rice pudding recipe

Last weekend I went to G.Dog's mom's annual Christmas regifting and caroling party. G.Dog's calculations on food quantity were wayyyy off, so there ended up being about twice as much rice as was needed. I brought some home. The last time I made rice pudding from leftover rice, it wasn't really that great, so I hereby record for posterity this excellent recipe. I used 2% milk ('cause that's what I had) and threw in some ground cloves and a cinnamon stick at the end. If I did it again, I might drop the cloves.

cake

Tonight I went to E.Be's and N.Hu's for dinner. It was a lovely meal and was followed by this German chocolate cake:


Bold statement by Safeway, huh? I mean, they're really throwing down.

I'm not going to swear it was the most moist cake I've ever had, but it was pretty moist. And it was tasty. Sure, a Safeway cake has a lot of ingredients that aren't found in nature, but the food engineers know what they're doing. The final product tastes good.

I would not recommend eating this

The week between the shows we don't have rehearsal - we're just supposed to, you know, not totally forget the show. On the Wednesday night some of the 20- and 30-somethings (the "aging teens") got together to make:


...a gingerbread model of the set. I made the base out of Rice Krispie treat (which I'd never made before, but let me tell you, not difficult), then we piled pieces of gingerbread from a bunch of gingerbread-house-making kits, then had way too much fun adding people. This is the "Chasse-Galerie" sequence, which included multiple flying canoes (here represented by tootsie rolls).

We made it for display at the cast party, where it was a big hit. You can see a much better picture of the final product on facebook, complete with tags.

mmmm, white food

I mentioned my stupid stomach? This is the kind of thing I ate while I was in Oregon:

Saturday night we went to the house of one of Kay Ray's friends, who is a fabulous cook and made beautiful food for everyone. Including some special boiled starches just for me. Sigh. (I'm back on normal food now, pretty much.)

salt n pepa

My parents just got back from two weeks in Russia and a week in Prague. They brought me a lot of cool presents, but I find this one the most amusing:

It's a salt and pepper grinder. Coming soon on a bowl of popcorn near you! (Does anyone here read Russian?)

belated summer recipe

I don't know how frozen yogurt is doing in other places, but here in D.C. we've suddenly got three trendy places offering yogurt that tastes like yogurt, not like fake ice cream, and comes with various delicious toppings. I've been to two of the stores, a number of times now, and every time I've gotten my yogurt with blueberries and honey.

So last week I was walking back to the office with compatriots, eating one of these, and I thought, hey, I have yogurt at home. And blueberries. And honey. I consulted a number of recipes for frozen yogurt, and here's what I did:

2 cups lowfat (2%) plain yogurt
1/2 cup honey
1 cup blueberries (or whatever)
1 tablespoon vodka (or kirsch or whatever) - supposedly this helps it not get icy

1. Mix yogurt, honey, and vodka. Stir in the blueberries. Mush some of the blueberries up, but leave most of them whole.
2. Freeze overnight in a 9x13 inch cake pan, covered tight with foil or plastic wrap. Stir every 45 minutes or so. I mean, don't stir all night - I did this for like the first four hours, then went to bed because it didn't seem to be freezing. But I can't even tell you if the stirring was necessary at all.
3. Break up the frozen product and transfer into a container with a tight top.
4. Enjoy!

The texture is icier than ice cream. The blueberries freeze solid, which is pretty fun. Worst case, if the freezing doesn't work out for you: stick it in the fridge to thaw. It'll still taste good.

bed, breakfast, and logorrhea

Miss Shirley and I stayed at a pleasant little B&B in Vermont - a friend of the housewarmee runs it, just two bedrooms above her house. Breakfast included these blueberries and some awesome bacon. I love blueberries. And bacon. I could eat them every day.

Breakfast also included the guests in the other room, who turned out to be a woman in her early 20s and her mother. The mother could not. stop. talking. She told us about everything - from the time when she lived on the West Coast to the attitudes of the people in the town where they live to the daughter's experience in the National Guard. And a whole lot of other stuff about the daughter. Who was right there, and has to be the most patient person on earth. I checked out of the conversation when I caught on that the woman was 100% output. No taking information in. Only dispensing. (Miss Shirley is more polite than I am.)

The one thing that saved us: our breakfast started half an hour before theirs, so we escaped after about 15 minutes of monologue.

house, warmed

Bet you thought I was done blogging my trip to New England. HAHAHA. Like I would be done with a four-day trip a mere three weeks after it started.

