The other request I had was from a friend who is trying to eat healthier, eat more fresh and local foods, and learn to cook. Oh, and is a big fan of the Pioneer Woman. And Jamie Oliver. Kind of a mashup of the two.

I had to phone a friend on this one, since I was aware of the Pioneer Woman but not familiar. The description I got back was:

A summary of the Pioneer Woman? Hmm, where to start! She’s girly, down-to-earth, with a very, very full life.  She wears a lot of hats
(sometimes simultaneously) and has a deep enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life (a sleeping dog, silly, dirty kids, a truly
delicious meal, the pond at sunrise).  I think her hobbies really reflect that, too–capturing precious moments in time, and sharing
them with the world.  She cooks because she has to, really, but she hasn’t let that stop her from doing the exact same thing with cooking
- capturing her deep enjoyment of creating good food–not fancy food, but good home cooked meals that warm the soul–that other people will enjoy too. AND teaching them how to do it.  I identify with that a lot.  She’s the genuine article, too, not afraid to admit her flaws and with the enviable ability to laugh at them.

Immediately I think of Alice Waters. She started the whole fresh local foods movement at Chez Panisse in California. I got her book Simple Foods back at my birthday, but have held off from diving in yet. (There’s a stack of books I haven’t read yet waiting, and history shows that if I start too many cookbooks at once, I tend to stop reading all of them. So, one at a time.) The thing about Waters is that she’s really invested in the idea of local and organic. While I have almost exclusively found farmer’s market fare to be better tasting than the supermarkets, keeping a pantry stocked on local and organic alone isn’t always feasible. Go with what you’ve got, cook it yourself, and you’ll be better off than you were.

Same as last post, anything by Mark Bittman should be good to have on hand. There’s a reason he’s known as The Minimalist at the NY Times. Plus, he’s got a great podcast to watch – I’ve gotten more than a few inspirations from it in the past.

Finally, look at Appetite by Nigel Slater. Nigel is a food writer in the UK, and his writing style is very approachable and easy to read. (Side note – same goes for Michael Ruhlman.) The main reason I bought Appetite (almost ten years ago, wow!) is that his measurements are natural and imprecise. Think “a handful of chopped onion” rather than “3/4 cup of diced onion”. That takes the focus away from doing things just right, fretting over exact measurements, and more on what’s actually happening in the pan or pot.

Oh – and an honorable mention to pretty much anything by the Cook’s Illustrated folks. The magazine is excellent, and they have a number of collected “Best Of XYZ” volumes. This falls very much in the “go here and do this” camp – they’ve taken a fairly scientific approach to their recipes and can describe in pretty exact detail what to do and when. It’s not always the simplest of cooking (although sometimes it is), but it’s a good way to get comfortable in the kitchen.

Okay, that was fun, but it feels good to be back to a more modern look and feel with all the bells and whistles.

One question I get when people find out I’m obsessive about food, after “What do you like to cook?”, is “What’s your favorite cookbook?”. I always have trouble with this. There isn’t one magical book that just does everything for me. It’s my obsessive nature – I read cookbooks like novels.

However, I find I’m much more interested in helping people find the right cookbooks for them. This is a personal thing, since the right books for you will change as you grow, become more skilled, and find your flavors. It also opens up a much bigger conversation about tastes, influences, and goals, rather than me trying to sum up everything I believe about food in a sentence or two.

I’ve had two open questions to me about finding the “right” cookbook, which have been waiting for me to answer for an embarrassingly long time. I’d like to answer them here and encourage the readers to chime in with comments about what I got right or wrong, or with questions of their own.

Some general background, first: I tend to categorize cookbooks into three main categories. The first kind are the massive recipe tomes, big books that remind me of the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary that we used growing up. These books tend to focus almost exclusively on recipes, giving enough background information to be functional but really serving a need to be a reference point. The second kind are technique books, ones that focus on how and why cooking works instead of what to cook. For convenience, I put the true cooking theory books in this category. Finally, there are the niche books. These may be everything you wanted to know about Italian, Occitane, or Southeast Uzbekistan cooking, or they might be the end-all-be-all book on cooking kumquats or sea anemone (side note – what’s the plural of anemone?), but they universally go in depth into a single facet of cooking. All of these types of cookbooks are valuable as reference or jumping-off points, one is not better than the other, but that system helps me give a foundation to making recommendations.

On with the show. First up are a newlywed couple – VERY cool people – who enjoy food and are wanting to learn more about cooking. Oh, and they like to eat Italian.

