domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

Maura and I made incredible pasta for supper tonight. Mushrooms were on sale last week, and I’d bought a pound and a half of them. The initial plan was just to sautee them and eat them on toast–which, a little embarrassingly, is maybe my favorite thing to do with mushrooms–but they were starting to look slimy and we needed supper.

The pasta pot went on the stove right away. Maura set to work cleaning and chopping the mushrooms, and I cut up four pieces of bacon and tossed it into a hot skillet. When the fat had rendered out, a chopped shallot and five cloves of slivered garlic were added. A minute or two later, Maura started adding mushrooms.

We bumped up the heat to medium high, and Maura stirred the mushrooms while they browned a little. Once the mushrooms were brown and the shallots were soft, we tossed a knob of butter into the pan. When it melted, we added about three tablespoons of flour to make a roux. Into that went about a quarter cup (maybe a bit more–a small can would probably be perfect) of tomato paste, a cup of white wine, a cup of chicken broth, and some thyme. It all got stirred together until we had a skillet full of mushrooms in a slightly thickened broth, then we left it sit on low.

As soon as the pasta was cooked, we dished it into bowls and topped it with the sauce. We added a little parmesan, but it was, I think, unnecessary–the sauce was delicious on its own. The best part is that I only ate half of my bowl, so I’ve got leftovers for lunch on Friday!

So good, even the cat tried to eat it!

Maura, about three months ago, discovered ice skating. Ever since then, she’s been begging (and begging, and begging) for me to take her skating. She, like little kids everywhere, was totally convinced that the moment she set foot on the ice, she’d be like a ballerina in skates. (Note: she has also tried to be a ballerina without skates. Maybe predictably, that didn’t go so well, either.)

So last night I finally sucked it up and took her to Kent State’s ice rink–public skate from 5:30-7:30, ridiculously expensive for two people. She can run around on skates just fine, it turns out, so long as you don’t try to put her on the ice. Put her on the ice, and she’s like a just-born four-legged creature, tangling its legs and falling over. And falling over again. And falling over some more. She was totally delighted, though, and now I’m wondering if it’d be worth it to invest $95 in skating lessons for her–there’s a session starting in mid-March that she could probably join, and it might be nice for her to have something to do once a week.

Pleasingly, I did not fall over. I hadn’t skated in probably fifteen years, so I was sort of paranoid–fifteen years ago, I was much smaller and more limber than I am now. My first go around the rink, I was sure my feet were going to fall off, and then I realized that it was because my skates were too small. Duh, self. I got a size larger, and was able to do things like go in a straight line, turn around, and spin three or four times in a circle before getting dizzy enough that I had to stop. Maura was terribly, hilariously impressed. I got on the ice without falling over: “Wow, mommy, that’s some good skating you’re doing!” I stopped without crashing into a wall: “Wow, mommy, that’s some good skating you’re doing!” I skated ten feet in front of her and turned around to tow her: “Wow, mommy, that’s some good skating you’re doing!” It was pretty adorable.

Of course, having been home for several hours, I’m now feeling the effects of both the initial too-small skates and the surprising difficulty of towing one’s eighty-pound child around the ice for an hour and a half. Ow, my ankles.

When we got home, Maura went to bed and I decided that what I needed more than anything else was pesto pasta and sauteed eggplant. As I was eating, I remembered that I promised Jules I’d post a recipe for eggplant sometime, so here we go.

This is the thing about the eggplant recipe I’m about to give you: it’s not pretty. I mean really, it’s unattractive. That’s why there’s no picture. (Also, I was too lazy to get the camera, but not the point.) Nick and I call this eggplant sludge–it’s very, very tasty, but…well. Sludgy.

Anyhow. Heat some olive oil in a skillet, and add a thinly-sliced onion. Cook that over low for a while. While the onion is cooking, take your eggplant and peel it. Cut it into slabs, then lay them out and salt them quite heavily. Let them sit for about ten minutes to draw out some of the bitterness, then rinse them off and cut them into cubes. Add them to the pan.

Here, I peel about two heads (yes, heads) of garlic, chop off the bottoms, and add them to the pan. If you are not totally wild about garlic, you can use less garlic than I do. A lot less garlic than I do. Throw the garlic in.

Eggplant soaks up oil–make sure that there’s still a little in the bottom of the pan, else this will stick and you’ll never get your pan clean. (Here, never means maybe someday, but not until you’ve spent many hours cursing and chipping away at the gunk on the bottom of the pan.)

