Where the hell have I been?

Okay. You know how sometimes you're scared of your mail? Because maybe some overdue bills are there, or letters from the lover you don't like anymore, or maybe even some stuff from PETA, and you don't support them anymore? Well, that's how I've been feeling about my blog.

And you know how sometimes you go through some stuff, maybe at work, maybe at home, that might be great comedy if you can look at it through the proper lens, but that good lens isn't working right now, and you can only see it through the unfunny crap spectacles and you don't want to share it, because it's not entertaining?

And maybe you don't want to answer the phone, because you don't know if it's friend or foe, and maybe you're ninety percent sure it's friend, but you just don't know?

Well, that's how I've been feeling about my blog.

But I think I'm ready. Again. To try to be interesting. As if I ever were.

Shameful Confession

So, I basically haven't eaten at McDonald's for years because a) I don't like it and b) everything there has ten million calories. And I know that a) should preclude b), but in the past, it didn't always, because sometimes Mickey D's was just too convenient and cheap. It wasn't until I decided that if I'm going to "spend" 1700 calories on one meal, that meal had better rock my world rather than be just tolerable, that I really left McDonald's (and most fast food) behind.

Fast forward many years to when my son is introduced (by my MOM) to McDonald's. Now I basically have to go to McDonald's a couple times a month to get Happy Meals (i.e., food that gets thrown away and a really crappy plastic toy made by slave children in China). If I'm hungry too, I usually grab something for myself somewhere else, like the French bakery nearby my local McDonald's.

Today, my son wanted to eat at McDonald's so he could play in the (also craptacular) play structure because he hasn't had enough exposure to flesh-eating bacteria lately. I didn't think I could get away with bringing my own sandwich to a "restaurant," so I resolved to try to find something to eat at McDonald's.

I settled on this. The southern-style crispy chicken sandwich is a fried piece of chicken breast on a bun with a pickle. And, to their credit, McDonald's now provides easy access to nutritional info at their locations, so I knew in advance that the sandwich is 400 calories, which I deemed reasonable for something I figured would be bland and unmemorable, but filling.

Imagine my surprise when I took a bite and liked it. I mean, I'm not saying this was some kind of delectable gourmet snack, but it was tasty, and here's why: The chicken itself tastes like pickles! This totally appeals to the seriously trailer-parkish part of my palate that enjoys the occasional bowl of ramen noodles with melted American cheese slices, pickle sandwiches on soft white bread, and Tater Tots.

So now I'm looking forward to the next time the junky toys change genre at Mickey D's and Chase wants to get his next Happy Meal. I'm not going to make a habit of it, of course, because there's probably a ton of junk like growth hormones or DNA-altering herbs and spices in there, and because I recently renewed my commitment to pesca-vegetarianism, but, dang that pickle-chicken made me say yum!

Recipe: Lime smoked salmon with avocado

A recipe that's been in my repertoire for years, and happens to be one of my mom's favorites, is grilled salmon with lime, chive, and avocado vinaigrette. It's super simple, delicious, and I think it came from a special issue of Bon Appetit magazine about eighteen years ago. I can't find the original recipe anywhere anymore, so I'm just going to claim it as my own until the copyright police find me. Heck -- who knows how I've changed it over the years? Anyway, the fun part is making the leftover recipe (which will be my next post. probably).

Lime-Grilled Salmon with Avocado Vinaigrette

Adjust amounts to fit your needs. In this case, we had too much salmon for one meal, which is why the leftover dish came about.

I used an outdoor gas grill and hickory chips for smoking. I'm sure a charcoal grill will also make this pleasantly smoky. If you wish to use a grill pan or indoor grill, it's still a delicious meal without the smoky taste.

Salmon

If you are using an outdoor gas grill, set your woodchips up for smoking as directed.

2 pounds wild-caught salmon, fileted
2 to 3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
kosher or sea salt
fresh ground pepper
1/8 to 1/4 cup olive oil

With the salmon skin-side down, sprinkle the lime juice over the salmon. Sprinkle salt and pepper on top. Drizzle olive oil over, and rub mixture into salmon until well coated. Let sit for ten to twenty minutes.

Grill fish until it bounces back to the touch (about eight minutes on medium-high on a gas grill).

Sauce

2 medium avocados, diced
1/4 cup lime juice
zest of one lime
1/3 cup of olive oil
1 tablespoon finely chopped chives (or more to taste)
salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl. Let rest several minutes (while fish cooks). Taste, and adjust seasoning as necessary.

When fish is done, serve with several spoonfuls of sauce on top. Accept the kudos when your mom acts like you're a big chef!

Fettucine with Green Pea Pesto and Spring Herb Salad

I've been watching Jamie Oliver's new series on FoodTV and getting inspiration from some of the things he makes. Not so much lately, though, as the latest few episodes have been about game and lamb, and I do my best to be a pescatarian, if that's a word.

