To Thine Own Self, Be Food

The television show, "The Office" - ever heard of it?  I personally enjoy the opening scenes of each episode...especially this one. The only thing that ties this clip to today's blog post is the mention of beets.  Otherwise, there is no relevancy whatsoever except that I wanted to try embedding a video from YouTube.  And it worked, so let's count that as Success #1. Success #2 includes the vegetable mentioned in both The Office clip and my blog entry title today.  Beets.  Up until the last couple of years, I never gave beets much thought.  Most of the time I saw beets on salad bars in pickled form...and that just didn't excite me. Until I learned about roasting them.  And then all of a sudden, beets were amazing and delicious!  And they are beautiful, too.  (Although, a word of caution, wear gloves when you work with them - you'll be grateful later) And here was my latest brainstorm...I bought three beets earlier in the week, and by the weekend, th

Guilty Pleasure Sundays will very, very likely be a Once a Month Thing only. So, no, this post will not be about anything sexual.  Get your minds out of the gutter! I am talking about junk food. Yesterday was quite the long day at work for me...as in, thirteen hours of non-stop prepping and serving food to hungry college students.  Sundays are my Saturdays, and a day that I try to cook as little as possible. So the idea originally was to eat out somewhere decent for dinner, but then, my thirteen-year-old daughter and I came up with a brilliant idea... and We originally were going to call it Junk Food for Dinner...but then Kirby came up with "Guilty Pleasure Sunday Dinner".  Brilliant! Understand that I don't normally condone junk food.  If I can't or don't want to make it myself, then I try to stay away from it in the grocery stores.  Which is why - I never usually would buy Little Smokies, plastic Easy Cheese, Ritz Crackers or microwave popc

Ecclesiastes 3 is a popular biblical verse for those meaningful rites of passages: birth, death, marriage, puberty... And, more importantly, it is THE game-changer in the Kevin Bacon version of "Footloose".  John Lithgow was NOT expecting his rebellious daughter to employ Ecclesiates 3 as the cornerstone of Kevin Bacon's moving "Let This Town Dance" argument. And I agree...for everything, there is a season.  Fall just happens to be the season for soup. It's mid-October here in Iowa - that crazy, unpredictable time of year when anything, weather-wise, can happen.  We could have snow tomorrow and 80 degrees the day after.  That's how we roll around here. Yesterday, though, was gray and rainy and windy.  My front lawn is littered with yellow and orange leaves from our birch trees, and yesterday's wind was the final straw as many of them finally let go of the summer season.  And it was on this odd and spiritual note that I smiled...and got my mir

This is usually my modus operandi for buying new and unusual foodstuffs I see in the produce section of my sort-of-rural supermarket.  Any time I see some cool thing that definitely does not grow in Iowa (cherimoya, chayote squash, etc), I buy it lickety-split-quick.  Because.  It's a like a conveniently quick, cheap ticket to some exotic place in the world.  Except there's no long airport lines, no TSA, no risk of malaria or worse, Ebola. And then when I get it home, I Google it to find out what I can do with it. Today, doing the weekly shopping, my small-town Iowa grocery store has this in the produce department: I know, right?  It's like a hairy little sea anemone or something.  Its real name is rambutan , and it comes from Vietnam.  It's indigenous to many Southeast Asian countries...that means it's a tropical fruit.  These fruits (or at least the ones I found at the store) are small, even in the palm of my hand, and the weirdly prickly skin is pee

Some college-level football player gets fed by me just about every day.  If that isn't saving lives, then I don't know what. So, almost three weeks ago (tomorrow) marks my last day as an employee of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, MI.  That means I've been home for about two and a half weeks.  And I am different.  I have changed, and sometimes the environment I live in has not changed quickly enough for me. But.  It is what it is.  Things will realign most soonly, I am sure.  Until then, the first item of business is to get a job...because a.) it's just simply the thing to do these days, b.) I've got to put this new degree to use, and c.) not working is not part of my genetic makeup. Here in Small Town Iowa, there's only a few jobs available to me.  So I applied for a Cook job with Sodexo Corporation, which runs the cafeteria at the college here in town.  I also applied for a Cook job at the local hospital and I even interviewed, but have not heard bac

I woke up this morning, about 6:35 a.m.  I walk down the hallway to the front room of my house.  There, I see a colorful assortment of school detritus, papers, backpacks, blankets, and clothing strewn about the floor.  Oh, and a totally functioning microwave in the middle of the floor that my parents want, but have not found the time to come get yet (even though my mom is now retired and has more hours in the day than she knows what to do with). Continuing on to the kitchen, I am greeted by random Cheerios on the floor, not to mention other wrappers, rubber bands, and litter that has not been swept up recently.  Our kitchen is actually one long room that contains the dining room and TV room and that means I can see the mess that is normally called the dining table.  Chili splotches that did not get wiped up from the night before, more school papers and such scattered about, etc.  The entrance to the downstairs is actually blocked by a random plastic bag and my daughter's Adidas g

What you're looking at is photographic evidence of a happy little beer-food pairing I came across last night.  Panna cotta is among one of my favorite desserts to make...easy, cheap, versatile, and yummy.  And I had two slightly overripe bananas that needed something doing with.  I had no idea I was about to do something incredible. The porter is a dark, malty beer with roasty, slight coffee notes.  Typically, porters (and their stout cousins) go well with spicy foods, barbeque, some chocolate dishes, etc. And, as it turns out, porters also go well with Roasted Banana Panna Cotta.  After adapting the original recipe from Cody Curl here , I turned out the dessert onto a plate and began digging in.  It is a very sweet dessert, and next time I will cut out the sugar altogether.  Roasting the bananas give them a roasty sweetness that completely negates the need for granulated sugar.  Curl's recipe called for a banana-flavored liqueur to bloom the gelatin in...which, what?  W

Current parenting trends tell us it's not appropriate for moms to declare that they have a favorite child. But I say, sometimes, that's just the way it is.  Depending on the day, the situation, etc., I most certainly do have an especial inclination towards one of my three children.  And equally, there are days and situations in which none of my children are my favorite and I actually prefer the cat over them. This morning, I caught a glance of my youngest, 10-year-old Elliot, hauling his laundry basket downstairs for washing.  My kids all do their own laundry, they have been for at least a year now, and he is consistently the only one we don't have to remind or nag to do it.  So, yeah, favorite child award today goes to him.  On the other hand, the 15-year-old is currently on my Crap List because his favorite slacker trick when doing dishes is NOT to remove the silverware, thus letting pile up and not get washed properly.  I am considering having him revert to the old

Today is the first day of October.  It's a beautiful day.  That kind of pale, gray, gently rainy morning that is perfect for a cup of coffee, the latest issue of Mother Earth Living, hard-boiled eggs gently simmering on the stove... This is serendipity, folks. Until the husband comes upstairs and says, Hey, how about we do the cat's ear medicine now? Thankfully, only Juno the cat's morning was the slightest bit disrupted, as Brent went back to work and I was quickly able to rediscover my bubble of tranquility. Starting tomorrow, my family and I are doing the 10 Days of Real Food Pledge (as discussed at this website http://www.100daysofrealfood.com/ ).  Because, frankly, I won't be getting as much exercise here at home as I did on the island, and I just need a better plan for food around here.  Eating "real food" is very easy in theory, but difficult in practice. For example.  According to the Real Food Rules, those bottles of squeezable fruit spread