This is the part of the recipe where you can do whatever you want. Add a tablespoon or two of lemon juice to the pan. Then figure out what else you have in the cupboard that’d about to go off. I suggest roasted peppers of any color, mushrooms, spinach, and/or tomatoes. Chop them and add them to the pan, then let it cook until the eggplant is very, very soft and browned. You can dump this over pasta or rice and call it a day.

Definitely not health food–I wasn’t joking when I said that eggplant soaks up oil–but delicious.

So the other day I was looking at sheets on Amazon, and I found not sheets, but these pillows. I’ve always wanted to try gel pillows, but didn’t want to pay eleventy-two dollars for them, so it was super exciting to realize that these were only $25.

I bought them (and had free two-day shipping thanks to a trial of Amazon Prime) and guys, these pillows are awesome. If you like down pillows but don’t like pokey feather bits, you totally want to buy these. They’re fairly soft, but substantial, and they more or less stay where you put them–it’s not the sort of thing where you put your head down, and then all the feathers navigate away from your head, and then ten minutes later you’re resting your head on two layers of fabric and have giant feather-piles on either side of your head. (It’s not just me who has that happen, right?)

Anyhow, if you are looking for pillows, you could do worse than buying those ones.

Also, I didn’t technically buy this, but maple sugar from Marx Foods is totally my new favorite thing. The nice people at Marx Foods sent my friend Livia a box of exciting samples of things from their store, and because she is lovely, she passed some of those things on to me. Maple sugar is, so far, the only one I’ve used, but holy crap, it’s delicious. Maple toast? Yes, please. It’s also delicious on pancakes, which is nice, because I don’t really like soggy pancakes, so syrup is sometimes an issue for me. I will also admit to eating it directly out of the packet, because it’s just that tasty. I suspect I’m going to have to order some of it when my packet runs out, because yum.

Who else has recently bought stuff that turned out to be somewhat unexpectedly awesome?

That’s right, falafel! Falafel! is so awesome that it gets its own exclamation mark.

Here’s the thing. I really, really like falafel. (Enough exclamation marks. They give me hives after a while. Please pretend that there is an exclamation mark of happiness after every instance of falafel.) Unfortunately, living where I live, falafel options are pretty limited. There is–or there was, anyhow, five or ten years ago–this super-amazing place on Lorain and W117 in Cleveland where you could get a giant falafel of deliciousness for $2, but (1)it’s an hour-long drive, and (2) it may or may not exist any longer.

Anyhow, all of that is basically to say that when I want falafel now, I pretty much have to make it. Luckily, falafel is super easy to make, and requires pretty minimal work.

That was supper a few nights ago. Lesley asked me to post the recipe, so here we go.

First, you should make tzatziki. I realized after I’d started cooking that I had no dill, so mine was less delicious than it could have been, but it was still damn tasty. Take a container of plain yogurt and mix it with grated cucumber, minced garlic, dill, and a little salt. If you’re the kind of person who plans ahead, you could do worse than letting the yogurt drain a little bit first–the sauce gets rather thin if you don’t. (Delicious! Just messy.)

Let the sauce hang out in the fridge while you make the falafel.

2 cans chickpeas, rinsed and drained (If you’re a better person than I am, you could start with dried chickpeas and soak them overnight and then boil them for a few minutes, but I don’t usually plan meals that far in advance, and, frankly, canned ones are easy.)
1 small onion, minced (or half a giant onion)
1 bunch fresh parsley or cilantro, chopped
garlic, grated or minced (I used a bunch of garlic–like eight cloves–because I love garlic. Normal people probably do not want that much garlic in their falafel, so maybe two or three cloves would be better.)
cumin
salt
pepper
lemon juice
ground coriander (omit if you’re using cilantro.)
2 eggs
(maybe) flour

In a large pot or pan, put about 1/2″ oil and start heating it. I set my burners to just above medium and left them there, and it was fine. (My thermometer melted in an ill-advised candy-making experiment a while back, so I can’t give a precise temperature. That said, the oil’s hot enough when you drop in a pinch of chickpea mixture and it bubbles.)

Grab a serving fork and mash your chickpeas. When they’re mashed, mix in the garlic, parsley, and onion. Add about a tablespoon of lemon juice and mix that in. The spices are to taste–start with a teaspoon of cumin and half a teaspoon of coriander, mix it in, then try a pinch. Keep going until it tastes good. (We used about three teaspoons of cumin, I think, and also a dash of cayenne.)