A couple of weeks ago, a salad he made inspired me to try to recreate it, and for some reason, I thought it would go nicely with a green pea pesto and pasta dish. I'm not going to write out a recipe, because I used a recipe from Gourmet magazine for the pesto (with the addition of a little tarragon and parsley), and the salad was just arugula, Belgian endive, Italian parsley, and raddicchio tossed with a lemon-tarragon vinaigrette. The point is, it was really good, and I remembered to take a picture of it.

Actually, there's more: My son LOVED the pasta. In his little mind, pesto now means the pea mixure that was on that pasta, so I have finally found a way to get him to eat vegetables. As long as I puree cooked veggies with garlic and parmesan and call it pesto, he seems to be willing to eat them. (I recently tried this with roasted cauliflower and called it "white pesto" and it worked.)

Aside: The plates in my house reflect my mom's taste, not mine so much.

Guilty Pleasures

I pride myself on a certain amount of snobbery, but I must confess to having more than a few guilty pleasures. For the moment, allow me to indulge my snobbish side while I explain what I mean by guilty pleasure.

I believe the term guilty pleasure has suffered from a bit of the Irony Effect. Alanis Morissette screwed up a generation's understanding of the true definition of irony. I don't know who messed with guilty pleasure, but my experience indicates many people think it means "something you feel guilty about but still like to do it, so you have no intention of stopping." Like smoking or drinking. Or cheating on your diet. I define guilty pleasure the One True Right Way: "something you like that you would be ashamed to have your friends know about." Like Kid Rock. I'm hardcore.

But most of my guilty pleasures fall in the area of food. My mom has never been the most imaginative or fastidious of cooks. She honed her cooking skills over a period where meat and potatoes ruled the dinner table, and frozen and convenience foods were fabulous new ideas. So, many of our family dinners comprised a pan-fried or oven-roasted protein, Rice-a-Roni, and a small portion of frozen vegetables. I don't recall the spice rack getting a lot of action during those times. We definitely had no knowledge of fresh herbs, and a limited understanding of fresh vegetables: corn on the cob for Independence Day, occasional green beans, and potatoes (though scalloped potatoes from a box showed up frequently on our plates).

Sometime during my late teens and early twenties, probably influenced by all the varieties of fresh and delicious foods I had during a stay in France, I started to develop my own interest in cooking. Guided by Bon Appetit and early cooking shows like "The Frugal Gourmet" and Jaques Pepin's show on PBS, I gravitated toward fresh ingredients, including lots of herbs and fresh garlic, and explored the world through food. I also decided to become a vegetarian, and for years, I eschewed the hearty, nutritious, but boring, meals my mom made.

In the ensuing years, I have maintained my love of cooking, trying new flavors, and experimenting with new dishes. Unfortunately, I also got a lot busier in life, what with having a child and working a stressful full-time job. Also, I moved back in with mom and dad after my husband and I split up.

As unmemorable as most of my mom's dinners were, she had a couple "special" meals she made that really stand out in my memory. Recently, after a long stressful week, she made what I discovered I still consider the ultimate comfort food: The Joy of Cooking's version of Chicken Cacciatore, as modified by my mom. As I described previously, my mom does not like cooked onion, so she substitutes onion powder. She also uses garlic powder rather than regular garlic because in the fifties and sixties, I don't think Americans had discovered garlic yet. She doesn't drink wine, so she uses the old standby bottle of dry sherry we keep in the cupboard pretty much just for this dish. Finally, because she hates mushrooms, but my dad loves them, instead of fresh sliced mushrooms, she uses canned whole button mushrooms that she can easily avoid when plating up her serving. The sauce is made by thinning out tomato paste and the chicken juices with the sherry. The chicken is served with a side of spaghettini and green beans, and the whole thing is drizzled with the sauce and then sprinkled with parmesan.

Don't ask me why, but I love this. There's something about the blend of crappy "wine" and rubbery mushrooms that takes me straight back to a secure, comforting family dinner after a winter day. These days, I have been known to turn and flee if I see canned mushrooms in a salad bar or as an ingredient in any other recipe, but in this one dish, it's the only thing that will do. I confess that when I lived by myself, I tried to make this dish using fresh ingredients and the original recipe, but the result did nothing for me. It didn't have the tang of the vinegary sherry. It didn't have the little bursts of salty brine that come when you bite into a canned mushroom. It didn't taste like home, or like mom.

I love mom.

Lentil and Sausage Soup. If you call it "stoup," I will cut you.

