Chicken tagine (using the ras el hanout)

Lazy, lazy. I bought the ingredients for this last weekend, and my rule of thumb is to try to use perishables within the week. So really, this is my last window to make this recipe before I kick myself and throw out some of the ingredients.

While I was researching the ras el hanout mix (can you call it research, if it's an hour's work on the internet? I like to think I was using at least some of the scientific skills I was taught in college, weeding through all this... data), I found this recipe for a chicken tagine. It looked good; most of the things it has in it, we like.

But this is not that recipe. I don't have a tagine pot, I don't have preserved lemons, I don't feel like measuring all those various spices out when most of them are already in my ras el hanout (and adding them in will muddy the ras el hanout experiment itself), and I can't cook chicken breasts to save my life. Actually, that's not true. I could cook them to save my life; they don't have to be good to provide enough sustenance for survival.

I'm not good with 95% lean ground beef, either. I think it's the lack of fat. It makes things hard to cook, and it pisses me off. I'm not into this low-fat thing. I mean, I'll buy olive oil and use it instead of butter or bacon grease; OK. And I can see the sense in not stuffing your face with deep-fried chicken and fries. But cutting fat out of every little thing, just for the sake of cutting fat? I don't trust it. Your brain is made with fats, you know. So chicken breasts can suck it. (I occasionally still try to find a way to cook them well, for the challenge of it. It galls me that the entire nation is all crazed for this meat, and I can't cook it. I've had some success butterflying it, pounding it flat with a tenderizer, breading it, and then frying it in a pan, but that was more work than I like.)

Good God, where was I? Oh, right: this is not that recipe.

What I have is a crockpot. Here's what I threw in it:

• 1 package boneless, skinless chicken thighs (mine was 1.29 lb.)
• 1 package baby carrots (1 lb. - minus a couple I held back, because the little guy likes to nibble on carrots)
• ~1/4 to 1/2 cup green olives stuffed with garlic cloves, from the olive bar at Wegman's. (I don't know exactly how many were in there - I got a whole pint-ish-sized tub of them originally, but we've been eating them straight all week. Which I knew would happen, which is why I bought more than I needed.)
• 1 14-oz. can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
• ~ 1 tbsp. minced garlic (I scraped out the last of what was in my jar. It might have been less than a tbsp.)
• 1 tbsp. ras el hanout (see earlier post)
  
• ~ 1 tbsp. lemon juice (I didn't measure that either; I squeezed it straight into the crockpot.)
• 1 32-oz. box chicken broth (I used the Swanson's Natural Goodness kind; one of my cooking magazines recommended it as the best one, for lower-fat-and-salt reasons. I think canned soups are one of the french fry type offenders, so, ok.)

I put this in the crockpot in the morning, turned it on low, and let it go all day, until dinnertime. I didn't chop anything up. I figured the crockpot would tenderize it (and it did). I'd never actually crockpotted chicken thighs before, but they cook better than breasts in every other way I've tried. And it worked out; they fell apart very easily, without being that gross powdery dry texture I've somehow managed to give chicken breasts when I cook them in liquid.

The olives lost their characteristic saltiness after hours in the pot. I don't really know anything about olives, besides that they're salty. But this seems to suggest that one should choose olives that are still going to taste good when their salt is gone. I have no idea how you would tell, though. I seem to have lucked out, in that these olives were not offensive. They might even have been good, but it's hard to tell when you're surprised by the total re-definition of the food. I don't know if maybe there's some other variety that would really taste spectacular in this situation.

Anyway, the tagine was really good. It was sort of light, and the broth was nice - just spiced enough to taste interesting, but not overpowering. I think it would be a really good chicken soup analogue, when sick.

It reminded Jerry of medieval food (that's a compliment); he says these spices were often used back then. And even the Little Dude, who had thus far refused to eat chicken in non-nugget form, consented to eat this. He started picking out the chicken pieces after a few mouthfuls, but nonetheless: he did eat some chicken!

We had a loaf of bakery bread (rosemary-salt-olive oil, I think), and dunked pieces into the broth. I tell you, that was to die for.

