Peachy Keen

Tonight I once again benefitted from Nate's prodigious cooking binge last week -- as a side note, it's pretty awesome that we're still using up vegetables from last week's share today. Hooray for late summer!



Anyhow, for lunch I had some of the meatballs with a baked potato (again, courtesy Windflower Farms) before going to the Y-3 show downtown. Everyone should enjoy meatballs before Fashion Week, that's my policy.






For dinner, since Nate was closing, I went to town on some of the remaining leftovers, supplemented with a little Whole Foods extra. I started with some salad mix (from Long Island -- holla, NY!) and added corn (Nate had cooked some of the share corn and left it on the cob in the fridge), green beans, parsley, pepitas, avocado (totally not local, unless you count that I bought it from Whole Foods at 59th St.), some orange tomatoes from the share and some low-fat goat cheese from Coach Farms. I warmed up some of the potato, corn and pepper chowder that Nate made last week, and I had some bread with the goat cheese and the avocado.




For dessert (no pictures, because that would have required I not scarf it down immediately upon creating), I combined Nate's brownie with some of Nicole's vanilla ice cream and some chopped up peaches. Peaches make everything delicious. Then I watched yet more of the "House" marathon. Nothing goes with adrenal tumors and footage of colons in epileptic episodes than peaches.

Ratatouille. Psych! It's Actually Pasta Sauce!

Last night my genius paid off. The genius of making many meals on my day off resulted in a wonderful night of coming home and simply heating something up. Even better was that it was Jen who did most of the heating while I sat on my butt. Fantastic.



Jen made some salad with the romaine and assorted tomatoes and we toasted some bread with some tapenade we got in France. The salad may look flat and that's because it was the tiniest head of lettuce I've ever seen and it barely had enough greens for two plates. Indeed the end of the summer greens is upon us as we transition into the heartier vegetables of the fall.



I had made the eggplant tomato pasta sauce on Friday without the ricotta which I intended to add right before serving. Jen came home from San Diego and ate the sauce thinking it was a makeshift ratatouille. She even emailed me at work to compliment me on it. I guess this dish turned out to be more versatile than I'd imagined.

The pasta turned out well with the ricotta and a little Parmesan. Normally I'd have gone heavier on the tomato and less on the eggplant but in the interest of using the amounts that we had on hand it came out a little eggplant heavy. I also would have used fresh basil but only having the farm share parsley I opted to feature that more prominently and use a little dry basil.

For dessert we enjoyed some of the peaches with yogurt as well as a second dessert of brownies with vanilla ice cream.

We also watched "Psych" so it was a pretty action-packed Saturday evening. So action packed that we fell asleep before it ended. The last I can remember Shawn, Gus and Henry were all dressed up in disco clothes in a junkyard. I wonder if they were able to get the evidence they needed to get that guy back in prison. Wait, I'm picking something up. I'm sensing that they did.

Catching Up, Cleaning Up

This week has been a little atypical. Jen's in San Diego and I've been spending all of my time not at work assembling various Ikea items and reorganizing our apartment after our most recent Ikea jaunt.



Part of the mission was installing a $12 shelf above the stove to hang pots and pans. This is an improvement that is extraordinarily cheap that I've been talking about doing since we moved in four years ago. For $12 I'm a little embarrassed that it took so long to finally purchase and install. We've been living with pots and pans overflowing all over the stove for all this time and after a quick installation our kitchen is now 500% less miserable to be in.



I was now able to do something I haven't been able to do since we moved in here, cook on all four burners without having to move any pots and pans onto the floor.

Why didn't I spend this $12 sooner? It has already made my kitchen life infinitely more tolerable.



The only unfortunate portion of this process was me "spilling" paint all over my hand. I say "spill" because it's less embarrassing than "squeezing the paint out of the paint brush like a big, stupid idiot and subsequently covering my hand in paint." So that added about 30 minutes of scrubbing, soaking in nail polish remover and removing more of skin than paint in an attempt to clean up. It also resulted in little white fingerprints on our soap dispenser, bottle of hydrogen peroxide and on Jen's nail polish remover (which is now nearly empty).



I had to sadly discard the computer desk that my father had purchased with our first computer, an IBM 8088 PS/2, in 1987. Since then it's been home to at least ten different computers and even made the move with me to New York. Unfortunately it was pretty damaged and had to be tossed out and replaced by a lighter, smaller desk from Ikea.



As is always the case with moving a computer after I unhooked everything then set it up on the new desk I was left with a tremendous amount of unused and unneeded wires that I was able to put directly into our computer recycling bag.

Having today off of work was a good opportunity to do the laundry, finish up some of the home improvement project and cook a number of things to get us through the weekend. Jen will be home very early in the morning so I figured I could make some stuff and refrigerate/freeze it for her so she can focus most of her weekend on relaxing (and going through the tremendous number of books she has to reorganize).



I started by making some corn chowder. I still had the purple and red pepper from the previous week so I sweated them down with a little onion and garlic, steamed the corn, cut it from the cob then finished it with a little stock, skim milk, salt, pepper, Old Bay seasoning and thickened it with some roux. I would normally use green and red pepper. The purple was a little weird so I added some of the chard to the soup as well to make it a little greener.



We still had some meatballs in the freezer so I made some sweet and sour meatballs quickly. The recipe is so simple that I'm a little embarrassed to print it. Let's pretend that it's a laborious process that involves lots of herbs and spices.



We also had the eggplant in the fridge so I made an eggplant, tomato and ricotta pasta sauce that we could hopefully use up in the coming days.



Earlier in the day I had baked some brownies because we were out of cakey substances, my favorite food group. I had to make s'mores to have with my afternoon tea and that was not really acceptable. Not acceptable, yet very delicious.

