Change of Plans

Julia and I spent a lot of time this morning agonizing over whether it wise to go to Boston this weekend. We didn't want to lose the money for the tickets, but we also didn't want to get trapped in a blizzard. We decided to be brave and adventurous and boarded the plane. As soon as we sat down, they canceled the flight and told us to get off. I'm sorry, Rita!

Since we had an unplanned Saturday night together, Jason and I decided to treat ourselves to a steak frites dinner at home, which was surprisingly easy to do at the last minute. We just had to buy a steak- Eastern Market has many fine options- and some potatoes.

With a glass of Malbec from Argentina-dreaming, and a chocolate heart from my mom

Jason cooked the steak perfectly- he even used a stopwatch. I made oven fries with thyme and parmesan. And a salad with feta, raisins, and walnuts.

All meals must have cheese!

Not bad for a thirty minute meal!

We had already had our traditional Valentine's Day outing last night to Taqueria Habanero. We usually go somewhere that is supposed to be cheap and delicious, but new to us, and a little inconvenient, at least for us. The hope is that no one else would want to spend their Valentine's Day there. It usually works pretty well.

The non-taco dish is a huarache, which I had never had, covered in cactus.

Unrelatedly, I really hope that newspapers never stop producing print copies. I think hipsters should take up the case. Reading yours news on paper is retro and authentic, like suspenders and facial hair. Let's bring it back. If not, poor Sal will be out of luck.

Week in Review

This has been an uncharacteristically and unpleasantly busy week, both at work and after work. I haven't cooked once! We've subsisted on empanadas and eggplant dip. Which has been kind of great, actually.

Since we won't be home tonight or tomorrow night (in THEORY, if Julia and I make it to Boston without being crushed by snow), we had a Valentine's themed dinner last night. It's exactly what we always eat, but heart shaped.

Excuse the worse than usual picture quality

I also quickly made some peanut butter chocolate chip brownies, because what is Valentine's day without dessert?

Note the icing heart- I work really hard at food styling.

Updates:

• We are going to ITALY! We sat down to buy tickets to Buenos Aires and booked non-stop tickets to Rome instead. Argentina was just too far away and complex for a 10 day trip. By going to Rome, we can get to more places, and we get an extra day of vacation because we don't lose a day on the way home. We've already booked a monastery hotel in Siena, and a seaside apartment in Cinque Terre. If you have suggestions on where to stay in Rome, let me know. We would like to get an apartment somewhere central-ish, but quieter and more residential...the Capital Hill of Rome, if you will.

• We talked to a lender and realtor. I have a lot of thoughts about this, which I will try to post later. The two most prominent ones: (1) I don't understand money, generally, or how much we can afford, even after getting pre-approved; (2) this seems like a painfully time-consuming process.

Another Good Food Weekend

This time produced by our kitchen. We didn't leave the neighborhood at all this weekend so we had a lot of time to produce the following:

Lemon Cream and Prosciutto Pasta:

I had to take Jason's portion out before adding the peas.

This was really good and really easy. I used mascarpone cheese instead of heavy cream because I wanted to use it up- not sure which is less heart attack inducing. And I added chopped arugula with the mint. And continuing with the theme of crazy ingredient amounts, I used 3 slices of prosciutto, not 12.

Gooey Butter Cake Ice Cream:

This is from a book called Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream, which Jason has been a little suspicious of- he prefers the more straightforward flavors in The Perfect Scoop. But he was inspired by some Ben and Jerry's cake batter ice cream that he liked. He spent most of the day making this- first you have to bake a cake, then make honey butterscotch sauce to drench the cake in, and then make cream cheese ice cream, and then mix it all up. He thought it was fine, but I thought it was so good I couldn't stop eating it and almost made myself sick. Cream cheese in dessert is my downfall. So is cake and ice cream mixed together. So, I'm not allowed to have anymore. And we still have most of the cake and butterscotch leftover! Ack! 

Empanadas:

Some are formed with more care than others

Jason also made the dough for these while he was making the ice cream, and I made the filling today. We loosely followed Martha's recipe, but made the dough from this recipe, which we had tried before. (The whole Smitten Kitchen recipe is amazing- you should make it! But only make empanadas if you have a half-day to devote to the enterprise). We added some chorizo and italian sausage to the ground pork, per Jason's request. This took most of my afternoon, and made about 15 empanadas, so I hope they re-heat well. 

