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 May 1, 2016. Today's luncheon (and tomorrow's) from Blue Apron: zucchini and spinach quiche. I think the crust got a little over done. I need a decent oven.
I think I may have goofed up the recipe. They sent a big cluster of garlic, and I was enthusiastically dicing it all up, tossing it into the pot, and then I glanced at the recipe card again and realized: OMG I WAS ONLY SUPPOSED TO USE TWO CLOVES, NOT THE WHOLE DAMNED THING! I tried to get most of it out, but in the end, it was just too garlicky. Not bad, but probably not as good as it should have been. Still one of the prettiest things I've ever cooked!
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 April 29, 2016. My first meal from Blue Apron, one of those new food services that sends you a certain number of meals in a big box. They send you everything except salt, pepper and olive oil. I mean, they even sent me a tablespoon of butter! It's cute how everything comes in little packages. I really like the lack of waste. I had kale in this but I didn't have to buy a huge bundle of it, just to have most of it rot in the fridge before I got around to eating it. I didn't have to buy a whole jar of Dijon mustard grain just to get two tablespoons for this recipe. It's hard cooking for one person, even with the occasional dinner guest. This serving had about 700 calories. True, skin was on the chicken -- but my serving was kept to one chicken breast. And you only make enough for two meals at a time, so overeating would be limited if you actually had two people eating together. Me, I suppose I could have eaten both servings, but one made me really full. One tablespoon of butter in whole thing, 4 teaspoons of olive oil. Everything was fresh, not frozen, not processed. And that's a huge difference for me, because I so often fall back on quick convenience foods. The "intro special" for Blue Apron cost $30, for six individual meals. $5 a meal isn't bad at all, not when it's fresh and mostly healthy -- certainly healthier than I normally eat. The normal price is $50 for the package; that's a little over $8 a meal, which wouldn't be too bad if i could do it maybe once a month, instead of this every week deal. While cooking, though, I had my doubts. How do you know when a purple potato is done, anyway? The veggie medley was certainly not a combination of things I'd ever tried: purple potatoes, onion, kale, one Granny Smith apple, almond slivers and Dijon mustard grain. It doesn't look good here, but it was surprisingly tasty. And it was an adventure, because I would never have come up with this on my own. (I could have done without the apple in it; for me, it was just one flavor too many.) I'm not sure how the leftovers will reheat, though. This was really yummy because of the crispy seared skin. I'm so proud it came out well because I have this slight, uh, phobia about cooking chicken. I'm always afraid it's not done, and I'm sure it's due to a past brush with death brought on by bad chicken salad. Which actually came from a respectable restaurant in town, not something I'd cooked. But still, you only have to spend 24 hours puking your guts out and praying for death to be marked for life. I just don't know if I can afford to stay with the program. This is probably very cost effective for people who are used to cooking. But I'm not. I'm cheap and lazy when I shop for groceries, and I fall into that trap that so many of us po' folk do, which is choosing cheap but filling crap instead of healthy. It's expensive to eat fresh and healthy. Corporate American wants us fat, depressed and dying. Sigh. I hate money. Probably because I don't have it, but it just gets in the way of doing what you'd really like.   April 30, 2016. Tonight's dinner from Blue Apron: Grains of Paradise Crusted Steak with mashed plantain, collard greens and ginger peanuts.
I was really impressed with the collards -- i may be cooking them like this again - though I'll end up with a huge mess of greens that I can't possibly eat. Anybody want to split a mess of collards with me? The ginger peanuts, well, I had my doubts, but they were really good! The steak was a little fatty -- excellent flavor, but I've not eaten any kind of steak except for filet mignon in over a year -- I just got tired of crappy cuts of meat, and would rather go for three months without steak at all, so that when I did splurge, I could go for something that I really liked. The "sauce" of olive oil, lime juice and parsley was a waste, though. Really had no use for it.  May 14, 2016. My first Home Chef meal. Onion and mushroom smothered flat iron steak with mashed sweet potatoes and salt crusted green beans. Tasty but nothing mind-blowing or different for me. We'll see about tomorrow's dinner.
 Home Chef, May 15, 2016. The potatoes are fab! The chicken came out a little dry but the sauce of Demi glacé with shallots and butter is really good. I'm talking, drinkable. The potatoes are cream, shallots and Parmesan. OMG.
 If you have noticed my postings recently on Facebook, you are aware of my current love affair with the plethora of food box services. They ship you fresh ingredients for meal recipes, you cook it. (And then you clean it up. Sigh.)
