Category Archives: Eating

Chomp it up.

menu plan Monday

Menu Plan Monday: the I Need to Go to the Store edition

Did you have a Merry Christmas? I hope so. We drove 700 miles to spend the holiday with my dad, and it was frantic but nice. I wish he lived closer. We got home last night around 10, and I still haven’t made it to the grocery store. So the following is what we’ll be having if we don’t end up eating cheeseburgers at Wendy’s every night instead.

Monday: Chicken sausages and macaroni & cheese
I made the macaroni and cheese from Homeroom for Thanksgiving, and it was stupendous. I’d promised Poppy that we’d have mac and cheese one day this week, but I thought it would be nice to have something other than Kraft.

Tuesday: Tacos
Pete strongly suggested that he’d like tacos for dinner. And so we are having tacos.

Wednesday: Ham!
As I understand it, pork is a traditional New Year’s food. As are beans and greens. I’m not a fan of black-eyed peas and collard greens, though, so I’m trying to find a good-looking lentil salad recipe. Lemme know if you have one!

Thursday: Scalloped Ham and Potatoes
There’s a box of scalloped potatoes in the pantry, and I’m relatively certain there’ll be leftover ham from NYE.

Friday: Pizza
Oh yes it’s pizza night, oh what a night. (Oh what a night!)

I’m linking this up with OrgJunkie.com’s weekly Menu Plan Monday thing.

menu plan Monday

We have no running water and so today is ‘Appreciate the Wisdom of Glam Band Cinderella Day.’ By which I mean: You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Til It’s Gone.

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A water main broke sometime in the early morning hours yesterday near our house, and we haven’t had water since. The original estimate was that the water would be back on last night at midnight. I woke up this morning and it hadn’t come back on yet, so I called the city’s water department to find out the new estimated fix-it time.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m in southeast WaterMainFailuresville, and I was wondering if they had a new estimate on when the water might be back on.”

“Well, there was a massive leak in the water main,” the lady replied.

“Yes, I know. Yesterday they said it would be back on by midnight, but it’s not on yet. Is there a new estimate?”

“It’s going to be a long time,” she said. “It caused a sinkhole, and they had to replace 8 feet of pipe.”

“Wow,” I said, trying to downplay my slight feelings of panic at the word “sinkhole.” Sinkholes are the scariest. “When you say ‘a long time,’ does that mean it’ll be today or more like sometime next week?”

“It’ll be today.”

“OK. I’ll just continue to be unshowered in the meantime,” I said. I thought I said it lightly, but she didn’t take it that way.

“Look, we can not fix it and you can be without water for a long time or we can fix it and you can be inconvenienced for a little while.”

“Ummm… thanks for your help.”

So my point is: This menu plan may or may not hold up, depending on when the city gets the repair done.

Monday: Quesadillas
Probably chicken and black bean for most of the fan. Definitely just cheese for Poppy.

Tuesday: Sloppy Joes
Once upon a time I found the perfect crusty hamburger roll for these. I should’ve written down the brand, because now I can’t remember which one it was.

Wednesday: The grocery store
Kids eat free this week at one of our local groceries! And they have pretty great food, so we’re going to take advantage of the offer.

Thursday: Crispy garlic chicken
Maybe with au gratin potatoes, because there’s a box of them in the pantry.

Friday: Dinner with friends
I think we’re going to their house, but I’m not entirely sure.

Now I’m going to go over to the gym to take a shower! How’s your day going so far?

I’m linking this up with OrgJunkie.com’s weekly Menu Plan Monday thing.

baking, Bandwagons

My Paris-Brest pastry had a flat tire

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Cream-filled pastries and feats of athleticism go together like peas and carrots, so the history behind November’s Daring Bakers Challenge recipe makes perfect sense.

The Paris–Brest-Paris bicycle race was first run in 1891 and is the oldest open-road bicycle race that’s still being run. It’s held every four years now, and it isn’t open to professionals. It’s 1,200 kilometers from Paris to Brest and back again, and PBP participants have 90 hours to complete the course. An equivalent distance in the U.S. would be from Kansas City to Detroit. That’s a pretty long bike ride.

The Paris-Brest pastry was created in 1910 to commemorate the PBP race. It’s piped into a circle to look like a bicycle tire, and it’s filled with a fluffy praline-flavored pastry cream because… ummm… I guess just because praline pastry cream is delicious.

The Paris-Brest is made with a pâte à choux dough, which I’ve made successfully in the past. It didn’t go so well this time around, though, and I think it’s because I didn’t cook it quite long enough and didn’t get enough air into the dough. My bicycle tires were pretty well flat. I decided to make the pastry cream with cookie butter rather than praline, mainly because I didn’t want to make praline. Poppy — who often prefers a very subtle flavor — thought I should have used less cookie butter, but the rest of the household was pleased with the result. It was a little bit grainy, but it tasted nice.

Since my pastry was more cracker-ring than pastry, I wasn’t able to cut them in half to fill them. Instead, we piled the cookie butter cream into the centers and called it a day.
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