Category Archives: cooking

June Dinner Party Recipes!

For those who have asked, and for those who might be interested, here are the links to the recipes I used for this month’s dinner party.

  • Sicilian Eggplant-Pine Nut Caponata
    • Quite delicious, though a bit sweeter than I would have expected. Also, next time I’ll try to remember the extra green pepper that I accidentally put the gazpacho instead!
  • Pretzel Bites
    • The recipe calls for pretzel rods but we cut them up into bite-size pieces. They came out more chewy than crisp – clearly we need to work on technique.
  • Grilled Gazpacho
    • This was a really great recipe. The grilling is a bit of a pain, but really adds to the flavor. Also, if you double the recipe it will take three rounds of processing the a large blender.
  • Baked Eggs
    • I made the recipe as stated, but also made a filling with potato, bacon, and thyme. Make sure to watch these closely and pull them out on the early side because it’s easy to cook the eggs to a hard-set yolk.
  • Fancy Salad
    • Simply delicious. I would absolutely make this again!
  • Asian Crispy Caramel Skewers
    • Yum. Just yum.
  • Grilled Curry Chicken Kebabs
    • Ditto!
  • Chicken Skewers with Penzey’s Ozark Chicken Seasoning
  • Chocolate Chip Cookies with PB2 Powdered Peanut Butter
    • Dan modified this recipe to use a little less chocolate chips, substituting in some additional PB2 chocolate-peanut butter powder.

As I noted earlier, while I wish we could throw the big blow-out parties we used to, smaller recurring dinner parties are much more manageable and will go a long way in allowing us to welcome our friends into our home without stressing me out too much. If we missed you this month, we’ll be doing may more dinners like these, for sure!

Where Have I Been and What Have I Been Doing?

I could bore you with the long drawn-out tale of how I was captured by pirates off the coast of Somalia, made friends with the captain and wound up entertaining Bedouins in a Yemeni oasis before I was able to escape to Belgium, where I subsisted on crackers, aged cheese, and fine Trappist ales before stowing away on a transatlantic cruise ship and talked my way into a ride back to Chicago in an art-car covered with Hello Kitty dolls, but that would be tedious and wholly fabricated.

Instead, let’s talk about what I’ve been doing the last few weeks.

The weekend of August 21st, I joined aureth, linnaeus, genet, and roho for what we termed the “Milwaukee Booze Tour”. We started out with the Sprecher Brewery tour. We’ve done it before, but this time we paid extra for the “Reserve Tasting”: 15 beers paired with 15 cheeses. Not much beer (a shot glass of each), but most of the pairings were good, and a few were excellent (the Scotch ale paired with a whisky-infused cheddar was stellar).

From there we grabbed a quick bite at a little dive Mexican joint, Conejito’s, then walked around Milwaukee Public Market and did a bit of shopping at The Spice House.

Then it was off to Great Lakes Distillery for a very interesting tour and tasting. The $6 cocktails before the tour were nice. The specifics of their distilling process were fascinating to me as a chemical engineer, and we had great fun sampling their various products. My personal verdicts: Their gin is wonderful, their vodka so-so, the maple-spiced rum kind of vile. The grappa was watery, the kirsch was…well, kirsch (the only think I know to do with kirsch is spike fondue with it). And their absinthes were overhyped. I’ll buy pastis and be happy.

I was only slightly tipsy after the tasting, but fortunately Genet was our designated driver. For dinner we went to Crawdaddy’s, which was apparently a really great place back in 2002. Alas, it’s 2010 and the place is well past its prime. Roho left a scathing review on Yelp, and I agree with every bit of it.

Last weekend I felt the urge to cook. Since I have a lot of cookbooks but don’t use them nearly enough, I decided to pull some recipes from there. We were joined by Aureth, Roho, and Genet, and I made a baby lettuce and arugula salad with peaches and almonds, and a summer vegetable gratin (with zucchini, summer squash, Japanese eggplant, and Roma tomatoes), both from Ad Hoc At Home.

For the entree, I made Anthony Bourdain’s pan-roasted pork chops with Sauce Charcruterie (a brown sauce made with onions, demi glace, mustard, and cornichons) from the Les Halles Cookbook. For dessert, Dan made a delicious fresh yellow watermelon sorbet that was amazing when mixed with Grey Goose vodka 🙂 The salad was pretty good, but the flavors didn’t quite meld. The gratin was amazing and I would absolutely make it again. The pork was OK, but I really liked the sauce more.

The big news this week is that we got shiny new phones, the Sprint Samsung Epic 4G. We’re still getting used to the quirks of Android, but after less than 24 hours I can still say that they are far superior to our Palm Pres. More on these as we’ve had time to play with them!

A Weekend of Cooking, Partying, and…Training?

On Saturday, aureth and jenwolf were hosting a party over at their place. I thought I’d try to make a couple of new dishes to bring: Spicy Baked Plantain Chips and Salsa Verde. The plantain chips did not turn out well – a bit leathery, unfortunately. They were close to burning, but could have used a bit more time in the oven to crisp up. The salsa verde was… well, it wasn’t up to my standards. Way too salty, and the four Serrano chiles in the recipe made it mighty damn hot! This was a good reminder that I really need to only make tried-and-true recipes for these sorts of things.

mirkowuff arrived Saturday afternoon with his malamute, Chase. Buddy seems to be feeling better (though his appetite still isn’t up to snuff – possibly due to the continued antibiotics) and so greeted Chase with a wagging tail…and then spent the next hour trying to mount him. Oy. At this point I have to assume it’s a dominance thing. Chase let him know it wasn’t appreciated, and eventually they got things sorted out, but it was certainly comical to watch. We were a little late to the party because Mirko wanted to watch some basketball thing or something with his alma mater. He spent the rest of the evening squee-ing about the game 🙂

The party was a lot of fun. Jim’s brown ale was excellent, and the company was wonderful. I wish that we could have stayed later, but we had to get up stupidly-early the next day, so we grabbed hartree and Mirko and headed back to our place.

On Sunday morning, Hartree and Mirko and I left before 8 AM (well, left the first time – we had to double back because I forgot my ticket. Doh!) for the Illinois Rail Museum Snowflake Special CTA Tour. This was a 9-hour tour of the Chicago elevated train system. We were joined by dexcat, rustitobuck, and linnaeus. The tour went from Rosemont (right next to the Hyatt Regency O’Hare!) to downtown, out to UIC, down the South Side to 61st Street, then north to Evanston, with numerous stops and detours along the way. I have to say I was very much impressed by the IRM’s organization, and the quality of the tour was very good as well, with near-continuous narration provided by a pair of very knowledgeable fellows. I took over 180 pictures, and I’ll post some of those soon.

We had lunch in The Loop, stopping at the Qdoba on Randolph. We were unexpectedly joined by a rather loquacious train fan who was maybe 10 years old. He talked a blue streak, and while he knew his stuff, it was amusing to listen to him rattle on about the wisdom of the Circle Line while his parent nodded wearily beside him with that look of, “Oh thank God, he’s talking to someone else for a change.” After lunch we had time for a quick stop at Intelligentsia Coffee, then it was back on the train. All in all, I have to say that it was about seven hours of an interesting tour – the last two hours really dragged and it was a bit of a relief when we pulled back into Rosemont. takaza, roho, and genet met us there (with Chase, who went home with Mirko from there). The rest of us went down for dinner at Smoque, which was excellent, as usual.

And here we are at a new week. I have some errands to run after work, then I’ll grill up dinner while Dan works on the FCN con book. It sounds like we’re going to go see “How To Train Your Dragon” tomorrow night at one of my favorite local theaters, so we’re off to a great start to the week!

What Have I Been Up To?

So, what have I been up to these last few weeks (besides, you know, answering questions)?

Well, back on January 17th we had the first staff meeting of the year for Midwest FurFest. Time to start it all over again! It was a good meeting, recapping some of last year’s activities, and including a walk-through of the new hotel space. We’ve got a lot of big plans, but it’s going to take some time to bring everything to fruition. I’ve got some items for the website that I need to take care of, and I need to get some information posted. That’ll come this week, I hope.

On January 23rd we braved some freakishly dense fog to visit aureth and jenwolf‘s lovely place in Hebron. Excellent company, some very tasty beer, and entertaining games followed. The next day I finished up my taxes and arrived at some very happy numbers (yay for first-time homebuyer’s tax credit, boo for not being able to e-file if you claim that credit!).

That week kicked off what may be my most stressful week at work since I started with $employer, and it’s been pretty crazy ever since. This has really put a damper on my time that I would be able to post to this journal, or even to think about posting anything since when I get home from work I just want to de-stress. Unfortunately, this trend will continue at least until the end of February, though I’m hoping that things will ease off a bit after that. It’s all but certain that I’ll be working Saturdays for the rest of the month, though.

At the end of January I squeaked out of work on Friday the 29th and takaza gave me a ride down to O’Hare Airport, where I caught a flight to Columbus to spend the weekend hanging out with fordshepherd. The ostensible purpose of the trip was to give him a weekend to relax and not stress, but we all know the futility of this – it would be like someone wanting to do the same for me 🙂 Anyway, it was a delightful weekend, with dinners with roby_panther and kai_darkwolf, cooking up a storm (and a lot of smoke) with crappy recipes from Jamie Oliver, and generally just hanging out and chatting. I had an excellent time!