You may have noticed, too, that I’m promiscuous, spreading my affections around. I started just checking out different programs to see how they worked, if i liked them, if I could afford them. And taking advantage of first order discounts. I like discounts. Discounts are good. Discounts are my friend and Free is my soul-mate. On the first few boxes, the estimate for “time to prepare” was a big fat lie. The first meal took me almost two hours -- but that’s because I almost never cook, and I had crappy tools, and I was really slow. Probably took me half an hour to peel and dice an onion. All that endless veggie washing and peeling and chopping. The prep is what takes the time, not the cooking. The first two recipes made me a little nervous, because for the first time in my life I had to “zest” a lemon, and then a lime. (I had to buy a zesting tool, of course; I could have used my grater, I suppose, but I was worried about ruining the whole thing by not zesting correctly.) In the beginning, I spent a lot of time staring at the recipe, almost afraid to start for fear of mucking it up. But it's been a lot easier than I thought it would be, and with practice, I've gotten faster. The most recent meal took about an hour from prep to plate, and was ridiculously easy. I've been impressed with how clear the instructions have been, because this has always been a stumbling block for me: recipes that assume everybody knows what “zesting” or “blanching” is, or how to make “creme fraiche.” If I, as a charter member of the Society for the Domestically Challenged, can say a recipe was simple, you can believe it really is. I'm also finding that having the right tools helps enormously. I did not actually own a decent knife or frying pan when I started. Now I do, and the difference is amazing. Of course, I spent $200 at a kitchen store in Opry Mills, but that’s beside the point. I was suddenly compelled to buy a bunch of little prep bowls. And a salad spinner. And special kitchen scissors. A $60 ceramic frying pan. Two new knives that will take my fingers off. And a Keurig coffee maker. Which had nothing to do with my cooking projects, but it was there, you know? I wanted it for my desk at work. I will overlook the $10 bucks I spent on a really crappy slap chopper. I’ll go old school and chop by hand. It’s just that possibly of losing a fingertip that has me concerned. The benefits to this experiment are even more numerous that I anticipated:
Because people have asked about my culinary adventures, here is a breakdown of the ones I’ve tried so far: Overall: the delivery, instructions, food freshness and recipes have all been very good. BLUE APRON
HELLO FRESH
HOME CHEF
MARLEY SPOON (MARTHA STEWART)
FRESHLY Absolutely AVOID. They do pre-prepared fresh food that you just microwave. I so wanted this to be good, because it sounded perfect for a single person who didn’t like to cook. But the food was barely edible, some downright nasty in taste and appearance. Really disappointing. I will be following with postings of my dishes and critiques of their worthiness. Stay tuned. Today was hell, I tell ya. Pure hell.
First, at 8:45 am on a Saturday morning, I had to climb out of a nice, soft bed where I’d been snuggled all up against my warm honey. Now, I wanted to go to breakfast with my brunch posse but it’s damn hard to leave a sexy man snoring softly in your bed. Especially when as soon as you get out of bed, he’s wrapping his arms around your big special “Woobie” pillow and nuzzling it while making vague “mmm... mmmm” noises. Breakfast was good, the company fine... but then I had to do something I dread with every fiber of my being: I had to go to Green Hills. That had already required me to put on makeup and actual clothes without paint on them, because there is a dress code for Green Hills, you know. I have learned that if you want even a modicum of decent customer service in Green Hills, you must look like you at least made an effort to blend in. I worry that the bumper stickers holding my car together -- either by sheer volume or by their opinions -- will give me away as “NOT ONE OF US” but I needed the Apple store, and that meant Green Hills or Cool Springs. God help me. My beloved iPhone camera has, for the past week, not been taking photos with the breathtaking focus and clarity I have become accustomed to. After an hour on the phone with Apple support (“have you tried shutting it down and then booting it back up?”), they made me an appointment at the Apple store. An appointment. Well, thank god because without an appointment I’d still be sitting outside Nordstrom’s watching well-scrubbed and almost uniformly skinny white people walk by, attempting to amuse myself by making up stories about this one’s bulimia and that one’s apprenticeship into the Shoe Whores of America Guild. All kidding aside, there are not nearly as many fat people in Green Hills as you would find in, say, any WalMart anywhere. Is the peer pressure of the upwardly mobile stronger, or do they just have the money to eat better and buy gym memberships? I don’t know. But I felt fatter than usual. The Apple store is loud. I mean, you have to lean close to the ear of the smiling twenty-something in the grey polo shirt to spell your name for the tenth time over the echoing roar. There are always at least fifty people crammed into the store, and each and every one of them has their head down looking a screen of some kind. The store really