The inspiration for this trip was sometime in July, when I was at a Norwegian dance party in my neighborhood complaining to a friend who's moved away about the trouble I was having at work. (Note to everyone I know: sorry about all the complaining. It might be getting better.) And she said the obvious remedy to that was to come to her housewarming in Vermont in August. So here's the inside of her beautiful house:


We warmed it well - the fiddler from here flew up, there was dancing, it was great.

The best thing was the food. This party was full of the kind of people who make their own venison sausage (mmm). I tried pie made from wild blueberries picked that morning, a beautiful, beautiful ham, and lots of salads involving cucumbers. I met a teenager who's into revolutionary war reenactments (he "carries a musket" for some group or other) and someone who runs a Swedish-style weaving school in Massachusetts. Good times.

antonio's

I mentioned telling Miss Shirley about the museum over lunch. That lunch gets a blog post all its own, 'cause it was awwwwesoooooome.

I was walking past the library at work a day or two before our road trip when I thought, hey, I should find a guidebook on New England. The New Bedford entry had two restaurants - one downtown and one somewhere else that was supposed to have good Portuguese food. So when we were in New Bedford looking for lunch, we plugged the Portuguese restaurant, Antonio's, into the GPS and drove over.

And wow, the guidebook did not lie. It was darn good Portuguese food. I got "Madeiran Scabbard Fish" - I had no idea what scabbard fish was, but it was on the specials list and the waitress said it had bones in it, which makes fish more fun to eat. It was in some buttery sauce with beautiful boiled potatoes. They were so potatoey. Miss Shirley got a skewer thing with shrimp and beef and scallops and deliciousness. The whole thing, with cod fritter appetizers, was about $30 for the two of us.

The Portuguese came to New Bedford because of the whaling (and, later, fishing). When I was on Cape Cod in the summer of 2005, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Brazilians who told me that there are tons of Brazilians around there, too - they work in all the restaurant kitchens. Oh gosh, and speaking of amazing meals, they took me to one of those Brazilian restaurants where guys walk around with skewers of meat, offering to cut bits off for you. I ate an astounding quantity of meat and drank about three caipirinhas. I did not think this would go over well with my stomach. But I was wrong: not only was I not sick, I was so well fed that I wasn't even hungry again until breakfast two days later. (I ate a little at mealtimes because it seemed like a good idea, but I wasn't hungry.)

yay, popcorn!

My parents are the best!

public service announcement

This popcorn is really good. I've only had the blue one ("Kailey's Kernels") so far but I'm hoping my parents will pick up one or both of the others while they're in Colorado. Although I suppose I could mail-order it. But that seems kind of excessive somehow. On the other hand, it *is* really good popcorn....

kayaking

Much better today, thanks to J.Bro - still waiting for the rest of you layabouts to leave me jokes. (They don't have to be good jokes. Seriously.)

Tonight after work I kayaked around on the Potomac for 45 minutes or an hour. This was about 10,000 times better than the rest of my day. (In which thing #1 from yesterday became no longer true.)

The kayaking was part of a party for my department. And, I'll admit, I was completely dreading this party. But then I got there and the host was all, Towwas, cmon, let's get you in a kayak! And I said, uh, ok, because she can be difficult to work with and I would like to please her. She picked out a particularly stable kayak for me and held it while I got in. Five minutes later I was halfway to Virginia. When she caught up with me later on the river, she said, "Towwas! You're like a duck!"

There was wide, slow-moving water. There were trees and baby ducks. A great blue heron and big sky with clouds and glorious sun rays. And after that, sangria and hummus and chocolate chip bars and so on. And now I am very tired.

garlic scapes, how I love thee

So, like I said, garlic scapes are my new favorite thing. When you grow garlic, you cut off the stems so the plant puts all its energy into the bulb. Those stems are the scapes.

Why are they so awesome?
1. They look like this.
2. They taste like garlic.
3. But they're not as sharp as garlic, so you can eat them raw.
4. You can make this out of them:

Garlic Scape Pesto
(takes garlic scapes, peanuts, olive oil, salt, and about 10 minutes)
*Start with a bunch of garlic scapes. Five or six or however many they give you at the farmer's market.
*Cut up the stems into little pieces you can stick in the food processor. (Throw away the flower part - the bulgey bit and the grassy tapery bit above it.)
*Eyeball the stems in the food processor and add the same quantity of peanuts, or up to double that many peanuts. If all you happen to have around the house is roasted salted peanuts, well, that's all I have around the house and it worked out fine.
*Throw in other greenery - I put in some basil because the plant was right next to me.
*Dump in some olive oil. Maybe a quarter cup.
*Add a little salt.
*Blend/Chop/Whirl/whatever until it's the right consistency.
*Use it like pesto - on pasta, with potatoes, whatever. Or eat it right out of the food processor. It's like spicy, green, garlicky peanut butter.