Starting out, everybody needs at least one recipe tome to be a catch-all reference, the one book likely to have what you need, no matter what. I grew up on Joy of Cooking, although now that I’ve browsed the book (and downloaded the iPhone app) I’m a fan of How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. Either will get you going towards being comfortable in the kitchen.

Ask about Italian food, and I immediately go to Marcella Hazan, the doyenne of Italian food in America. She is for Italian cooking what Julia Child was to French cooking in this country, and her books couldn’t be more useful or exciting. This will get you out of the rut of thinking of Italian food as spaghetti with meat sauce, lasagna, and pizza, and open your eyes to a whole different range of flavors and a different approach to cooking. In a nutshell, Italian cooking is about choosing great ingredients and really not doing anything to screw them up. Marcella makes this instantly accessible to read and follow along at home.

I haven’t recommended a technique cookbook yet, since these two are great books to get started with and get a good feel for being in the kitchen. I’m not sure what technique book I would recommend yet, as I want to see what’s interesting from these two at first.

The other question… Well, that’ll be for another blog post.

UPDATE: Comments are now working. They’re not displaying, but they are being submitted and stored. They’ll show up when the look and feel goes back to normal.

Happy birthday, coffee corner. It’s been ten years since I started blogging.

To celebrate, I thought I’d bring you all back to the original, Blogger-powered, wow-I-really-shouldn’t-be-a-designer layout. Compare to the web.archive.org copy – not bad for my first WordPress template, eh? Apparently, not using capital letters was all the rage. Or something.

Wow. A decade. Let’s see…

• In that time, we went from exchanging email addresses, to identifying ourselves by blog URL, to passing around Twitter names.
• In that time, I’m still with the company I hired into fresh from college.
• In that time, I went on a business trip to London that lasted almost two years. And met some really great friends, who I can blame thank for pushing me to meet Christine.
• Um, yeah. I’m now married, with a stepson who graduated high school, a mortgage, four cats, and I switched – partway – from PC to Mac.
• Ernie was the first person I can say I met through the internet. We’re still good friends today. There are innumerable others who all deserve a mention, but I won’t be able to do justice to it, only to say that I’m amazingly lucky to have so many people all over the world I can claim as friend.
• Gaming has given way to cooking.
• I started this blog as a group blog, before group blogging was in vogue. Chris is now a doctor in New England, while Stephen does amazing research foundation work in the Pacific Northwest. Both are married to amazing women, and have started insanely cute families. Amy is off doing, I believe, theater work in New York; I need to find out…

I can’t get away from this post without talking about food. I’ve been in early morning and long day workshops all week, and Christine hosted workshops at the studio, so I’m a bit off my game lately in the kitchen. For Father’s day, I got a new end-grain butcher block from Ikea (Exklusivt, for anybody who can speak Swedish) that you see in the picture above. Haven’t even had a chance to break it in properly yet. Putting the pictures together for this post, though, reminded me about everything that I’ve got lined up to post about, so it’s time to get cracking.

What I can tell you about is the salt-crusted eye of round roast I cooked last weekend. Our brains are very proficient pattern matching engines, so while salt-crusted roasts have been in my mental bookmarks to try for some time, I saw mention of it a couple of weeks ago and suddenly it showed up everywhere. The idea is simple – get a lot of salt a little wet, so it’s almost like a snowball to pack, and use it to encase a (herb-seasoned) beef roast. Really, a lot. I used three pounds of kosher salt for a two-and-a-bit pound roast, and that wasn’t quite enough. Since you’re not leaving it to sit for hours before going in the oven, the salt doesn’t make the meat overly salty; instead, as it cooks and dries it forms a hard crust that seals in the roast, its juices, and any steam that would otherwise escape. The result is easily the juciest and most tender roast I’ve ever cooked. Add some roast or sautéed potatoes on the side and a vegetable and you’ve got a great meal.

Traditionally, this method would be used on fish or other more delicate meats to prevent them from drying out and getting tough in the oven. Pork loin would be good for this as well. I don’t know about fatty roasts, like a pork shoulder, as I would expect to want to render out some of the fat.

I’ll close this post with the words that started it all:

Welcome to the coffee corner. my hope is that my friends and i can share coffee experiences, tips, tricks, et cetera with the rest of the world and hear your coffee stories in return.
a bit about me: i’m a software/web developer currently in houston, tx. originally from lexington, ky, i spent most of my high school years in coffee shops, particularly coffee times and common grounds. i came down to houston for college, and didn’t have much time to spend in coffee shops, but was rather dismayed by a lack of good ones that i could find. i’ve settled on diedrich’s as my home down here, but there’s a starbuck’s near where i work that’s good for an afternoon fix.
well, enough about me. on with the show.