This brings me up to this past weekend. On Saturday, Dan’s mom and sister joined us, along with roho and genet for a joint early-birthday celebration for me and Dan’s sister. We had a delicious turkey dinner, and I made a butternut squash risotto that turned out really well. Afterward we watched “Julie & Julie”, which is a really fun movie. Last night we took all those leftovers (along with a freshly-made bread pudding) to Genet and Roho’s place where they hosted a Super Bowl party. We were joined by linnaeus, Aureth, and Jenne. We had a whole lot of fun and I really enjoyed the game. The couple of beers I had didn’t sit well with me, though, and as expected I had reflux issues all night long. I’m dragging a bit right now with the combined lack of sleep and lack of caffeine, since I can’t face the acid of coffee right now. Maybe a soda before I head off to work…

Speaking of which, time to shower. Hope everyone has a great day!

House Projects, Friends and Food, and Birthday Planning

So, we’ve finally settled into some kind of normalcy around the house, for some value of normal 🙂

The big push last weekend was to finish off the last of the house projects: Hanging various art around the house, installing the blackout shades in the master bedroom, and installing the undercabinet lighting in the kitchen.

The art was easy enough, though since I’m an engineer it involved a lot of calculations, levels, and weight measurements (to gauge the proper mounting hook). I’m pleased to say that it looks great!

I installed the first blackout shade last week, and it’s a very tight fit. The instructions are not well-written, unfortunately, and we found a couple of things that would have made the finished product look a bit nicer. Anyway, takaza (who had been running a fever and feeling lousy most of the week) took the initiative on Friday and installed the shades on the other two windows, aided by what we learned from the first window. They look great and are very effective, though for maximum effect I’m going to need to caulk all four sides of each window.

The undercabinet lighting was…yeah. Dan did a great job installing the track for the lights. I demonstrated that I am a chemical engineer and not an electrical engineer when I used the wrong kind of connector and wound up shorting across the two 12 V leads of the transformer for about 10 seconds, effectively frying it. One transformer later, I’m pleased to report that the lighting looks fantastic and really completes the look of the kitchen.

On Sunday we welcomed roho, genet, linnaeus, steviemaxwell, and magicpaw over for dinner, the online Midwest FurFest staff meeting, and to watch the season premiere of The Amazing Race. Dan and I made chipotle-marinated pork tenderloin (exceptionally spicy, but tasty) and butternut squash risotto, and Dan made an angel food cake from scratch. Continuing our fun with 10 Cane Rum, Dan showed off a new concoction that included watermelon puree, St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur, lime juice, 10 Cane Rum, and club soda. It was yummy, and it packed a punch!

We need to do a little more work around the house, but then we’ll be ready to welcome baja_hyena and fordshepherd this weekend to celebrate Ford’s birthday. Dan has cooked up quite an itinerary, and I think it’s going to be a very memorable birthday for him! 🙂

Oh yeah, and have you sent your RSVP for Too Much Light in yet?

…And sometimes you roll snake eyes.

I’ve been trying to expand our menu a bit lately, and investigating interesting recipes we find online. We’ve had good luck with a couple of different cuisines and dishes, so I was really hopeful. Tonight’s candidate was Shredded Chicken Red Curry with Rice Noodles. And it was…a bust. I was hoping cooking the onion and garlic down would make it more palatable to Dan, but it wound up driving him upstairs to get away from the strong smell. The deal-killer for me was the relatively large amount of fish sauce – the finished product tasted spicy, slightly onion-garlicky, which devolved into a strange, fishy flavor that came out of nowhere. Maybe 1/2 tablespoon of fish sauce instead to two tablespoons? Ah well. Live and learn…

You Say It’s Your Birthday

And so my birthday came and went yesterday. A little anti-climactic after last year’s trip to Napa Valley, but then again it isn’t every year you turn forty. On the bright side I’m now 41 which means, um, it’ll be a prime year for me?

Anyway, takaza gave me my birthday gifts on Tuesday night. First was a book that I had come across and really enjoyed flipping through at the bookstore, The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman. Tucked in among the pages was a card labeled “But wait, there’s more…” And so there was – a note informing me that I have been signed up for a 6-hour class on knife skills and butchering. This is awesome – while I can get by with knives in the kitchen, I feel a bit clunky with them sometimes. I’m excited that I’ll get to find out how to use them right.

Oh, and I really need to get my knives sharpened again (and I know where to go to get them done properly this time).

Last night we celebrated my birthday with dinner with friends. We had a lovely meal with roho, genet, linnaeus, daveqat, and jimcyl at Emmett’s Tavern in Palatine. I had a great selection of beers and the food was quite tasty. The downside is that I paid for those beers later when a nasty bit of reflux kicked in at about 2:30 AM this morning. I didn’t really get back to sleep after that and so I’ve been dragging badly all day. I may hit the grocery store after work, or I may go home and grab a nap. We’ll see how it goes, I guess.

Soup and Meetings

It was a busy and productive weekend. The busy part came on Friday and Saturday when we sent out impromptu invites for a small dinner at our place. After spending the afternoon doing a bit of cleaning around the house (yeah, we still have bits of Wuffmeet stuff lying around that we needed to clean up anyway), we welcomed roho, genet, and linnaeus, as well as last-minute additions tozier_wah and mirkowuff. We had a lovely evening of chatting while I made a tasty dinner of tomato soup with roasted garlic and herbs and pumpernickel grilled cheese with extra-sharp cheddar, apples, and thyme. Extremely tasty!

Sunday morning was a slow start, then it was over to the first Midwest FurFest staff meeting of the year. We did a bit of a post-mortem for 2008 and looked ahead to plans for this year. I’m excited about some of the stuff we have in the pipeline, and I’m very glad that the convention is blessed by such a capable and creative staff. takaza was feeling under the weather so I opted to pass on the post-meeting dinner and go home with him. We had a quiet night at home, and headed off to bed surprisingly early, by about 8:30 PM.

I should also mention that Dan and I had dinner with several representatives from the Westin Chicago North Shore. Really, not much int he way of business was discussed, but it was more of a “thank you” dinner from them. We had a great meal, and the company was excellent. Clearly, they do like Midwest FurFest and are excited to have us back this year.

Not much going on this week – work is pretty steady, and I have a couple of small projects to work on at home. We’ll be doing some brewing this weekend (the first time in about four years for me!), so I’m looking forward to that.

There and Back Again

And we’re back! Takaza and I spent the last few days down in St. Louis visiting with my parents and my sister’s family. We had a very enjoyable time, and Christmas was lovely. We visited Soulard Market (though many vendors were closed for the holidays) and got lost (willingly) in downtown St. Louis. Mostly, though, it was just fun to spend time with the family.

The trip down was a bit unpleasant, as we were leaving Chicago in the throes of a snowstorm. Things were much better after we got south of Joliet, but the 40 mph crosswinds between Bloomington and St. Louis made driving difficult. The drive back was a lot more pleasant, though. We detoured into Alton, Illinois on a quest to find Pietown Stompin’ Grounds (visited by Alton Brown in Feasting on Asphalt 2: The River Run) only to find that it was completely closed and out of business – but the website is still up? Bah. We instead stopped for breakfast at Forgettable Family Restaurant #2,341 and then hit the road north. We detoured onto I-39 from Bloomington and came across the nifty wind farm near Mendota, Illinois. Dan took a bunch of pictures – for some reason, I found the sight fascinating.

And here we are in a new, but short, week. Dan has gone off to work; he works today and tomorrow, while I don’t have to go back until next Monday. Hooray! I shan’t be idle today, though. We have a ton of preparations for our New Year’s festivities, starting with a huge shopping trip this morning. I’m making four pans of lasagna, and Dan will be cooking up about twenty pounds of chicken tonight. We’ve got a bunch of other cooking to do, so we’ll be busy today and tomorrow. After that, it’s off to party!

Playing Catch-Up

I see I’m in my usual post-convention blogging quiet period. This month is pretty crazy, and as usual, when I’m busy I don’t have much time to document it.

Last week included a delicious dinner with perro, darkwolph, and linnaeus at Tramonto’s Steak and Seafood, which sadly is due to close its doors very soon (along with RT’s Lounge and Osteria di Tramonto) due to Rick Tramonto departing the joint venture. We’ve heard some promising possibilities about what will be happening with those restaurants in the new year, but nothing for certain. We’ll see what happens!

The next day I joined justincheetah and calapurr for a tasty dinner (with some tasty wine) at Cooper’s Hawk Winery and Restaurant. The short ribs there were delicious! I’m thinking that during Wuffmeet we may need to swing by there and sample their latest wines.

On Saturday, takaza‘s family came over for an evening of dinner and games. I made a killer Lasagna Bolognese that was simply outstanding. I substituted ground bison for the ground beef and, not having ground veal readily available, did 50/50 ground bison and ground pork. Instead of Parmesan cheese, I used an aged Mahon cheese which was quite tasty (and half the price of Parmesana Reggiano). This was good enough that I think it may be one of our entrees for Wuffmeet. I just need to figure out the logistics of making the sauces, assembly, baking, and reheating.

Sunday? We did nothing. And it was good. (Oh, and the person I was rooting for won Survivor. That was nice too.)

Yesterday I finished my Christmas shopping. Yay! Hooray for Amazon.com 🙂 I’m impressed that some of that stuff will be arriving today. I {heart} Amazon Prime – we really do get our money’s worth on that.

