Blackberry tort

Tiny thing. Sufficiently saccharine to fuel a whole flock of humming-elephants for an entire month. These berries started out black. As they cooked through they forfeited their color. I pulled them when they started going pale which was within a just a few minutes. Crust made from vanilla wafers is a good idea which means somebody undoubtedly already thought of it.

Tuna fish salad

Angelhair pasta, sausage

Sausage and mushroom pasta

A pile of chantrelles
Portabellas
Shitakis

Sage country sausage, it's OK
Spinach
Onion
Garlic
Italian parsley
Basil
Parmigiano Reggiano, the king of hard cheeses.

Sage sausage, hash browns, eggs

I Ate half of this.

Roasted chicken in makeshift cloche

The idea was to stuff the chicken with mushrooms and garlic and herbs, then cook it en cloche atop a pile of cut vegetables upon which the chicken will drip its excess oil and moisture. Thing is, I don't have a cloche. But I do have a rather large unglazed ceramic bowl that I don't mind messing with oil, and I do have other glass bowls that I can use as a lid to watch what's going on.

I'm predicting all kind of trouble once this lid gets hot. It has no handle and no convenient way to remove it.

After the salt incident with the puffy eggs and vegetables I'm reticent to add it, and yet any directions you'll ever read will instruct you to salt the chicken inside and out. I didn't brine the chicken either.

Yup, all kind of trouble. What we have here is a homemade cloche.

More brown, please.

Those are the vegetables the chicken was sitting on, raised above on this trivet thingie that comes with a pressure cooker. The mushrooms were disgusting. Note to self: never stuff a chicken with mushrooms again, it wastes them.

ARTS!

What a mess. This bowl never did clean up. It is now permanently marked by this one event.

Gag. Needs salt, quick! Pepper too. Stat. Stat. I ate all of this except for one carrot. With tons of stuff left over to graze upon at will later.

Its poor little carcass is down there completely drowned. I used to think this was macabre, now I find it fun. In the end, more liquid gold. Thank you, Chicken, I cooked the thing that laid the golden broth. I mean "made" the golden broth.

Andouille sausage, pasta

A bit weird. Andouille is the sausage used in gumbo. French, smoked, contains chitterlings, ew, gross, and highly spiced. Not recommended. Ate half of it, saved the other half for later then never got around to it.

It perished from neglect, most egregious.

Foamy eggs and vegetables

Starved.  All day.  Tried this at night.

This is not a soufflé.  It's carrying way too much vegetables, a sauce was not prepared, and no care whatever was taken to assure anything other than the eggs spreading enough liquid and cheese to cover all the vegetables with wet cheesy foam.

I forgot how much bacon I put in there and how salty that is.  When I added salt to the vegetables I thought, "this has to go for two eggs too," so I added a little more.  Then I thought, "this is kosher salt which is a lot flakier than granular salt, you know," so I added a little more to make up for the flakiness.  

Mistake, all that was too much salt.

I could hardly finish it.  I didn't finish it.  It was like eating a spongy salt lick -- a salt lick covered with anchovies. A salt lick covered with anchovies that fell into a salt pit deep within a salt mine on Planet Salt, bombarded with salt asteroids that resulted in flooding of super-saturated brine in which this became engulfed. Then it snowed. NaCl. And it continued to snow for an age until the NaCl-snow built up in gigantic piles and compressed under its own intense weight until ultimately its chemistry changed forming veritable diamonds of salt-ice under glaciers of compressed salt-snow above extended salt-ice-shelves, underneath all of that and now quite thoroughly permeated with the essence of salt, on a cooling planet in the saltier section of space. That's what this got up to taste like. 

Put me off bacon for another six months.

Spaghetti with ham

Sandwich ham to be exact.

+olive oil
+butter
+pasta water
+onion
+garlic
+Parmisano Reggiano, king of the hard cheeses.
oh! +basil

Small tomatoes

With some other stuff put on them.

Pomodori, piccoli
Reggiano de Parma (garantito dal Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano)
Basil (chiffinade)
Sel de Mer

Pancake, banana

Nearly a caramelized banana crepe

A half dozen of these things would get you started.