Thanks for being a part of this adventure. Let’s see what another ten years brings!

Welcome to all the Houston Press blog readers who found this on Eating Our Words. A big thanks to Katharine for reaching out to me, and for taking the time to edit the near-stream-of-consciousness that she got back in return.

There’s plenty of things I have backed up to write about here, but life really has gotten in the way lately. I’ve begun working my way through the French Culinary Institutes Fundamental Techniques of Classic Cuisine, which will get written up along the way here. I’m doing more spur-of-the-moment weeknight cooking, all part of the weight loss plan, which means good food and also getting out of the habit of writing down recipes and notes after the fact. (Oops.) Fortunately, I photograph most of what I cook, so I can reconstruct what I did from the pictures.

I also got challenged when friends of ours were married (at the beginning of May – has it been that long? – ouch) to bring back more of the recipes. I can do that.

To start off, since this is a short post, let’s talk about tomato sauce. This is dead simple, comes together quickly, and really for me beats the stuff in a jar. Plus, it’s infinitely variable – cook it longer to reduce and thicken for pizza, play around with herbs and spices to flavor, and so on.
You’ll need:
* Four to six ripe still-on-the-vine tomatoes. (I get mine at Wal-Mart.)
* An onion
* Olive oil, don’t be shy
* A clove or two of garlic

In a medium saucepan, heat the oil and add the onion and sweat (cover the pot and cook until translucent). Add minced garlic and cook another couple of minutes to take off some of the raw garlic edge.
Meanwhile, chop the tomatoes – if you like it chunky, chop coarsely, if you like it with less pieces, then cut it finer. Add the tomatoes to the pot and cook covered to soften, then uncover to reduce until desired consistency. Maybe 15-20 minutes of cooking in total.

Toss it with pasta, spread on pizza dough, dip something in it, puree it to make soup – sky’s the limit.

To put a little more effort in and raise it up, try seeding the tomatoes. Cut in half along the equator and gently squeeze to remove the water and seeds, leaving only the tomato pulp or flesh. And for bonus points, peel the tomato – cut out the core, cut an x in the base, and a quick blanch in boiling water (30 seconds quick) should loosen the skin enough to peel. The sauce is that much lighter for it.

I like dining out. I love cooking. But, I’m at my best and happiest when I’m feeding people. That’s the best part, being able to share that meal with others. (Who wants to come over for dinner?)

Cooking for the family is all about the long game. It’s no surprise to me that my family and I have fairly different tastes and preferences, something Christine and I discussed after a bowl of decent-but-unremarkable beef burgundy the other day. Shame on me for serving a stew during the early hot days of summer, perhaps, but we have very different ideas of what comfort food lies. It shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve read before that I lean towards broadly French flavors and dishes. Some of that comes from my interest in the technique – more on that later – and some of that, I can’t trace. Growing up, while there was sometimes the Louisiana or occasionally outright French dinner at home, I wouldn’t say that either of my parents cooked particularly French food. (They’ll correct me in the comments if I got that wrong.) Whatever the reason, it’s what I lean towards.

Christine is much more in the Italian camp, but to get right to the heart of it, her favorite foods and flavors are classic Midwest American. Grilled steak, baked potato, creamed corn, and so on. Good food, but not what I would ever choose – it’s often bland and uninspiring to me. Neither of us is right or wrong, it’s just two different tastes and palates.

While some of what I cook isn’t to her taste for texture issues (both she and Jason are picky about how food feels) or for being more esoteric (I’ll tweet about food in French when I know it’s something she wouldn’t want to hear about), much of it comes down to flavors. My base herb is thyme, hers is oregano. I use, or would use, a lot of wine in cooking. And so on.

Back to the point about the long game, then. Eating in a restaurant means the chef has one shot to get you a great dish. If you don’t like it, you don’t go back. Cooking for the family, being committed to it, means catering more to their tastes over time. I’m thankful that my family has gamely played along when I go mad scientist in the kitchen, and their … candid … feedback is appreciated. (Seriously. Plus, I figure it’s karmic payback for the times we gave Mom grief about dinner growing up.) But, I’m not exactly winning hearts and minds, either.

