heyyyy....what?

So today my coworker got an email with something strange at the bottom:

Finding the resemblance eerie I checked out the site: http://www.myemma.com/

After so doing I whipped up a small sample of my new logo:

And finally sent this email with my logo attached:

I expect the sports car and check momentarily, at which point I'm driving away from this job laughing hysterically.

Sushi Tuesday

I am learning to make sushi. Its actually pretty easy. The only things which are problematic are supplies- my grocery store sure don't sell sushi grade nothin from the ocean. So I winged it. The best versions I made were vegetarian, but the smoked salmon worked pretty decently.

So do you want to make some sushi? My downfall is usually rice. But there is this blog about fish somewhere on internet (sorry I owe someone a citation here) with a baked sushi rice recipe! Whoo! Okay. Let's do it.

Oven sushi rice:
1 cup sushi rice (equals about 2 cups cooked sushi rice- the ratios will stay constant as you increase the servings.)
1 cup water
Maybe some nori to throw in while you cook it?

Okay so you take rice, put it in a strainer or a bowl and rinse it until the water runs clear. then let it drain in the fridge for a bit (30 minutes maybe?).

Preheat oven to 375.

Boil the water.

put rice into oven safe dish with lid. Add water and bake 20 minutes.

Let it rest for 10 minutes covered.

The end. Perfect sushi rice. Add seasoned vinegar, pull out your Nori, and start throwing some ingredients around. Its actually pretty quick. My next plan is some fushion sushi. Has anyone ever made sushi Caprese, butternut sage squash sushi? No? Oh...it is on!

Eats. I posted them.

Danish breakfast sort of- its Egg and Tomate without tomate, plus bacon. The tomate was unfortunately busy turning itself into a white fuzzy goo, and could not find room in the busy schedule it had lined up for breakfast. Bacon is a good friend though and offered to chip in.



Braised lamb and potatoes in my flea market cast iron pot. I think these are the most iron rich eats in the world. Cures anemia instantly. Even though I suspect the pan had some iron it shed into the sauce, it all tasted good:

End result- spinach with dressing from previous post, braised lamb, potatoes and the braising sauce (thyme, sage, garlic, butter, red wine and veggie broth, reduced and thickened with cornstarch)


Mini quiche. Saved for a rainy day.

Invention is the redheaded stepchild of Mother Necessity

Gentle Reader (s?),

Some bad things happened in the kitchen over the last several weeks. Our plucky, and some might say, obsessively tidy (might) Ms. E, actually had a brief and specialized case of amnesia about what sorts of actions are required to lead to clean dishes. Then some ants, which are always hovering opportunistically in the building, discovered a hole not yet sprayed with organic ant killing spray under the fridge and suddenly, washing dishes meant dealing with ants, and dealing with ants meant washing dishes, and there were all these community meetings and things, and...well...lets just say I didn't cook too much for a bit.

However. On Saturday August 2nd and Sunday August 3rd, I did great battle against foul minions of chaos; Ants and Dishes, and prevailed. See? Clean Kitchen.

I even scrubbed my stove. I took a picture of the stove, it was that shiny clean (it could only have been cleaner when I moved in and took the plastic off of it) when I finished.


Of course in the...cough cough...unspecified length of time that my kitchen was in a state of distress, I ran out of food. So tonight I recycled withered lemongrass, wilted lettuces, the one egg, an old chicken carcass and some leftover wonton skins from a dumpling project, and got to work on dinner.

This is the end result:

Its salad greens with parm, and fried chicken lemongrass things. I also wanted to say that one thing I take pretty seriously is salad dressing.

Lecture break now: I don't hold with store bought dressing. Thats madness. Do you have any idea how much high fructose corn syrup and poly unsaturated fat is in there? What about maldextrose, guar gum, xanthan and stabilizers? And you are supposed to pay 3 bucks because the preservatives are on the house? Whyyyy??? Don't go down that road folks. Real food= you know what the ingredients look like. Much of my motivation for cooking comes from looking at the ingredients list on pre-made food and thinking what percent of it I know the health benefits of. Even that fried stuff thai dipping sauce, which comes from my grocery is simple- its just sugar, chili, vinegar, garlic and water- I checked.

So for posterity I give you this motto: salad dressing is just vinegar (maybe oil) plus fun anything else you have in your house. Tonight's dressing- featured in the unmarked glass bottle involved the following three ingredients and some oil:



Other things I might put in salad dressing include mustard, herbs, pepper, salt, sugar, bbq sauce (the kind where I know the ingredients), and so on. I also have a small library of vinegars- but mostly I use quality balsamic or white vinegar.

And that is the saga of how I returned to my kitchen and my blogging duties.