Greek Eggplant Dip:

This recipe sounded so fun- you basically light eggplants on fire, and it is understanding of the limitations of my electric broiler. I very much appreciate recipes that give alternate instructions for people who don't have certain devices. One of my pet peeves is recipes that say, using your stand mixer, or using your 12 cup food processor, and don't suggest how else you might go about making the dish. Come on, these things didn't even exist not so long ago!

In the process of charring- this took about 45 minutes, and I had to check on them every five.

Not pretty, but tasty!

This is obviously supposed to be an appetizer, but I plan on eating it for dinner tomorrow- veggies, nuts, cheese, on pita- what more could you ask for!

Other:

I did our taxes and.......we booked our flight for the honeymoon! Except- it's not to Argentina. Ack! More on that later.

Carolyn Hax is my hero

Her Friday chats are the highlights of my day. Read this "Criticism vs. Healthy Discussion of Issues" response. Beautiful.

It's worth noting that CHax doesn't often get all riled up, so this freakout is especially awesome:

Q: Blah, blah, my husband doesn't do enough housework.

A: [Cover your children's ears, everybody:] This is bull****. You need "help"? He needs to "pitch in"? No no no no no no no.

You asked about discussion and criticism, but that's not the question I'm going to answer, because the fact that it has to be discussed/criticized is bull****. He wears clothes, so he does laundry. He eats food, so he buys, cooks and/or cleans up after meals. He uses the rugs, tables, bathrooms, beds, so he vacuums the rugs, wipes the tables, cleans the bathrooms and makes the bed. He uses the items in your home, so he puts the ******* things away. 

What is there to talk about? Nothing.

This is almost up there with my favorite column (well, one of them, there are so many) where she tells a self-righteous wife and mother: "That’s what friends do when it’s time to come through. They don’t say, 'Well, if you find a husband, I’ll buy you a vase.'" Amazing.

Cooking:

I made fish! This is noteworthy because I rarely make seafood. I never had it growing up, so I don't have any instincts about how to cook it, and it's expensive to mess up. This recipe called for halibut, which I was going to get, but omg, halibut is $25 a pound. That's nuts. So we substituted some cheaper cod, which is still quite expensive, as proteins go. (From Eastern Market- I don't buy seafood at Hateful Safeway.) This was ok.

There is fish under there.

I needed to put a lot of salt and the pepper on the fish itself once it was on my plate- the vegetables had a good flavor, but it didn't infuse the fish. Maybe halibut absorbs flavors better than cod.

My Greek Cat

We came home to a broken mirror yesterday. I have my suspicious on who the culprit might be.

What?

People have asked me what type of cat Sal is, and I always say, I don't know. A cute one. A short-haired housecat. I don't know cat types! Jason looked it up and decided that Sal is an Aegean cat. The description and pictures certainly sound like Sal, but also probably sound like most cats. The line that got me was "also communicative, not hesitating to draw a person's attention." My goodness is Sal a chatterbox! I have lived with four cats and have never heard a cat meow as much for attention or demand so much interaction. One of his favorite things to do is go into a different room and mewl until one of us comes to see him. And if that person is not Jason, he will continue mewling until he is satisfied with his Jason-petting quota.

Cooking:

Tonight we made this fig, prosciutto, gorgonzola, and arugula pizza. So good!

The weekly pizza

Hateful Safeway does not have fresh figs so I simmered dried figs in marsala wine to re-hydrate them, per a suggestion on the internet, and then used that liquid instead of balsamic vinegar to dress the arugula. I don't know what fresh figs taste like, so I don't know if this worked exactly, but it was tasty.
I do have to say that I think the proportions on this recipe are insane. Two (generous!) cups of gorgonzola? You would not be able to taste anything else on the pizza! We used about half that. And eight cups of arugula? This was maybe three. And it absolutely does not take 20 minutes to cook cheese on dough in a high heat oven- probably half that. Measurements in recipes can be so off, so I usually just go with my gut unless I really trust the recipe source.

Pity the English Major. You Should Definitely be an English Major.

I always enjoy reading articles like this one, debating the merits of my life choices. It's true, in the two main jobs I've had, I have never met another English major.* If I could go back, knowing what I know now, would I still study English in undergrad? Um, yes, absolutely. I wish I could go back and study more English at the expense of electives, and also at the expense of Core Bio and Phy Sci while I'm at it.

I don't think studying English ever helped me get a job, but I don't think it hurt me either. The most salient aspects of my employability (I think) were that I was a good student at a good school who interviewed well. I got a fellowship to teach English in Spain after college, and that experience got me my first job. And then I went to grad school, and that degree got me my second job. And after grad school, no one cares what you studied in undergrad, so you might as well study something that is lovely and world-expanding while you can.

