Calamity Shazaam in the Kitchen

Since I read Tamar Adler's brilliant book I have been a one-night-a-week cooking machine. Which means I have been eating both well and more or less healthily.  Wednesday is my FTY delivery day so it makes sense to do most of the cooking as soon as I get home with the groceries.  In this week's order I got two bunches of ramps. The taste of ramps sends me back in time to when I was a kid and I spent hours outside down in Hull pulling up small spring onions and pretending to be a survivalist in "the woods" which was really just a wooded lot.  The ramps flavor is far more delicate, but then again, the spring onions I thought I discovered as a kid were probably not really onions at all and I really probably shouldn't have been eating them. But for better or worse, the scent of fresh onion means spring to me.  Oh I am ready for summer already. Anyway, I rinsed the leaves of the ramps and chopped them off. I sauteed them in a little oil to wilt them f

I love my Nook. Yeah, yeah, everyone has a Kindle, but I am in love with my Nook (thank you Evil Twinster) and I use it everyday. Which is why I will never be able to save up for the moped I want. I love to read and instant access to an online bookstore is exactly like an unlimited supply of crack to a crackhead. Sometimes on Mondays I will look at my bank account and be like "oh snap! I bought WHAT?" Eh, I suppose it could be worse, I suppose I could be addicted to actual crack. Well so here is what happened on Friday - I downloaded Tamar Adler's amazing book " An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace" and then stayed up all night and read it. Seriously. Remember how last post I was all like "a-wah-wah-wahhhh I waste so much foooood wah"? Well this is the book that fixes that problem for me. I woke up on Saturday and started cooking everything in my fridge. I made braised short ribs for Sunday lunch, two batches of beans, roast

The ugly secret in my kitchen is that I buy ingredients with more ambition than actual execution. This is something I am trying to change because frankly it is a really sh*tty habit to have. My resolution has been to try to eat everything I buy, a hideously first world resolution, and because it makes me uncomfortable, I am breaking the habit. I will buy dried beans and think "oh I will make a big pot of baked beans!" Or pick up a giant squash and think "ahhh squash and curry soup!". But the fact of the matter is I live on my own and I can only eat the same thing for three days, tops. On the occasion that I make soup, for some reason I make enough for seven people to eat for three days straight, which if you do the math means I am eating that soup for 21 days (I think, I am not great at math and I was drinking wine earlier). This kind of gluttony and waste is getting on my nerves. So no more bullsh*t as La Mamman would say.  Basically this means that