Thursday, December 25, 2008

Merry Christmas Everybody!

So I'd thought about hanging with the Jews and hitting up a movie and having Chinese food today. But I bought a lot of food yesterday to make some specific recipes and I cooked all day. Which is a little weird as I'm cooking for 1, but it's fun. I always want to make more food than anyone could possibly eat. I held back a little today, but if you add it to the vat of soup I made yesterday, my fridge is pretty full. The kitchen, it's working well, efficiency wise. Still have to figure out where some final things go (mostly the small appliances) but overall? Waaaaay better. And it smells good with the mulling spices warming on the stove.

I made a lamb stew type thing which came out too pasty to look good for a picture. But it was tasty enough to eat, so whew! I also cooked up artichokes and peeled a pomegranate so it was a Greek kind of meal. I do wonder why pomegranates were one of the earliest cultivars though. Yes, it stores well - it can last for weeks or months, maintains the juiciness of the seeds, and one rotten seed rarely affects many others. But dang are they a PITA to peel. I do wonder how Pom does it industrially for juicing.

I also made my favorite cranberry relish and just finished rolling out some egg noodles. It's a recipe I made up myself. Typical recipe is 1c flour, 1 egg, 1T water and 1t oil with a pinch of salt. I use 1c flour, 1 egg, 1T low sodium soy sauce and 1t oil - although this time I also ground up some dried mushrooms in a coffee grinder and added an extra t of water with the powdered shrooms. They're drying right now. Usually I don't have the patience to wait for them to dry, but I'm pretty full. (I had to test out the Corn Pops I bought for mom's breakfast...)

Tomorrow, I need to get out of the condo though. I'm meeting up with a friend at some point, and I want to go to the beach because it's California and I can, even if it's still pretty wet and chilly. I could use a good 3 hour walk, too. Hope you had a fun day hanging with family and don't need too many gin and tonics to recover from said family.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Happy Festivus! I just saw someone do a quick, and more importantly clean, job of pomegranate peeling. Cut it into quarters and then submerge the quarters in a big bowl of water. Pry apart the membrane and the seeds pop out and sink while the white membrane floats, scoop out the flotsam. No stained fingers, no seeds go AWOL.

Lorraine

CrankyOtter said...

Yeah, but I still spray myself with the cutting into quarters. I'll have to give it a try though.