Monday, monday

[completely unseasonal image ...]

I want to write about food & cooking & eating, but not in the form of kvetching about how much too much I ate or drank, how much I weighed yesterday ... Ok to talk about how good something tasted, but no reports on how much I exceeded my recommended caloric intake for a day, charming as that might be in Bridget Jones Diary . Today was not much of a cooking day, I had a board meeting where dinner was provided, spinach lasagna and a pretty good salad, garlic toast with too much butter, and bars of good chocolate to break up and pass around for the hard talking parts. I walked for almost an hour and a half to "earn" it, and be allowed to eat lunch, too (to stoop to a tiny bit of that type of reporting I just said I would NOT do ...) - which was some really good spicey salami and thin slices of swiss cheese on toasted sourdough - the beauty of having a toaster in the breakroom at work.

I read some older posts on Heidi Swanson's 101 Cookbooks - she's been reading and cooking from Nigel Slater's books as long as I have - there's even vegetarian meatballs based on Nigel. But what was encouraging for a blog beginner like me was that way back (2003) there are no comments on Heidi's posts either - so it took her awhile to get read in the blogosphere - or else (even more likely) they lost the comments in a software upgrade .... But awww, shucks had to go looking at some of the best food blogs of 2005, like Orangette, and once again am an inferior newbie ...

I did make that Spanish rice on Sunday - it's based on a Cooks' Illustrated "prefecting Mexican rice" - their site was down Monday, so I never could link to it, but it's one where you rinse the rice in a big strainer, then fry it in oil, and add tomatoes, chicken broth, cilantro and chiles, bring it to a boil, then cook it in the oven - this time it came out with the rice a little softer and stickier, not so separate, because, remember, I was hell bent to use stuff up - V-8, chicken broth, that Newman's pasta sauce, peppers .... And I made quick barbecued chicken, which is the boneless chicken breasts browned in butter in a cast iron pan, remove them, add bbq sauce (either home made or bottled; Sunday was bottled all the way), roll the breasts around in it and bake in the oven at 350 for about 30 minutes. The lone teen in the house Sunday night ate at McDonald's, but the chicken and rice was microwave dinner for him Monday while I was at the Board meeting (and probably lunch tomorrow).