And then there’s today. I’m keeping a close eye on the weather radar as we’re supposed to get hit with 2-6 inches of snow in the next 24 hours. I’m not wild about this since tonight we’re having dinner with the folks we’ve worked with at the Westin North Shore down in Lincolnshire. Still, travel difficulties aside, it should be a good meal and I’m looking forward to it.

For the rest of the week: I’m hoping that we can help genet celebrate completing her last final for the semester tomorrow. Then on Saturday (after I have to work all day in exchange for getting Christmas Eve off), Dan and I will be going over to his mom’s house to exchange gifts with her, since we’ll be out of town on Christmas. Oh, in case I haven’t mentioned it, Dan and I will be in St. Louis visiting my parents and my sister’s family from December 24th through 28th. We hope to do a bit of touring around the city (though I just found out yesterday that a main highway is closed – man, that’s got to suck!). If nothing else, hope to hit one of the fine eateries the Good Mister Brown visited during his road trip through the city.

Well, time to take care of a bit of work before today’s free “Holiday Lunch” – the usual uninspiring beef/chicken/pasta buffet. Hey, at least it’s free…

Edit @ 5 PM – No steak dinner for me – the Westin folks cancelled due to weather, and I can’t blame them. Dan is on his way home, and he’s thinking that his normal 50-minute commute is going to be closer to 2 to 2.5 hours.

Beers and Dinners and Meetings, Oh My!

Now that was a busy, but fun weekend.

ramalion was crashing at our place on Saturday night and he had mentioned that he had never tasted my cooking. Those of you who know me know that this is a dangerous challenge! We invited roho, genet, and linnaeus to join us for dinner and I got to planning, digging into my online recipe stash to find some new and interesting recipes.

Prior to dinner, though, takaza and I met up with Roho and Genet at Wine Knows for their Fall Beer Tasting. It was a blast! So many good beers, but the real standout was the Browning’s Brewery Bourbon Barrel Imperial Stout, which is aged in bourbon barrels. Absolutely amazing! (And sadly out of stock. But Genet is going to check in with them later this week!) We picked up a couple of bottles of wine and some good beers, and ventured to the store, then home to start dinner.

Rama was there when we arrived, and Linnaeus arrived not long after. I dove into the dinner preparations. The menu included Eggs with Cream, Spinach, and Ham, Spinach and Bacon Salad with a Roasted Shallot and Dijon Vinaigrette, and Potato Gnocchi with Meat Sauce. I learned a couple of useful things:
1. Don’t start cooking an involved dinner at 6 PM. Fortunately, the beer and wine (and chips and salsa) helped maintain everyone’s good spirits when the food was served at 10 PM.
2. Gnocchi is neat and fancy, but it’s a pain in the ass. Next time, keep it simpler.
3. The Eggs with Cream , Spinach, and Ham is nothing short of astonishing. Saute the spinach with garlic and shallots, then coarsely chop and place in a ramekin. Simmer diced ham with heavy cream, then spoon the ham into the ramekin. Break an egg into each ramekin, then spoon the cream over the egg. Bake until the white is set but the yolk is still runny, and serve with buttered toast. Heavenly!

Sunday brought the Midwest FurFest staff meeting. The meeting went a bit longer than I usually like, but we got a lot done and made sure that no action items from the past year has fallen between the cracks. After the meeting, we adjourned to Mi Mexico, a new Mexican restaurant just north of the hotel (in the old Weber Grill location, for those who know the area). Wow! What a great find! Our meals were really fantastic, and they handled a large crowd of people extremely well. Plus, if someone is looking to eat cheaply, you’ve got a winner here, with $5.00 entrees available.

The rest of the evening was spent at home relaxing, working on some small MFF projects, and watching The Amazing Race (yay for the comic book geeks!).

This week is crunch time for the Midwest FurFest Restaurant Guide. We’ve got 120 restaurants listed and my goal is to have a useful review for every single one of them. Once that’s done I need to go to work on some other projects. No panicking yet, though – everything seems to be coming along nicely.

A Winnar Is I!

I neglected to mention yesterday that I actually won something! One of my favorite food blogs is Serious Eats. Every so often they have giveaways to promote various cookbooks or vendors. I’ve been entering for months, but never was the lucky name drawn…until Tuesday, when I entered to win Artisanal Chocolate Eggs from John and Kira’s, a chocolatier out of Philadelphia. I seem to have won a box of 36 chocolate eggs. Um, wow. A note to all of my friends in the area – hit me up, because it would probably be better if we didn’t eat all those ourselves 🙂 (As an aside, today Serious Eats linked to a recipe I’m tempted to try: Cadbury Creme Eggs Muffins!)

Meanwhile, I’ve been working with my shiny new laptop. You’re right, kellicjtiger, I wouldn’t say it’s flat-out pink; after looking at the possibilities, I’d say it’s a more light Thulian pink. I’m having fun shifting all of my files from my old laptop, and now that I have space, I’m starting to copy our MP3 library on there too. It’s so nice to have a laptop that runs fast and doesn’t have to shift into high gear when I click on a YouTube video, for instance.

And finally, it looks like we’re in for something like 5-7 inches of wet, heavy snow starting tonight into tomorrow night, with possible thundersnow. As this morning’s forecast discussion says, “Happy Astronomical Spring.”

Weekend Update-o-rama

It’s the start of a new week, which means it’s time to look back at the weekend that was.

We were both pretty worn out after last week. It had been a rough final week for takaza at his old job, though he received some really nice going-away gifts from his boss and cow-orkers, including $120 in Best Buy gift cards. Dan slept in on Saturday and I slept rather late for me (8:30!). We finally got motivated at around 1 PM and decided to head up to Milwaukee. After a bite to eat at a nice little burger joint in Spring Grove, we headed off to Mukwanago, Wisconsin, home of the Elegant Farmer.

Saturday: Fun in Southeastern Wisconsin

Games, Cooking, and Constuff

It’s been pretty quiet over the last few days, which might explain the lack of updates – not a lot of exciting stuff going on.

takaza and I had a pleasant weekend together at home. On Friday Dan was feeling like a bit of retail therapy and between gift cards and Reward Zone credits we had $75 of credit for Best Buy, so we headed down to the BB in Mundelein. We stopped by the Gamestop there to look at their used PS2 games and I picked up a couple of games I hadn’t played before: God of War and Destroy All Humans! (I’m about five hours into God of War and it’s a whole lot of fun. A little more gory than a lot of games I’ve played, but the puzzles are fun and the action keeps things interesting.) As for Best Buy…well, we never did find anything that looked interesting. On the bright side, the next item that comes up on sale, we’ve got a $75 discount waiting to be used.

On Saturday, we bummed around the house most of the day, except for a run to the grocery store. Sunday I made Dan the chicken and dumplings I promised him for Valentine’s Day (a few days late), as well as the delicious semolina bread from Cookwise. Mostly we just sat around the house and enjoyed doing gloriously nothing.

This week has been pretty interesting. Dan will be transitioning from his old job to his new job until the end of the month (gotta love those internal transfers) so he was at the old location in Mount Prospect Monday, Tuesday, and this morning, then he’ll be at the new location in Buffalo Grove this afternoon and for the rest of the week. As for me, I got a couple of important reports turned in and I’m at a momentary lull until everything gets signed off and we’re working against the clock to finish a couple of projects. In the meantime I’m catching up on accumulated Midwest FurFest correspondence, and trying to resolve an annoying lingering issue with the house rental out in California (they’re trying to charge us for damage that we’re not responsible for).

Looking ahead to this weekend, we’ll be going by the MFF storage locker on Saturday to try to track down some convention assets and answer a couple of questions. Since we’ll be out and about, we’ll probably make a couple of stops (I want to swing by Ikea) and maybe even be social. No plans yet, but we’ll see what happens. Sunday evening is the online MFF staff meeting, and we also need to put together all the numbers for the Point of Sale hardware and software for Anthrocon’s Artists Alley. Oh, and speaking of conventions, congratulations to tozier_wah for signing on to run the Information Desk at Midwest FurFest. We own your soul I’m sure you’ll have a great time!

Chili and Football and Bookmarks, Oh My!

After all that hemming and hawing about what to serve on Saturday, we wound up punting and changing the proposed menu completely. takaza got up shockingly early (9 AM) and by 11 AM we were on the road running errands. We decided to make a big ol’ pot of chili and supplement it with tasty accoutrements like rice, queso fresco, and chopped onions. I made a batch of homemade cornbread that unfortunately not only turned out dry and flavorless but, when I was trying to get it out of the Pyrex glass pan, the pan slipped and landed on the inside of my forearm, giving me a large, nasty-looking burn (fortunately, it only looks nasty – it’s about as painful as a sunburn).

We wound up with 12 guests in attendance, including Dan’s family. We had a really fun time, and there was good food, good beer, good wine, and good company. The evening seemed to fly by. We finally said good night to everyone by midnight. As usual, we didn’t get to play as many games as Dan would have liked – next time, we need to focus less on the food and more on the games.

Sunday was delightfully lazy. We snacked off leftovers, and finally got around to watching the Super Bowl about an hour after it had started, Tivo-style. That made the game (and the commercials) much more enjoyable, and since I didn’t really have a favorite to win, it was nice to just watch and appreciate some good football.