Next week should be a slightly more typical week as far as our vegetables go. Once we clear the mounds of books off our table we may even be able to enjoy dinner like civilized people! Won't that be exciting!

Swedish Meatballs and Home Improvement

Jen is currently in San Diego and I am stuck here on the island of Manhattan all alone. Hopefully that doesn't come across as jealousy. San Diego is towards the bottom of the list of places I'd like to visit in California. It's not even close to the top of the list of places in California that start with "San" that I'd like to visit. For those curious the list is something like this: San Dimas, San Francisco, San Jose (to see the shark tank), etc.

Jen's whirlwind tidying mission preceded our planned trip to Ikea where we got in around 10:30AM and immediately lost Jen's painstakingly mapped out and measured drawings of our apartment. This was a real morale killer but we still managed to spend over four hours and far more money than I am comfortable writing on some fixings for the apartment.



After a one-hour scouting tour of the store we headed to the cafe which I maintain is the cleanest kitchen I've ever seen in all of my days on this planet. Jen had the Swedish meatballs, which she'd been looking forward to since before our trip to France. I think she may even have longed for the Ikea Swedish meatballs while dining at some of the nicer restaurants we visited on our honeymoon.

The next several hours were spent in Ikea hell. We'd made the ill-advised decision to go to Ikea on Labor Day. We we knew in advance it was a bad idea but given the convenience of where it fell in our schedules we decided to do it anyway. After all that we even took a side trip to Target to pick up a few odds and ends. I would highly advise against that as well. Our original plans even included a trip to Crate & Barrel but thankfully we forgot the gift certificates we were supposed to bring with us to spend there. Perhaps that was our subconscious at work trying to protect us.



When we got back to the city we were unloading when I saw a a brownish blur flying towards me. I jumped back and looked down to see a frog just hanging out on the ground near a fire hydrant. I tried to get close to it and it leaped up and clasped onto the side of the fire hydrant.



Slowly it made its way into the little gap where the side cap of the hydrant is screwed on. This brings the total number of wild frogs that I've seen on the street in New York City to one. I think that may be a new county record.



After getting home I quickly assembled our new bed and Jen quickly ordered take out from Dallas BBQ after we also ditched our plans to stop by a grocery store on the way home. An all-day Ikea expedition will take the ambition right out of anybody. Life would be so much easier if we didn't love that damn store so much.



Before dinner I had decided to break down some boxes using a razor blade, something I do often. Something I do not do often is slip while holding the razor blade and slice my finger open. I was lucky enough to have that happen on this occasion. After debating going to the emergency room for stitches I used my last emergency room visit as a guide and decided not to. It took four hours to get seen when I was nearly dying of some sort of rogue intestinal virus, a little nick on my finger would have kept me there for at least twelve hours. I've worked with sharp knives long enough to know how to bandage it up and move on.



After dinner I put together our new kitchen console and rattled off more creative curse words in thirty minutes than the naval complement of an average battleship blurts out in a twenty-four-hour period. For some reason the screws did not line up with the screw holes and that caused me to sweat profusely while crouching inside a stainless steel cabinet for much of the post-dinner hours. Don't let the smile fool you, I hated life at that moment.



Jen left for San Diego early this morning leaving me to pick up our farm share on my way home from work. Here's what we got this week: 5 ears of corn, 3 red tomato, 2 green zebra tomatoes, 1 yellow tomato, 1 pound potato, 1 head garlic, 4 carrots (the ones that look like parsnips), 2 red peppers, 1 head lettuce, 3 pounds peaches, 1 1/2 pounds green beans, and 1 bunch chard. They are all artfully displayed on our new kitchen console which is only two-thirds complete at this point.



After coming home to an apartment that was in a transition (to put it mildly) and that Jen was not here I opted for an easy meal.



I cooked up some frozen raviolis and served them with some farm share tomato and some sliced cornbread from last night. Just enough to eat quickly then get back to work assembling and cleaning.



Two fingers of this wine we got (because it was Shiraz and had a cool hologram on it, a clear winner in my book) and I am not ready to jump back in the kitchen and tackle another portion of this cabinet assembly.

Sadly for Jen she will not be here to hear my clanging and cursing from the other room. Instead she will be in San Diego which is currently about ten degrees cooler than New York.

Lucky stiff.

Duck, Duck, Goose

With a full Saturday before me, I decided the time was ripe for two projects: One, an immense decluttering and purging, and two, cooking a duck for the first time ever. (This second, I will admit, was helped along greatly by the fact that Nate had bought a duck and then left it in the fridge, ready to be cooked.)

Anyhow, I'm very pleased with the results of the project one: I'm only sad that I didn't take any before pictures of the messes that were the hall closet, bedroom closet and wardrobe so that the pictures below would seem all the more impressive:





Seen in vignettes as such it doesn't seem like this could be an entire day's work, but yet it was. Although I did draw three to-scale floorplans of the apartment, so there's that.

Project two I am willing to consider fairly successful as well. Given very straightforward directions (season the duck, sear it, then roast it over low heat in a pan over celery, carrots and onions), I followed them to the letter. I also made a quick salad by mixing the leftover corn, parsley and tomato with a little red onion and some olive oil and cider vinegar.



Since Nate was home earlier than expected (hooray!) we ate the corn salad over some greens as an appetizer while the duck finished cooking. Then we had the duck (nice and juicy, although perhaps benefitting from a little more time in the oven), with the vegetables (all delicious in the fat from the duck) and baked potato.



We washed it down with the last remaining Amstel -- and at this point, I think we may have finally cleared out all the second-hand beer.


For dessert, yogurt, of course, with some of Nicole's Haagen-Daas to follow. And tea, in the lovely teapot the Gauvrys gave us as a gift. A very fortifying drink, tea. Just what one might wish to imbibe before taking a stab at the entry way closets...