Margherita pizza (attempt)

Yesterday, Heather made pizza at our house and left the remaining half jar of pizza sauce. William actually used the word "delicious" to describe the pizza, which is VERY unusual for him. So today I decided to use up the jar on another pizza. We had a ton of basil from our CSA share that we needed to use up, plus some fresh mozzarella. So, margherita pizza! Well, something close to it, anyway. I didn't have a store-bought crust but also didn't feel like spending hours on a totally-from-scratch crust. I've never tried my bread machine for anything other than a finished bread product, so this was the perfect opportunity to try it.

I found a recipe for Bread Machine Pizza Dough on food.com that looked simple enough. The only change I made was to add a dash of garlic powder and some ground Italian herbs. After a few minutes of kneading, it looked like the dough might be too dry, so I added maybe a tablespoon or two more of olive oil and used a rubber spatula to help the machine pick up the flaky bits from around the side of the pan until a single ball of dough had formed. Then I left it for the hour and a half of the dough setting.

It looked like the recipe was going to make enough dough for two pizzas, and I wasn't sure if the half-can of pizza sauce was going to be enough, so while the dough was mixing I made extra pizza sauce out of one can (14.5 oz) tomato sauce, one clove of garlic (crushed), a few basil leaves, about 1/2 a teaspoon of onion powder, and some salt and pepper to taste. I let this simmer for about half an hour.

When the dough was done, I divided it in half and spread it out on two baking sheets that were covered in olive oil and then a sprinkling of corn meal. I was really happy with this dough recipe - it seemed like the perfect consistency and was really easy to stretch out. The recipe I usually use tends to get holes in it and is almost too elastic to work with. This one really held its shape. My other recipe says that putting indentations in the crust with your fingers prevents it from bubbling, so I did that, then left it for about 10 minutes to rise just a bit.



Then I put it in the oven at 450 for five minutes (in hindsight I could have skipped this step, since the bottom ended up burning in places by the end). Meanwhile, I sliced up about two balls of fresh mozzarella and cut up a few basil leaves.



After the crusts came out of the oven, I spread the sauce over them and topped them with the mozzarella and basil, and put them back in the oven at the same temp for about eight minutes.

A strange thing happened with the mozzarella. We had two brands: Sargento and BelGioioso. The Sargento, when melted, had the look and consistency of normal mozzarella (kind of translucent and stringy?), whereas the BelGioioso was more opaque and not as stringy, which was more what I expected. But neither one of them was exactly like the cheese I'd seen on margherita pizzas that we've gotten from local restaurants, which was almost the consistency of stiff ricotta (?). So that remains somewhat of a mystery.

The other problem was the slightly burned crust, which I think could be solved by just not pre-baking the crust, or maybe not baking the full pizza for as long (I was hoping the sauce would become a bit less saucy during baking, but eight minutes was apparently not enough for that, so maybe cooking more liquid off the sauce would be another solution).

The ironic part was that I never even got to use Heather's sauce on this pizza since the 14-oz can of tomato sauce was exactly enough for the two pizzas, and I figured Heather's sauce would keep for longer than mine. So more experimenting later.

Anyway, the final product was quite tasty, and this pizza dough recipe is my new favorite. William didn't touch it, but I suspect he would have liked it if he tried it. And now he is threatening to make a big mess if I don't get off the computer, so off I go.

ETA: The next day, William ate FOUR pieces of this for lunch. I'm marking this recipe as William Approved™.

The spice must flow: ras el hanout

The intarwebz, she sez that ras el hanout can be made of up to thirty ingredients; that each shop has its own blend, and the merchants compete with each other for the best one. A lot of the ingredients are obscure to an American market, and I got the impression that some recipes strive for secret ingredients that would be obscure anywhere. I've got the best recipe around, you'll never guess what's in it! The name itself means something like "top of the shop". (That translation seems to be rampant on the internet, in the exact same words, all over the place. I suspect a lot of people of copy-pasting, so I'm not real sure you can consider its ubiquity to be any indicator of the accuracy of translation.)

