On A Cooking Jag

 


I am definitely on a cooking jag.  This morning before I even had breakfast I put together the wine-herb butter for tonight's supper.  (more on that in a minute)  The shallots I bought were too big (aw, what a pity) which meant I had half a finely chopped shallot with no place to go.  So once my herb butter was mixed and in the fridge cooling, I whipped up a little scrambled egg sandwich for myself for breakfast.  The big revelation was finding out that 1 1/2 teaspoons of McCormick's Bac'n Pieces only costs 1 point so my breakfast had that lovely, smokey fake bacon flavor we all crave and only added up to 4 points.

Not willing to let a cooking jag rest, after I ate breakfast I decided that I should really fire up the breakfast burrito assembly line for Durwood's breakfasts.  (I feel much better about him eating one of those than having to make do with half a Kwik Trip fake-blueberry donut [ack] or a Eggo waffle with jam on it.) I had all the ingredients on hand, have had them for at least a month and hadn't found or made time to buckle down and get them made.  Today was the day and, as you can see, I still have some of that gorgeous pink Glad Wrap left from cleaning out Mom's kitchen 6 1/2 years ago.  I even went downstairs for a roll of plain plastic wrap figuring that the end would come soon but 14 burritos later there's still some left on the roll.  (I think this stuff is related to "the ham that never ends."  Ask DS and DD about that...)


Once the burritos were in the freezer it was time to get dressed, bolt a cup of delicious lentil

soup (yesterday's cooking and the start of the jag), grab my writing stuff, and take myself to The Attic Books & Cafe to write for a couple hours, waiting for a friend to arrive for a chat.  As you can see I was plugged in to waves and rain sounds on my Kindle (cuts down on my natural tendency to eavesdrop) and had my Alphasmart which had proved to be a whiz bang word generator last weekend.  It worked its magic again today--when I downloaded what I wrote after I got home, I have four pages of Chapter 29.  Not to imply that Chapter 28 is finished.  It needs some tweaking but I'm at the part of the manuscript where I wrote bare bones of the story because I wanted to be able to write "The End" on the last day of November since that's when NaNoWriMo ends so there are many scenes that need to fill in the spaces left by the plot leaps I took.  I hit the high spots then so I'd remember where the story needed to go but quite a few interesting details got left out.  I'm filling in those blanks.

And then it was supper time.  The Gulf shrimp that I thawed yesterday got peeled and deveined, then arranged in a small iron skillet, dotted with half of the cold wine-herb butter that I made this morning, rested in a bit more wine and lemon juice, then roasted in a 475 degree oven until done.  Served with a slice of Italian Semolina bread for sauce-sopping-up and a pile of fresh steamed broccoli and we had a meal both of us are anxious to repeat next week.  Can't let the other half of the butter mixture go to waste, now can we?  (The money we spent on Gulf shrimp from the itinerant shrimp truck was worth every penny and I don't begrudge the 8 remaining packages of shrimp frozen in blocks of ice the freezer room either.)


January 10--Chester Harding, The Artist's Son, Frank S. Harding.  Jamie and Ry were inseparable.  When Jamie was an infant Ry would lay as close to his cradle as possible and not get his paws or his tail rocked on.  If the baby fussed and Mama was busy, Ry nudged the cradle with his nose to soothe Jamie.  Ry lay still as Jamie crawled over him, tugged on his ears or tail, and tried to catch the dog's tongue as he licked food off Jamie's chin.  Once Jamie was walking Ry finally had the playmate he craved.  You never saw one without the other as they ranged all over the town and its surroundings.

I know for a fact that my cooking jag isn't over.  I found a recipe for Cream of Three Tomatoes Soup in Sunday's Parade Magazine that I plan to make for Durwood tomorrow.  All I had to buy for that was half & half, I even have sun-dried tomatoes that we made a couple years ago in the food dehydrator to cut up.  I've got some turkey thighs I got in the Quick Sale cooler at Woodman's before Christmas and I picked out one of our favorite chicken thigh recipes from an older WW cookbook to make for the next two nights' suppers.  Then there's the recipe for WW Turkey Breakfast Sausage that one of last weekend's writers shared with me and didn't I buy the fat-free ground turkey at the store yesterday?  You bet your booties I did.  Yessiree bob, there's a cooking jag going on.  When I said so to Durwood tonight he said, "Do you hear me complaining?"  No, Dear, I do not.
--Barbara