Why I don’t have a food blog

I love to cook, and every so often, I toy with the idea of starting a food blog.  I even went so far as to register a domain name for a food blog I planned on starting with a foodie friend.  I just paid the second year of registration to hold the name, but we still have no blog.  Here’s why.

1) I am starting to recognize the “new project” excitement that leads to lasting and good things, like this blog, and the “new project” excitement that leads to a project that I start and then abandon, like making my own Nakashima-esque table.  I have a sneaking suspicion that a food blog might of the latter variety, and would run out of steam once I blew through the ten fancy things I make on the regs. 

2) I don’t take photos of food.  Well, sometimes I do, but I take them on my phone.  Poorly.  No stunningly styled photos in which the fork sits just so, sparklingly clean in the professional lighting.  Nope, blurry photos on my phone, through a lens smudged by my sunscreen-covered fingers, on my basic everyday dishes on a table with permanent marker marks and glitter glue residue. (FYI, glitter glue isn't washable like regular glue.)  Or I forget altogether until I’ve eaten a few bites and messed up the pretty drizzled things.

3) I steal recipes.  Sure, I have some things that are all mine.  My chicken wing dry rub.  The polenta appetizers I made this past weekend.  My fruit crisp topping.  The crème brulee with ganache that I sort of reverse engineered and then perfected after having it at a restaurant.  Those are officially “my” recipes.  But mostly, I’m stealing stuff from other food blogs I follow or find on Pinterest or making stuff with recipes my mom invented/perfected.

4) Failures are funnier than successes.  If I had a food blog, how would I not show you this cake I made?  I mean, come on, that’s blogging gold.  A gluten-free carrot cake.  My first time making carrot cake.  My first time working with gluten-free flour.  And my first layer cake in, let’s say… ten years?  I forgot the basic rule.  Make sure you have enough damn frosting to hide the mistakes.  Oops.

My gluten free baking masterpiece.  No, the kids didn't help.  This is all me, people.

And how would I not talk about how I made this cake the morning after a bout of food poisoning, on 4 hours of sleep because I was up all night violently and variously expelling food from my body?  And how would I not describe the swearing, ohhhhhh the swearing, as I was already running an hour behind for the dinner party I was co-throwing with a friend at her house, feeling sick and clammy, on no sleep, and this damn effing cake just kept crumbling and I didn’t have enough frosting and F**K!!!! 

I mean, never mind that the deconstructed fried rice recipe I shamelessly stole from Smitten Kitchen was a hit.  Never mind that if you make polenta with from-scratch veggie broth and broil some Cambozola cheese on top, people are going to love that shit, duh.  Never mind the perfect combination of goat cheese mousse, roasted red peppers, and basil puree.  From my perspective, the cake is the story here.  And the fact that I got too drunk to chop garlic because apparently homemade Limoncello martinis are not a good way to break one’s fast after food poisoning. Oh, and the balsamic reduction I over-reduced so it turned into balsamic salt water taffy.  (Just so you know, if that happens, you can totally add a teeny bit of hot water to it and salvage it.)  THAT.  That’s my food blog.  What you do when you over-reduce your balsamic vinegar.  What you do when you make the world’s ugliest cake.  (Answer, make sure everyone is drunk and then serve it sliced.) 

What was I saying?  Oh right, reasons why I don’t have a food blog.  So anyway, those are the reasons.  But, I do love food.  I love to experiment with food and make delicious things, and I even like to photograph food poorly.  So if it’s OK with you guys, I might do some food-related entries.  They’re far more likely to be comedic failures than Pinterest-worthy masterpieces.  I guess that’s just who I am.  Coming off of a delightful dinner party with spectacular food, wine, cocktails, and company, the story I find I want to tell is one of food poisoning and the world’s most hideous cake.  Maybe that makes me negative.  I prefer to think of it as amusingly real.

Calories that totally don’t count

In general, I make thoughtful and intelligent food choices.  I cook from scratch with whole foods, and lots of fruits and veggies.  Sometimes we make homemade pizza, but then the next day, the meal plan compensates with fish and a salad.  But over the winter, the number on the scale has crept up a little and the waistband of my jeans has crept ever-so-slightly deeper into my skin.  How can this be?  I am meal planning so thoughtfully…

Except, you know, for the loopholes.  Some calories don’t count.  Here are just a few of those calories:

• Food eaten off your children’s plates.  Because you wouldn't want to waste it.

• Broken cookies or chips.  Everyone knows that crumbs are not caloric.

• Food tasted while cooking.  It’s important to sample all of your ingredients.  Especially the cheese. 

• Food eaten during major storms or when the power is out, especially if it is being eaten to save it from going bad.  (Or if it is being eaten because you don’t have internet or TV.)