This week has been crawling by, as I knew it would – don’t the weeks before vacations always slow down? I fully intend to take some work home with me this afternoon, though, since the forecast is for 8″-12″ of snow up here, with the worst of it falling between 4 AM and noon tomorrow. If it’s really bad, I have no intention of trying to get in to work. That’s fine, though – I have a stack of about 50 SOP’s I need to read by the end of the week, and I can do it at home or here.

By the way, on a complete tangent: Does anyone else use Del.icio.us? I can be found on there under the username DuncanHusky. I tend to use it to bookmark good recipes that I want to come back to, funny comics, and other random things (random example: the amusing comic “I Am a Host at The Olive Garden”).

Random Stuff

None of this makes a coherent single entry, so you get a bunch of random stuff:

I just finished a quick meeting with my boss. Granted, he technically only had two months of me being an employee of $employer (in addition to the nine moths prior working the exact same job as a contractor), but he gave me an excellent annual review and is very happy with my work. This makes me positively giddy 🙂 Speaking of work-related things, I had lunch earlier today with tozier_wah, which was very cool since he just works across the campus from me. We need to make that a weekly thing or something. We had a great discussion about Midwest FurFest and I think I might have something to keep him busy during the con this year 🙂

Yesterday I was all virtuous and stuff and went ahead and got my voting for next week’s primary out of the way. It was very cool that the Lake County website had a sample of the exact ballot that I would be presented with so I was able to do a little research on the local candidates and make some informed decisions. Plus I had a nice chat with the poll workers, who were very nice folks.

We’re having takaza‘s family over on Saturday evening, along with some friends, for a night of gaming. I’m working up a nice menu too – maybe French Onion Soup, and roasted chicken. I think we need some more wine – perhaps a trip to Wine Knows is in order. We also need to do some thorough cleaning of the place, which is pretty standard before company. It’s one of the reasons I like to have company over with some regularity: left to our own devices, we keep the clutter to a minimum, but I need a reason to get really motivated to deep clean and take a toothbrush to the baseboards 🙂

Apparently, I’m going on a trip in a week and a half. I say “apparently” because, well, I don’t know where I’m going. You see, Dan has put together some kind of trip for us to celebrate my fortieth birthday, and all I know is that we’re flying off…somewhere (he won’t say where)…for a four-day vacation. About all I know is that it’s domestic, since neither of us have valid passports, but other than that I have no clue. I also know that no amount of begging for clues from Dan will yield any further information, so I probably appear annoyingly incurious, but I’m very content in the knowledge that Dan knows me well, and whatever he has put together will be truly amazing. And whether it’s amazing or not, I’ll have my love there with me, so that makes it amazing in itself. (I’m sure he’s made all kinds of posts in his journal about this that I can’t see, and all of you who have read and heard about this from him are dying of laughter. Hey, I’m OK with that. I’ll just sit here in quiet anticipation 🙂

Oh, and one last note: I would note that one of my favorite coffees, Dark Roast Sumatran, from one of my favorite coffee providers, Alterra Coffee, is on sale at 10% off. With shipping by Priority Mail only $4.60, if you order a couple of pounds (like I usually do) it’s comparable to buying coffee off the shelf from some of the higher-end providers. (I also recently discovered the Brazil Traditional Dry, which is simply outstanding as well).

Random Things For Your Reading Pleasure

Hmm, so it sounds like most people will be getting a check for $600 from Uncle Sugar Daddy. Politics aside, about all I can see is that for us, it’s $1,200 that’s going to Visa. As I said to takaza, “Fiscal responsibility is boring.” But hey – less debt is a Good Thing. I still want to buy something frivolous, though – like maybe a sexy new dual-core laptop or something.

Cook’s Illustrated is looking for recipe testers. Heck yeah, I signed up! While I often have an idle yen to cook many of the recipes from their pages, this gives me the impetus to actually get off my butt and do it. Of course, I may need some help from friends in evaluating the finished products. Hmm.

It was a screwy morning today. As we approached Dan’s usual train station there were cars streaming out of it – never a good sign at 6:50 AM. Dan checked and Metra’s website said that a freight train had derailed in Antioch and no trains were running (which was not really the case). Well, phooey on that. I dropped Dan off at the Round Lake station and he wound up having to take an expensive cab ride to work from Glenview. Then, as I was getting some cash from the ATM on the way in to work I notice (after my transaction, unfortunately) that the lock on the ATM was half-open (it’s the type where when unlocked a faceplate pops out, then you unscrew it). I called the bank branch when they opened and they assured me that if the ATM had been opened an alarm would have disabled it. I’ll keep an eye on my account just in case…

It’s a Difficult Monday

I started the day feeling completely out of kilter. Long lists of stuff to get done for MFF and for work, weaving in and out of each other, all seemingly insurmountable. After spending the morning across the campus and having gotten a very tasty chicken avocado wrap for lunch, things are looking much better. There’s still a ton of stuff that I have to get done, but it’s no longer quite so scary.

We had a very enjoyable weekend. Friday evening we had a lovely dinner with genet (unfortunately, roho‘s soul was still being consumed by his employer), then got to relax and unwind a bit. Following a lazy Saturday morning, takaza and I did a bit of cooking for daveqat‘s birthday party – Dan made cheezy mashed potatoes with bacon, and I made a warm potato-bacon salad (which was supposed to be a warm salad with bacon and Jerusalem artichoke, but alas, Garden Fresh had no Jerusalem artichokes in stock). For the bacon trifecta, I made pig candy, which was served with brie and sliced pears. Most people who tried it really liked it. The party on Saturday night was quite a lot of fun, and much booze was consumed.

On Sunday we met mirkowuff and perro for lunch at Osteria di Tramonto (yum!) then gave Perro a tour of the new MFF hotel. As he mentioned in his entry today, it’s going to be tricky: we have more space to work with, but the way that the space is divided up makes things rather tricky. I think that Perro will do a great job. By the way, Perro has also been named my Vice-Chair for this year. While traditionally that has been a role for the next chairman, in this case I don’t care about that. I’m more interested in making sure that we have someone who can reliably answer questions and act in the chairman’s role when I am unavailable.

Next up was the first MFF staff meeting of the year. I didn’t quite get it in under an hour, but I was close. We covered a lot of ground, and got a lot accomplished. Staff members, if you didn’t see the minutes on the staff mailing list, they have also been posted to the staff area of the Midwest FurFest forums. Sunday evening I got a bit of unwelcome news that is going to take some time to figure out how to deal with. Part of the fun of being con chair, I guess.

Finally, I just finished registering for Furry Connection North. We’re still working on the accommodations, but we should have that nailed down in the next few days. Woohoo!

Hooray for Half-Pony, Half-Monkey Monsters!

It’s Friday and I’m feeling random.

So it appears that we’ll be going to Furry Connection North (April 11-13, Ann Arbor, MI). It will be the first convention I’ve been to in a long LONG time where I haven’t been on staff, so it should be an interesting experience. Once we get our rooming situation sorted out I’ll go ahead and buy sponsorships for takaza and me. If things work out, it appears that there may even be a Fine Potables Party there!

We need to make a couple of side dishes for a birthday party this weekend. Because I’ve never really cooked with Jerusalem artichokes (and because everything is better with bacon) I’m going to try making Warm Salad with Jerusalem Artichokes, Bacon, and Radicchio, a recipe from Jamie Oliver’s newest cookbook. I don’t have a lot of use for Oliver, but hey, the recipe sounds tasty. I just hope it scales reasonably.

Speaking of food-blog related stuff, I’m sad that I didn’t win anything in the Menu for Hope 4 raffle results that were announced today, but they did raise over $91,000 for the United Nations World Food Programme. That’s just amazing. I look forward to participating in Menu for Hope next year! (and I’ll probably mention it more next year because not only is it a great cause, the prizes they were raffling off were extremely nifty)

Finally, yesterday I introduced a cow-orker to the amusement that is Jonathan Coulton. That reminded me to go back and listen to some of his songs I haven’t heard. My new favorite of his is Skullcrusher Mountain, a tender tale of an evil overlord attempting to impress his less-than-willing female captive:

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

Fun With Food Safety!

So after lounging around all morning yesterday I decided to get a start on the cooking for Wuffmeet. The plan was to make Curried Lentil, Tomato, and Lamb Stew. After some annoying issues that included having to buy the lamb sirloin bone-in (and subsequently getting about 2 pounds of lamb from a 7-pound hunk of meat, bone, and fat after butchering it myself), I got a later start than I would have liked. By 11 PM, the stew was done cooking, so I packed it off and put it down in the garage. I figured that the low temperature was going to be in the teens so it would chill quickly, a tall order for eight quarts of stew.

This morning I checked the internal temperature: 86 degrees F. That would mean that it spent 8 hours in the “danger zone” of between 140 and 40 degrees F, providing a fertile breeding ground for bacteria. And after some online research to confirm my suspicions, I found that even if you kill the bacteria by reheating to 165 F the toxins that the bacteria generate will still be present. And as much fun as it would be to give all of our friends food poisoning, I think I’m going to take the safest course of action and throw it all out. It sucks, but I’ll chalk it up as a learning experience. Besides, the overwhelming flavor of the stew was curried carrots, which…well, it’s not what I was going for. So I think I’ll be making something else in its place, though I’m not sure what just yet.

Tonight’s entertainment: Cooking up the Chili Con Carne (and then properly cooling and storing it!). The recipe looks delicious, and I have a couple of tweaks that I am sure will be very good.