Beat your eggs and mix them in with the chickpeas. Take about a tablespoon of the mixture and form a patty. This is your test patty. Put it into the hot oil and see how it cooks. Ideally, it’ll get all delicious and brown and will hold together when it’s flipped.

This is not what happened on my first batch, and I was not smart enough to do a test patty. Learn from my mistakes, guys.

If the patty falls apart, add maybe two tablespoons of flour to the chickpea mixture, then do another test patty. (It’ll almost certainly be fine now.) If the test patty looks good, form a bunch of patties and start cooking them–I could do about five at a time, and that worked out pretty well.

Awesome people eat falafel with pita bread, lettuce, tomatoes, feta, tahini, and tzatziki. You should have grapes on the side, because grapes are delicious, and are double-plus delicious with feta.

In not-food-related news, I have decided that my next career will be as a professional mattress tester. I’m not sure that this is actually a job, but surely someone out there has to test mattresses, right? It sounds like the greatest job ever, and, like I was saying elsewhere, it would basically give you a 32 hour day–work and sleep would combine into one magical 8-hour block, so you’d have the other sixteen hours of the day to do whatever you wanted.

Of course, most of what I want to do when I’m not working is sleeping, so I’m not quite sure what I’d want to do, but I bet I could think of something.

New Year’s resolution news: Remember how I said I wanted to be more interactive? Did you see what I did in there? I linked to TWO BLOGS written by actual people who I have spoken to. I’m so proud of myself it’s embarrassing.

Book news: I finished Connie Willis’s latest, Blackout, and am totally boggled by how amazing she is. I can’t believe that we have to wait until October for the ending. To get myself through, I’m going to reread as soon as Nick’s finished.

Knitting: I love socks. That is all.

A rare weekend post to talk about this soup that I made.

Unlike many people on the internet, I don’t really love soup. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we’re at least nodding acquaintances, but we’re never going to be BFFs. Push come to shove, I’d rather eat some mashed potatoes, or a beans and toast, or the components of soup, but roasted and put with bread instead of simmered in liquid.

So when I make soup, I’m usually ready to be at least sort of disappointed. But this time, this soup, required exactly zero thought, about three minutes of prep, and no attention at all, and it was good! Good enough that I’ve eaten it two times in as many weeks, anyhow, which is a lot of soup for me.

Here’s the thing: this soup has three ingredients, and one of them is water. Not even stock, just…water. And, somehow, it tastes sort of like bean with bacon soup, but less like canned and salt, and more like…well, meat and beans.

Put a pound of rinsed and picked-over beans in a large pot. (I used a huge variety, tossing in a handful of literally every type of beans in my cabinet, which was…well, a lot of beans. Probably a dozen kinds.) Cut one twelve to sixteen ounce piece of kielbasa into slices, and throw that into the pot. Cover the whole mess with a substantial amount of water–I put about two inches more than the beans. Cover the pot and leave on low heat all day. (Or throw it into a crockpot and leave that on low all day.) Come home and eat your ridiculously tasty and easy bean soup.

I feel a little bit guilty about how much we liked this soup, but especially for the total lack of work required, it’s delicious. You should make some.

I was originally going to do hot or not Tuesday, and then I realized that I didn’t want to think about the not-hot things, because it was depressing. Instead, it’s just stuff that’s awesome.

• 25% off sales at my local yarn shop. Their website’s dated in areas, but it’s a really nice shop, and about twice a year they have 25% off sales. I love this, because I feel totally justified in buying very pretty yarn. I’ve been in sort of a rut lately–nothing I’ve been knitting has been keeping my interest–and I’m hoping that the new yarn will jolt me out of that. Also, weird though it may be, yarn makes me happy. I just love it.

