What do you do when you have $35 of produce delivered to your front door every week?  You try your damndest to use as much of it as you can before the next week's delivery, that's what.  And what do you do when you're tired from work and don't feel like cooking for a week or so?  Throw a bunch of it in the compost pile. 

 

Having so many veggies arrive every week has pretty much thrust me into a 90% vegetarian.  Not vegan, mind you, because breakfast is generally eggs on toast and butter makes everything much happier.  In fact, right now, I'm munching on dinner: sauteed sugar snap peas with lots of garlic and shitake mushrooms.  On the stove are some onions browning for some french onion soup.  Okay, so that'll have beef stock, but in general, wow.  Lunch is usally some vegetable soup that I made a few days before and I take bananas and oranges to snack on during the day. 

 

Anyway, just thought I'd share.  Time to go check on the onions...

Okay, so I'm showing up a little late to the party, but better late than never, eh?  My entry in the Grilled Cheese Sandwich Blog-o-thon was exceptionally tasty.  First, I started with home-baked bread.  Add some of the best butter I've ever had, some roma tomatoes, some locally-grown, fresh basil (they sell it live, rooted at the store year round!), some locally-made Beecher's Flagship cheese, a hint of kosher salt, and fry, fry fry!  I took a picture and may post it when I get off my ass long enough to upload it.  Suffice it to say, it was one damn fine sammich.

So if a guest brings over some vanilla ice cream for a dessert (cardamom-cinnamon apple crisp) and leaves half a gallon of it behind in your freezer, chances are you want to find a way to get rid of it eventually.  If you're lactose intolerant, like our hero, the Fledgling Foodie, the temporary joy of ice cream alone might not be enough to lure you into eating it alone.  If you'd prefer to make a chocolate sauce to go along with it (having plenty of chocolate in the fridge for just such an occasion), but don't have the cream necessary to keep the chocolate from turning back into chunks when cold, well, guess what ice cream is made of?  That's right!  CREAM!  Here's the Fledgling Foodie's Terribly Tasty Choco-Cinnamon Super Sauce recipe:

 

 

 

What do boucheron and Indian food have in common?  They are both things I want to talk about but am too lazy to separate them into their own blog entries. 

 

Boucheron:

I think I have found a new favorite cheese.  It's like a chevre (goat cheese, for those not in the know) on its way toward becoming a blue cheese.  Soft, flavorful, and damn tasty.  I recommend you pick some up the next time you're in a store with a good cheese section.

 

Indian Food:

I've always wanted to know how to cook Indian, Thai, Chinese, Ethiopian, etc.  But so many ethnic dishes call for such specialized ingredients that you need to buy a whole new set of pantry items just for one style of cuisine.  I figured I'd do just that with each of these someday, but hadn't gotten around to it.  Well, we had a Friday Night Feast recently (that someone else organized, so no entry on the blog here--I've been lazy about the organizing since I got my own kitchen.  Bad me.) and the theme was Indian. 

 

I busted out my "1000 Indian Recipes" book (which I'd never used before--and wasn't really happy with, since "Aloo Mutter" wasn't in the index, which seems to be a pretty standard Indian recipe everywhere I've had Indian food) and went to town.  Since then, I've cooked a single dish four times to get it down to where I like it.  And I have.  Yay!  So now I have to pick another dish and work on it...  Maybe someday one of my big dinner parties will have an Indian theme.  We'll have to see.