So.
Hello.
It's been a little while now hasn't it? Now in my defense I've been a weensy bit busy lately, and I'm glad to report that school is on the verge of being finished (two more months) and "work" is fine. I'm still more than ready for it to be done so I can start working without the training wheels on anymore, but I've settled into a nice "it'll all be over soon enough" stage, so that's fine for the meantime.
Apart from that I've tried to remind myself that one of the biggest reasons for this whole undertaking is that I used to like cooking at home (yes I conveniently forgot about how bad the the messes were) so I've made it a point to try and do something about that in recent weeks. I'll maintain that I've been very good about making my kids dinner, but pasta with melted butter is hardly a "post worthy" endeavor, so I've been stuck with my "waaa... poor me, I got exactly what I asked for" posts. I've also made it a point to try and do something about that in recent weeks as well...
So with my "new leaf" freshly turned, I present to you the first of a few new posts that have nothing to do with whining or quitting jobs... This is an actual food post that deals with "food."
I hope you like it:
ROOTING FOR THE HOME TEAM
One of the "bonuses" of being a culinary student is the added pressure you feel when you have any type of "pot luck" or group dinner thing.
When you have two kids, this happens a lot.
So with the start of another school year for Thalia recently, there was the inevitable "getting to know you" dinner at her school and as you can imagine, that meant doing something good, but without being too "show off-y" to wow the mounting tide of expectations that have been rising since last year, and then all summer as Liz politely explained to the parents of the other children that the reason I couldn't be at almost anything was because I was in culinary school and thus too busy to actually make anything for any number of the "parent dinners" that my school or my internship (mostly thankfully) got me out of.
With this in mind, and having just returned from walking through the many markets in Barcelona Spain a couple of day prior (post forthcoming, I swear) and with fall freshly in the air, I decided to walk through our local vastly (and I mean vaaaaaaaaastly) inferior farmers market (I don't just mean this particular one either, I mean ALL of them here in new york) to fulfill the still burning desire I still had in me from Spain to cook what I had just picked up from the market the way I wish I could have done in Barcelona but was unable to due to the lack of a kitchen in our hotel room (there should be "foodie hotels" that have well stocked kitchens in hotel rooms all throughout Europe, right?).
Anyways, (despite my "run on sentence contest" that I'm apparently having) our local Brooklyn Farmers Market is a cute little thing "filled" with what seems to be filled with family-owned conglomerate farms from nearby that despite having exactly the same products at the exact same price as our local Garden of Eden, you get the foodie cred of having been ripped off at a farmers market instead of a specialty store... So that's cool...
Here's what I picked up...
When you're cooking for a pot luck dinner for 25-30 people it's hard to even think about a protein, so I decided to do a side dish of roasted root vegetables.
Very Fall appropriate I'd say.
Fennel, leeks, carrots, onions, butternut squash, potatoes, parsnips, turnips, fresh herbs, and apples.
I took the whole vegetables and trimmed them down to this:
And that into this:
and that into this:
Which in turn became this:
In case someone reading this doesn't know how amazingly easy/delicious roasted root vegetables are to make, you basically preheat the oven to 400 and roast them for about an hour until they're done. Now I personally do more than that, so I'll take you through the steps that I do, but it's pretty much that easy...
I start by preheating the oven to 450, and cutting the vegetables into same-sized pieces (vegetables or fruit that don't take as long to cook through I cut into bigger pieces to compensate for cook time).
When that's done I toss them in a bowl with olive oil and fresh picked thyme to coat them and season them with a bunch of salt and pepper.
While I do that I heat up a roasting pan on the stove top over med-high flame for a couple minutes till it's blazing hot and then add a blended oil so it doesn't smoke or burn as easily. When the oil starts to ripple I add the vegetables as evenly as possible and let them sear on one side for a couple of minutes.
When you start to get good color on that one side give them a stir and add a little chicken stock or water (less than 1/2 cup depending upon how much you're making) so the vegetables don't dry out, and stick them in the oven for 10 minutes, at which point you lower the heat to 350, and then let them go till they're done, about 30-40 minutes or so, but check the bigger pieces to be sure they're cooked all the way through before you take them out (especially if you cut the potatoes too big like I did, because it turns out they take waaaaaay longer than every thing else does).
In the meantime I brown a stick of butter, add some salt, pepper, thyme and rosemary until it pops and foams up, once that subsides I take it off the heat and add some maple syrup while it's still hot, but not so hot the syrup burns.
When that's done I pour it over the vegetables and give them a stir when they still have 10-15 minutes to go so that the flavor cook into them...
When they finish I let them rest for a few minutes and transfer them into a serving dish.
One of the great things about this dish is that they're just as good hot as they are room temperature, so it's perfect for a pot luck thing or any other situation where you have to travel and don't have a way to reheat or keep hot...
I'll leave to the picture to suggest that they came out great, and they did, but in typical Nate-fashion, they were pretty much the most ridiculously over-prepared thing there, even for how simple they are to make...
I guess it's better to care too much then not at all (ahem... I'm talking to you, whoever made those gross quesadillas), but I was hoping for a bit of a homemade-cooking-Battle-Royale with someone. I mean, I didn't expect a cooking contest that I'd be crowned the King of Parents in, but I was hoping for some sort of "are those better than my -whatever-?" looks or someone eating them and pretending not to like them a little too much. But I guess that's not how it goes in Brooklyn Heights...
In other words, I guess not everyone else in the world is as much of a competitive prick as I am... But that doesn't mean I can't wish that they were... Or at least pretend that they are so I can continue to overachieve for the sake of this sad, pathetic little blog...
Who needs friends when you have a blog you write in a few times every now and again anyways?
In all seriousness, the parents are all insanely nice and lovely people, and it's only my self-conscious insecurities that cause me to feel like a teenager hanging out with a bunch of my mom's friends whenever we have a parent thing. Also the fact that I make less than I did when I was a teenager probably factors into it as well, while they are all seemingly successful "adults" with "careers" and are able to "provide for their families".
But like I always have to say to myself, "what can you do?"
And really, what can you do?
I know I can get writing a post on Spain, which is long past due. I'm still very much looking forward to it as it was an amazing time and I can't wait to write about it. So until then, I hope this eases you back into the flow of things (and by "you" I mean "me") and that the next post doesn't take nearly as long to write and that it isn't nearly as difficult to find a rhythm in...
See you soon my waiting-with-bated-breath-I'm-sure friends...
n*