• My Diva Cup. I bought mine seven years ago, and it’s still going strong. Also, it means that instead of thinking about my period every goddamn time I have to pee, I can just think about it twice a day and ignore it the rest of the time. Awesome.
• Connie Willis has a new book coming out today, and the magical gods of Amazon will have it to my house either today or tomorrow. I am so excited. I have two must-buy authors–Connie Willis and Margaret Atwood–and I’m not joking when I say that if someone released a phone book to which one of them wrote a preface, I would quite happily plunk down my thirty bucks for that phone book, and then I’d probably buy several more to give away as gifts. That they’ve both released a book within a year of each other is cause for great, great rejoicing.
• Cats that sleep on my feet. Totally awesome. We keep our house pretty cold, and the cats are fantastic footwarmers. Without them, we’d have to do that thing where you heat bricks and put them at the foot of the bed.
• Malley’s Pretzel Crunch bar. Holy crap, do I love these. We were out visiting relatives on the weekend, and I realized that there’s a Malley’s right by their house. We stopped on the way home and bought, no joke, about fifteen of these. They’re probably my favorite candy bar.
• Leaving work in the daylight. I love winter, but man, it’s really hard to do things when you leave work at five and it’s dark before you get home. The days have gotten longer by just enough that we get home while it’s still light.
• Paint. I’m starting to think seriously about painting some of the house. We’ve been here a year and a half, and the walls are still the boring beige and scuffed white they were when we moved in. I keep building up painting as a Big Deal Thing, but really, it’s a wall. I’m going to put paint on it. If it sucks, I’ll paint it again. It’s not that hard, and I should just do it. (Please feel free to leave painting tips in the comments.)
• Blue Ginger’s Black Sesame and Sea Salt Rice Crisps. Holy crap are these delicious. I bought a giant bag of them at BJ’s, and we ate it within about a week. Which matters not at all, because in addition to being delicious, a giant serving of them is only about 100 calories. Of course, when I went back to BJ’s to buy more, they were gone. I’m going to phone tomorrow and see if they’ll order them. Fingers crossed.

That’s about all I’ve got, but really, that’s pretty good for a Tuesday.

Apparently there’s this meme, 51 things I found in my room? Or 52 things I found in my house, or something like that. Unfortunately, it involves making a video of yourself with random things and setting said video to quirky music, and let me tell you, my tolerance for that is pretty less than zero.

Instead, I give you a list of nine things I cannot find! Since I cannot find these things, obviously there is no video, and if you feel the need for quirky music, I suggest that you queue up your media player of choice before reading this entry.

• The next gem in Bejeweled. Look. I’m a reasonably smart person, and I cannot for the life of me break 200,000 on Bejeweled Blitz. Actually, I can’t break 170,000, and I’ve only managed it that high once. I have a friend who has 400,000 points. How is that possible? What am I missing? Why does it bother me so much that I’m not better at a stupid, time-wasting game on Facebook, which I hate?
• A tiny bit of gives-a-fuck about Apple’s upcoming tablet. I keep finding blog posts and announcements and pre-announcements and and and, and this is what I do: mark as read, mark as read, close tab, mark as read. Shut up about it already.

• The half-dozen thank-you notes I’d written thanking people for Christmas gifts. I wrote them on my lunch break one day last week, and I know that they didn’t get mailed. Where the hell are they? Somewhere between my office (spartan, relatively uncluttered) and my house (messy at best, full of stuff) they’ve been misplaced. I’m trying to convince myself to man up and rewrite them tomorrow, but I hate having to write things with pens.
• Thing number four. This is actually an ongoing problem–in any list, I stall out around four. Once I’ve got four, I can plow right one, but four gets me every time.
• My stripey green underwear. They’re my favorite underwear, guys, and I have no idea where they are.
• Any knitting needles between 3.25mm and 5mm. That’s a big gap, and I am 100% sure that I have needles in that size range. I just…can’t find them. Anywhere.
• Appropriate photos go to with blog posts. You like how I’m sticking that bit of meta in there? I should stop caring about stupid things like photos and just post. It’s not like this is a photoblog.
• An understanding of why this Prop 8 nonsense has gone to trial. I honestly don’t understand–since when do we let the majority vote on the rights of a minority group? How is this even a question? Bonus thing I can’t find: the stomach to read much of the trial coverage.
• Stupid Jasmine stupid Disney Princess stupid Polly Pocket, stupid stupid stupid. Possibly you’re picking up my frustration with that one. Maura–to my distress–is obsessed with those stupid Disney Princess Polly Pockets. As a reward for two weeks of awesome behavior, I ordered Tiana from Amazon. Jasmine is the only one we’re missing, and I can find her nowhere. I’d just order her from Amazon, too, but the goddamn thing costs THIRTY DOLLARS. For a two-inch-tall doll and three little dresses made out of rubber! Twice as much as all the other ones cost! I am so annoyed by this that I’m reduced to exclamation marks as a way of expressing my anger. Argh.