I'm sure that in some situations studying English is probably a bad idea, if you want to do something other than teach. If you go to a no-name school with a bad humanities faculty, or have to take out a ton of loans for your degree, or are not a great student, I can see that it would be better to study something more practical.

Alex's Guide to Being a Successful** English Major:

• Go to a good school and get good grades 
• Do not take out a lot of loans to do this
• Be ok with not learning anything that will be professionally relevant 
• Do some extra-curriculars that have some cohesion and relevance to possible jobs
• Also, work someplace professional sounding on campus during the school year
• Get a summer internship, but only one that pays. Do not ever work for free, young English major!
• Learn how to interview and articulate why your education is relevant
• If you feel social pressure to go to grad school, study something professional. Do NOT study English in grad school, unless you want to be a teacher

Easy, right? Notice none of this involves "responding to student demands and real-world concerns through digital humanities work," or double majoring in computer science.

Honestly though, who even knows what college will look like in 20 or 30 years? I think changes in undergraduate core curricula and intensifying pressure to professionalize are much bigger/sadder issues than noticing that there are fewer English majors running around.

*DC is basically a world with no English majors. If ever there were a city made for people who have been striving for a professional goal since birth...
I guess teachers in DC have English degrees, but I don't know them.

**I'm defining success pretty unambitiously- for me, success has meant supporting myself since graduation, with jobs that require a college degree.

Cooking:

It's been a quiet cooking week here! I just came from a happy hour with $4 plates of dumplings, and who am I to turn down a $4 plate of dumplings?

On Monday, I made this mushroom tart from the Smitten Kitchen cookbook.

I don't have a tart pan. Why don't I have a tart pan?

It was delicious! It took longer than I like for weeknight cooking (30 minutes active + 45 inactive is my absolute max, and this took exactly that) and that was with pre-made-by-Jason pie dough. Also, Hateful Safeway does not sell "wild" mushrooms- they sell only white button mushrooms, baby bellas, and oyster mushrooms, so I used the latter two. I don't really know the difference between cultivated and wild mushrooms though, so it's fine. My knowledge of mushrooms: if it's sold at the supermarket, it's probably not poisonous.

Great Food Weekend

A lot of delicious eating this weekend! In reverse order:

Enchiladas with creamy green sauce. This was another easy Martha Stewart enchilada recipe, which was very good, but maybe not quite as good as the spicy pumpkin one. Jason made these last night for an excellent Sunday dinner.

It's hard to get a good picture of enchiladas

 

Earlier in the day, the Brigade reconvened for another greatest hits tour, at Uncle Liu's Hot Pot. Unfortunately, the food was not as good as we remembered. We pondered whether our taste buds have just become too refined, urban sophisticates that we are (kidding!)....but determined we should just do more research on better places to go. Hot pot is very fun though, since they bring you a bunch of raw food and you boil it at your table in spicy or mild broth.

We got pork belly, little dumplings, lotus root, and Chinese cabbage, among other things.

Not wanting to miss out on the further glories of Fairfax county, we decided to get dessert at Pastry Xpo, located in the- wait for it- Mosaic District! You will recall the Mosaic District, the shiny new development we had no idea existed, from our trip to Four Sisters.

Adam wanted pie, ice cream, and coffee. Julia and I shared a salted caramel cupcake. It was very delicious and relaxing. You go, Mosaic District.

Honestly, my stomach was a little overworked from spicy Asian food by that point, since I had a very spicy and delicious dinner the night before, at Thip Kao, a new Lao restaurant in Columbia Heights from a chef that the Brigade was familiar with from our trip to Bangkok Golden way back in 2011. A group of six of us went, so we were able to share many tasty appetizers like spring rolls, papaya salad and potato puffs, and Julia and I split a brothy chicken curry and this rice cured tilapia dish from their more adventurous "jungle" menu.

I did not take this picture, I stole it from Yelp. But this is the dish I ordered.

Jason's pork dish was so spicy that he spent the evening sweating through his clothes, but I think he enjoyed it anyway.

I think I need a fruit and veggie detox for a couple of days....

Other than that, my weekend mostly consisted of lying in bed with Sal, reading cookbooks, guidebooks, and novels. That was pretty great.

It's February! Thank goodness. Not that I love February, but man, January was not a good month. Between the flu and the cracked rib, I mostly associate it with illness. Here's to being one day closer to Spring.