Monday, February 18, 2013

Roundup (mostly cooking and books)

I'm still here, no Austin in sight. They lowballed Matt so it looks like we are going to keep looking a little closer to where I already have a job. But I still am having urges to sell furniture. There is a trip to Reno and a storage unit cleanout somewhere on the horizon... I just had to have the transmission rebuilt in my car so all that stuff up there is looking mighty sellable.

Now I am in the throes of cooking projects. I have invested in some Indian spices and am working on diversifying my vegan cooking (the January resolution hangover). I am pretty happy with lentils and garbanzos as protein sources, but I still need to work on white beans, I basically only like them as Italian-style with pasta and lots of garlic. Bean diversification is in progress!

Also I still hate chard.

My mom gave me David Lebovitz's most recent book to read and now I want to buy all his cookbooks too! I have made the chocolate yogurt cake things twice now, they are basically a lovely moist chocolate muffin that goes great with coffee. He was the dessert chef at Chez Panisse, among other things, and it's a light memoir about living in France. I went through a travel reading phase and still go back to read Peter Mayle on French food, but this book was one of the few food-related memoirs I've read that made me want to actually cook 3/4 of the recipes in it. Julia Child and Jacques Pepin wrote my two favorite food memoirs, My Life in France and The Apprentice, and they are both AMAZING books. But while they completely inspire me and make me want to cook, they never really make me want to cook what they are talking about. This guy does. Clearly I need to spend some time perusing his blog.

I'm making a chicken curry-ish thing tonight with carrots and tomatoes, we'll see how it comes out. I've also been experimenting with desserts some more, I have 2/3 of a batch of the Barefoot Contessa's chocolate buttercream recipe sitting in my freezer because it is insanely rich and I have to figure out what else to put it on. Might need to bake myself a birthday cake at this rate just to use it up!

Garden pictures should be forthcoming soon, it has been cold and dry but we are getting some more rain soon so I need to get planting!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Annie, I'm sorry - I've been so occupied with my own life that I completely missed your move from Reno. Where are you at now? And what do you do? xo