Sometimes I think I should start a recipe blog titled 'cooking as the art of the possible'.

Like, for example, today's dinner.

Recipe:

Realize it's Mother's Day, you should probably actually cook Mom a real meal.
Refuse her suggestion of "hot dogs and beans" because you are an adult(-ish)! woman(-ish)! dammit!

Suggest her old Sweet & Sour Chicken recipe, because you don't cook steaks, you had pork yesterday, you had burgers for lunch, Mom thinks meals all need meat, and it's too hot for most of your richer standards or anything that involves baking.

Realize there is no canned fruit in the house, unless you count tomatoes or pumpkin or some single-serving 'superfood' fruit cocktail things that may or may not include chia seed that she bought because they were on clearance.

End up with this instead, based on what you found in the kitchen:

( Read more... )

I bet I could come up with one recipe a month along those lines for at least a couple years. As long as "different ways of serving peanut butter" counted.

Reading list, I have a question: does ~3,000 words of Methos and Joe Dawson talking about the Lone Power, Ahriman, Immortality, and the Song of the Twelve count as "a Highlander/Young Wizards crossover fic" or "boring self-indulgence"?

Because that seems to be appearing on my desktop, and I'm not sure which one to file it under.



So yesterday was the church picnic. And Saturday I went to the Books for International Goodwill book sale in Annapolis, and pulled A Calendar of Dinners with 615 Recipes (printed 1923, last revised 1913) off the free-cookbooks shelves.

I was thumbing through it and found a recipe for The Wholesome Parkin, which turns out to be a traditional molasses-oatmeal-ginger bread from Northern England, famous for only getting better as it gets staler ('excellent when a week old'). And partly because I have a thing (inculcated by LotR at a young age) for durable breads, and partly because I realized that it only uses ingredients that I have in my basic camping kitchen, I decided I needed to make it for the church picnic.

( Here is a picture, and a recipe, and also Crisco and some other things. )

( Other books acquired at that sale )

PS: I am testing the new AO3 update in IE6. Always offer to test in IE6: it is so much fun, there are so many things that don't work.