Isn't this blog supposed to be about food?

I am planning a tea party, and yesterday I looked at my version of a recipe from In the sweet kitchen, by Regan Daley, and realized I like my version better. (Little lime-syrup-soaked coconut cakes) And that reminded me that my main aim for this blog is to write about my experiences trying out recipes, and how they came out, and pleasures of eating and so on ...

I am so taken with my the personal tone of my brother's blog, but I am afraid to write as frankly as he does, and I don't want to dissolve into a litany of "I ate too much" female-type complaints. The thing my brother does really well is to reflect on the things he sees each day, like old guys on bikes, or cool people in cafes in SF. But I seem to have too many days where I don't see anything that I can reflect on, or even more, I do see things but the experience is too visceral, and I am at a loss as to how to write about it (and I know, I know, being able to write about those visceral experiences beyond the "it was yummy" level are what being a good food writer is all about) - like the patterns in the frozen snow while I walked to work this morning, and how that got a Jefferson Airplane song stuck in my head (and how now, in my office, it's the easiest thing in the world to link to the lyrics of that song on the Web, even though it's a little dicier to get the tune itself ...), or how I was crossing the street, in this kind of a.m. haze, and suddenly there was some kind of military officer - I think Navy - on the sidewalk looking so crisp - I was crossing near the ROTC building.

But back to food - on Wednesday nights this semester I teach a class, so I don't get home until almost 8:00. I was trying to think of what I could have for dinner, and settled on egg in toast - I had some slices of the challah I made for the soup dinner, and I cut a hole in one with a cookie cutter, and fried the bread in a cast iron pan in kind of a lot of butter, with the egg in the middle and the extra piece on top. Sprinkled with red pepper flakes, and with an extra slice of toast with apricot preserves on the side, it was just right (as Goldilocks would say).

And, oh yeah - tonight I am going to try out this chili recipe from Gourmet, but make it with some vegetarian sausage, that's been frozen since the Lake Julia not-ski trip. I see that the recipe has got mixed reviews on Epicurious, and I am just sure that's because it has a sauce method I recognize from Rick Bayless (so must be Mexican <grin>) where you puree vegetables raw and then cook the sauce in oil - for the peole where the dish came out bland, they probably did not cook the sauce down enough - probably because it was splattering all over the stove, because that's what happens when you put a watery vegetable puree into hot oil.