foodhole

I know this is intended to be a food blog, but I just wanted to take a little break from our regularly scheduled programming to talk about something else I liked ALMOST AS MUCH AS FOOD.

I just read "Shutter Island" by Dennis Lehane, and I unequivocally recommend it. I don't read a lot of fiction - I'm more of a biography gal - and it takes a lot for me to recommend a book with no caveats, but I was absolutely enthralled by this one from start to finish. I generally like Lehane; he writes very muscular, dark, gritty fiction, but he never loses an undercurrent of humor that keeps it from getting too murky. His dialogue is impeccable, and the plotting of this book elevated it over his usual standout work. It's one of those books that is so intricate, that it will blow your mind.

Also, there is a movie version of it coming out in October, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patrica Clarkson, Elias Koteas and Jackie Earle Haley, amongst others. Oh yeah, and it will be directed by a little someone known as Martin Motherfucking Scorsese. So you KNOW that shit's going to be nominated for some Oscars. Take it from your friendly bookstore manager; read this book, because it and the movie will be runaway hits. I should know; I am an expert, and that's why they pay me the medium bucks.

So, after last night's autumny/wintry vegetable beef stew extravagana, I felt the need to finish the meal with a dessert that matched the theme. While I made my stew in the tagine, I started cutting up some fabulous fruit from Fresh Market; four red plums, three red pears, and two Jazz Apples the size of my fist. I diced them all and threw them in a big cooking pot with the juice of half a lemon, a generous drizzle of honey, a small bottle of Martinelli's apple cider, a dollop of Madagascar vanilla bean paste (available at Williams Sonoma and Fresh Market - you'll never go back to vanilla extract once you've tried it) and a generous sprinkling of ground cardamom.

( Click the link to find out what I actually do with all of this! )

Summer has been hanging over us like a canopy this year. I've lived in Florida for over twenty years, but I can't remember a summer this oppressively sultry. It's been blessedly short on hurricanes so far, but the lack of major storms means there's no break in the humidity. Maybe this is why I've been craving wintry food all week. All I can think about is root vegetables and sharply sweet non-citrus fruit. Luckily, Fresh Market had some lovely autumny produce already out and about today, and so I cranked the AC down to a nice chilly setting and busted out some rustic cuisine more suited for a snowy day than a humid one.

( Recipe-ish things, and pictures behind the cut )

I also made dessert ( a little thing I'm calling "Mode A La Pie"), but as this post is long enough, perhaps I'll save the details for tomorrow ...

I get one weekend off a month from work, which makes things pretty difficult food-wise. QB has a regular 9 to 5 kind of a gig, while I might work 6am to 3:30pm or 10am to 7:30pm or 12pm to 9:30 pm, or 1:30pm to 11pm, or 2:30-12am, or ... well, you get the drift.

Thus, when I do have the rare weekend off, I like to cook enough food to last all week. It makes me feel like a responsible contributing part of the household (since QB takes care of the care and feeding of us 90% of the time). I have been dreaming of pasta salad lately, so I figured that would be our Lunch Of The Week; it's easy enough to make several portions in one big batch, and it stores very well.

Now, when most people think pasta salad, they probably think of the gloppy mayonnaise-y pasta salad that threatened impending salmonella at every childhood picnic and barbecue. I actually avoided pasta salad of all kinds for years, because I so loathed and detested mayo (now I could eat it deep-fried or straight from the jar, but I digress). But then I discovered that, just like regular salads, you could dress a pasta salad any way you wanted to, and it opened a whole new culinary door for me.

( Loosely-transcribed recipe under the cut. I didn't take pictures this time, because, well, it's pasta salad, yo. But I did include a picture of some butternut squash gorgonzola lasagna I made for dinner last week. It wasn't super-tasty, so I didn't bore y'all with the deets, but I spent an hour making it, so I figured I should at least post a picture. )

And now, I must close up the laptop. The weekend draws to a close, and I'm going to end it the best way I know how; by curling up next to my husband and making him read awesome Joel McHale/Chris Hardwicke fanfic out loud that I am making him write for me, because I think it is the one pairing that does not exist on the internet, already and I had a hankering.

So, QB and I finally tied the knot after 4 1/2 years of living in sin! You'd think the whole thing would have been all planned after so long together, but we pretty much threw it together in two months, because we roll procrastination-style.

We don't just put off planning big things, like weddings, either; we also put off planning dinner. By the time we start discussing what we want for dinner, it is already practically bedtime, and we're hungry and cranky from low blood-sugar. The only fights we ever have are about food, really. So, I've started enacting The Fancy Sandwich Escape Clause. Fancy Sandwiches are our new default dinner for when we're tired from work, and we want "real food" and nothing frozen or take-out-y. We get to use our fresh ingredients, but it's still a relatively quick meal that feels gourmet.

This week's Fancy Sandwich was thinly sliced pear, figs, salami, honey-roasted asparagus tips, tarragon mayonnaise and gorgonzola on toasted garlic foccacia. It was all stuff we just happened to have in the house. The only actual cooking involved oven-roasting the asparagus for 10 minutes at 350 degrees with a little olive oil cooking spray in the bottom of the pan and some honey drizzled on top; while the asparagus was in the oven, I toasted the bread, sliced the pear and figs, and began assembling the sandwiches. In under 30 minutes I had a fabulous meal full of decadent flavors, with very minimal cleanup. They're perfect, because you can really push your culinary boundaries and go crazy with your flavor combinations, but you ultimately wind up with a lovely comfort food.

( Under the cut, you'll find a fairly poor quality photo of this week's Fancy Sandwich, and a much better photo of me and QB on our wedding day - for those of y'all who know me in real life, it may be the only time you'll ever see me in a dress. )

QB and I are not huge seafood eaters. It's not like we're afraid of it; he's a born and bred New Englander, and I moved to Florida when I was 4, which makes me practically a native. We've certainly been around it nearly all our lives. We don't avoid fish because we've only ever encountered a pet goldfish named Fluffy. It just ... doesn't ever really occur to us.

Now that we've finally set a wedding date though (May 2nd, y'all!) QB is anxious about looking pretty on his Very Special Day, so he's working out like a maniac and low-carbing it. Me, I'm content being a pudgy bride - I got a big giant dress to hide my fat ass, and hired an awesome photographer who will photoshop away any stray chins. But QB wants to do high-protein and low-fat, and a girl can only eat so much chicken. So, tonight, it was fish.

( Recipe-ish things and a highly amateurish photo under the cut )

QB and I have been together four and a half years now, and until a few months back, I had maybe seen him eat fruit a half dozen times. In December, when he was hospitalized for pneumonia, he couldn't eat anything for several days. The first solid food he got was pineapple, and it was like somebody flipped a switch in him. Suddenly, he can't get enough fruit, and pineapple is his favorite of them all. He has researched how to grow pineapples. He is a font of of pineapple wisdom. He has announced his intentions to quit his job and go into the pineapple sector. He has declared himself the ambassador of pineapples (it is an unofficial position).

( More Talk Of Fruit And Dinner (Including Pics!) Behind Cut )