This flexibility in the recipe is a little unfortunate, because it means that you absolutely will not be able to look up a recipe and have it be pretty close to whatever the ideal is. It's not like shortbread, which is just flour and butter and sugar or whatever, with only minor fluctuations. There's no ideal.

But it's also a little liberating, because if you happen to not like one of the ingredients, you can just ditch it from your recipe next time around, and you can still call it ras el hanout. It's not like chili, where if you ditch the chile peppers because you can't handle the heat, the Chili Police get all up in arms if you try to call it chili. Or beans, or ground beef, or whatever else a particular sect of Chili Police do not dig. But ras el hanout, it appears, is very anarchic, and does not bother with Police.

So what I did was google "ras el hanout recipe", collected the first dozen or so hits, discarded the few that were over-laden with too-obscure ingredients, and averaged the rest. For example, they all contained cinnamon; 1.5 tsp., 3 sticks, 1 tsp., 1.5 tsp., 1 tsp., 3/4 tsp., 2 tsp., 3/4 tsp., 2 tsp. The ones with 3/4 tsp. cinnamon actually had about half the amount of all the ingredients, compared to other recipes, so I doubled those recipes when I made the comparison. I added them all up, divided by the number of recipes with cinnamon, and came up with something resembling 1.5 tsp. cinnamon. (This was tricky when some recipes called for an item in its un-ground form. I made some educated guesses on how to convert it.)

I admit to manipulating data, too. I rounded up on ingredients I like, and down on ones I didn't. In particular, I took a whiff of my coriander, wrinkled my nose, remembered the less-than-ideal results last time I used it in something, and reduced that one from its calculated average of 1.5 tsp. to a mere .5 tsp, just because I didn't like it. I may not use it at all, next time.

What I came up with was this (all spices pre-ground):

2 tsp. cumin
1.5 tsp. cinnamon
0.5 tsp. cloves
1 tsp. cardamom
2 tsp. ginger
0.5 tsp. coriander
1.5 tsp. nutmeg (But actually my ground nutmeg was very expired, so I pulled out my whole nutmeg and ran as much of one nut across a grater as I could without grating my fingers)
1 tsp. turmeric
0.5 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. allspice

So, we'll see how it does. It smelled really good, in the meatballs; I also plan to put it in the sauce, when I cook those up for dinner.

I put it in my coffee grounds this morning, that being another recommended use of the spice. It was pretty good, but not perfect; I blame the coriander, and possibly the turmeric. Possibly there's not enough cloves for my taste. I've never used cardamom or allspice before, but they smelled complementary to the cinnamon/cloves/ginger that I like so much.

We'll see. It made a fair amount of spice blend, so I'll have quite a bit of opportunity to play with it before mixing up the next iteration.

Not-my-mother's strawberry freezer jam

I have a lot of posts that I've been meaning to make that I haven't gotten around to, but I wanted to write this one down before I forget. Anyway, when I was growing up, my mom had a huge garden and canned and froze enough veggies and fruit to last the whole year. I've already tried and failed the garden thing (although I do intend to give it another try when I have more time to devote to it), I have never canned anything, and we have a decent sized deep freezer that's mostly empty. This year my goal is to fix the last one. This weekend I attempted to make strawberry freezer jam for the first time, and I'm happy (and surprised) to report it was mostly a success. Someday I'd like to make the normal cooked and canned jam, but I do not have that much faith in my cooking skillz to not give everyone food poisoning or something. So freezer jam it is for now.

First, after reading that once you thaw out freezer jam, it only keeps in the fridge for a week, I decided to get a dozen 4-oz canning jars that can go in the freezer. I figure 4 oz of jam is a reasonable amount to eat in one week, but 8 oz might go to waste.

We have a U-pick strawberry patch (Brookside Berry Farm) right down the road from us, which is where we picked the berries, and their website has a recipe for strawberry freezer jam that uses Pomona's Pectin. The recipe that my mother uses requires 4 cups of sugar per quart of berries, which seems like a lot considering how sweet the berries already are. But this pectin only requires about a cup of sugar or honey.