• Birthday cake.  Zero calories.

• Road trip food.  Any road trip longer than five hours demands kettle chips and individually wrapped pie and pizza-flavored pretzel combos and a fourthmeal Italian sub from Wawa at midnight. 

• Wine.  Obviously the calories in wine don’t count.  The calories in other drinks, like margaritas, are slightly more complicated.  If you order a margarita at a restaurant, it has a shit-ton of calories.  But if you’re at someone’s house and they hand you a margarita, all of the calories fall out. 

• Similarly, food consumed when wine or other mood-altering substances have rendered you unable to make good food choices have considerably fewer calories than they would if you chose them in the light of day.  Like, say, a plate of nachos. 

• Food eaten to combat ennui or soothe a broken heart.  Or to help a friend combat ennui or soothe a broken heart.

• Naughty foods wrapped around healthy foods.  For example, if you were to make and eat fresh figs with bacon and blue cheese, broiled lightly, and then drizzled with balsamic reduction, the cheese and bacon are magically transformed into fruit.

• Also bacon.  Just in general.

• Holidays.  Thanksgiving pie. Christmas cookies. Traditional Arbor Day Doritos.

• Seasonally available food.  Pumpkin lattes.  Stauffer’s chocolate star cookies.  Reese’s eggs.

• Leftovers.  Naughty food choices only count once.  So you ordered chicken parmesan or fettuccine Alfredo at a restaurant in a moment of weakness, and a veritable trough of food arrived?  It’s OK.  Just eat a reasonable portion.  And then eat the rest for the next two days.  The leftovers totally don’t count.

• Food eaten on really good workout days.  If you had a good workout, it was probably enough to counteract that bag of chips.  And the burger too.  Because your muscles must need the protein.

• Regional foods when in that region.  Beignets.  Poutine.  Philly cheese steaks. New York pizza.

• Food eaten after midnight, because if you are up that late, your body is surely burning more calories than it would be if you were sleeping.  Even if you’re just on the couch watching back episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 

• Food from a buffet.  Because you want to get your money’s worth.

• Food that you virtuously declined, but then someone came and ate right next to you and you smelled it and couldn't help yourself.

Any to add?  Comment away! 

From takeout to truffle oil

Lately, I have been feeling that my cooking efforts have become a little bit crazy.  In some ways, I am extremely proud of the fact that I cook.  When we moved to Maryland from the San Francisco bay area, I had no clue how dinner was supposed to happen.  In California, meal planning looked like this: 

“Thai?  Sushi?  Indian?  The kebab place?”

“We’ve been getting takeout a lot.  Maybe we should cook tonight.”

“OK, frozen pizza or omelets?”

And, scene.

We moved to Maryland, where takeout was less abundant, less delicious, farther away, and cost an arm and a leg, and I was taken completely by surprise by the reality that we had to cook.  Like, cook food.  Every single day.  How was that supposed to happen?  It was a complete mystery.

Pre-kids, every few months, hubs and I would take a cursory look at our expenses, and have the “Wow, we really spend too much on takeout” conversation.  We would make lists of meals that we knew how to cook, and promise each other that we would cook twice a week.  Just twice a week!  Every few months we had that talk, because that twice a week vow generally lasted approximately… yeah, about a week.

We were both working full time then, so I cut myself a lot of slack. But when the kids arrived and I became a stay-at-home mom, I transformed magically into Susie Homemaker. 

Not. 

If anything, it was worse.  The convenience store at the gas station around the corner sold us an awful lot of fried chicken.  The pizza guy accurately predicted our order in a bored tone when he heard my husband’s voice over the phone.  Thank goodness for breastfeeding twins is all I can say, or I would have gained 50 pounds in that first year.

But our income had been cut substantially, and those pesky child-people are expensive, so (horrific lack of nutrition aside) takeout really wasn't a viable option in the long term.  Once the kids hit a year old, things started to change.  They went from two naps to one, and that one nap was 2-3 hours long.  I had time to cook if I could do it in advance.  I would chop and prep things for fast meals like stir fry.  I got a casserole cookbook, and did turn a little bit into the scary version of Susie Homemaker for a while there.  See, here’s the awesome thing about casseroles.  You can make three of them, cook one and freeze two so that some other night when you’re feeling lazy, you have an instant meal.  We got a big freezer in the garage that I still count among one of the best investment purchases I have ever made.  I also used my crock pot A LOT.  Put stuff in as soon as the kids go down to nap, and by 5:30, you have dinner.

But casseroles and crock pot food… I mean, it’s OK.  I still make a few recipes from that time, especially in the winter when stews and braises taste so good.  But remember the girl who liked Indian and Thai and actual food?  Yeah, I missed that stuff.  I really, really missed delicious food, and we couldn’t afford to go out and have that very often.  So I started getting fancy.

