Elsa Macbebekin's Profile

Here's the blog entry I wrote detailing the food I served for an all-day open-house just days after sticking a paring knife right through my index finger. It's mostly party food, but I also linked to this very simple black bean soup and my brother's not-even-a-recipe for pulled pork, which is a lazy cheater's version and also is so good that I would never bother with more complicated methods.

I couldn't cut vegetables either, so I bought a lot of veggies either frozen and precut (like broccoli) or at the salad bar (like onions and carrots). See if your grocery carries packaged cut-up vegetables in the produce section; they cost a bit more but are well worth it when you're cooking one-handed.

I also had the luxury of a live-in partner who would chop double the onions whenever he cooked our dinner, then stash the extras in the fridge for me in case I wanted to cook while he was working nights. Perhaps a friend would be able to do that for you?

More than anything, I wished I had an under-cabinet jar opener. If you can get a friend to install one for you (a simple matter for someone with both hands free), you'll be able to open jars one-handed.

Our local options for CSA boxes either don't fit my schedule or my geography (require pick-up on a busy day or in an inconvenient location), so I haven't tried one yet.

For folks who don't like the sometimes-inflexible aspect of the CSA box: check with your local farmers to see if they have other community-supported agriculture options. One of my local farms offers a pre-season buy-in that gets you credit to spend as you like; instead of a box full of pre-selected produce once a week, you go to their farmer's market stand or to the store at the farm (open most of the week) and buy what you want at a small discount.

If your local farmers offer that option, it's a great alternative to the produce box while still investing in local growers early in the season when they need it.

What's cooking? for once, nothing much. I'm having one of those days: out of ideas and not much interested in cooking. We had a late-night supper of fried rice last night, and I made two loaves of bread, but that's all I had the ambition for.

I came here hoping for ideas and --- yay! --- got one. Reading about robinette's Greek meatballs (which sound delicious!), I remembered that we have (store-bought) vegan "meat" balls in the freezer, so I think I'll throw them together with some spinach in tomato sauce over pasta with that homebaked bread on the side, and call it good.

I also bought an extra set of measuring cups to keep in baking canisters: I have a half-cup measure in the sugar bin, a cup measure in the flour bin, a 1/3-cup measure in the oatmeal jar.

That makes it even easier and faster to scoop out main ingredients for a great many things. For simple baking recipes, those are often the only cups I need, and they go straight back into their dedicated places.

Tonight, I made a winter vegetable cobbler (mushrooms, potato, carrot, and caramelized onion in mushroom-sherry gravy topped with whole-wheat biscuit dough), sautéed spinach, and avocado-cucumber salad with orange-sesame dressing.

Tomorrow, maybe balsamic-roasted tofu (because while I was rattling around trying to figure out what to make tonight, I opened and drained a block of tofu), roasted potatoes and carrots, and probably broccoli --- or that avocado-cuc salad again. Dang, it was good.

Aaaand because I was craving something sweet, I just threw together two little blueberry cobblers with the leftover biscuit dough, topped with sugar to sweeten it up. Mmm.

Mmmm, waffle wedding! What a fun, festive way to make a wedding a little more personal and idiosyncratic.

One of my favorite ideas for our wedding buffet was a make-your-own waffle bar with lots of syrups and macerated fruit and flavored butters and whipped cream and bacon bits and and and. The Fella had to talk me down pretty gently from that: it's a fun idea for a medium-sized group but in practice, it would have been pretty messy and impractical for a big family-and-friends gathering like our wedding. (HCI, when Ben settled on J.J.'s waffles as the wedding feast, The Fella and I high-fived.)

But this is reminding me that a waffle-bar brunch party would be swell!

In many cases, it's not the heat-susceptible bacteria (the ones that would be killed off by heating the food as recommended above) that you need to worry about, but rather the heat-stable toxins that they excrete/produce.

Which is to say, heating that pulled pork may kill off the original bacteria, but whatever harmful products they spewed out are still in your food, unaffected by the heat and ready to make you sick.

It takes even less time and effort to peel the safety seal back halfway and crease it in two, which leaves a straight and sturdy edge --- even better than cutting it, in many cases. So simple.

Sometimes the failure is mysterious, which is unsettling. Just this weekend, I made a very pretty, balanced dinner with several favorite dishes: black bean soup, a roasted butternut squash galette with caramelized onions (pulled from the freezer), and a big pile of lemony broccoli. I served The Fella, then puttered around a bit before I sat down with my own plate.

So he'd been eating for a while before I took my first bite of galette, which I promptly spat out. "UGH! The galette is TERRIBLE!" Not wanting to agree too enthusiastically, he said, "It's not too good." It was inedible. I don't know if the squash was spoiled or the onions were too old or if it went off in the freezer, and I'll never know.

Once in a while, things go wrong, and if you can't unravel the mystery to prevent it a second time, learning to shrug it off is a valuable lesson. And that's what frozen pizza is for!

So, the "something" that I wasn't sure about? It ended up being an accidently (and deliciously) overcheesy penne & cheese, a big pot of homemade tomato soup, and an orange cake drizzled with orange syrup and ganache. Some days, only the jars of sauces and staples in the freezer keep us from ordering take-out.