Tag: Cooking

  • ODDS and ENDS: Ravenous Day, Cooking, and Don’t Be an Angry Old Dude

    ODDS and ENDS: Ravenous Day, Cooking, and Don’t Be an Angry Old Dude

    (Sweet Dionysus
    She never really liked us…)

    I was hungry all day yesterday. And I mean all day; morning to night, and then again this morning when I woke up. I remember that back in my twenties this would happen to me often enough to name this affliction – A Ravenous Day. On these days, no matter how much I ate, or how often I ate, I would never feel full or satiated. Yesterday was A Ravenous Day, and I did my best to handle this situation in the healthiest way possible, but fruits and veg wouldn’t cut it. I tried salty, but that wouldn’t end it. I tried sweet, but that seemed to make everything worse. I even tried cold pizza at 2am. Nothing worked. I stayed hydrated, and out of the heat, as if that had something do with it. I am bottomless pit.

    I really love cooking for my family. Even with the kid at camp, and it’s just me and the wife, I want to cook for her. I tried Thai fried rice and spring rolls the other night. I had never done it before, and I thought I should try. The rice turned out well, but my ability at rolling rolls was very much lacking. More practice is needed. It was fun for me to try something new, and in a sense, fail at it. I like the idea that the kid is going to come home from camp, and I will have this new meal for her, and it will be something that she will like. But that feeling, of knowing that I am going to make a food that she likes, that we haven’t made at home before, gives me a feeling of providing for, and taking care of her.

    I refuse to be an angry old dude. Anger will not be my driving emotion. I will not be bitter about how my life has gone. I will be a happy silly old man. I’ve met a few in my life, and I aim to be like them.

  • The Bored Days of Summer (Unedited)

    We got three days into Summer Vacation, and the kid announced that she was bored.

    “There’s nothing to do”

    “No one to talk to”

    “Nothing to watch”

    “Nothing to read”

    “Nothing to listen to”

    I think you get the idea.

    Not surprised to hear her say this. All kids get bored when they have too much time on their hands. When the get too much freedom, it becomes repressive. As I am the stay at home dad, I get the brunt of the kid’s complaints, and she looks to me to solve this problem of hers.

    My first reaction was to tell her that it’s not my job to eliminate her boredom.

    But as soon as I said that, it dawned on me that it really is my job to end her boredom. Look, if I don’t get involved then she will want to zombie out on the iPad, and that is the worst thing that could happen.

    I’m not saying that she won’t get on the iPad this Summer, but I want to limit that as much as possible.

    Now, I don’t want to create mindless things for her to do, such as dumping a bunch of chores on her. There is no joy or magical memories that come from that. No, what I want to do is encourage healthy habits while also spending time together. (She will help me paint the livingroom this Summer, so she does have one huge chore, but we’ve been talking about that for months now.) I want her to stay active, so we are going to go running, and work on her soccer skills. I also want to keep her reading up, so we need to set time aside for that. She’s brought up that she wants to go to a museum, so that will take care of the art side of things. And I want to encourage her to think about the food she wants to learn how to make, and then we can work on recipe testing.

    IN the end, what I know to be true is that you only get to have so many Summers as a kid. When the days are hot but not too hot, and the Summer feels like it stretches on forever. In two or three years, I really won’t see her over the Summer, as she’ll be involved in something, or will be hanging out with her friends. Until then, I want to make sure she has some memories of enjoying time with her dad. Doing stupid stuff while trying to avoid being bored.

  • The Age of Dinner Parties

    The Age of Dinner Parties

    The other day, the kid was asking me and the wife lots of questions of what our life was like before she was born. It’s a fair and very good question, or more accurately, questions that she was asking us. The wife and I were together for nine years before the kid was born, so we had a good amount of time of being a couple before we became a family.

    As I reminisced about our past life, it dawned on me that we had a very unique period of about two years, where we host other couples at our place for dinner parties. And on the flip of that, we were invited over to several couples dinner parties. It was a very specific time of us and all of our friends, as we were entering our thirties, beginning to be established in careers, all in committed relationships, but we weren’t married yet and didn’t have kids. I mean, as soon as people started getting married, kids weren’t far behind, and then some started moving out of the City.

    I still have a Spotify playlist for one of our dinner parties from long ago.

    It was a fun time. Usually we hosted on a Saturday night. The wife, at the time the girlfriend, would come up with the menu and I would shop for it over the week. We’d do some prep on Friday night, and most of that would be the making of the desert. The wife was the chef and I the assistant. My strength was in cutting veggies, and making drinks. The wife did the heavy lifting for the rest of the food. We made a really good team in the kitchen, and by the time the other couple arrived, I only had the entertain for maybe 30 minutes and then we were eating.

