I Have Offended the Kitchen Gods

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The kitchen is not my friend. Not this week, anyway. I'm batting... well, I don't follow baseball and have no idea what a bad batting average is, but I know this: mine ain't good. 

Sunday afternoon: I make oatmeal-raisin cookies, the healthy version from my E2 cookbook. Only I don't have pastry flour so I use regular flour and the recipe calls for "rolled oats" and I'm not really sure what those are  but how different can they be from what's in the Quaker Instant Oats cylinder in our pantry? The recipe calls for an an Ener-G egg replacer and I use a different brand but so what. The result are cookies that taste unbaked and a lot of them. I insist on eating two of them anyway with a cup of hot tea because that's why I made the damn cookies in the first place, but I'm not fooling anyone. They're gross. 

Sunday night: I don't know what made me think an onion and carrot quiche would hit the spot. I think I was just excited that I had all the ingredients on hand. It wasn't bad, but any main dish recipe based on "3 large onions" is going to have repercussions.

Monday night: I never make dessert, but I feel the need to redeem myself after the oatmeal-raisin cookie debacle. I make a Blueberry mousse that ends up looking (and tasting) like a pureed Barney the Dinosaur. 

I've got a new recipe for Pad Thai scheduled for tonight that involves rice noodles. I'm scared.

I obviously need to appease the cooking gods. To that end, I'm going to light some candles around a spatula, sprinkle dried herbs around the kitchen, and offer up some extra-firm tofu. See if that helps.

Here's a recent New Yorker humor column that COMPLETELY captures my kitchen personality in just the first two opening paragraphs: "The Cursing Mommy Cooks Italian."

A Little Lesson In Engine 2 Diet Portion Control

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Quinoa - looking all innocent likeOkay. First I just want to say that it's not my fault.

The recipe I made last night from the Engine 2 Diet book for Red Beans Over Quinoa with Kale said it served 2-4 people. Blair and I are not shy eaters and typically we find that a recipe that says it serves 4 generally gives each of us a healthy portion plus one small meal leftover. So it's NOT MY FAULT that there is now enough Red Beans and Quinoa in my refrigerator to feed a mid-sized middle Eastern village for a week.

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Saying Good-bye to Cheese

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I was all set to write about my re-energized committment to going vegan and was going to start the post off with a definition of veganism which--because the Universe has a sense of humor-- when I found it, knocked me off my moral high horse and back down to earth. The definition for Veganism in Wikipedia reads thus:


Veganism is a diet and lifestyle that seeks to exclude the use of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose.

 

Without doing too much research, I'm thinking the leather chair in our front room, the honey in my kitchen cabinet, and the rockin' winter suede boots in my closet aren't going to earn me any "Vegan of the Year" awards.

 

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