Inspired by a strange site I visited tonight where pancakey pocket type things are filled with all sort of strange mixtures. They had writing branded on their surfaces. All I had was bananas and I couldn't be bothered to turn the inside into a paste like all the things on the inspiring site. I chose to make a syrup out of brown sugar, butter and cream, then added banana and put it on top of tiny pancakes made from thin batter of buttermilk and laced with sugar and vanilla +little dots of cinnamon. One tablespoon of batter per pancake, 4 tiny pancakes per 10" saute pan. Sandwich a few tablespoons of filling between two thin pancakes.

Rumaki and mashed potatoes

Now there's a combination for you.

Mongolian stir fry

A lady brought over her carried-out Mongolian stir-fry, a different lady than the one who brought over the chile. She said the stir-fry gave her teh heartburn. She made a twisty face, and a wrenching motion with her hand at her abdomen, pantomiming the perfect ASL sign for 'stomachache'.

I added it to noodles and vegetables rather than rice because I couldn't be bothered tonight with the whole 35 minute rice thing.

French fries

Matzo ball, chicken soup

mirepoix +matzo mix -- follow directions on package
+Chicken broth (frozen)
+pre-cooked chicken bits (frozen)

Chili and breadstick

Whoooh. Ate dinner standing up.
A nice lady made the chile.
I made the breadsticks -- Denver sourdough

crackers
apple
Parmisano Reggiano, king ov a de 'ard cheeses
olio oliva
root beer

Why crackers and breadsticks? Because I started out with just chile and crackers, getting other things together and eating them simultaneously, then finally the breadsticks came out of the oven. By then I was half-way done and started clearing up the mess, at length I was fully started with the mess making and just about half-way through with mess clearing. By then both crackers and breadsticks were in play but the emphasis had shifted entirely to breadsticks. Had a chair been right there I'd have had a seat and sorted it all out, as it was, I remained standing shifting about, putting away things. It's a very odd way to enjoy a bowl of chile.

Rice and beans

This is such a total cop out it's not even funny. Why? Because all you do, basically, is open two cans of stuff and make some rice. That, and fluff up things a little.

Ingredients: rice, can of black beans, can of diced tomatoes with chili peppers, fresh cilantro.

What to do: Steam the rice for 25 minutes on low. Without removing the cover, let it rest for an additional 10 minutes, for a total of 35 minutes steady steaming.

Open the can of black beans and rinse off the goop.
Open the can of tomatoes and drain off the liquid.

Add diced onion and chopped cilantro to both.
Add fresh tomato and avocado if you feel like it.
Drizzle with olive oil and lemon, flavor with salt and pepper.

This time, tumeric was added to the rice before steaming. 1/8 teaspoon was intended, but 1/4 teaspoon got scooped up and added and the result was much darker yellow and more bitter than intended. Honey was also added, also slightly more than intended, so the two mistakes tended to cancel out each other, although a lighter version would have been an improvement. Also, and this is an unusual mistake, too much water was used initially with the rice resulting in a much creamier end product, more like risotto than the ususal sticky rice, and not at all bad.

On this plate, half an avocado and a small tomato were cut up and used as a base for a scoop of bean/tomato mixture. That mixture was made more interesting with crumbled habañero pepper flakes and cumin.

Chicken livers

Ingredients: flour, corn flour, baking powder, chicken livers.

What to do: Trim the chicken livers. Remove anything ugly. Trim into bite-size pieces. Flavor the flour mixture however you wish, salt, pepper, chili powder, curry, etc. Dust the liver pieces with flour mixture. Add milk to the flour mixture to turn it into a batter.
Re-dip all the pieces into the batter and let it flow off. Put the batter-coated liver pieces into 350ºF oil. Cook for a few minutes, until they turn brown.

Every now and then I go totally "Rosemary's Baby" on some kind of liver. Then, it seems just a few bites is enough. You know, a little bit of this stuff goes a loooooooooong way. A few more bites and your gills slam shut. Then you're put off liver entirely for a whole 'nuther year.

Salad, dry bread

Rustic bread doesn't last, let's face it. Therefore, thousands of ideas have arisen to solve the problem of stale bread wastage, this is but one, and let me say it's simplicity most brilliant.

Ingredients: dry rustic bread, tomato, onion or shallot, water, your favorite vinegar, your favorite olive oil,salt, pepper + torn basil.

What to do: Dunk the bread in a bowl of water. Watch it so it doesn't go mushy. This cannot be done with Wonder Bread™. I used lemon juice instead of vinegar.

Salad, tossed green

+sandwich ham
+apple
no cooking atoll.