    The other side that I miss was the conversation. Most of the time, it always started off the same way. When the guests would arrive, we’d talk about what trains they took to get to our place, and transit in general. Next we’d sit for the meal, and the conversation would move to food; either on cooking or places we’d eaten at recently. By the time desert came around, people had a drink or two, then things got really fun. People would tell stories, or experiences they had, or a friendly debate would occur. It was the moment when we started really getting to know people, who they were, and how they worked.

    I remember that after one particular fun and engaging dinner party, me and the wife high-fived after the guests left because we were so excited and proud of ourselves for hosting such a good evening.

    But things changed, and having an adult evening over at someone’s place, only adults, is a pretty rare thing now. I’m not complaining, because it was a moment of our lives that existed for a very specific time, and place.

    Just hadn’t thought about it in a while.

  • Japanese Curry and the Fun of Trying New Foods

    YouTube is now the devil in my home. I say that because I find myself watching YouTube videos before I head off the bed. It started simple; I would watch rounds of different disc golf tournaments or Bad Movie Bible videos. Then somehow the algorithm figured out that I am curious about making Japanese food.

    The cooking video that Google decided that I needed to see was this guy:

    I respect Kenji’s cooking show and the recipe he put forth. I do draw an exception with putting raisins in curry, or any food that isn’t trail mix. It’s just gross people, always has been, always will.

    Like I said, not sure how I got to this video, but am I glad that I arrived, because now I have to make my own. As luck would have it, the local H-Mart carried the curry powder that Kenji used in his video, so later this week, I will give his recipe a try… except no raisins. Honestly, it’s just a bad idea.


    The great thing is that my kid is game for this. I don’t know how we did this, but we have a kid that is willing to try new foods, no questions asked. When I was her age, what my mom prepared us was pretty middle of the road, Midwestern American food. Nothing crazy or surprising, as most of the recipes my mom followed either came from Betty Crocker, or her mom, or her mother-in-law. Later in life, both of my folks became much more adventurous with food. Probably because they didn’t haver to feed three boys anymore.

    I was lucky enough to make great friends in college, who were from all over the world, or had at least traveled around the world. It was positive peer-pressure, as I didn’t want to look like the unrefined yokel who was afraid to try sushi, or Indian food, or the Mongolian grill, or the new Pho place that opened up down the street from campus. And it also helped that I started dating a gal who was a trained chef, and trying new foods was like her whole thing. And then I married her, so that kind’a sealed my fate.

    Point here, I guess, is that I’m going to try my hand at making Japanese curry. I am very fortunate that I have a wife and kid that encourage me to try my hand at creating these dishes, as they are very open to trying them. Oh, and I have really great friends that forced me out of my culinary comfort zone twenty years ago.

    Just, no raisins please.

  • Making Gumbo (assuming that you’ve made it before)

    So… I made gumbo over the weekend. It turned out good, but still not what I was aiming for.

    See, I have a friend who used to live in New Orleans, and he gave me his gumbo recipe a couple of years ago. Not that I do it often, but every now and then, maybe once a year if that, I will get in my head that I really need to eat gumbo. Just happens. Anyway, somewhere back in June, I knew I wanted gumbo when Fall rolls around. This past weekend it was a little rainy and cool, and that makes it soup season in my book.

    Now, over this past Summer, on our travels, I happened to come in contact with a couple of restaurants that had gumbo on the menu. Some of the gumbos were great, some were okay, but none of them were bad. What they all had in common was that they were more stew than soup, multiple proteins (chicken, sausage, shrimp, crawfish… take your pick) and the gumbo’s color was brown.

    When it came to making my friend’s recipe, I did notice one ingredient that stood out to me; a can of diced tomatoes. Not only were tomatoes in his gumbo, but you also added to juice from the can. To me that said this was the reason my gumbo was going to turn out orange. Unless, I took that roux down to a deep brown color.

    That was my plan. It was also my plan to take lots of pictures and put together an awesome food blog post. What I found out was that taking pictures while cooking was not my thing. As in, I just kept cooking and forgot to take pictures. BUT, I did get a couple when it came to making the roux. See:

    Though I didn’t get a final picture of it, I did get the roux down to a dark brown color without ruining it. But as I continued to make the gumbo, and added those tomatoes, what I ended up getting was an orange gumbo, and to be honest, one that tasted more tomato like than what I had over the Summer. That’s not to say the recipe is bad or wrong, because this recipe is solid and tasted good. It just wasn’t what I was aiming for.

    And here’s my thought; I’m just going to have to make gumbo again. Probably in a month, as my family isn’t as hip on testing out gumbo recipes as I am. When I do take another crack at it, I have to say no tomatoes, I want to add okra (I think that will help thicken it) and add shrimp as I only used chicken and sausage this time. I think my roux was fine, no need to mess with that.

    See you in October.