Time to Cook!

Well, the snow came and went, as predicted. I think when all is said and done we got about eight inches up here. It’s not too big a deal, but the roads were pretty sloppy this morning. It took me twice as long as usual to get to work – 15 minutes! Man, I love living nearby.

So takaza is still off in Detroit training, which means one more night of living the bachelor life. Last night was terribly exciting: relaxing on the sofa, reading the paper, chatting with folks on the muck and by IM, and listening to a good net radio station. Woo, life in the fast lane! 🙂 Tonight may be a bit different, though. Now that we have a little extra freezer space to work it, it occurred to me that the dinner that we traditionally cook for the first night of our New Year’s shindig could be made in advance and frozen. This would take a lot of pressure off me right before the party, which is always a Good Thing. I’m thinking about making a curried lamb and lentil stew tonight. I also want to make a tasty chili, and Dan will be making a beef stew. How crazy will we get? Who knows. This adds an extra bit of flexibility, though, and I love the idea of being able to offer a couple of different dishes.
I expect I’ll be stopping at home after work to track down the recipe(s) I want, then it’ll be off to the store to pick up ingredients.

Hm, need to make some plans for the weekend, too. I’ll work on that.

A Semi-Lazy Weekend

Well, as lazy as weekends can be, given the proximity to Midwest FurFest.

On Friday, takaza and I had talked about possibly going out for a quick and simple dinner. Dan lay down to relax a bit at 7 PM, and long about 9 PM I went up and tucked him in for the night ’cause we weren’t going anywhere. Eh, I’d had a big lunch, so I had a little cheese and crackers and called it dinner. At least I got caught up on South Park and Drawn Together.

Saturday, I helped Dan with the MFF pocket program and con book, then ran out to do a little shopping. Dinner was tasty homemade buttermilk fried chicken with mashed potatoes. Dan worked hard on the con book into the evening until I suggested he take a break; we relaxed a bit in front of the Tivo then went to bed.

It was more of the same on Sunday, except that while Dan put the finishing touches on the con book and the room setups (since he’s Hotel Liaison, too), I worked on dinner. perro and wolphy came over and Perro and Dan hammered out the last of the Programming details while I was all domestic in the kitchen and Wolphy noodled on his laptop. For dinner we had baked polenta (imagine lasagna made with strips of polenta instead of noodles, layered with a Bolognese meat sauce and béchamel sauce, with a sprinkle of freshly-grated Parmesan. For dessert, we had hot fudge pudding cake with vanilla ice cream. Yum! Once the programming shop talk was done, there was a lot of good conversation about MFF ’08, and general chatting. It was a lot of fun, and it was a real pleasure to hang out with those two!

Then came this morning. I slept poorly, and Dan had to wake me up when the alarm went off at 5:30 AM (he usually sleeps until 6 AM). In spite of dragging a bit this morning I’m doing a lot better now. After work I’ll be heading down to our usual staff badge engraver (the shop right around the corner from our house quoted me a price twice what we usually pay, so back to the old reliable). We should be getting a ton of packages this week, from sponsor goodies to A/V equipment to credit card terminals. Somehow our house became Midwest FurFest Package Central! We’re going to need to figure out where to stick everything around the house for a few weeks, but we’ll make it work.

OK, back to work with me!

It’s That Time of Year

Crunch time is upon us for Midwest FurFest. This past weekend was spent preparing several different orders for sponsor and Registration items, gathering information, etc. I won’t bore you with the details, but that pretty much ate up most of my Sunday. Saturday was a lot more fun, though! While takaza slaved away on the Con Book and hotel issues, I made a savory sweet potato casserole which was simply divine. I figure anything that’s made with half a pound of bacon and three-quarters of a pound of cheddar cheese can’t be bad! I’m not a huge fan of sweet potatoes, but this was just delicious! I was fascinated by the way the sweet potatoes added a complex, almost curry-like flavor to the dish. The dish was my contribution to unclevlad‘s birthday party; once it was done I packed it into a cooler with layers of towels to keep it warm and drove on down. The casserole was a hit (yay!) and the party was a blast. I was able to chat with perro, darkwolph, and linnaeus about con stuff (sorry if the smoffage put everyone else off!) and had a great time chatting with all of the other folks there.

On top of all of this we have the preparations for Midwest FurFest 2008. I was vastly relieved to get confirmation of our second (of three) guests of honor yesterday. The third slot will probably remain open until early next year. A theme has also been chosen, so we can go ahead and add those to the promotional materials for next year. (What’s the theme and who are the Guests of Honor? Come to Closing Ceremonies and find out!) This is a nice weight off my mind, though.

Unfortunately, Dan’s health issues continue, with good days and bad days. I worry about him a lot, and it’s frustrating that there’s really not a lot I can do to help. We’ll muddle through this somehow, but I do hope it passes sooner than later.

In happier news, a couple of nice things from yesterday: 1. My Aeropress came in the mail. I may make my first cup of coffee with it tonight (early in the evening, though!). 2. With CBS canceling the apparently-execrable “Viva Laughlin”, the gap in the schedule opens the door for the premiere of the new season of The Amazing Race on Sunday, November 4 at 7 PM CT. Yaaaaay! Anyone interested in making a social event of the premiere?

Why Do I Smell Like Garlic?

Well, something about being wrist-deep in garlic will do that to you, I suppose. Last night’s kitchen adventures included preparing the Asian peanut dressing for the grilled zucchini (easy enough – dump a bunch of stuff into the food processor and puree). I also made the rosemary-garlic oil for the potatoes grilled in foil, which consisted of 50 garlic cloves and 30 sprigs of fresh rosemary pureed with three cups of olive oil. Let me tell you, it’s a pain in the ass to peel 50 cloves of garlic. Still, I’m happy with the results.

Then came the main event: dinner rolls. Very exciting, no? Well, baking 96 yeast dinner rolls is a bit of a challenge. takaza was kind enough to borrow a number of muffin pans from his cow-orkers (some of which were best described as “vintage”). I made the rolls in two batches of 48 (actually 45 in the first batch and 40 in the second due to vagaries of portioning). Blessings upon Dan for reminding me that our square Cambro containers are awesome for holding rising dough and perfect for determining when the dough volume has doubled. I’ll post the recipes after this weekend, but everything came out reasonably well with only a couple of rolls getting a bit overdone and having to be eaten/discarded (most of them from one of the “vintage” pans). They’re all nicely bagged up in one-gallon Ziplock bags and ready to go; the plan is to put them into foil and briefly throw them on the grill (maybe with a quick spray of water to moisten them) so they can be served hot.

Tonight’s entertainment? A run to the butcher immediately after work to pick up 20+ pounds of New York strip steaks, then an evening spent making apple slab pies (mmm, 20 pounds of apples to be peeled and cored. What fun!).

Incidentally, if anyone is going to be at the game on Saturday, isn’t going to be playing, and would like to lend a hand, we will probably be able to put a few folks to work as we prepare dinner. Dan and I will probably be on site and setting up between noon and 1 PM. Also, note that if I understand things correctly (and I hope steviemaxwell corrects me if I am wrong), although we will still be in Madison Meadow Park in Lombard, we won’t be at the usual field (the ones at Madison and Ahrens) but at the ones near Harding and Fairfield. Here’s a map to make things a bit clearer.

70 Pounds of Produce Later…

Well, that was fun! Yesterday after work (which was, by the way, interrupted by a 4-hour power outage. For those of you familiar with such things imagine the fun of extended power outage + cGMP-compliant contained environments. Fun!) I headed over to the final Grayslake Farmers Market of the season in hopes of buying the majority of the produce I needed for the Picnic (or Steakball, as I’ve taken to calling it) this weekend.

First up: apples! For the Apple Slab Pies (I decided to make three of them), I needed 10.5 lbs each of Golden Delicious and Granny Smith apples. I checked with the apple seller with the widest variety and he cut me a deal on Golden Delicious and Cortlands (which I prefer to Granny Smith anyway), $1.42/pound. If I’d haggled I could have gotten it cheaper, but OK. Alas, they were out of the monstrous zucchinis that would have made life so much easier. On my way out, I passed a vendor who had a nice variety of potatoes. A little discussion and some digging in his truck netted me 30 pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes for $0.50/pound. Score! Yukon Golds hold their shape much better than Russet potatoes, and have a nice intrinsically buttery taste. Usually they’re a lot more expensive, too, so I was happy with this find.

Then it was off to Garden Fresh for the rest of the supplies, including 22 pounds of zucchini and 8 heads of garlic. I wrapped up in time to pick up takaza from the train station, and even to surprise him with a small root beer shake (his favorite). After a short break at home, I left him to work on con book stuff and struck off to Sam’s Club, where I picked up the last few things we needed (like powdered drinks and foil pans). The real find was a large pack of ready-to-roll crusts, just what we need for the apple pies, at half the price it would cost to buy them at Jewel. Woo!

So now we’re stocked and ready to roll. Tonight I’ll be making the Asian peanut dressing for the zucchini, the garlic-rosemary oil, and nearly 100 yeast dinner rolls. Tomorrow will be the really busy night, with 21 pounds of apples to be cored and peeled (fortunately, I picked up a little help for that) then making three 13″ x 18″ apple pies. Dan will be a big help with those!