The Reasoning
As the millions of you who have faithfully followed my meandering mutterings have likely deduced, I have no clear idea what to do with my blog. Until the light bulb comes on, I will take the common road of bloggers throughout time and post whichever of my thoughts I believe the world cannot do without. Also, I plan to steal ideas from others. In this post, I take a leaf from my friend Gumbeauxgal's blog, and post a recipe I puttered with that came out pretty darn good.

The Background
It all started sometime last week, when my mom wanted to make black bean soup. She got the idea too late in the day to soak the beans, so we talked about other options, like using canned beans (ick). I said she could always have used lentils, which don't need to be soaked before cooking. She hasn't cooked much with lentils, but then reminisced about a soup she used to get at a great no-longer-existent restaurant called Cane's (owned by these people). The soup she remembered had red lentils and some kind of sausage. I had black lentils in the pantry and a curiosity about andouille. So, I decided I would make lentil and andouille soup on Sunday.

The Recipe
Because I spent the last half of the eighties and all of the nineties as a vegetarian, I haven’t cooked much with meat, especially “exotic” meats and sausages that weren’t available in San Diego until the last decade or so. So, though I know how to make a vegetarian lentil soup, I did some research on the web to figure out how long I was going to have to cook the sausage. I came up with this recipe. Based on the reviews, I knew right off I was going to make the following changes:

• I increased the amount of the veggies to one-half cup (more or less) each.
• I omitted the first half hour of cooking the lentils in the broth by themselves.
• I made my own creole seasoning rather than using a commercial product. This is the recipe I used.
• I used twelve ounces of sausage.
• I used fresh thyme.

Then I had to make some further modifications due to personal limitations:

• I could not get hold of my aforementioned friend Gumbeauxgal to find out whether good andouille is available in a San Diego market. Rather than risk disaster, I instead opted to use Trader Joe’s smoked chicken-turkey-garlic sausage.
• My mom hates, hates, hates the texture of large pieces of cooked onions, celery, peppers, and probably some other vegetables. For my mom, large is defined as detectable. Therefore, instead of dicing or even mincing the vegetables, I essentially turned them into pulp in the food processor. I drained off some of the water that pooled in the bottom of the processor, and then sweated them with a bit of salt for five or ten minutes.
• I couldn’t find beef broth, so I used all low-sodium, organic chicken broth and reduced the amount of broth from nine cups to eight.
• Finally, to make extra super sure that my mom would not notice any sort of vegetation, after cooking, I stuck the ol’ stick blender in there (being sure not to “catch” any of the sausage) and whirred it around for awhile. It seems to have worked!

The Result
After about an hour of making my house smell like smoky sausage heaven, the soup came out pretty darn good. My mom loved it, which means I successfully hid all the veggies from her (and makes me think those books that tell you how to sneak veggies into your kids by pureeing them must have some merit). Though smoky, the sausages weren’t overly salty, so, with the couple big pinches of kosher salt I added during the cooking process, the soup was perfectly seasoned. There was a bit of a kick from the cayenne in the creole seasoning, but not too much, so this soup would be good for kids. Sourdough rolls dipped in were divine. And in the end, it’s healthy!

The Future
As good as it was, I will continue to refine this soup. For me, it was a little thin, so I will definitely increase the amount of lentils the next time I make it. I also felt it was a bit celery-riffic, so I would change the vegetable proportions to those used in mirepoix. Here are some of the other tweaks I will try:

• Create a vegetarian version using vegetarian sausage and/or liquid smoke and vegetable broth.
• Increase the cayenne, if not serving kids.
• Find out how to get andouille and use it. I’m still dying to know what it tastes like!
• Experiment with different varieties of lentils.
• Add rice.
• When using the chicken sausage or other lower salt sausage, render pancetta or bacon for the fat in which to start sautéing the mirepoix.
• When using the stick blender in the future, I will cook the sausages whole so I can remove them easily, blend, and then cut them up and put them back in.

The End
While I was shopping at Trader Joe’s for the remaining ingredients I wanted for the soup, I remember standing in front of the Greek yogurt section wondering if I ought to get some for the week. I couldn’t think of anything I would use it for, so I didn’t get any. It would have been absolutely perfect dolloped on top of a nice hot bowl of this soup. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that! Let that be a lesson to you all. Always get the Greek yogurt.

Can I become cool at age almost-41?

I just signed on to twitter. I don't really know why, but I suddenly feel it necessary to reenter the realm of random communication with strangers, after having left message boards and discussion lists behind last year. I can't figure out myspace.com. Twitter seems easier, but weirder.

Anyway, I noticed all the cool kids at Twitter have web sites and blogs, so here's mine. I have opinions -- oh, yes indeed. But a life? That is what I don't have.

I know all the words to the Go, Diego, Go! and Pokemon: Battle Frontier theme songs. I know how to put together Bionicles. I have a good score in Viva Pinata. What's that spell? I have a five-year-old son.