Studying cooking means expanding the vocabulary of ingredients and techniques avavilable. Doing a program like Weight Watchers (down 25 pounds this year to date, thank you very much!) has meant changing that vocabulary, replacing some habits with newer ones. This is no different – I need to amend my vocabulary to include more things that my family likes, to balance everything I would choose to prepare otherwise. It sounds so simple to say, once I put it down in writing, but it’s one of those realizations I just had to come to in my own sweet time.

Oh, and I mentioned technique. For my birthday, I picked up a copy of The Fundamentals Of Classic French Cuisine, the book form of the first part of the French Culinary Institute’s course work. I have every intention to cook my way through the book – it’s broken into twenty six units – and blog the hell out of it along the way. I may have even convinced Christine that she needs to do some of the food photography for me. So, throw out everything I said above – I may be going hardcore French soon.

I just have to remember to grill a steak and bake a potato too.

Roasted meats – the essential comfort food. Normally, when “pot roast” comes up, images are conjured of lightly seasoned beef, with some root vegetables, somewhere between cooked deliciously and dry-and-leathery. It’s such a simple food, it’s often overlooked as being too basic, too familiar, too trite to remain part of the home cook’s zeitgeist. (How many food blogs do you see writing about roasted meats?)

However, likely since humans first put beasts on a spit over fire, we’ve had roast meats. While these can be aggressively flavorful, today’s roast is lighter, more delicate, and much more mellow. The French call it rôti de porc au lait – roast pork in milk. Take a pork loin roast – a lighter, mild cut – sear it on all sides, then “roast” (braise, really) in a milk sauce with leeks, carrots, onion, celery, and a bit of garlic and herbs. None of those are really stand-out, punch-you-in-the-gut assertive flavors; the onions and garlic develop a sweetness from long cooking rather than their sharpness in, say, a sauté.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• The ingredients from the book
• Plus whatever I think I adapted.

How it works: Sear the pork roast on all sides, in a bit of oil, over high heat. Set aside on a plate. Either discard and replace the remaining oil or not, as needed, and throw in the vegetables to siften. Cook them until soft/translucent, then add flour. Slowly pour over hot milk, stirring constantly to avoid lumps, and bring to a boil. Return the pork to the pot, cover, and cook over very low heat (turning occasionally to keep the meat moist and stirring to prevent scorching) until the pork is done. Set aside the pork to rest, strain the sauce, and serve.

Interlude: While the pork cooked, I ducked into the guest bathroom to show the cook “in action”. I stepped out to turn the meat, forgot to close the door, and came back to find this (the other two were in the windowsill).

Here, I’ve got sides of roasted sweet potatoes and sautéed zucchini, as well as a green pea purée. Comfort foods all around, as spring starts to make its way through the grey of winter.

Briefly: Peel the sweet potato, cut into thick wheels, lightly coat with oil and throw into a 425F oven for about 20 minutes, turning halfway through, or until nicely browned on both sides. Peel and cut the zucchini into sticks, heat a skillet over high heat, add a bit of oil and when hot sauté the zucchini until lightly browned and done. Remove to a paper towel, add a pinch of salt to taste. Heat a can (drained, rinsed) of peas, or a cup of frozen peas, in boiling water until warm. Drain, and using a stick blender, purée with a little onion, a little butter, salt, pepper, and maybe some herbs as you like.

Today is my 32nd birthday. Barring significant medical advancements or major catastrophe, I’ve only got one more power-of-two birthday left. I’ve seen 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and now 32. I expect I’ll see 64, but I’m not holding my breath for 128. These are the things I think of in the wee hours of the morning…

Chicken, when done properly, is a deceptively simple kitchen pleasure. It is said that a whole roast chicken is the true measure of a cook, where all complication of garnish, pairings, and the like are stripped away – the final product showing the cook’s ability and attention (or inattention) to detail in all its plain glory.

At the other extreme, chicken is a vehicle for flavor, delivering its own texture characteristics but melding into the background. Consider many chinese dishes (by this, I mean Americanized chinese dishes, like Kung Pao chicken, General Tso’s chicken – mmm… – and the like) or cajun fare (chicken étoufée, gumbo, jambalaya) – it’s hard to imagine any less assertive flavor in a dish.

Somewhere in the middle lie sautées and fricassées. Break a chicken into parts, brown it in a pan, and finish cooking in a simple pan sauce. There are some important technical distinctions – in a sauté, the chicken is removed from the pan and the juices reduced and thickened into a sauce, while in a proper fricassée, a little flour is to the meat before adding liquid so the sauce forms in the pan as it cooks – but these aren’t such involved or technical dishes as to mask the chicken itself.