So here's what I did, pretty much following the instructions in the box of pectin:

Washed the berries, hulled them, and mashed them up until I had 4 cups of mashed berries.



Mixed 1/2 teaspoon of the calcium powder (in the pectin box) into 1/2 cup of water and kept it in a jar for later. Mixed 1 cup of sugar and the juice of about half a lemon into the berries. Mixed 1 tablespoon (might have to check this) pectin powder into 3/4 cup of boiling water with the handheld mixer until it was all mixed up and jelly-like consistency, and then poured this mixture into the berries and mixed it all together. At this point, it started looking more like jam. Then put 4 teaspoons of the calcium water into the jam to get it to "gel." The instructions say to keep adding calcium water, a teaspoon at a time, until it gels, but mine looked about right after just 4 teaspoons, so I left it at that. Then I filled the jars up to 1/2 inch of the tops, put on the lids, and put them in the freezer. That was it!



I should mention that I haven't actually checked the ones in the freezer yet to make sure they didn't explode or anything. But the jar we kept out tasted quite good, and was spreadable on bread, although maybe not quite as firm as the kind you buy at the store.

Meatball variations: NOT LAZY

Laurel and I were talking the other day, and discovered that we have different approaches to meatballs: I make a big production of the meatballs, and she makes a big production of the sauce. I drooled over her description of her sauce, actually: so much more intriguing than a jar of store brand. What's even worse than my sauce issues, though, is that my meatballs are such a big production that lately I've just been buying the frozen ones.

Anyway, now I crave meatballs. Good meatballs, with fabulous sauce. And it occurred to me: you can freeze meatballs. As long as it's going to be a big production anyway, why not just make a lot, and freeze the extras?

My original recipe comes from our maternal great-grandmother. This is probably the source of my meatball/sauce behavior: her recipe uses canned tomato soup as the sauce. The recipe is designed in such a way that the meatballs themselves transform the sauce - literally, I mean, not one of those food-critic literary wordplays. The meatballs are rolled in flour, browned on the stove, and then plopped in a dutch oven with the tomato soup and put into the oven for an hour or so. The meatballs are very tender and juicy; the meatball juices and the browning-flour leach into the soup, thickening and flavoring it. The meatballs themselves are influential ingredients in the sauce.

But I haven't made the original recipe in years, not since my mother-in-law of Italian descent told me what she puts in her meatballs - lots of garlic and Parmesan cheese. Since then, I've been making what I call "Marriage meatballs" - my Graco's recipe, plus lots of garlic and Parm. In tomato soup, of course.

And yet a third meatball variation I've been wanting to try: this is a longer story. A couple of years ago, we were living in an apartment complex, and some guy knocked on our door. Jerry answered. The guy was selling magazines. After some long negotiations, Jerry agreed to buy a two-year subscription to Rachael Ray Everyday. He bought it for me; he knew I liked Rachael on TV. This was very selfless of him, since he hates her voice so much that even looking at a picture of her irritates him. Sometimes, when he's done something to piss me off, I leave one of those magazines lying around, face up. HAW HAW. Poor guy. What a reward. When the first issue of the subscription came, he growled that he was disappointed; he had really hoped the magazine guy had been running a scam.

So anyway, even though it's not a great cooking magazine - there's a lot of omg let's be healthy!!11 recipes calling for absurdities such as replacing the milk in your hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows (putatively to cut calories - I would need a whole 'nother post to describe all the things are wrong with that), and froo froo fashion and travel stuff in which I am not interested - we've been getting it in the mail. Sometimes there's some interesting stuff in it. Once, there was this North African lamb slider recipe. I made it, wasn't a fan of the harissa, but loved the cumin/cinnamon/cloves spices in the burgers. Flavors of Morocco, I think it said. I tried it later in a tomato sauce for pasta, and liked it.

So: Morocco! Some internet "research" revealed that there's this spice blend they use, called ras el hanout, which can have like a zillion ingredients, and is different from shop to shop. I mixed some up - that'll be a different post - and used it in another meatball variation.

