Sunday Delights and Discoveries

I find myself humming "Back in the Saddle" right now since it's Monday and all the excitement of the race is now well behind me. Granted, this week's going to be a bit out of the ordinary: The kiddo is home since his daycare is closed for staff vacation. Do I let that hinder my normal routine? Not if I can help it! So we've been to the gym (yup, I put in seven miles and a little over 1,000 calories, but I did have to reduce the incline to 2 from 3 after the third mile because my left hamstring was balking a bit), hit HEB for a few goodies and have even whipped up one and a half recipes. Look for several Culinary Misadventures With the Kiddo this week!

But before I get too involved in sharing the tales from kitchen and the kiddo, I wanted to share our adventurous Sunday. Had a few delights, made a few discoveries and just tried to recoup and recover from our weird Saturday.

Delight #1: America's Test Kitchen Can Read My Mind
Mad props to Time Warner Austin and its DVR and digital cable channels in the 1000s that have thematic programming. This weekend the husband and I sat down to go through the daily multiple recordings of America's Test Kitchen from one of the PBS digital channels (the program I set captures every episode on that channel, which is overkill, I know, but I'd rather not miss any episodes) because, hey, watching Christopher Kimball and the folks on the show is a weird sort of fun. (Yes, we are pathetic. But we like our pathetic-ness.)

After sitting through a pan-seared steak and mashed garlic potatoes episode (gads, how barfaliciously all-American), a grilled fish episode, an episode on low-fat fudgy brownies and chocolate mousse (I put on 10 pounds just watching it, but their big trick to lightening up the mousse--using egg whites or an Italian meringue--is the basic mousse recipe I got from Mrs. Beeby for the French Christmas party back during my sophomore year of high school) and a fish and chips episode (which had me hankering for Long John Silvers--disgrossting!--and thinking that I could even manage to fry fish in my own home), there came unto us like manna (gnocchi?) from the great FSM above an episode featuring (insert heavenly host of angel hair pasta singing here) vegetable curry and chicken tikka masala. Do I need to tell you how utterly delighted the husband and I were? Do I need to tell you how hungry that episode made us? Do I need to tell you how all fired up we were to try both recipes out?

Methinks that perhaps our DVR is going to be chocked full of saved America's Test Kitchen episodes very quickly.

Delight #2: HPB on North Lamar Saves Me an Overloaded DVR
Don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I adore the Half-Price Books on North Lamar. It's friggin' huge, has attracted someone (or someones) who drop off recently comics regularly (keep our comics costs low--hazzaa!) and just seems to have little delights about every time we go (which is every Saturday, barring anything out of ordinary, like a 5K run).

This Sunday, my delight was a boxed DVD set of America's Test Kitchen's sixth season. Yes, that's my kitchen karma (culinary karma?) at work. Or is it just a helluva coincidence that after sitting through countless 30-second spots advertising these DVD collections while going through our DVR episodes, we should find a boxed set at our favorite HPB? Even though I already had two books in hand (Sallie Tisdale's The Best Thing I Ever Tasted and a preview copy of Kim Sunee's Trail of Crumbs, which I bought more for the Korean adoptee angle than the magazine food editor angle), I had my heart set on that boxed set, and I didn't have to work very hard to convince the husband to let me get it.

Much to our delight after our purchase, we discovered that the boxed set has episodes titled "Two Curry Traditions" (yummy yummy!), "Asian Chicken" (yummy yummy!), "South-of-the-Border Soups" (let's see how New Englanders do with tortilla soup), "Tex-Mex Favorites" (I bet Christopher Kimball dons a sombrero for this one), "Cookies" (ahh, what treasures might this simply titled one hold?), "German Chocolate Cake" (I'm getting fat here just thinking about it) and, last but not least, "Old-Fashioned Birthday Cake" (which the kiddo assured me he'd learn to make with me). One of the episodes even has a review of chef's knives--and just that morning we'd run out to Target (the husband had read that the Star Wars stuff was being clearanced to make room for the upcoming Clone Wars stuff in August), and I'd done a bit of gawking at chef's knives while there. If karma can come in a box, I think I found it at the North Lamar Half-Price Books.

Delight #3: I Know Copper-Tops and Copper-Tips, But Now I Know Copper-Bottoms
While at Target at 8:30 AM on an overcast Sunday morning, with a tissue crammed under my nose as I suffered through the worst case of post-nasal drip ever in my life (all that dust I inhaled at Auditorium Shores was making a return appearance), I lingered in the kitchen goods area because.... Okay, I'm going to be honest here. I was doing it just to piss off the kiddo. Partially. He was being a brat, and I just felt like being juvenile. Plus I really just wanted to spend a little time browsing because I didn't get to do that the previous day.

After gawking at the chef's knives (and telling myself and the husband, who's also curious about them, that I'd look up the review and recommendations on cooksillustrated.com), me and the crew turned onto the next aisle, the pots and pans aisle, for no particular reason (except to linger and piss off the boy). While we were strolling ever so leisurely down the five, six yards of the aisle, my keen eyes spied a favorite sight: orange clearance stickers. These were adhesed to some Chefmate Choice 12-inch encapsulated aluminum/copper-bottom fry pans and three-and-one-eighth-quart sauce pans. Yes, I already a very nice 10-inch Cuisinart fry pan/saute pan and a very nice Farberware three-quart sauce pan. But the sauce pan was only $10, which I thought was a damn good deal, plus we have a cheapie Mirro three-quart that needs replacing because the handle is loose. The fry pan was only $15, and the 12 inches of that fry pan seem so ridiculously spacious in comparison to the 10-inch Queasy-Art.