It’s funny – this seems a lot of hassle, and I sometimes wonder why I put myself through this kind of stuff. Last night, though, while relaxing with the knowledge that everyhting was falling into place and things are shaping up to be as good as I hope they will be, I realized that’s the key – that sense of accomplishment. It takes a lot of effort to get there, but it’s a really good feeling.

Appley Doux? Don’t Mind If I Do!

That was the weekend that was. On Friday, takaza and I went out after work for a quick trip to Sam’s Club to price out some shelves that he had his eye on so we could bring some order to our garage (and hopefully other areas of the house as well). We didn’t buy anything while we were there, but we had some better numbers to work with. On the way home, we decided to try one of the family restaurants in Grayslake, the Hillside Restaurant. While Dan’s meal was pretty blah, my Reuben was excellent, with some of the better corned beef that I’ve had in a while. Afterwards, we stopped by the Prairie Croissant Cafe and picked up some coffee beans (they get theirs from Metropolis Coffee in Chicago, my second-favorite roastery there 🙂

On Saturday, Dan had to go over to his mom’s place to hook up her new DVD recorder and show her how to use it. I struck off on my own and joined roho, genet, feren, lady_curmudgeon, and colliedoc for brunch at Las Vegas Restaurant in Antioch. Afterwards we walked around downtown a bit to fight off the inevitable food coma and we were joined by linnaeus. The lot of us headed north to Brightonwood Orchard, home of Aeppeltreow Winery. We sampled some of the new wines for 2007, but I wound up buying a bottle of the very tasty Appley Doux sweet sparkling cider and a bottle of Pommeaux apple dessert wine (fortified with apple eau de vie). Then it was over to the apple barn where we checked out some of the wonderful heirloom varieties. My favorite, Northern Spy, wasn’t in yet, but I picked up some Northern Greening and Gravenstein apples.

After returning from the orchard, Straif and I headed south and picked up Dan, then stopped at Garden Fresh to get some dinner fixins before returning to Antioch. Roho grilled up some delicious burgers and sausages from Antioch Packing House, then I went to work on the grill, test-grilling a couple of different things to see how they might work for the upcoming picnic. The verdicts:
Grilled Butternut Squash: Delicious, very potatoe-y when grilled. This begs the question, though, why not just grill potatoes, which are easier to deal with in quantity?
Grilled Honeydew Melon: The grilling didn’t really add much to the flavor. Maybe good for a garnish in a salad? Probably won’t pursue this for the picnic.
Grilled Honey Crisp Apples: Excellent! Nicely caramelized, very tasty. Might be a bit too expensive, though (there’s a reason the orchard nicknames them “Money Crisp” apples)
Grilled Nectarines: No verdict, since the coals were dying and I never succeeded in doing much more than warming the nectarines.

Sunday got a lot crazier than expected. First, we were surprised by a call from our landlord wanting to come in and change the furnace filter (read: “I want to come by and make sure you guys aren’t destroying my place.”) That’s cool, though – this was the first time he’s been out since we moved and, and I can understand his concern. Fortunately, we’re good tenants and he seemed happy with what he saw. We also talked about re-upping our lease and he seemed very amenable to that, so we’re covered for next year, it appears (thank heavens!). After he left, we drove back to Sam’s Club and bought the shelves we had looked at on Friday. We rearranged some of the stuff in the garage and put the shelves together, then Dan started replacing the various boxes on the shelves. Dan’s mom showed up to start work on a slipcover for our sofa, and I went to work in the kitchen making the aforementioned Apple Slab Pie. That sucker took seven pounds of apples and four pie crusts, but it came out well and I’m very happy with the results. In the midst of the chaos, luckytheevildog showed up and Dan helped him install a new hard drive on his computer. I whipped up dinner for everyone, a simple fettuccine with a modified pesto consisting of olive oil, garlic, fresh herbs (basil, oregano, and parsley), and Parmesan cheese. I cooked up some Italian sausages to serve on the side, and I was very happy with the results. The pie definitely passed muster; I’ll be posting the recipe in the next few days, since Dan’s mom wants a copy.

The alarm went off far too early this morning, and I’m dragging a bit now. Coming up this week…um, beats me. I know I have a lot of work to do for Midwest FurFest, though, so that will probably be my primary non-work focus. For now, though, I’m going in search of caffeine!

I Can Has Steak!

For the record:

Chocolate Chess Pie
1 oz. Praline Liqueur
1 oz. Stolichnya Vanilla Vodka
1 oz. Heavy cream
1 Tbsp. Hersheys Chocolate Syrup

Shake with ice, then strain. Serve in martini glass as is or in old fashioned glass over ice.

1″ thick New York strip steaks are on the grill cooking. Oven fries are in the oven. Friends are having fun. All is right with the world.

Edit after dinner: I neglected to mention the 2005 Marquis-Phillips Shiraz. That stuff is heaven in a bottle. I will now go die a happy man.

Cooking Update

‘Cause in my journal, it’s all about the food 🙂

So, I had mentioned making a dulce de leche cake last week. Basically, you make a sturdy sponge cake using whole eggs, and it’s flavored slightly with cinnamon. You poke lots of holes in that and you pour a mixture of milk, evaporated milk, vanilla extract, and caramelized sweetened condensed milk over it and let it sit overnight to allow the liquid to be absorbed into the cake. Then you top it with a whipped cream icing. Sounds great, doesn’t it? So how did it turn out?

Not well. Not that there was anything wrong with the cake or the icing or even, I suppose, the milk mixture. But it was just too rich. Even the smallest piece was overwhelming, and pretty much all flavors got lost in the richness. Imagine drinking a nice tall glass of heavy cream, and you’ll be getting close to the feeling of eating some of this cake. Sadly, I had to declare the recipe a failure. I’m not sure what could fix the recipe, but I’ll keep an eye out for other approaches.

Tonight we’re going to try something else new and different, this time from the pages of Cook’s Illustrated. Since we’ve been huge fans of the chicken tikka masala at the Indian restaurant in Gurnee, we’ll be trying a recipe for that which appeared in the most recent issue. This calls for you to marinate boneless skinless chicken breasts in a whole-milk yogurt paste, then put the lot under a broiler. You top it all off with a tomato and cream sauce with some tasty Indian spices. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this works out.

I also have a bunch of cherry tomatoes sitting in the fridge that I need to use up. I’ve seen a recipe where you cut the cherry tomatoes in half, thinly slice some shallots, and roast the lot on a baking sheet for 40 minutes at 350 degrees F. Since takaza‘s not a fan of chunky tomato sauces, I’ll try pureeing the mixture; it should come out pretty tasty! I’ve got some nice cavatelli to serve that over, and maybe we’ll add some Italian sausage.

Hmm, I seem to be hungry. I wonder why?

You Don’t Have a WHAT?

So I was thinking this morning about a recipe I’m going to be working on tonight and I was reminded that one of the steps calls for microwaving something. Well, that’s a problem. See, we don’t own a microwave. We haven’t owned one since, um, I lived in Joliet, I think. The main reason is that I’ve never really had much need of one. I used it primarily to melt butter (which takes only a hair longer on the stove) and to boil water (which takes about as long as the electric kettle we have). I’m vastly amused because our lack of this appliance seems to boggle many of our friends.

A secondary reason is that, for me personally, having a microwave encourages lazy cooking. Call it a remnant from my chemist father (“I work with chemicals all day long, I don’t want to eat them, too!”) – I tend to avoid processed food whenever possible, which means steering clear of frozen dinners, meals in can or boxes, and that sort of thing. Sure, it took me an hour and a half to make chicken and dumplings last night when I could have just picked up a package of Swanson Frozen Chicken and Dumplings and microwaved it in five minutes or less. The big difference to me is that first, there is a sense of pride of having Made Something, and second, my dinner was actually (for me) edible.

Please don’t take this as a condemnation of how others eat and cook, though – this is what works for me. I know that I’m lucky to have the time and knowledge to cook like this. One of the big influences on my tastes is the couple of years my parents spent living in France, where their refrigerator was the size of a tall dorm fridge and it was the norm to go grocery shopping every day for the freshest meat and produce. I certainly don’t have the inclination to shop every day, but I do only tend to shop for three or four days at a time.

Anyway, enough of that little digression. Oh, the recipe that I’m working on tonight? Dulce de Leche Cake (from Cook’s Country magazine). Basically, you make a sturdier-than-usual sponge cake (using whole eggs instead of just whites), poke holes into it and pour a Dulce de Leche mixture over it and let it soak for 3-24 hours, then frost with a whipped cream frosting. The recipe calls for the Dulce de Leche mixture (a combination of sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, heavy cream, and vanilla) to be microwaved for several minutes to cook it. Fortunately, they offer an alternative where you pour the mixture into a pie plate, put it in a roasting pan and pour boiling water around it, and cook it in the oven for 40 minutes (and apparently 80 minutes will reduce it to the thick, gooey Dulce de Leche sauce that goes so well over ice cream – we’ll need to try that too!).

Oh, you want to try some of the cake? You’ll need to come to Game Night, then 🙂

It’s Wednesday Already?

My, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun. Which leaves me no explanation for this week, but that’s OK. Not that it’s been a bad week, mind you, just…eh.

Monday found takaza and I having fun making dinner. While Dan experimented with slicing and frying techniques to make home fries, I fired up the grill and cooked up a couple of steaks, as well as some fresh pineapple. I learned a couple of things: 1.) Three chunks of hickory is too much. The steaks tasted a little too much of smoke. 2.) When grilling pineapple, add the cinnamon sugar after grilling, otherwise the cinnamon gets bitter. Ah well. It was a learning exercise all around, and in the end we still had steaks and yummy home fries. Yay!

