Minimally Invasive

I walked into the house this evening to find my husband at the top of the stairs with a look of panic on his face. “I tried to call you. I swear, I tried to call you.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t need to peel the onions or the garlic.”

Some couples finish each other’s sentences; we just process how badly the other has screwed up. It works for us.

See, I’d asked him to put a pot of water to boil with a couple of onions, a head of garlic, and a bag of Zatarain’s Crab Boil in preparation for our shrimp boil this evening. Specifically, I asked:

And around 7pm, can you fill the big silver pot (kept under the sink) about 3/4 with water and put a Zatarain’s bag in there to boil? Once the water starts boiling, add some salt, the onions and garlic to the pot. It needs to infuse the water before we begin our seafood boil!

Pretty clear, right? I know him well enough at this point to spell out everything when it comes to cooking, so I thought the lack of cutting/chopping direction would be enough. Sigh. Anyway, he could’ve always called my dad, but chose instead to peruse his iPhoto library to see how it looked last time.

Despite his worries, things turned out fine. I threw in some small red potatoes, some smoked sausage cut into pieces, and boiled until the potatoes were tender. The shrimp went in next and boiled for a couple of minutes until they floated to the top. At this point, I used a trick my dad taught me — I turned off the flame and threw in a package of frozen corn on the cob. It stops the cooking process and heats the corn through at the same time. After it rests for about 10 minutes, everything is ready to eat.

In Louisiana, we pour the boiled seafood over a table covered with newspaper (see below), but only made enough tonight for the two of us, so it went onto a platter. Not as colorful, maybe, but not as messy, either.

Delicious! I served it with dipping sauce from Leah Chase’s The Dooky Chase Cookbook.

recipe after the jump

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So it isn’t exactly the royal wedding, but if you happen to be awake around 5am EDT tomorrow, check out the excitement at CheddarVision. The resident expert cheesemaker will “pull out a core of cheese and sniff and taste it to check if it is maturing properly.”

I’m all a-tingle!

I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government.
– John McCain

The prospect of a McCain presidency is pretty chilling. It’s remarkable more people don’t see him for what he is. At least Matt Welch does.

I love to cook. Really, I do. But sometimes when I get home from work I just can’t stand the thought of it. Unfortunately, that leaves me with only two choices: Call Luigi’s for a pie (which we did Monday night) or suck it up and cook something anyway (which I did last night). Sucking it up can be as easy as eggs and toast or I can actually produce something from the pantry, albeit something simple.

Enter the lentil. It’s hard to go wrong with lentils. They’re great for you, cook quickly, and pair well with lots of flavors, as they live somewere between tofu and wild rice on the “blank slate” continuum. The Young Ones connotations aside, they make for a perfectly fine meal.

I opted for a really easy preparation last night. While the lentils (green ones, this time) were simmering in about two inches of water, I cooked a few strips of bacon using the easiest method ever: Place bacon slices on a rimmed baking sheet and put into a cold oven. Heat the oven to 425 degrees, and the bacon is ready! (Seriously. No mess, no fuss, no hot grease splatters on your skin.) With the lentils and bacon cooking away, I made another basic vinaigrette — dijon mustard, lemon juice, olive oil, minced shallot, chopped thyme, and salt & pepper — and tossed it with the drained, hot lentils, then mounded them over a little spinach sauteed with olive oil and garlic. Topped with crumbled bacon and blue cheese, it paired nicely with our “honeymoon rosé,” the Roshambo Imoan.

Update: I just had the leftovers for lunch and highly recommend making this a day ahead. The lentils were fine last night, but much tastier after mingling with the vinaigrette, bacon, and cheese overnight.

I never can remember.

via Thrillist 

The Official MI Husband bought me a couple of presents today:

Am I the luckiest girl in the world, or what?

When I landed in New York and started going through the grueling process of finding not just an apartment, but roommates, I really started to re-evaluate my decision to move halfway across the country for what boiled down to finding some kind of social life in my 30s. Now, of course, I don’t regret it at all, but things were looking bleak there for a few months.

Then I met my favorite Brits. Kate & Carl sort of knew each other through a friend back in London, but we all found each other on Craig’s List, met for a drink, and hit it off immediately. They’d moved across the pond for reasons similar to my own (I suppose that’s true that “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” but Mr. Johnson hadn’t been to modern-day New York). Kate and I discovered we had a great degree of overlap in our cd collection, an aversion to too-tidy apartments, and a longstanding dislike of girly girls. Carl had a terrific, dry sense of humor and was a fellow ginger, so how could I go wrong?

Short answer: I couldn’t. We shared a converted apartment for about a year, until Carl’s company transferred him back to London, at which point Kate and I lived with a succession of roommates whose horrible non-Carlness served only to highlight the catch we’d found in him. So we ditched the third person at lease renewal time and moved into a two-bedroom that restored some measure of peace and tranquility to our lives.

New York can be a terrifically lonely, hard place to live, so finding the sort of camaraderie with two strangers that I thought I’d left behind in St. Louis really eased my transition. It was great making new friends who understood the value of taking the piss out of each other without storming off or collapsing into a big puddle of weep. Though our time as roommates taught me quite a few things, food wasn’t high on that list, but the two most important food-related discoveries were learning to appreciate a good shepherd’s pie and discovering that a healthy dose of HP Sauce on just about anything makes it better — eggs, meat dishes, potatoes, veggies, takeout, pretty much anything short of a milkshake.

Now that I’m married, I have another (former) Brit in my life — my fab mother-in-law — and so, inspired by this wealth of propriety in my life and the leftover leg of lamb in my fridge, we dined on shepherd’s pie this evening.

Shepherd’s pie (or cottage pie if you use beef instead of lamb) is almost embarrassingly easy to make, although I’m sure what I produced isn’t exactly traditional. I chopped up some leftover lamb, made a gravy with the pan drippings, topped it with sauteed spinach, then crowned the whole thing with a fluffy helping of mashed potatoes. As Nigella Lawson recommends, I ran a fork across the top to make ridges that would crisp up in the oven, and dotted the whole thing with butter.

And it was marvelous with the HP Sauce.

recipes after the jump

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Colby Cosh is back!