food

I appear to be an extremely delinquent blogger.  From day to day, I do not feel that anything that has happened is blogworthy (or perhaps, one small event might be blogworthy, but certainly would not make up an entire blog) and I have thus completely avoided the question by avoiding the blog.

Clearly, this is not a workable long-term solution for keeping a blog up to date and interesting for anybody (including me).

Therefore, I give you food.


I have long known that when living by myself, I have minimal desire to make actual food on any kind of regular basis.  I read a news article somewhere not too long ago about the dangers (and pleasures) of living alone.  One of the points was food-related.  When you live by yourself, nobody will know if you eat cookies for breakfast every day for a week, or if instead of creating actual, balanced, meals, you have half a grocery store rotisserie chicken (without any side dishes) for dinner one day, half a loaf of bread for dinner another, and actually get around to roasting that butternut squash as a side dish another but failing to actually come up with a main course to go with it.

The cats do not count as not-living-alone in this instance, because they don't care what I eat, as long as I give them stuff to eat on a regular schedule (they actually have an alarm on my cellphone so that we all know when kitty mealtimes are).  Though there is often some begging involved when the rotisserie chicken occurs.

When living with another (human) person, one may be inspired to actually create actual food from time to time.  In fact, we've actually made real food more days than not (though my lunches, which are alone, still leave something to be desired).  The following is a random sampling of the food (mostly, the food I actually thought to photograph, because it was pretty or otherwisely noteworthy).

Spanish Meat Pie, with Lion Face.  This was in celebration of acquiring an oven (and stove), as well as a glass dish which could function as a pie plate.  Apparently, the French do not use pie plates that are shaped like American pie plates (i.e., the ones I'm used to).  The first person to come visit me from the US (or Canada, or anywhere else that has easily acquire-able pie plates like the ones I am used to) will  have to bring me one as payment.

Cheese.  There will be (hopefully) a more complete blog post about this cheese (or rather, the second batch of cheese, this being a photograph of the first).  It is homemade cheese, made from milk, a bit of vinegar, a bit of baking soda, a pinch of salt, some heat, and some time.  Tasty with honey and strawberries and bananas.  Also tasty with smoked salmon, capers and crepes.  The French also don't have actual baking soda, BTW.  I found something called alimentary bicarbonate, which had a sole ingredient of bicarbonate of soda.  I used that.

Magret de Canard avec des fruits rouges.  We were intrigued by the blueberry-flavored pasta at the store, so bought some.  And then didn't know what to do with it.  And then discovered that there was a recipe on the label.  Thus, careful application of duck breast, frozen redfruits (stuff like strawberry, raspberry, gooseberry (?), blueberry), raspberry vinegar, shallots, some other stuff I don't remember offhand, and heat rendered this to be a very pink, but very tasty meal.

Pork chops with butternut squash and brussels sprouts.  I've blogged about this meal before, except it had kale before (because that's what the original recipe suggests).  Except I haven't seen any kale since coming to this country.  I have seen some odd, dark green, veiny-looking cabbages though.

Cookies, before

Cookies, after.  These are Cinnmon Twists, from some really nifty cookie book that belonged to a roommate of mine in university.  It's one of the few recipes I actually wrote down, and can therefore reproduce from time to time.