It’s not a bad weeknight meal – this isn’t 30 minute start-to-finish cooking, but with a couple of quick sides it’s a nice way to wrap up a day. It shows off some sophistication and skill without being extravagant.

Here’s how it’s done:
    •    Break a chicken into parts. I took this bird into quarters (boneless breasts, bone-in thighs and legs) which was generous, can go to six (split legs and thighs) or eight (cut the breasts in half) depending on the audience.
    •    In a hot, wide sauté pan, brown the chicken on both sides in a little oil until golden. If you can’t do this in one go without overcrowding the pan, do it in batches.
    •    With the chicken out, throw in a couple of handfuls of chopped onion and some whole, peeled garlic cloves. Leaving the garlic whole brings more of its mellow sweetness than sharp bite to the party. As the onion softens and becomes translucent, throw in equal parts white wine and chicken stock (about 1/4 cup each, maybe 1/2 cup each) and deglaze. Scrape up all those brown bits of goodness on the bottom of the pot.
    •    Put the chicken back in the pan – it’s okay if it’s a bit crowded now – and cover. Pop it into a preheated 375F oven for about half an hour, or until the instant read thermometer you test with tells you that it’s done.
    •    Meanwhile, cook up a couple of sides – I was able to get some rice cooked during that time – and plate and serve. Enjoy!

Note that I didn’t really do anything to thicken the sauce – having the thinner pan juices as-is mix in with the rice on the plate was just fine by me. If you want to be proper, though, either stir in a tablespoon of flour after the onions are sautéed before adding the wine and stock, or let the thicken rest and reduce/thicken the juices. (Skim off the fat, bring to a boil, and thicken with some sort of starch, such as a cornstarch slurry or a beurre manié. But that’s something for another post.)

I’ll admit, I’ve never been a huge fan of breakfast. Growing up, breakfast was more often than not a bowl of cereal – I wasn’t a big egg fan, bacon was a rare treat, and most mornings nobody had time to prep a hot breakfast. (Aside: To think of all the bacon I could’ve eaten while my metabolism was still young and vibrant….) By college, breakfast was more like a cup of coffee grabbed on the way to class, or the omelet I would eat before sleeping, having being up all night in the lab. This coffee-only tradition carried proudly into adulthood. Breakfast was relegated to an event, maybe something fancy to do on the weekends or something extravagant.

I still don’t have time for breakfast; now, I have even less than before, as I wake up immediately behind in my work day. Coffee is a must – I get disoriented and surly without it, usually by mid-morning. However, I can’t wait for lunch like I used to, especially now that I’m tracking portion sizes and trying to eat healthier and all. Cereal just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I needed something else.

Enter the steel cut oat. Forget everything you knew about oatmeal growing up – this is the real deal. Hearty. Filling. Full of all that good stuff your mother used to tell you about. And, really tasty too, once you know what you’re doing.

Oatmeal comes in three basic varieties: steel cut, rolled, and instant. Steel cut oats are the closest to whole, unprocessed oats, with all the bran and fiber intact. Raw, it looks sort of like tiny grains of brown rice. Rolled oats (or “old fashioned” oats) are what we’re used to thinking of as oatmeal in the US. These are prepared by taking steel cut oats and rolling them to flatten them, breaking down some of the structure of the grain and shortening cooking time. Instant oatmeal takes this concept to its limit, pulverizing the rolled oats to really shorten the cooking time.

If you think about this, you can imagine the effect this has on the texture and taste of the oatmeal. Instant oatmeal is basically mush, with little or no distinct texture. There’s no distinct grains, just a congealed mass of starch and fiber, often bolstered by all sorts of flavor additions to make up for this. Rolled oats are better – not quite as mushy, still retaining some of the oat-yness of the grain, sort of the great compromise. It’s like you can taste what oatmeal should be, but the individual grains are too soft to really be distinct. If you’re willing to go that little bit farther, steel cut oats are where it’s at – emphasis on the oat, not the meal, in OATmeal.

There’s one more key to making great oatmeal, regardless of what kind you use: salt. It had never occurred to me to salt my oatmeal until I saw it done one morning on a business trip by a coworker in an aging chain hotel near a refinery in Port Arthur, TX. Oatmeal at its core is just oats cooked in water, so it makes sense that it desperately needs salt to taste good. At the time, I always thought of oatmeal as wanting to be sweeter and that salt was reserved more for savory foods. (How wrong I was – add a little salt to your hot chocolate sometime. Works wonders.)

