No food today...

I thought I'd begin with the warning.  I'm not out to make you read my personal commentary without the reward of a recipe at some point in the post.

So I'm doing a bit of nesting.  I'm not pregnant.  You can all breathe a sigh of relief.  I'm very much aware that I'm nowhere near ready to offer up spawn to the world at large.  Someday.

In the meantime I can still nest and channel my (wonderful and actually pregnant) boss who's set to have her first child, perfect-iously named Addison, in February.

Part of this nesting has been to clean out and actually organize papers.  I'm not a completely paperless girl yet, though I've cut back quite a bit in the last year.

I've actually got bills from the dwelling I occupied two dwellings ago, along with bills from accounts that were open in the glorious days of undergrad.  It needed to be un-disheveled.  Which I suppose is sheveling but that's not a word apparently.

So here I am playing tidy and domestic when in reality I'm not very good at either.  A lack of practice has created an adeptness in chaos and general disaster.  With practice comes proficiency, which is really all I aspire to in this area.

There is a weird plush sort of box I was given on my 18th birthday.  My two best friends at the time kidnapped me for a day and redecorated my room.  And I got a box that only pictures can really do justice at describing.

In this box I have apparently been storing business cards from past lives.  Okay, well really this life and just long ago.  So in an effort to be a thorough tidy-ness sort of person (read procrastinate and delay) I looked through them and jovially skipped and leap-frogged my way down memory lane.

I've discovered the following:

-Being a cashier at a car wash for three years yielded hundreds of thousands of interactions with wonderful people.
-I still have a crush on Troy Hughes.  Wherever he is I hope he's happy and never goes to a movie alone.  I kind of wish that I'd ditched Brian that day and hung out with him instead.
-I hope I never freaked out Brandt Simmons because he was the sort of person I just watch.  And he had a great accent.
-I never called Lee Malone who was a deacon-like person for a Buddhist group in Riverside.  He was uber-kind and I regret this.
-My wisdom teeth guy, Dr. Michaelis was totally hot in a Dr. House sort of way.  My cousin was spot on with that.
-I intensely miss Minou Chau, best dentist ever and her dog, Tokyo, the best dog ever.
-I still don't know what I did to Sidney to make him hate me.  But I'm hella proud of myself for actually bitching him out.  Score one for not being passive.
-Sparkie Clark could always make me smile.
-Sam Wilner is the most awesome tax guy ever and tells great stories.
-Rick Stark ordered the same thing for lunch everyday that I worked at the bagel place.  Oh, and he has amazing hair.
-I miss my old bosses at the car wash.  They were the best and I wish I had enough sense to learn more from them.
-I don't know the name of a hundred other people who have touched me.  I couldn't even pick out their faces.  They have no idea how radiant they made my world and I have no way to thank them.  I wish I did.  Everyone needs to know how much they mean to people they don't even know.

It's probably just my childhood, but there's a bright and shiny bit of me that will love you for unsolicited kindness.  These people have all at one point offered me that.  I never know how to respond.  It means the world.

Memory lane makes me so sappy.

Thanksgiving

This is my favorite holiday. 

Likely because it centers around food and family and the modest act of reflection upon how lucky we each are.

Thanksgiving this year was different.  It was only my mother, grandmother and I, and a half turkey that was pre-seasoned and nestled in a bed of vegetables, ready to just stick in the oven.  I can hear the hecklers now, a pre-seasoned turkey! 

Now I will say this for my Thanksgiving meal -- the other entrees: corn cassarole, roasted winter vegetables and mashed potatoes all turned out gloriously and all were made by yours truly.  My Achilles Heel seems to be surmounted and the running record of horrid mashed potatoes seems to have come to an end.  Hurrah.  How someone can by foiled by simple boiling is beyond me.  However, this year a recipe for excellent mashed potatoes was discovered and modified to become a new addition to my recipe box.

Mashed Potatoes

4 lbs. of Russet Potatoes, peeled and cubed into 1 1/2 inch cubes
8 cloves of garlic peeled
3 tbsp. coarsely chopped Rosemary
8 tbsp. (1 stick) room temp salted butter
Salt and Pepper to taste

Fill 5 qt. stockpot halfway with lightly salted water.  Bring to a boil. 
Peel and cube potatoes, peel garlic and chop Rosemary.  Add all to the boiling water, reduce heat to medium and simmer for 20 minutes or until smaller pieces of potato start to fall apart at the edges.  Drain potatoes using colander.  Transfer to large bowl. 
Cube butter.  Using a sturdy rubber spatula, stir in butter, salt and pepper to taste.  Best if served immediately.

(adapted from a recipe by Diane Rossen Worthington published November 2010 in Bon Appetit)

And here comes the philosophy.  Hopefully you've stayed with me thus far.

There's a painting by Norman Rockwell titled Freedom from Want that depicts a family at a Thanksgiving table.  I begin to have an appreciation for Rockwell now as I grow older.  In my younger days him works seemed obvious..  Why would I ever want to look at paintings of real-looking people?  I suppose the truth is that I had enough reality to last for ages, but I digress.

On the cover of one of those newspaper insert magazines, which one I can't remember, President Obama's family patterned themselves after this photo.  It's quite charming and it's definitely nice to have a President with a young family.  It struck a chord with me.  This idea of Freedom from Want. 

Satisfaction.

Which is what a lack of want really is (though Satisfaction is not so a good a painting title).  I find it ironic that at midnight of a day of copious reminders of how gluttonous we are -- while people still do starve -- we then go out and relieve ourselves of copious amounts of money.  Which we are so sick of having that we spend it with gusto to obtain things which the celebration before just told us we don't need.

So I'd like to stop a moment and try to think on how we have somehow turned a holiday which is to remind us to be grateful for that which we have and to remind us there is nothing more that is needed than food and family.  I'd like to blame businesses for starting a tradition of sales on this day.  An act that seems ripe with plot and ploy to keep us from really feeling... well, satisfied.

But that blame actually lies upon me and upon you, for so easily forgetting that food and family are really the basics of everything.  That we really need little else.

The challenge for this December, will be to remember that companionship and the availability of food are something that few of us reading this lack.  Despite this, why is it that we all still don't feel free from wanting?

Food Blogs

So it occurs to me that it's high time I start reading blogs by people more local to me.

Pim of the fabulous blog Chez Pim is hosting a fundraiser for the Thai flood victims, in Northern CA.


 Click here for details.



The other blogs I read are from bloggers who live in places like NY or San Diego or Seattle.

Granted San Diego is a bit closer than I'd originally thought, only about 2 and a half hours it's still not close enough to entice me to go to cooking classes or participate in events.

So I'm on a mission to find local food bloggers to follow. People whose recommendations on finding fresh eggs and fantastic produce will not just me fits of whimsy but practical tangible bits of knowledge.

Also, it's time for me to start using this blog again. I dare say I may need to remove the previous posts as they have nothing to do with current content.

And...

As it seems that the Inland Empire is a bit devoid of food bloggers, I may just have to set up my own.