Kind of freaking out over here. Apparently Conde Nast is shuttering Gourmet Magazine. This is bad. That's the magazine I use for recipes for everything. How am I supposed to keep cooking? You going to teach me to cook without recipes Conde Nast?

And what about my grandmother? She's been passive-aggressively insulting Julie and me year after year by sending Julie a subscription to Gourmet and me a subscription to Smithsonian. I've cooked her Christmas dinner for the past two years. From recipes out of Gourmet. I have no clue what she's going to do.

Or what I'm going to do. I might need to buy some paper cookbooks.

I've been encountering a lot more vegetarians lately. It's probably not so much that I'm encountering more, as I'm not driving them off as quickly. In the past I was an asshole if you were a vegetarian. Something along the lines of, "But we are omnivores, you're just depriving your body." Also, "Plants have feelings too."

But as part of my laziness new cooking regiment, I've been using epicurious.com's weekly meal planners to plan my meals for the week. They pretty much always do a vegetarian meal or two. Something that at first I just left out. Or filled in with something meatier. Like hanger steaks and fries.

But recently I've started cooking them. And Julie and Stella have been enjoying them. Mostly. The meals are hit and miss. Often the things that sound horrible are quite good, and the things that sound good are completely horribly foul. We had a side dish composed almost entirely of zucchini and I liked it. I didn't like it for zucchini. I really liked it.

I even cooked tofu last week. And last night. Which still gives me a bit of a weird feeling. Because I'd rather cook an animal, than an animal substitute. I actually like tofu. But I'd prefer to cook it as tofu. This really cool vegetable product. Rather than tofu, "I can't believe it's not chicken"!

I've noticed a trend. There are a lot of vegetarians I've encountered who don't really eat vegetables. This is supposed to be a diet about health. Or politics. Or both. But I'm seeing a lot of people who just eat McDonalds fries. And Annie's Mac and Cheese. And Mission cheese burritos. Which seems like it's defeating the point. Vegetarianism has become big business. The business being providing calories without requiring the actual consumption of vegetables.

It's the same bad diet that is making most of America obese, but without the benefit of getting second-hand vitamins and minerals from animals that have already predigested those noxious vegetables for us.

I'm still learning to love vegetables. But we're working through this together.  Stella's my mascot. She'll eat pretty much anything raw, but once I cook it she becomes uninterested. Potatoes. Zucchini. Red peppers. Garlic. Ginger.

Julie would prefer that I not give her raw garlic.

Maybe I should join the raw foods movement.




Joking.

Oh goodness. What a week already. Monday night lentil soup was on the menu. I find that I enjoy soups once they're made, but I don't really enjoy making them. So I dutifully boiled the soup. Then I was supposed to put it in the blender to puree it. I should stop here to say that I hate our blender. It looks pretty cool, which I'm sure is why we put it on our wedding registry. But it sucks. None of the pieces are particularly water tight. The lid doesn't completely cover the spout, so if you turn it on a high setting with something fairly liquid you'll get whatever's inside splashing out of the lip. It's awesome for making margaritas. You cannot have enough sticky syrup coating your kitchen.

But back to the soup.  So I put the boiling hot liquid in the blender. I put on the lid. Hold down the lid, push down the puree button. Blender starts doing its thing. And that clear plastic piece. You know that one they put in the lid for reasons unknown? That piece doesn't lock in place on my blender. Apparently I didn't check it well and it was close to being unlocked. The force of the boiling water spun it that extra eigth of an inch and it dropped into the blender. Lentil soup sprayed up, covering the control panel, so I had to unplug at the wall to risk getting scalded. I fished out the plastic piece and notice it had been chopped up a little bit. Had to trash the Lentil soup, poured it down the drain. Turned on the garbage disposal, and it shut off. Looks like corrosion has set in on our garbage disposal and it's leaking out the bottom. In this case it leaked out the bottom, traveled along the power cord, and flipped the GFCI swtich. Awesome stuff. We had easy-mac with dinner.

Last night I was making a whisky mustard sauce for some meat. The receipe called to flame the alchohol to take off the edge. I wisely asked Julie to come in the kitchen and hang out with some flour in case things went wrong. Which they did. 5 foot tall flames lept out of the pan. The recipie noted the flames might be high, but who exactly has a kitchen where 5 foot tall flames are not a problem. Julie tossed the flour and I spent the next 20 minutes cleaning up flour. Julie has spent the morning cleaning up flour. We had a red wine butter sauce on the meat instead.

So in the last two days I've ruined two meals. And a blender and garbage disposal. Thankfully the fire did not actually burn anything. I'm really looking forward to the squash curry I have on the menu tonight...

A while back I received a citrus zester. It is labeled as such, but it doesn't really work well for zesting fruit. You end up with long skinny strips. When I want zest, I want tiny shavings, not long strips. This is clearly the wrong tool for the job. So it has been sitting in my drawer.

Recently I had a lot of julienning to do, so I pulled it out. Just on a lark, to see if it would work. I took down a cucumber in less than a minute. It works great.

Everyone I talks to about their mandolin says that they're worried they're going to slice their hand off. Not owning one, I don't know exactly why this is the case, but I can say that you won't do that with one of these devices. You might shave off your knuckles, but you shouldn't end up in the hospital.

Which leads me to last night. I was making an Asian salad which calls for julienned beets. I was really going to town, tearing down this beet into strips, when I looked up from my work. The kitchen was covered in red. It looked like I had slaughtered a pig. I couldn't have paid Hollywood special effects wizards to come in and do a better job.

While I love this tool, I've decided that I have to use it in the sink when working with beets.

Our movie night theme on Sunday was "hunting". For some reason this got me thinking about Wild Boar, and the way that cooks used to make fake versions of food when the king demanded a beef roast when there were no cows on hand. So I made a fake wild boar.

Stella was really into the process and wanted to see the pig at each step of the way.

I was worried that once I put it in the oven the dough would rise and obliterate the basic pig shape, but thankfully it stayed put.

It's actually a goat-cheese, mozarella, and prosciutto calzone, btw. And yes, I used food coloring in my egg wash.