Today, I made a double batch of the Marriage Meatballs, and a single batch of the Moroccan ones. Not that I think they necessarily make meatballs like this in Morocco, mind you. I wonder what they call American bastardization of their elements of cooking, over there. Ah, well.

I think, for clarity's sake, I'm going to start with the ingredients, before I get into the process.

Graco's Meatballs

1 lb. ground beef
1 egg
1/2 onion, chopped
1/4 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup milk
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. dry mustard
1/4 tsp. ground sage

Variation: I like Worcestshire sauce, and tend to put it in all things beef. It's been a long time since I've looked at this recipe, and I'm surprised it's not in there. I replaced maybe 1/8 of a cup of the milk with Worcestshire sauce. (Done by pouring the Worcestshire sauce into the measuring cup first, and then filling it to the 1/2 cup line with milk.)

Variation: Marriage Meatballs: Add 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese and 2 tbsp. minced garlic.

Variation: Moroccan Meatballs: Omit sage and dry mustard. Add 2 tsp. ras el hanout, and 2 tbsp. minced garlic. I wanted to use ground lamb instead of ground beef - lamb seems a big Moroccan ingredient, from what I can tell - but the grocery store didn't have any this weekend. My guess is that it's the wrong season, and I should look again in September.

OK. So the first stage of this exercise is to mix all the ingredients. I left the meat for last, and the cornmeal for next-to-last: I'm pretty sure the point of the cornmeal is to react with the milk/eggs/meat somehow, and since I was making a lot, it would take me some time to get things all together. I thought if I added the cornmeal first, it might be sitting there doing its thing for a long time before it was supposed to.
[Pictured here: cornmeal added, but not meat. The double recipe of the Marriage Meatballs, on the right, has been stirred already; the Moroccan Meatballs on the left have not, yet.)

And I left the meat for last for several reasons. One is that I wanted to mix all the other stuff together before trying to mix it into the meat, to make sure it would all get evenly distributed. And because you can mix most of the stuff with a spoon, but once you add the meat, it takes more work to mix. Finally, because I bought one of those big, $1.99/lb., 6-lb. packages of ground beef on discount, and I was going to be guessing how much was a pound. I felt like if I left it for last, I could add what I thought was about right, and then if it turned out too squashy, I could just add another handful of meat. Which I did wind up doing.

I'm not really sure how you're supposed to mix ground beef for stuff like this. I find even a sturdy wooden spoon inadequate to the task, and I don't own a stand mixer. (I've read chef-nattering about "overmixing" meat, so actually I'm not even sure if a stand mixer would be any good.) What I do is take off my ring, wash my hands, and stick'em right in there to mix by hand. I recommend being prepared to wash your hands in very warm running water midway through the process; these ingredients almost all came out of the fridge, and it is cold.

It's going to be squashy, because of the liquids. It makes a very tender, fall-apart meatball. If the mixture is too squashy and fall-apart before you even start making it into balls, add more ground beef, until you feel like your meatballs will hold together through the rolling and frying processes. So really, it does help to have more ground beef available than you think you need. You can always freeze that, too, or make cheeseburgers. I'm going to pack up the rest of it in the freezer, for future sloppy joes.

Once it's all mixed up, I think it's best to set the stage for the rest of the process, so all your equipment is prepared before you actually need to use it. There are two stations: one for flouring, and one for frying. All the flouring station needs is your meatball mixture, a bowl of flour, and a plate to put the rolled, floured meatballs on. You can move the plate at will to the other station, when you're ready to fry those meatballs.


The frying station needs your frying pan, your oil, a slotted spoon to fish the meatballs out with, and some paper-towel-laden cookie sheets (or something similar) for the meatballs to drain on.