Last night we were feeling minimally motivated. I sautéed up some peppers and onions, then Dan cooked some chicken and diced it up and we had tacos. We both love the whole wheat flour tortillas we’ve found, and the chihuahua cheese is delicious. A little salsa and some crema…yum. It was a quiet evening, as Dan was working on Anthrocon cash sheets and I engaged in a bit of transit geekery (see below). Afterwards we watched the latest episode of Deadliest Catch.

Click for boring transit geek stuff

Aww Yeah…

As of 8 AM, there is an 8-pound beef brisket and two 8-pound pork butts on the smoker, with a combination of hickory and apple wood providing the smoke. This is gonna be good.

BTW, if anyone in the Chicago area wants some apple wood, have we got a source for you!

Midweek Already? I’m Not Ready!

It’s been a bit crazy this week as takaza and I make preparations for the weekend. Mainly just getting things cleaned up, etc. but also running errands. yesterday I stopped by our favorite local butcher to order some meat to smoke this weekend. We’re going to have rather a lot of meat, since I wound up ordering two pork butts (yes, that’s a pork shoulder, and no I don’t understand the vagaries of butcher-ese) plus a beef brisket. Each butt is going to be 7-9 pounds and the brisket will be 8-10 pounds (with fat attached; probably more like 6-8 pounds of meat once cooked). If we see the 50% yield on the pork that I did the first time I smoked (this will be better quality, so I expect more like 75% yield) we’re looking at putting between 13 to 17 pounds of cooked meat on the table. Hope everyone is hungry! 🙂

The other big news on my mind is Anthrocon. Besides some slight changes to my staff (and welcome to woodychitwn as my second-in-command in Artists Alley/Con Store), I was taking a hard look at our travel plans. We typically leave the Tuesday evening before the convention, spend the night somewhere in Ohio, the roll into the con at around noon on Wednesday. First off, leaving Tuesday night after work means trying to leave town on the evening of July 3. I expect it’ll take at least double the usual time if not more just to clear Chicago and surrounds. Which leaves us driving way too far too late at night, or having to drive further than we’d like on Wednesday morning. Plus, there’s the expense of the gas (assuming $4-ish per gallon), the hotel Tuesday night, the tolls, the food along the way, and the parking at the Westin.

Then, the thought occurred to me: just how much is airfare? If we fly out from O’Hare Tuesday night after work, we can stay at the La Quinta near Pittsburgh International very cheaply due to Dan’s points there, then catch the express bus downtown Wednesday morning. Monday morning, it’s as simple as catching the bus back to the airport. And after totaling all this up, it’s actually cheaper to fly than to drive. Couple that with the kind offer from linnaeus to carry a few other items in his car for us (i.e. booze) and flying suddenly becomes a very attractive possibility. Dan and I will talk this over tonight and probably have a decision in the next day or two.

So, to do tonight: install the new shower head (which, according to Amazon, is currently sitting on our front porch), clean both showers (we have a stall and a tub/shower in the master bath), then start in on dinner. Busy busy busy!

Heavy cream, Chicken broth, 4-6 large lemons…

That’s from my shopping list, of course. Since I flaked yesterday and forgot a bunch of things when I went to the store, my penance is that I have to go back today. takaza‘s mom is coming over for dinner tomorrow so I need to get more pork chops, and I think I’m going to make a nice lemon sorbet for dessert.

Last night wasn’t so good. My back was killing me, even after a round of naproxen and some time on the heating pad. After waking up several times, I finally took some Tylenol 3 at about 2:30 AM to get some sound sleep and that did the trick. On the upside, last night’s episode of Heroes was quite excellent. You know it’s good when you have to pause the Tivo in the middle of the show and just stare and say, “Wow!”. One more episode to go, and it’s going to be a doozy.

Dan and I have talked a bit about FRAC (Furries Race Across Chicago) and it sounds like we’ve got some plans in place. It’s going to be on Saturday, October 13, and we’re going all-out this time. We’ll have a website for it, and we plan to have some players out at Anthrocon as well. Dan is going to set up a hotel room block for out-of-towners. For those veterans who are interested in working behind the scenes this time, we’re going to have some fun opportunities to help out, as well. We only have a very general idea of places we want to send people this time around, but we’re happy to take suggestions and also ideas for fun puzzles (privately, of course).

That’s it for now! Back to wrestling this protocol into shape…

Hump Day (My Lovely, um, Weekly Hump?)

The Midwest FurFest confirmation postcards arrived yesterday from Vistaprint. In the past, I printed up all the postcards myself, front and back, then cut them up, the put labels and stamps on them, then mailed them. That was fine when it was just a couple hundred. Last year, I mailed out close to 800 postcards. It was very clear that it was time to choose a different route. takaza did a fantastic job sourcing a vendor for who would pre-print the postcards, then he worked with film2edit to come up with a beautiful design for the postcard front. When I got a look at the finished product yesterday, I was thrilled! It’s a quality print job, and the cost was a quarter of the quotes that we got locally, and they sent the cards to us four days earlier than we expected them. I’d really recommend Vistaprint!

So, my task tonight is to stop by the post office and buy a whole bunch of (new, improved, more expensive) postcard stamps to stock up for the year, finish stamping the hundred-odd cards I have in hand, and drop those into the mail (I’ve got one in the for you, Chilly, so you can see the finished product!). I need to stop a couple of other places as well, but that’s fine – the weather should be nice, and it’ll be good to cruise a bit with the windows down and some good music playing. Once I get home, it’ll eithe rbe pork chops of pierogis for dinner, depending on how motivated we are (and what the sell-by date on the pork chops is!).

Speaking of music, thanks to everyone for their music recommendations yesterday! I hope to sit down tonight and sample a little of each artist. I promise I’ll let you know what I think (and if anyone else has suggestions, feel free to add them). Now that I have our MP3 library in order, I’m steadily adding to it. We’ve also found a neat new way to use it: Orb. This is a nifty utility that lets you stream your MP3 library to the web painlessly – no IP spoofing, no client software needed. You load up their Flash-based site and it handles everything for you. The biggest downside for us: one connection per username, so if Dan’s listening and I log in, I knock him offline. The site offers some sharing functionality that I need to investigate further, though.

Aaaaand back to work!

I Spent The Weekend Cooking

(Yeah, yeah, I know. Big surprise, huh?)

This past weekend was most excellent. Very low stress, and I got to try some new and cool things.

We started out on Friday evening by meeting partran for dinner at Osteria di Tramonto in Wheeling (I note that there are plans to open another Osteria di Tramonto in Rosemont at the new Le Meridien hotel there). The meal was excellent, as always. We took the opportunity to sit at the counter into the kitchen and were rewarded with some entertaining banter with the chefs, as well as a complimentary plate of steamed mussels! I’m normally not much of a fan of mussels, but these were just delicious. I had the veal saltimbocca, while Dan had a seared (monstrous) pork chop. The meal was great, as was the company. We had a great time. Good luck, Partran, as you head out west in a few weeks!

On Saturday I was up and about early for my project of the weekend: smoked pork butt (or pork shoulder – same thing). It was a very educational project, and I learned a lot about smoking. I went to Home Depot bright and early and picked up a small bag of charcoal (Kingsford Briquettes – none of that match-lighting stuff!), a chimney charcoal starter and a five-pound bag of hickory wood chunks. Once I got home, I made up a dry rub for the pork (a mixture of a couple different dried chiles, onion and garlic powders, Turbinado sugar, thyme, marjoram, bay leaf, allspice, ginger, cumin, cinnamon, and pepper), applied it, then went down to fire things up. The smoker worked reasonably well, but I learned something: the higher-end smokers (i.e. $150.00 or so) are a lot more adjustable, with vents on the top and bottom to help control the temperature. Ours is…not a high-end smoker. Alas, it has no vents. This meant that instead of maintaining the ideal smoking temperature of 225-250 degrees F for 10-12 hours as I was hoping, instead it ran closer to 275-325 F for about 7 hours before I ran out of charcoal and the fire died. I improvised by wrapping the pork butt up in foil and put it in the oven for another three hours at 275 F until it came to 180 F internal temperature. Perfect! We let it cool a bit and then pulled all the meat off, shredding it, and throwing away the bones and fat and chewy bits.

How was it? Oh. My. Goodness. It was utterly delicious. Unfortunately, I also learned that a 6.3-pound pork butt reduces down to three pounds even of pulled meat once you’re done. I think in the future, I’ll probably go for things which take less smoking time, like poultry or smaller cuts of beef or pork. The temperature thing may be sorted out by more carefully metering in the charcoal, but overall the experiment was a success. I need to remember: “Don’t let the great be the enemy of the good.” Just because you can’t get everything exactly perfect, doesn’t mean that you can’t get a damn fine result out of what you’ve got.

