Four for Dinner

Lesson: read the recipe. For last night’s dinner, I tried a new recipe: Orecchiette with chicken sausage and broccoli rabe. Up until just this minute when I was looking for the recipe to link on-line, I thought I had followed the recipe. But, I hadn’t. The recipe said to blanch the broccoli rabe in boiling, [...]

This morning, for some unknown reason, I was thinking about when I worked in New York, right after college. There was a coffee shop behind the building where I worked and I would go there for breakfast. It was called “Genie” and it was on New Street. New Street did not look new. It was [...]

I have some leftovers and lots of great memories of a wonderful weekend with S’s family. Given that we live closest (by more than 800 miles) to Grandma, we were the locus of the activities for this past weekend’s celebration of her 80th birthday. Family started to arrive last Monday (scrambled eggs for dinner day) [...]

Have you ever eaten jellyfish? I have. It doesn’t taste like chicken. In fact, it doesn’t even taste like much of anything. Jellyfish is sort of crunchy and chewy, but not as chewy as overcooked squid. It takes on the taste of the sauce in which it is served or cooked. It is something that [...]

My favorite holiday is Passover. I love the tradition of it and the lack of commercialism surrounding it. My favorite part of the holiday is the seder dinner – making the meal, setting the table, putting together the seder plate, reading the Haggadah (we finally bought new ones and graduated from the Maxwell House version), [...]

Tonight we are having a decidedly non-”kid food” dinner. And, I cater a little bit to my kids when I make dinners like this. What I am preparing isn’t fancy, but it isn’t what the typical American kid would eat these days. Here comes my preaching and also my guilt, because I do cave-in to [...]

I think I’ve figured out a couple of things after charring the boneless pork chops tonight. 1) S is a much better grill cook than I. He babysits his meats and vegetables on the grill and makes sure that everything that comes off of it is cooked to perfection. 2) I always wondered why grills [...]

Time for another student council bake sale. I got the e-mail yesterday. Luckily, this time, there are two additional bakers added to the mix and we are each responsible for 36 muffins. One of the parents had a healthy cookie recipe, but because the recipe had chocolate chips in it, it was given the axe. [...]

Weekend guests are always a welcome change of pace, especially when they make everyone in the house so happy. This weekend was particularly great because our guests surprised L for her birthday and she was utterly and completely astonished when she saw them. Our Saturday birthday dinner was for nine people. I made it as [...]

I think big breakfasts are, as a friend of mine would say, the cat’s meow. But, eating a big breakfast is generally not on the time schedule or on the trying-to-slim-down-by-summer plan. Sometimes on weekends, or when we have friends staying with us, I’ll cook a big lazy breakfast. That is usually around holidays when [...]