The plan to cook more during the week is not going as well as I might have hoped. We have good weeks, where we cook dinner three nights a week, and we have bad weeks, where it’s restaurants and takeout every night. At the beginning of my school year, good weeks outnumbered bad weeks. By now, it’s all bad weeks. Excuses are just excuses–we’re not keeping up with grocery orders, we’ve both been fighting off colds (and in some cases succumbing), full work days are really tiring. Whatever. No matter how many excellent restaurants are nearby (and seriously, I have finally found Mexican food out here that’s up to my spoiled ex-California-resident tastes, which makes me happier than you can possibly imagine), I really like cooking, and I wish I was managing to do more of it on weeknights.
We are kind of making up for it, at least a little, on weekends. Thanksgiving weekend in particular was fabulous–we did family stuff on Thursday and Friday, but Saturday was a big cooking adventure. It started with the local farmer’s market. Ours runs year-round, but during the core winter months it’s pretty much just root vegetables and dairy. (I’m guessing on that, by the way. Once the snow and ice sets in, I’m a lot less willing to walk the ten blocks or so just to check out the farmer’s market.) We came away from there with apples, pears, carrots, leeks, potatoes, and onions. The next stop was the newly-opened Brooklyn Kitchen Labs, which absolutely lived up to the hype, and where we spent way too much money buying steaks for dinner. Grass-fed dry-aged beef, though, which came complete with cooking advice from the butcher.
Oh, hey, wait, I forgot something. The plan for dinner was pan-grilled steak with roasted vegetables, finished with apple-pear-ginger pie for dessert. Looking back at a distance of a whole week, I’m remembering the eventual feeling of victory, and almost forgot about the pie disaster.
I like making pie, and I think I’m pretty good at it, but I’ve always used store-bought pie crusts. Over the summer, I decided to learn how to make my own pie crust. I read a bunch of cookbooks, I bought a pie pan and a rolling pin, borrowed my mom’s old food processor, and set to. And my pie-crust attempt over the summer was a stunning success, so I figured I knew what I was doing! After we got back from food shopping, I started working on the pie crust. Flour, butter, a little sugar, a little salt, zipped together in the food processor, drizzled with some ice water, mashed into a ball and stuck in the refrigerator for a little bit. When it came time to roll it out into a crust, though, it became clear that whatever I had, it wasn’t dough. It was a dry and brittle mess of flour that sort of could be squished together but would never, under any circumstances, look or act like a pie crust. I have a couple of tentative theories as to what went wrong, but whatever the cause, the outcome was incredibly disappointing.
That was the only problem, though, in an otherwise amazing meal. And a really simple one–I bought Matt a really nice cast-iron skillet for his birthday last year, and with a good skillet like that, cooking an excellent steak is about the easiest thing in the world. The vegetables were easy, too, just rough-chop and toss in the roasting pan and wait for it to be awesome. The trickiest part was remembering to put the softer vegetables, the leek and garlic, into the pan after the onion and carrot and potato had already been cooking for half an hour. The pie thing even worked out okay; when I picked myself up enough to go out and buy some goddamned pie crust, so that my stupid dough failure wouldn’t prevent us from having dessert, I discovered that the Van Leeuwen ice cream truck was in the neighborhood, so we got to have amazing ice cream too.
There’s something just deeply satisfying about all of that. It’s not weekday cooking, at least not when you take into account the time spent wandering the neighborhood collecting ingredients, but it’s good happy cooking, which makes for good happy eating. I want to do more of that.
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I also want to do more of this! So I signed up for Holidailies. We all know that there’s no way I’ll actually write every day, but maybe I’ll write more, even if it’s all food and book posts. (I have so much to say about both!) It doesn’t technically start until tomorrow, but consider this a down payment on a good-faith effort to come out of isolation!
Posted Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 4:36 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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I do not hold with these here new-fangled food processor-type automata when it comes to pie crust, no I do not.
Aviva and I made the pumpkin pie crust for Thanksgiving, and we just took a bunch of butter, poured some flour and salt onto it and squished it in with our hands until it was coarse grain, shaking in some more flour whenever it felt like we oughta, and then splashing in some cold water, and then some more flour, until it felt right.
This is so straightforward that I do not see what a food processor would add to the process other than give us a whole lot of oddly shaped blades and plastic parts to clean afterwards, and make the trial-and-error aspect of balancing the ingredients much more difficult to manage.
(Of course it’s always possible your standards are higher than mine…)
Not sure if you are looking for ideas, but lots of stuff can be made in the crockpot from ingredients you have around: meat straight from the freezer, canned beans, frozen vegetables. See crockpot365.blogspot.com for instance.
I have lived in NYC for 15 years and not eaten any Mexican here as good as any I ate on trips to CA. I never should have visited so I wouldn’t know our Mexican is so lacking. So I’m dying to know of this place you found if you would share the name?