When I was a kid, helping Dad make these meatballs, sometimes I'd have the choice of which station to work at. I liked the flouring one better; it was messier, but it didn't spit hot oil at me, nor did I have to mess with meatballs stuck to the pan, or with trying to get every side of a round meatball to touch the bottom of the flat pan to brown. When I moved out on my own, I tried baking the meatballs, but I was dissatisfied with the results for some reason I have forgotten. It might have involved hamburger grease overflowing my cookie sheet. I also tried deep-frying them in a wok; I liked the resulting meatballs and the ease of cooking them, but I think I wasn't a fan of how much oil I had to dispose of afterwards.

I was going to do the wok method today, since it involves stirring the meatballs in a medium they don't mind moving through, rather than painstakingly rolling them across a flat-bottom pan. But it turns out that using your wok for a Halloween candy dish and setting it aside on a shelf untended for years isn't really good for the wok; it was all grungy and rusty when I pulled it out. I guess I'm going to have to fix that somehow. So for today, I was stuck with a flat-bottom pan.

And actually, it was fine. It turns out that if you just increase the amount of oil you use - I used about a centimeter deep - it's a lot easier. The oil never runs out, so the meatballs never stick to the pan. Because the oil is almost as deep as half the meatball is tall, it cooks half the meatball all at once, so you only have to turn the meatball over once, not endlessly roll it around the pan. It's still messy cleanup because of all that oil and meatball grunge, later, but it came up pretty easily.

Anyway, once you have all that set up, you can start the oil heating, and then go to town:

1. Pick off a bit of meatball mixture, and roll it into a ball, maybe about 1-inch or 1.5-inches in diameter.
2. Roll this meatball in the flour.
3. Place it on the plate.
4. Repeat 1-3 until either the plate is full, or you have enough meatballs for a batch to fry.
5. Put some meatballs in the pan. Don't fill the pan! You want to leave room, both so that you have room to roll the meatballs over, and so that you don't drop the temperature of the oil too much. I don't really know the details, but if your oil is too cold, it doesn't brown things right. (I've never seen this on beef, but I've seen it on battered shrimp.) Anyway, I put in as many meatballs as fit in a circle around the edge of the pan, and then pushed them in towards the middle, where it was hotter.
6. Fry till brown on that side. It'll take a couple of minutes, but I didn't really time it, and there didn't really seem to be any consequences for leaving them a couple minutes more beyond what they needed. I had the heat to just barely under 3 (on a scale of Lo-2-3-4-5-6-hi), and that seemed a pretty good, stable temperature for the long-term frying.
7. Roll the meatballs over (I used two spoons for this, though you might be able to use the slotted spoon itself), and fry them on the other side for a few minutes.
8. Fish the meatballs out with a slotted spoon, and put them on the paper towels to drain.
9. Whenever you have a few minutes (like while the meatballs are frying), roll and flour more meatballs. You could also have a buddy doing that; it would save a million trips back and forth from the sink, washing your hands.
10. Repeat until all the meatballs are cooked.

In Graco's original recipe, you put the meatballs in the oven for another hour afterwards, so I never worried about whether they were cooked through or not. (In the less-oil browning method, I rather suspect they weren't.) But I cut one of these open - one of the larger ones, from a batch I didn't cook as long; that would be the most likely to be not fully cooked - and it was, in fact, cooked in the middle. So these guys could really go in a sauce at nearly the last minute, if they had to, and just heat up, and be fine.

This makes a lot of meatballs. The three batches filled up the two pizza pans I set out for draining them on. Possibly overflowed, actually; I packed up the Marriage Meatballs into 3 quart-sized freezer bags before I started the Moroccans, which I put into 2 quart-sized freezer bags. They weren't all on the pizza pans and paper towels at the same time, is what I'm saying, but they definitely would have at least filled them up, which is why I cleaned up the one before starting the other.

A single batch of meatballs should feed at least four, possibly six to eight, depending on what you serve it with. It took me all morning to make the triple batch; it would have gone faster had I used two pans instead of one, or only done a single batch, or had a second person at one of the stations. But it couldn't possibly have taken less than an hour, even for two people and a single batch; and then you still need the sauce. As previously mentioned - big production.

UPDATE: First pass at the Moroccan meatballs here.