(adapted from a recipe scrawled on cardboard by these good people)

twice in one weekend? what are the chances?

Theme week: We're old.


Teenage boy working at the farmer's market: What does "TMBG" stand for?
Me: They Might Be Giants.
Him: [puzzled] Oh.
Me: It's a band.

(Also in this picture: garlic scapes, my new favorite thing.)

old europe

Tonight Barkley, S.Ball and I went to a German restaurant for dinner. This is the general decor concept they have going:


Oil paintings everywhere, quite a few antlers, and juuust peeking in at the top middle of the picture, that's a model ship, one of several hanging from the ceiling. Oh, and there's beer steins. AND the waitresses wear dirndl-y German outfits. The restaurant has been there since 1948.

It was really quite tasty food - we were just in time for the tail end of the spring Spargelfest, so I had schnitzel with asparagus and potatoes - mmmmm. And they had this drink called "May Punch" with champagne, sweet spring wine, and some slices of strawberry floating on top. Mmmmm. Also, there was a blind pianist who played (and occasionally sang) such things as Mozart arias, a Sound of Music medley, Strauss waltzes, and Send in the Clowns.

Good surreal times.

eating

Saturday night I cooked dinner for the first time since getting home from Germany. I've eaten plenty of dinners at home - frozen pizza, peanut butter, popcorn (it's a whole grain! back off!), perhaps some canned soup. But Saturday I finally settled down and made some spaghetti sauce. And it was taaaaasty. And healthy.

My problem is the same problem as always: I'm overscheduled. Since coming back, I've had something almost every night of the week and most weekends, too, so I end up grabbing dinner on the way to something, and getting home too late, and having no interest in cooking just to make lunches. I even ran out of peanut butter a few weeks ago. I had planned to get to the co-op last Sunday to catch up on the basics, and instead I got sick and really, food was the last thing I wanted to think about.

But now my fridge and freezer are stocked with little lunch-sized glass containers of rotini with tasty homemade sauce (heavy on the rosemary, 'cause someone brought a shopping bag of it to work recently). And tonight I made rice pudding (mmmm) so I can take dessert, too! Yay!

intestines

I just wrote a blog post about my digestive issues of the last 24 hours, then decided nobody really needs to read that. I'll summarize by saying I'm limiting my greasy food intake from now on, and that this applies double to tempura at so-so Japanese restaurants.

evening

Here's a way not to run an evening reception:
6:30 scheduled start of program
6:45 actual start of program
7:30 scheduled end of program
8:05 actual end of program
8:10 people descend on food-and-drink area
8:12 to discover that it's more drink than food
8:13 and some of these things are really not meant to be finger food
8:15 and, hello, dinner time was two hours ago and we came from work
8:45 and the celebrity panelist doesn't seem to be at the reception
9:00 patrons leave, drunk and lightly fed on greasy food

krakow, at last

After Warsaw I took the train to Krakow. Krakow's old town somehow avoided bombing and is just lovely. Krakow was Poland's capital for centuries; there's a big ole royal palace and a cathedral next door with tons of royalty buried there. There's a church every 20 feet or so, a lovely little art museum, and tons of cute little shops and galleries. All the restaurants I saw had menus in English, so yes, it's heavily touristed. But it is so worth it.

A restaurant in Krakow:


Awesome, eh? I'm not sure that I like pork knuckles, or I totally would have gone there, because it sounds like a good time.

and now, a blog post about my real life

1. The other night I went out to my car and the CIRCUS TRAIN was going by. Oh my gosh. I was so excited. This is confusing, actually, because I just checked the circus schedule and the train was going into D.C. from the direction of Pittsburgh two days before opening in Baltimore. But anyway. It was still exciting.

2. Last night I saw Sara from Cycle 6 of "America's Next Top Model" at a metro station.

3. I remembered the Austin Grill as having decently priced, reasonably edible tex-mex food. Apparently I hadn't been there in a while. Last night I had a quick dinner there before going to the theater. For $24, I got a bad margarita and chewy enchiladas. The bad margarita, people, cost $7.50. What the heck??? N.Lu tells me this is now normal at the Austin Grill.