On Sunday I made up a batch of Miss Piggy Barbecue Sauce and the finished sauce was just wonderful – sweet, spicy, mustardy. Yum! To compliment the BBQ, I decided to make Alton Brown’s Asian Slaw. Once dinner time arrived, roho and genet brought potato salad to add to the menu, and steviemaxwell brought his usual charming self (and sodas as well 🙂 takaza made Texas toast for the BBQ and I’m pleased to say that we went through half of the Miss Piggy sauce – I think Stevie had a small serving of the Bulls Eye sauce I had on the table, but everyone preferred the yummy mustard sauce. The slaw, unfortunately, was a disappointment. There’s a whole lot of interesting flavors in there, but they don’t come together in a cohesive whole. For the amount of preparation that goes into it, I wasn’t happy with the final product. No one cared, though because, dude: BBQ. So, so good.

The meal was capped off with a yummy yellow cake with chocolate whipped cream frosting that Dan made and decorated festively for the occasion of the finale of The Amazing Race. We watched the show, and most of us were disappointed in the results. But Stevie’s weird anyway, so we’ll discount that. We followed this with some Simpsons and Family Guy as we struggled through our digestive torpor, then saw everyone off for the evening. Hmm – we need a new excuse to get folks over for dinner on a weekly basis 🙂

How to Make a Cassoulet

Cassoulet is a French slow-cooked bean stew, typically made with a variety of meats. In this case, I used pork and duck. My parents learned how to make this when they lived in France about twenty years ago, and I’ve always wanted to make it again. Being that I’m blessed with living in Chicago and therefore have access to some of the more exotic ingredients the dish calls for, I figured it was high time to give it a shot.

Recipe, with copious pictures, below the cut

Thursday linky-links!

Not too much going on this week; I’m still slogging through our MP3 library, culling out the duplicates. I’m through the J’s now, and probably have another 1,500 files or so to go. I went ahead and popped for the $20 license for MediaMonkey because the library synchronization features are quite useful, though I just wish it had a free plug-in to play over Airtunes. I may look into something like Airfoil for that, though, since it’d be nice to have something that works on all applications.

That aside, I’ve come across some interesting links to pass along. On a side note, I’ve started using del.icio.us to mark stuff that interests me. Feel free to add me to your network!

The Webby Awards have been announced, which is always a neat way to find new and interesting sites.

The above list led me to Truthdig (“Digging beneath the headlines”), which led to an utterly fascinating article that provides a thumbnail history of the Shias, the Sunnis, and the Wahhabis, which provides context for the present-day struggle for Iraq. The article is written by Scott Ritter, formerly a U. N. weapons inspector in Iraq.

We’ve recently started watching Deadliest Catch. The show has really impressed me, not so much because Alaskan crab fishing is so fascinating, but because the producers have done an amazing job in constructing a compelling narrative. I was pretty bummed to see that Captain Sig Hansen was actually in this area for an appearance (right near the MFF hotel, actually!) and we missed it. (Though I have to admit my favorite captain is Phil Harris of the Cornelia Marie. He strikes me as the kind of guy it would be a hoot to go out drinking with.)

We’re looking to finally put the smoker that Dan got last year to use this weekend. In poking around on the web, I found The Virtual Weber Bullet, a great site with good information on grilling and smoking (the Weber Bullet is a nickname for a popular smoker/grill). We’re thinking about smoking some pork this weekend, and they have an extremely useful article on pork selection, preparation, cooking, and serving.

Funny, now I’m hungry…

TGIF, Baby!

Friday’s here, and it’s just when I needed it! It hasn’t been too bad of a week, but I’m looking forward to the weekend and getting more stuff done.

On Wednesday, I picked up takaza from work. The blinds we ordered (for the stairwell, kitchen, guest bedroom, and Dan’s office) had come in and were too heavy and bulky to carry on the train. We loaded everything up and headed over to Mitsuwa Marketplace. See, we found our old rice cooker in all of the boxes and Dan made some rice with it. Which burned, the way it always had when we used it before. This is just completely unacceptable, particularly since we make rice two or three times a week. Having envied linnaeus his nifty rice cooker, we went to Mitsuwa and picked up a Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker We even double-checked the price on Amazon, which I didn’t realize offers a handy mobile interface. Surprisingly, Mitsuwa beat Amazon’s price by a good $50.00, so we bought it on the spot, along with a good supply of sushi rice. Afterwards we wandered up to Wauconda and found a lovely coffee shop there, Honey Hill Coffee Company. The guy who owns the place is very nice, makes a good cappuccino, and they sell Intelligentsia coffee beans at a reasonable price. Oh, and they’re open until 7 PM most nights. See ya Cafe’ Barista, I’ve got a new local favorite!

Last night, posicat stopped by after work and he, Dan and I caravanned up to our storage unit in Lake Villa (though we were delayed due to a train accident). We stumbled a bit on the icy pavement, but we managed to empty almost all of our stuff out of the storage unit; there’s just an office chair, a bicycle, and car ramps to be removed (both Elements and Posi’s van were stuffed, so they just wouldn’t fit). I’ll be going by tonight right after work and grabbing those last few items. Once we offloaded everything into the garage, Posi and I went out and, um, donated a few items we didn’t need anymore to the dumpster (Mom, remember that TV Dad got from a co-worker in Greenville? It’s finally gone!). We got to Charcoal Delight five minutes after it closed at 9 PM, so instead we detoured around to Long John Silver’s and got Dan the chicken planks that he loves. While we were gone, he was nice enough to move most of the stuff in from the garage and pull my car in off the street and into the garage. I love my husband! We ate at around 10 PM (ugh), and finally got to sleep sometime around 11. I’m dragging just a wee bit today because of that.

As for the weekend: I hope to put up some blinds tomorrow morning, then do a bit of shopping and prep for a party we’re attending. It’s a potluck, and I’m thinking making a couple of roast chickens. Sunday brings the Midwest FurFest post-mortem/staff meeting/what-have-you. I’ll probably try to finish putting up blinds on Sunday morning before that. We’re slowly getting the place together; Dan’s desk is now in place in his office (though it’s still frigid down there, and will be until the week of February 5, when they come to fix the window). Which reminds me, we need to find a way to seal up that window temporarily. I’m thinking a few more screws and some silicone sealant will do it. We still need drapes or blinds for the living room window, and to decide if we’re going to drop the large chunk of change necessary to get a true blackout shade for the master bedroom. Wow, I’d forgotten how expensive fun home ownership can be (even if you’re only renting).

Unearthing the Kitchen, Suburban Explorations, and Entertaining

As expected, the majority of the weekend was spent unpacking, cleaning, and sorting.

Saturday I worked on the kitchen for a bit, then takaza and I went out to run some errands. First we stopped by Cafe’ Barista in Lake Villa, one of the sources of Intelligentsia coffee beans in the area. I give them two stars out of five; Dan’s hot chocolate was watery, and my cappuccino was tepid and had too much milk. That, combined with the fact that they’re charging $13.99/pound for my favorite kind of beans, leads me to think that I’ll be seeking out other places to buy coffee beans. The next place I’ll try will be Honey Hill Coffee Company in Wauconda – we’ll see how that goes.

We then headed south to Garden Fresh Market – not the one in Round Lake Beach, which doesn’t open until Wednesday, but the one in Mundelein (which is scheduled to move to the bigger Cub Foods space next door next month). Before we went there, though, we were distracted by the shop next door, which had a large sign that read “Sausage and Deli”. Well, that sounded promising, so in we went.

It’s a very strange thing to walk out of the middle of suburbia into unfamiliar surroundings. I realized as I looked over the items on the shelves that I couldn’t read a dang one of the labels – they were all in Cyrillic! After walking around a bit, we realized that we may have been the only people in the shop speaking English. As we waited at the deli case to order (they have Irish bacon! woo!), the woman behind the counter repeated something we didn’t understand a few times, as people glanced at us, and eventually motioned us over to speak with her. She had been saying “Next!” in Russian. Once we established that we were ignorant monolingual Americans, though, we got things sorted out. After that adventure, we went nuts in Garden Fresh Market, picking up a lot of staples and some nice produce. I can see why they’re moving – their current store is tiny and since it was a busy Saturday afternoon, the place was packed!

Just as we got home, we passed Dan’s mom, who was calling us for directions. She helped us put away a few more things, then we relaxed while Dan made his wonderful homemade macaroni and cheese. It was an enjoyable evening all around.

Sunday was even crazier. I was bound and determined to finish off the kitchen, and got it about 95% complete when I had to run to Target for a few things…which turned into a trip to Home Depot as well, then a return to Target for a few things I forgot. While I was gone, Dan did a great job of hooking up the stereo (which is now tied into the TV, the TiVo, a DVD player, the PS2, and the Airport Express. The Slingbox is the last thing to be added, but that will take some configuring). Thank heavens I got him a Harmony all-in-one remote to control all this stuff.

We made a mad dash to get everything presentable by 4 PM (we were close – it took until 4:30), when roho and genet arrived, fortuitously arriving at 4:30 🙂 I got to use and abuse our new kitchen, and I was very happy. We had a lovely dinner consisting of two bottles of wine (a North Carolina sweet red as an apertif, and an Australian merlot), homemade buttermilk bread, herb-crusted roast pork, steamed broccoli, and garlic mashed potatoes a la Buca di Beppo’s. For dessert, we had a chocolate-orange torte that Dan’s mom brought over from Le Vichyssoise. In between cooking and chatting, we watched both playoff games and had a good time cheering for the Bears. We had a great time, and I can’t wait to have friends over again so I can show off cook for them 🙂

And here we are back to the work week. Tonight, I think we’re going to take it easy and enjoy the fruits of our weekend labors – perhaps enjoy some leftovers for dinner, and have a nice lazy evening.