Shaved asparagus flatbread.  Beef Wellington with mushrooms and gorgonzola.  I started exploring making my own Indian food, buying stuff like garam masala and green cardamom pods, and making naan from scratch.  I read food blogs and the food magazines I get from my mother-in-law.  And then came Pinterest, a treasure trove of food inspiration.  I resumed my fabulous dinner parties with my foodie friend Cheryl, for which the two of us would cook like fiends and then present a feast to friends and family lucky enough to get a “golden ticket.” I reverse engineered the crème brulee with ganache I had had at an upscale restaurant (and mine is better, just for the record).  I discovered the magic of things like vanilla beans and truffle oil.  

I started thinking like a cook, not wanting to waste food.  I froze veggie ends and chicken bones to make my own broth.  I used leftover chicken to make chicken pot pie with pie crust made from scratch.  Prompted by my son, I bought the most fabulous apron.

Me in my fabulous apron, with my silicone
rolling pin, even though I use the non-stick
one more often.  But the red looked cuter.

Now I meal plan every week, like a real live grown up.  I write down what we’ll have each week and shop accordingly.  But if awesome ingredients like fresh shiitake mushrooms are on sale, I can mix it up on the fly.  I buy meat on sale, freeze it, and work it into the plan for the upcoming weeks.  I am kicking ass at this cooking every night thing.  Kicking total ass.

So back to the initial sentence of this blog.  Why do I think this is crazy? 

Well, here’s why.  The other day I made a chicken pot pie because I had some leftover chicken that I had pulled into pieces and put in the freezer for later use.  Because I am a frugal non-food-wasting MACHINE!  Sometimes I do a fun curry-spiced chicken pot pie with cauliflower, but it was rainy and icky out, so I went with comfort food classic.  Carrots.  Peas.  Corn.  Crust from scratch.  Thick delicious sauce made with the frozen broth I made from scratch the week before.  Fresh organic herbs from my garden, which I braved the rain in my PJs to cut. 

And then I realized.  I simmered chicken bones and veggie ends all day long, strained the resulting broth, poured it into one-cup servings and froze it that way.  I used a food processor and a rolling pin to make crust, starting hours before dinner so the butter in the crust would have time to get cold again in the fridge, which is what makes the flaky goodness.  I generated a sink full of dishes and spent a lot of time cooking, and you know what this is going to taste like?  It’s going to taste like pot pie.  Not for nothing, but Marie Callender makes a pretty darn good frozen chicken pot pie.  Mine is healthier, and yes, mine does taste better.  But… better enough?  I mean, come on.  A rolling pin?  Broth from scratch?  For chicken pot pie?  It’s all starting to feel a little ridiculous.  At what point would I have been better served using that time for something else and just throwing a frozen pot pie in the oven?

I think this same thing every time I make my foodie version of tuna noodle casserole, for which I make my own mushroom soup with an assortment of wild mushrooms.  As I dirty dish after dish just on the soup phase, I start thinking, “Is Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup really that bad?”  (But then when I eat this casserole, I remember why I go to the trouble.  It makes my mouth so very, very happy.)

I come by my food snobbery honestly.  My mom didn’t believe in cakes from a box.  Only from scratch.  Usually with egg whites folded gently into something at some point.  In fact, she wouldn't even EAT cake from a box.  I grew up having what I now think of as real brownies.  Box brownies still taste weird to me.  I do sometimes make cakes from a box, and I’ll make box brownies for the kids (or for my husband, who prefers them over my amazing from-scratch brownies, because he is a weirdo), but it always feels a bit like cheating and not like actual food.  So whether it’s nature or nurture, I got the food thing from my mom.  But at some point, I think I may have crossed over into Bree Van De Kamp crazy land.

Crazy land, exhibit A: That day of the chicken pot pie, I had used a rolling pin and pastry board the last two days in a row. (For the pot pie crust and for Indian vegetarian samosas from scratch the day before.)  Who does that?  Most of my friends don’t even own a rolling pin and pastry board.  This was the girl who couldn’t manage to cook twice a week a few years ago.  I’m proud of the transition that I’ve made, but I’m starting to think I have gone too far. 

Maybe twice a week, hubs and I should commit to eating takeout or a frozen pizza, or at the very least having breakfast for dinner.  OK, that’s it, I’m writing pancakes and bacon on the meal plan list for next week.  And spaghetti.  Ordinary spaghetti with Prego sauce from a jar, because my kids requested it. 

I won’t even doctor the Prego with fresh basil from my garden.

OK… yes, I probably will. Shut up.