Choose-your-own-adventure Salad

Sometimes, I don't feel like cooking at all. That's when I make salad.

• green leafy stuff
• fruit
• cheese
• nuts
• oil and vinegar

That's most of the major food groups, right? At least, according to two food pyramids ago or so.

Tonight was a spinach/arugula mix, blueberries, Dubliner cheese, walnuts, and balsamic vinegar with olive oil.

I often do it as spinach, strawberries, blue cheese crumbles, and walnuts, with the balsamic/olive oil. Once, I used apples, cider vinegar, and walnut oil; that was also good. The cider/walnut vinaigrette has a much lighter touch.

So far, the combination only seems to go wrong when I get the wrong ratio of oil and vinegar, but I can never remember what the right ratio is. I think it's 2:1, or possibly 3:1, with a little salt and pepper. I tend not to try to remember - I have one of those vinaigrette bottles where you fill it up to the "V" line with vinegar, and to the "O" with oil. Although it was a bit strong on the vinegar tonight, so maybe that's not the best way to do it. It might vary by the type of vinegar used, too.

The toddler did not approve; he ate all the berries, then sucked dressing off the greens and tossed them to the floor. We're still working on him on this salad thing.

Scrambled eggs with caramelized onion; Ginger cookie coffee

On Monday, I had the misfortune to be scheduled for some bloodwork. You know, the kind where you sit down on a bench, and they put some kind of tourniquet on your arm, have you make a fist, start poking the inside of your elbow with a needle, and then expect you to not use that fist to punch them in the nose when they declare you have tricky veins, and could they see the other arm, please.

And then when they do draw the blood, your vision goes black and you fall over.

They didn't have a "first thing in the morning" appointment available, so I instead got that weird ten-o'clock-ish appointment that's at just the wrong hour for expecting to go to work for any reasonable amount of time before having to turn around and leave again for your doctor's appointment. So I stayed home, drank a lot of water, and made a big breakfast in hopes that it would prevent me falling over this time.

I don't usually drink coffee, but there are days, man, y'know? I like flavors, and I prefer decaf, because I get all jittery otherwise. These are not things my husband is into, and he is a much bigger coffee drinker, so I try to keep my grubby hands off the main coffeepot. Some time ago, my mother-in-law gave us this little tiny coffeepot, just big enough for me. I'd been keeping it downstairs, in the "guest apartment" that is the finished basement, but I've been feeling an itch for coffee lately, so I brought it upstairs to play.

Our family has this ginger cookie recipe, handed down through at least four generations now. It is, for me, one of those recipes that defines you: I am not a chocolate chip cookie girl. Chocolate chip cookie favoritism is for conformists and capitalist sheep brainwashed by Nestle. I am a ginger cookie girl; not the crunchy boxed kind that break your teeth when you try to bite into them, but the soft, chewy kind that your parents taught you how to bake; the kind you threw a tantrum over when you were four years old in footie pajamas; the kind where you eat six out of every dozen before they even have a chance to cool. The cookies themselves take some time and effort to make; sometimes I put their spice combination in other things. Like coffee.

I made about two "cups" of coffee, as measured by the machine (is there a more miserly measure than this? What is this, literal cups, like half-pints? Who drinks in those doses?), with the appropriate amount of coffee grounds as suggested by the coffee jar. I think it was about two tablespoons. Then I added 1/8 tsp. each of ground cinnamon, ground ginger, and ground cloves, to the coffee grounds, and stirred them up. I popped the grounds into the machine and hit the button. Bam! Ginger cookie coffee. It was pretty good.
I like mine with milk and sugar. I tried molasses instead of sugar once - because the cookie recipe calls for molasses - but it didn't really work out. Maybe I didn't add enough, but it seemed like it would take a ridiculous amount of molasses to bring it to the same sweetness as a packet of sugar or two.

I've also had a craving for caramelized onions lately. Usually these don't rate very high on my list of ingredients, because they take so long to cook. But I want what I want, and I had time, so I decided to make some scrambled eggs with them.

