite, a cooking magazine with some pretty interesting recipes. Now, every week Greg and I pick out a few recipes from the magazine and walk over to the farmer’s market to pick up the necessary ingredients.
I can’t tell you what a relief it is to eat something new and different with regular servings of fresh vegis. This week we outdid ourselves, making halibut with beets and beet greens, greens and goat cheese quesadillas, cabbage pasta, and lemon berry soufflés. Plus, we also have the added benefit of a few cute little date nights.
Next week Greg is on his own, though. Since I will be in Missouri until Monday he has to pick out the recipes and go shopping all by himself. It will be scary but I think that he is up to it.
P.S. The travel got a little more interesting – a two and a half hour delay, a long flight aboard a plane with no bathroom, an aborted take-off, near air sickness, and a speedy 2 and a half hour drive to get 30 minutes of swim time before the pool shut down at 10 PM. Plus, KFC for dinner. About the same as last year minus the freak-out when I had no way of getting from St. Louis to Columbia (I rerouted to Kansas City and meet another team there). Now I am just working on internet hopefully I can post this soon.