would benefit from some acoustic improvement. Carpet would be lovely. But instead it’s loud, claustrophobic and chaotic. Then the worst thing ever. THEY TOOK MY PHONE AWAY FROM ME AND TOLD ME TO COME BACK IN TWO AND A HALF HOURS. How in the hell was I supposed to wait for two and a half hours without my phone? My audio book, and my ebooks, were all ON THE PHONE. Same for all my music. I couldn’t check my three email accounts, or my bank balance, or worse of all, I COULDN’T POST STATUS UPDATES THAT SAID “OH MY GOD THEY TOOK MY PHONE AWAY FROM ME AND I FEEL NAKED!” I don’t wear a watch, so I couldn’t even tell what time it was. I stumbled around the mall, periodically asking strangers for the time. Instead I ended up spending $70 on tea from Teavana (those evil bastards) and another $20 on Godiva chocolates. I wouldn’t have done this if I hadn’t been disoriented, vulnerable and bored out of my mind waiting... waiting... waiting.... I blame Green Hills, too, because when you are visiting there, you begin to forget that these are not your people, and this is not really your life, and you can’t afford to shop here because even the Jelly Belly’s at the candy store are overpriced. My phone was actually ready fifteen minutes early. They put in a whole new camera. My photos are once more spectacular. Thank God. I came home and crawled into bed for a two hour nap. Now, I’m drinking my extravagant Passion Tango tea.....  Boyfriend and I spent a good part of the day cleaning out and reorganizing the storage closet on my back porch, and the porch itself.
But the first step was last night, when we launched a preemptive strike against the original terrorist army: spiders-and-other-crawly-things-with-too-many-legs-to-be-anything-but-horrifying. Seriously, this is no exaggerating. I apparently live in the middle of the Spider Promised Land. There are more spiders in and around my house than I have ever seen in one place ever in my life. I have seen varieties of spiders here that I've never even heard of before, in colors and sizes and leg-distribution-patterns heretofore unknown to me. I should probably call in some scientific bug experts because I really think that I have spiders that exist no where else in the world, except maybe the depths of some South American jungle or a top secret government weapons lab. So, this morning, after a hearty breakfast from Mickey D's, we begin dismantling the leaning tower of crap that is my storage closet. Everything — and I do mean everything — is festooned with tattered, lint-filled webs and dead spider carcasses. There are so many dead spiders that they look like a wallpaper pattern on all the walls -- including the ceiling and floor. I wish now that I had taken a photo in order to effectively convey the depth, breadth and sheer scope of that terrible, skin-crawling sight. But at the time I was too busy worried about something falling on my head to do more than attack everything with my broom, until I had a pile of dirt, webs and dead spiders at my feet. Now, somewhere in the middle of this process, Boyfriend and I decided we needed a few repair items from Home Depot. We drove in his bright red, beat-to-shit 1978 Ford truck, which for some reason he is excessively fond of, and, even stranger, other people actually think is "cool." We were at the gas station and this couple, about to climb into their expensive SUV, had to pause to admire it. And they were serious. They gushed over this POS truck. Whodathunkit? But when we got back in the truck, and I rolled the window down, there was a tiny spider dangling off the rearview mirror. I grabbed a napkin to flick it away, provoking Boyfriend to utter what was, quite possibly, the single stupidest thing I've ever heard him say: "What? Are you that afraid of spiders?" "EVERYBODY is afraid of spiders," I squeaked. Now, as arachnophobia goes, I'm not excessively afraid of spiders. I have been known to capture and release, if the spider is small and non-threatening enough. I feel bad when i do kill one, because I know they are valuable to the ecosystem. I also feel sorry that they are so persecuted by humans out of irrational fear. But neither do i want to become intimate with them. Kind of like Jehovah's Witnesses and Republicans. I'll let them live in peace if they will simply leave me alone. We got back to the house and I was finishing up the final sweep of the closet. Suddenly, movement caught my eye, and I looked down at my right forearm to see a BIG DAMNED and VERY ALIVE SPIDER waving his freaky little legs at me. I SCREAMED like someone in a Wes Craven movie as I gave a very athletic if not particularly graceful performance of the Spider Dance. Boyfriend earned major brownie points for picking up the broom (from where I had thrown it some five or six feet away) and offering to finish the closet sweeping. Even now as I write this, I STILL feel the phantom legs of invisible spiders tickling my back, my neck, my scalp..... SHUUUUUDDER. And I am further haunted by wondering how that single enormous spider survived the Hiroshima of the bug bomb. He must have been the Super Spider King. For all I know, he's still out there, plotting his revenge for the deaths of his people. Er, his spiders, I mean. We got the closet repaired and reorganized. I got rid of a lot of crap I haven't seen, let alone used, in more than five years. But I was exhausted, back and knees groaning in protest, sweaty and grimy and still scratching at