I melted some butter in my egg pan - I can no longer remember how much, but it was probably on the order of half a stick - and sliced up an onion, which I then chucked into the pan and let saute until it turned brown. I stirred it sometimes, but mostly I made my coffee and toast and read my book, one of the Song of Ice and Fire series. I've been re-reading, since it's been a while, and I want to have it all fresh in my head when the next one comes out in mid-July. Exciting!

When the onions were done, I cracked two eggs straight into the pan and stirred them up, along with a handful of shredded cheese. It was a risky business, since they started cooking right away. I suppose, strictly speaking, I should have cracked the eggs in a bowl, scrambled them there first, and then added them to the onions, but that would be an extra dish to wash, so I just cracked into the pan and stirred fast.

I will grant you that the results were not pretty. I'm not sure it gets much uglier than slimy brown gook in your eggs. It tasted really good, though, and it was nice, to have a yummy, relaxing breakfast by myself, with the boys at work/daycare. (As opposed to no breakfast at all, racing out the door, to be honest.)

And I did not pass out when they drew the blood! I was still made into a pincushion, though. Damn trick veins!

The mysteries of lemon-cream pasta remain mysterious

I had intended to make the Creamy Lemon Pasta from the Moosewood Simple Suppers book. I had the lemon, the cup of cream, the fettucine, the butter, the Parmesan. I was going to put peas and sage in it. I was going to follow the recipe exactly. I was going to be a good little cook.

I put the pasta water on to boil. I zested and juiced the lemon. I chopped the fresh sage leaves. I melted the butter. I opened the cream.

The cream had separated. It's been in my fridge a while; I haven't been feeling well, so haven't been cooking as often as I meant to when I bought the groceries. The date on the carton was several days prior. I don't often cook with cream - no, make that never - so I have no instinct for it. It didn't smell funny, but my husband is always mocking me for my inferior sense of smell. I dunno. I decided to chuck it.

And then I didn't know what to do next. I am aware that milk is a poor substitute for cream, so I went looking in my freezer for ice cream; it's done well for my coffee before. There was butter pecan, peanut butter swirl, both relatively freshly purchased but not really appropriate for a pasta. There were two half-eaten tubs of vanilla, both of which looked pretty unpalatable upon opening. I chucked those too.

That left me with only milk, after all. Oh, well. So I added the milk to the melted butter, heated it up, and moved on to the next step. Lemon juice.

I gotta say, I don't understand how lemon-cream sauce works. Is there something special about the cream, that makes it not curdle when you add the lemon juice? Does all the extra fat buffer it? Because let me tell you, the milk curdled instantly. I stirred it for a minute, trying to tell myself this wouldn't be so bad, before I admitted that was an egregious lie, and there was no saving this mess. Goodbye, mess.

The pasta was, by now, boiling. Yet again, I was going to be done with the pasta before the sauce.

So I had in front of me the following: fettucine, boiling. A cup of frozen peas I'd already cooked in the microwave. A cup of grated Parmesan. A freshly washed pan. A mouthful of swear words and a wooden spoon itching to smack somebody. Probably me; I hate when I do this to myself.

I pulled a new stick of butter out of the fridge, put it into the pan to melt, and marched back out to the herb garden for new sage, because I like sage.

Also, look at this monster sage plant in my herb garden. It clearly wants to share.

So: a stick of butter, four sage leaves cut into thin strips. I had a hankering for caramelized onions. Why the hell not? It takes forever, but I already screwed up the pasta/sauce timing. So I chopped up an onion and tossed that in too. I should've done a second one. That onion was good.

When the onions were brown, I threw the peas in, too. Then I added the pasta (which had been done and drained quite some time ago, and was beginning to stick to itself), discovered that the whole pound of pasta the lemony recipe had called for was way too much for what I'd actually made, and pulled half of it out again. Half a box, next time.

I tossed the pasta and sauce together, and then added the cup of grated Parm and tossed it some more. It was not so easy to toss the second time, when the cheese melted and made all the pasta stick together, but I persevered, and divided it up into a couple of bowls.

And actually, it tasted fabulous.