MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and
chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.
14 January 2007
As much as I love cooking, cooking eventually leads to →[More:]having to clean the stove and oven. So, anyone else have a fun afternoon?
We had tilapia fillets oven poached in lemon juice, butter, a smidge of white wine, dill and black pepper. Also a nice mixture of wild, brown, and basmati rice that I found at the organic food store and a salad with leaf lettuce, mushrooms, red bell pepper, tomato, and broccoli.
My kids had seconds (and some thirds) of everything.
I thought I'd have leftovers. Whoops.
Leftover spaghetti here, tonight. Like fine wine, leftover spaghetti gets better with age. It was delicious. (And we each had a Kinder egg for dessert.)
I visited my parents, went to Target, cleaned a little, did some laundry, cooked spaghetti. I am trying to limit my meals to one or two pots. I love to cook but hate to clean up.
I was sure that the [MI] was going to be "DISHES" but that was totally me projecting, as I swear I spend half my life washing dishes...
I spent my whole afternoon cleaning for, then waiting around for a few potential roomies who were coming to look at my house. One out of four showed, only one called to cancel (and that was when she was already 40 minutes late). LAME! I missed swimming because of these dicks!
On the plus side, my roommate made delicious hummus with her new Magic Bullet (the blender, not the vibrator) and I ate delicious leftover tacos and watched good movies.
i intended to be heavy on the cleaning but ended up more on the cooking, except i had a nice mixed green salad in simple basalmic and olive oil with mushrooms and a waif of a filet mingnon sized steak rather early.
Now with this glass of red and reading about all the food, i'm not sure what to do.
i do know it hasn't stopped raining around these parts for ever, not that i usually mind, but Springfield is out of power! What will happen to the Simpsons next?
Our deal is one person cooks, the other cleans up. I do about 95 percent of the cooking, so I rarely touch a dish. Plus, he hates the way I stack the dishwasher, so he just does it himself.
We complement each other really well like that. I do the laundry because he doesn't sort or pre-treat to my standards. But I don't take stuff out of the dryer fast enough or fold things right, so he handles that part.
The pastor who married us said that we were the only couple he'd ever counseled who scored 100 percent on the "Egalitarian Roles" section of our premarital compatibility test.
Unfortunately in this place I cook and I clean. Today I had a few depressed individuals over, but I did pastitsio (minus the greenery on top, obviously). That was good.
arse_hat, malt-vinegary fries? A-mazing. Where can I find the recipe?
carmina, just make fries and add malt vinegar and a bit of salt. Common in Canada but I was disappointed to discover in the U.S. that most places that sell fries don't even have malt vinegar! Even sadder, over the years as the likes of Mcd's and the King moved in, many places in Canada no longer have malt vinegar.
to arse_hat, I hope you are not setting me up for *further* embarrassment with my grocer if I go in asking for "malt-vinegar"... Because I intend to seek it out!
to eth, it was a Big Night here in NY. But it sucked. I don't know about the movie.
to myself, bah! I have an enemy. Frankly, I'd tell him that he can go suck his dick, but he does not have any.
If you look in the british section of a food store they should have it. It's not so totally rare, esp. not in NYC.
There is an amazing baked pasta dish in Big Night that i actually sent my brother with the movie from a service that no longer exists of a place that sent gourmet food to people ready to cook in the oven. i used the term food porn with them in the early 90s for an interview and had to explain in was about obscenely good food. They also had a few movies that came with the food in them. One was Big Night, and i sent my sister and her boyfriend Babette's Feast.
Personally, i'm going to have some olives and sundried tomatoes and baby spianch leaves on whatever bread i do have with whatever other antipasto things lurking around.
"If you look in the british section of a food store they should have it. It's not so totally rare, esp. not in NYC." In south east Michigan I once went looking for sesame oil, Kroger had no idea what I was talking about. Walmart had no idea. Meijer said maybe in "the Oriental section", but no. The U.S. can be very provincial sometimes.
it's called 'malt vinegar' in the UK too and yes, it's used liberally on fish and chips (yum). Sarson's is the most usual brand - there must be somewhere in NYC that caters for homesick British expats, surely? The same place that would sell Marmite.
Actually in the UK it's normally an insipid, cheap imposter known as "non-brewed condiment" that you find in chip shops, but yeah - the real deal is just known as malt vinegar. Sarsons is the most common brand.
I went out for a (rather expensive) dinner at a British pub here in Texas, and OMG they had malt vinegar! And crock pot stew! and shephards pie! and even (a tiny serving of) corned beef and cabbage!
My mother is Canadian. She always had malt vinegar on her fries, or gravy, never ketchup. I used to work at a concession stand as a teenager at a big tourist attraction. It was funny to find out what regions of North American put on french fries.
Some people wanted fry sauce. What in the blue hell is fry sauce? It's a combination of mayonnaise and ketchup, but not Thousand Island dressing. I think these were mid-westerners.
Some Canadians wanted gravy, some wanted vinegar. Some people wanted mayonnaise, can't remember what parts they were from. The thought of mayonnaise on french fries makes me want to gag a thousand times.
I thought you were supposed to put salt and vinegar on your chips, and then dip them into something. It would never have occurred to me to think of vinegar as on the same level, as it were, with ketchup.
Ohhhh yeah. Malt vinegar and lots of salt. Now I want fries. Damnation.
Yesterday afternoon was like many others--I contemplated cleaning, did about 2/3 of my dishes, then putzed about doing nothing particularly productive. Then I had a nap.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