imaginary bugs when Boyfriend took off, and I dragged my tired ass up the stairs to take a shower. That was when I realized I hadn't see the cat in quite some time. I had already caught Boyfriend leaving the door open once that morning, and you KNOW how paranoid I am about Doolittle getting out again. So I start calling him. Normally, Doo will answer me and come running to see what I am doing, because you never know, there might be food or a skwerl involved. Or at least he will lift his head from my pillow and give an annoyed yowl as if to say, "Whaddya want? Can't you see I'm sleeping here?" But nothing. I keep calling, and search the whole house. Cannot find the damned cat anywhere. I'm ready to burst into tears because I am so tired and miserable and now I've got to search the neighborhood for a cat who is stupid enough to get lost for a month only forty feet from his own front door. I trudge around the house, around the neighbor's on either side, I ask a man working on his patio if he's seen a black and grey tabby. He says no, and I suspect he is not impressed by my appearance. By this point, I did look a bit like a deranged homeless person wandering around looking for an imaginary cat. I search the house across the street, with it's enormous backyard, because that is where Doo spent his last month-long vacation. But no sign of him. I finally go back in the house, because by this time I have to pee. And you know what I'm about to say, don't you? Yeah, you knew it was coming. There's the damned cat. Just sitting under a table, switching his tail. "Where were you?" I snap. "Why didn't you answer me?" He just blinks at me. The epilogue to this is that I have decided to deepen my credit card debt by paying a contractor to do all the painting and repair work on the exterior of my house. Last night Boyfriend and I shopped Home Depot to price lumber and paint, and realized that it would probably cost almost four hundred dollars to do it ourselves, when the contractor only wanted $500 to do the ground floor portions. I was going to have to pay him the $1000 for the second story work, because there was no way I could do that, nor would I trust any of my friends not to fall and kill themselves, should they be so masochistic as to offer to try. The work today brought fully home to both of us that we are getting too old for this shit. We've done some serious remodeling and repair work before, and survived, but the years between then and now have been harsher than either of us realized. Cleaning, repairing and hauling the junk from the storage closet nearly killed us. Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to take a pain pill or a muscle relaxer, and then crawl into bed. I may also take a Valium for the post traumatic spider anxiety. Maybe then I'll stop imagining that something is crawling on me. FREE DOWNLOAD SEPT. 20-22, 2014  Welcome to the Omani Realm, composed of twelve squabbling kingdoms, ruled by a holy dictator, who takes a new consort every six years during the Festival of the Single Moon. Young noble women are painstakingly groomed to be presented as one of the consecratia and perhaps chosen as the next shallan breda, all with the hope of bearing a male heir.
People ask, what is the book about? Well, think "Game of Thrones" plus Arthurian legends plus a little of "The Tudors" and a hint of "The Borgias," strongly slanted toward female characters. The Cadian Sisterhood are what would have happened had our early Christian nuns been cautious (and even a little scheming) feminists. There's a little magic, but not so much that readers who don't care for fantasy will be put off by it. There's a little romance, but not so much that it will make your stomach turn, because, after all, I wrote it and I have little patience for sap. There is a lot of drama, suspense, intrigue, betrayal, and scheming. All good stuff, right? If you can, please share the link on your Facebook page. If you belong to Goodreads, please post a review and recommend it there. Review it on Amazon, and go to my Author's Page and "like" me. You will earn my undying gratitude! And my mom's, too. Because she doesn't understand why I'm not on the bestseller list already. Hurry up and put me there so she'll stop saying, "But your books are so good, I just don't understand...." All kidding aside, I really hope you like it. Misery's Child, my beloved fantasy novel, is available for free download on http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CGP37RA  Something Blue -- my newest book — is laugh-out-loud funny. Everybody who has read it says so! Now it's YOUR turn.
Tomorrow only, Something Blue in Kindle form is FREE. It's not like it's an expensive book anyway when it's not free — only .99, for heavens sake! — but if you're on a budget or would rather spend that buck on the Dollar Menu at McDonald's, this is your chance! Just go here to download your free copy. If you don't have a Kindle, you can still read the download on your computer, or your phone. Or, if you prefer the feel and smell of a real, live book in your hands, Something Blue is available in paperback, but I'm afraid it's not free. Sorry. I will be working on doing a Giveaway on Goodreads very soon. And if you read it, and you like it, please take just a moment to give it a favorable review -- or just a whole bunch of stars! — on Amazon and Goodreads.com. I will be most appreciative! |
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