Like the DVD set I discussed earlier, I didn't have to try too hard to convince the husband to let me acquire the pieces. He offered them up as a prize for finishing in the top 50 at the 5K (which is still absolutely awesome and f'in unbelievable). Isn't my husband just the best? And he didn't even ask for any Star Wars toys in return. (Perhaps because I acquired the new Droid Factory two-pack he wanted when I was at Wally World last Thursday.)

Delight #1: I Like Broccoli
Or at least I can eat it and enjoy it if prepared a certain way.

We enjoyed a post-yoga celebratory lupper (that's lunch and supper combined, just as brunch is breakfast and lunch combined) at Indian Palace, where we haven't been in a few weeks since we've been on a Madras Pavilion jag. I was needing some recovery protein, and the boys were wanting meat, so we filled up at the buffet.

Said buffet featured, as it often does, a chafing dish of pressure-cooked (I'm pretty sure that's the cooking method) lightly spiced veggies: carrot spears, potato spears, onions, broccoli and sometimes yellow squash, zucchini squash and tomatoes. The carrots and potatoes taste just like the carrots and potatoes Mum used to make along with pot roast in her old Presto chicka-chicka-chicka-chuffer, so they don't strike me as terribly Indian, but they're damn good.

When I scooped out some veggies on my first visit to the buffet, a small floret came along for the ride. Once I'd finished off everything on my plate except for the small bit of basmati rice I'd served myself (and wound up giving the boy), I eyed the floret and chided myself for holding a grudge against a veggie I'd never really tried. So, throwing caution to the wind, I popped that little floret in and started chewing.

Well, I'll be damned! I thought with a bit of a smile. That's pretty good!

So I'm delighted that I like broccoli. Now there's yet another green veggie that only would be consumed by little 'ol me here at Chez Boeckman-Walker.

Those were my big delights. Now, onto my discoveries!

Discovery #1: I Am an Idiot
Yeah, I know, this really isn't a discovery. I already knew that I'm an idiot. But I discovered further proof of how big a blithering idiot I am.

After the Tandoori Chicken Saga and the conclusion that perhaps a dry heat source, such as broiling, might make the second go-round with this recipe more successful, I finally got around to whipping out the owner's manual for our ancient Lady Kenmore stove. (May the FSM above abundantly bless the former owners of this house for their organization and foresight in saving the appliance manuals.) It confirmed what I'd suspected: That broiler drawer? Not a broiler drawer. It's a storage drawer.

Now before you laugh too hard, you have to understand that I was under the impression that the drawer at the bottom was the broiler for most stoves--including the Lady Kenmore that conveyed with my house, which was built in 1980 or 1981, making it roughly the same age as my little sister, who's now a grown woman with a solid journalism career, a car loan payment and a neurotic cat all her own. GFurthermore, when I was a kid, Mum often referred to the drawers at the bottom of the stove (the ancient GE stove we had when I was a kid had a small oven alongside the larger one, and it too had a small bottom drawer) as the broiler, so I just figured that the drawer at the bottom of my ancient stove was its broiler. After all, broiling is a cooking technique that places the heat source above the food being cooked, not below it.


As the diagram on page 12 of my Kenmore gas range owner's manual shows, what I thought was the broiler unit is just the removable storage drawer and what I thought might be the broiler is just the removable oven bottom. And there you have it, ladies and gents, further proof that I am an idiot.

Discovery #2: Cook's Country Highlights the Strange Tastes of Whitey
I didn't realize that I'd signed up for preview issues of both Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country until my preview issue of the latter arrived in the mail on Saturday (which we didn't get from the mailbox at the end of the driveway until Sunday because we're a household of lazy, forgetful bastards). My first impression on opening it and thumbing through a few pages: How quaint with that retro '50s look, harkening back to Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines and Mother's little helper!

Not only did I receive this preview issue, but while browsing at the Anderson Mill HPB, I happened across the 2007 Cook's Country bound edition, which includes all six (seven?) issues of the magazine in a convenient (if not stain-attracting) hard-cover tome. Initially delighted with my find, I sat back and started to browse, thinking about my initial impression of the publication. It was followed with this one: The foods listed in the table of contents struck me as being very Southern for some reason, but I suspect that's not an accurate assessment.

And then I started looking closer at the recipes throughout the book. By the holy meatballs atop Old Smokey! White people put weird shit in their food! It's a miracle that people survived "the good 'ol days" with all the Crisco being used!

Don't get me wrong: I am a survivor of the all-'merican Crisco-meat-potatoes-Del Monte-veggies-in-a-can diet. Chicken fried steak. Smothered steak. The Bowl (a variation on what most folks know as goulash, I believe). T-bone steak. Dippy bread (ask my Dad). Del Monte corn. Del Monte cut green beans. Del Monte peas. Del Monte cream-style corn (cream of corn casserole was one of my favorites as a kid). Crisco in the cookies. Luckily Mum baked the Ore-Ida fries we indulged in occasionally (our fam of five in Bumblefuck, Okiemolah tweren't exactly rich), nor was she big on frying chicken (guess the field hands she cooked for as a kid preferred beef over chicken). And the last time I checked, I'm very white.

But, sheesh, there seem to be people out there who think adding bacon or ham to just about everything magically makes it better. I'm surprised the icebox Oreo cheesecake didn't call for a slab of ham or a shot or two of Jim Bean.

The issues do have wonderful tips and great product reviews and recommendations that I find very handy, and each one appeared to contain one recipe makeover to make it somewhat healthier (although the original often had at least 30 g of fat, and the made-over version had about half that). However, I found the overall audience for this magazine to exclude me, so I doubt this is one I'll ever subscribe to. Perhaps if I get I job and still have time to cook I'd consider subscribing to its Web site, but only if being a subscriber (which I hope to be) to Cooksillustrated.com doesn't include the subscriber-only content from the Cook's Country publication. Despite this finding....

I Still Heart Christopher Kimball