So, I tend to be simple with my oatmeal. I like it cooked thick, topped with some salt and cinnamon and a pat of butter. That and a cup of coffee is fast emerging as my morning routine.

Cooking the oatmeal is a snap – by volume, use four parts water to one part oatmeal. I fix half a cup of oats (so, two cups of water) to make a big bowl for myself. Add a good three-finger pinch of salt and dust with cinnamon. I have been known to add a chopped apple to the mix for flavor.

Plus, there’s no reason this can’t go savory. I’ve made it with great success by swapping out the cinnamon for a good sprinkling of thyme and oregano – change up your breakfast or use as a side dish with dinner. It’s versatile like that.

I’m doing Weight Watchers this year. Anybody who knows me knows that there’s probably a little more of me to love than there ought to be, and I could do with better eating habits anyway. This was spurred on by Christine joining a WW competition among photographers; I’m certain I’ll get the details wrong so I’ll let her explain in the comments.

We’ve done WW before, with more success for her than me, as well as a few other programs – we did, for example, South Beach for four or six months a few years ago. (I shudder now to think of that time. I’ve made pizza out of nothing but ground beef and mozzarella. No, really. The meat was the crust. God, I missed bread.) But, nothing like solidarity for support, and me trying to focus on eating classic, from-scratch foods just wasn’t getting the job done on its own.

In a nutshell, the program tries to change your habits both about the makeup of the food on your plate as well as the amount. No surprise there. Points are assigned to foods based on the caloric, fat, and fiber contents of the food (Wikipedia provides some decent background here). Your points allotment takes into account age, gender, weight, and typical daily exertion, as I recall. Track and eat your points every day, and watch the weight disappear at a healthy and safe pace until you reach your goal.

I’ve never been one to do thing by halves. My problem with WW before was that if I had to stay within a certain point range, I made sure to stay WELL within the point range. Overachiever and all that. Problem is, this doesn’t work unless you do eat all your points – you don’t do better by eating less than your points, you just remain heavy and hungry. So, while “diet” to me has meant “eat a bag of carrots for lunch” in the past, I’m having to make sure I eat all of my points each day.

Here’s where my problem comes in. Because I’m fat, reasonably young, and male, I get a good amount of points. Not enough to keep eating like I was, but enough. (39, for those of you keeping score at home.) I am trying to learn better eating habits, so I’m leaving my comfort zone and eating lots more vegetables, less meat, more beans, whole grains, and so forth. I manage to keep my meals to single digit points, occasionally to double digits. This means that, at the end of the day, I find myself playing the game “How much butter does Mike have to eat to cover all his points?”. Oy.

What I’m learning as I track is that by normal behavior, I actually undereat in the day more than I expected. I’m not a big breakfast person on the workdays (caffeine and stress, normally), quick lunch, and dinner. There may have been enough points in those meals to make up the difference, perhaps, but basically I need to pace myself better and start eating more.

Klondike no-sugar-added bars are three points apiece. I’ve got to stop using them to pad my points total for the day.

Expect to see more, healthier foods soon. I’ve been doing whole wheat breads, veggie pizza, and sandwich wraps for lunch. It’s new habits that I’m trying to learn.

Wow. Aspic (or, “flavored gelatin” these days) has so much potential. Consider the following: An entire meal created from gelatin cubes. Mix five parts chicken gelatin cubes (chicken broth set with unflavored gelatin) and one part tarragon gelatin (plain gelatin with dried tarragon added when heating the water, then strained before it sets – not the greatest color, but the flavor is cleanly tarragon). Or, barbecue chicken – mix four parts tomato gelatin (tomato water – squeeze tomatoes and strain out the seeds – and gelatin) with one part spice gelatin (add cayenne, cumin, etc. to unflavored gelatin), then mix with chicken gelatin, et cetera.

The possibilites are endless. It would be an amazing buffet of different cubes of flavor, and everybody can mix their own. I can’t decide if it’d be better to remelt and reset the gelatin once the mixes are done, or just put together a bowl of cubes…

(There is a logical reason for this. Driving down our street, in the span of about four houses, my train of thought was: “I should have leftovers for dinner. I have a leftover pork pie, I could cut up the meat and put it on pizza … I still wish I could have gotten the aspic in the pork pie … I was talking about aspic a few weeks back, when we talked about doing a ‘Mad Men’ view-a-thon … I did manage to make tarragon gelatin … hey, I could do chicken! ooh, and barbecue sauce!” See? Perfectly reasonable.)