No chili for you

Last night I didn't make the chili that I had planned. In fact, despite having defrosted in the fridge all day, the ground pork and ground beef were still rock solid. So, instead I ate a couple of my "gourmet ramen" noodle soups. They turned out pretty good.

But then I got inspired. I wanted something sweet. In these situations, I often dream of the little chocolate buttons that I would get as part of a Nutrisystem delivery a couple years ago. I would dip them in a tablespoon of peanut butter, and they were divine. (As a side note, the only proper way to eat peanut butter is with chocolate. I have been told my dislike of PB&J sandwiches is un-American. So be it.)

But without those chocolate buttons, I turned to the bar of dark chocolate I had in my freezer. Since my mother had recently discovered the jar of peanut butter in my pantry, I knew I had the makings of something wonderful. And then it occurred to me that I had the remainder of some vanilla ice cream in my freezer too. The wheels were turning.

In a mug I dumped the chocolate (which I had chopped into fairly fine chunks so they'd melt easier). I then added about two tablespoons of the creamy peanut butter. Into the microwave it went. The initial melt of one minute didn't quite do the job, so I think I put it in for another minute. A sauce was born.

The cool thing (no pun intended) about the dessert was when I drizzled (read: poured) the sauce on top of the ice cream it hardened. That makes sense since at room temperature the chocolate is solid, but it was a surprise nonetheless. And then I was immediately thrown back to the Magic Shell that my sister and I used to eat. At first, we really only had it when we visited family in Mississippi. Then, one miraculous Saturday morning, it was located at our corner grocery store in Brooklyn. Oh so tasty.

Anyway, breakfast this morning was the remainder of the banana bread and lunch is a couple more packets of the Thai Kitchen soups. Tonight, the chili will be made and I'll be making corned beef, cabbage, and champ to bring into work on Thursday (my knitting group will be having it for lunch).

...somewhere in all of this I have to cook a meal for my Caritas delivery. hmmm....

Shrove Tuesday

Prior to today, I had never heard of Shrove Tuesday. According to the ever-popular Wikipedia, "The festival is widely associated with the eating of foods such as pancakes and often known simply as Pancake Day, originally because these used up ingredients such as fat and eggs, the consumption of which was traditionally restricted during Lent."

My original plan to honor this "new to me" holiday was going to be to take advantage of the free short stack IHOP (the International House of Pancakes, of course) was offering up at all of their locations. There's one a few miles from my house, and while I didn't know exactly where it was, I thought free pancakes was reason enough to find it. But I got an opportunity to play squash tonight, so that went by the wayside.

I thought about it and wanted to stick to my plan of having pancakes for Shrove Tuesday (any excuse to have pancakes for dinner). I then remembered seeing a box of buckwheat pancake mix in my pantry. It came to me. I was going to have dark chocolate chip buckwheat pancakes. I still had chips left over from making my chocolate sauce for Valentine's strawberries. I knew that was going to be tasty. And then another epiphany. Craisins.

So in celebration of Shrove Tuesday, I made and ate a small batch of dark chocolate chip craisins buckwheat pancakes. YUM.

My Valentine's Party

I'm still eating leftovers from my Valentine's Night Party.

This year, since Valentine's fell on a Saturday (and since a few of my friends were bummed they didn't have dates for the evening), I figured I'd have some of my single girlfriends over and we'd just have a good time on our own. Truth be told, even when I'm in a relationship with someone, this holiday doesn't excite me so much. It just seems a bit silly, but I'll take any excuse to cook for some willing guinea pigs, so I invited them over.



I did what I do when I have people over for food....I made WAY too much. I had two kinds of dip (a salmon dill dip and a spicy spinach dip), two baguettes and four kinds of veggies to do the dipping (snap peas, broccoli, celery, and carrots), spicy cheese straws, lemon cake with blackberry sauce, and strawberries dipped in chocolate. (I think I'm forgetting something too.)



The salmon dip didn't go over so well, but I think that was for two distinct reasons. The first is that I didn't really tell anyone what it was b/c I was so busy welcoming people into the house that I never really went oer what I had laid out for them. The second, I believe, is because even if they had known, the concept of lox isn't one that is too familiar (or appealing) to them. I love lox. Every time I go home to Brooklyn, I MUST have a toasted pumpernickle bagel with tofu scallion spread (oddly creamier than cream cheese, go figure) and lox. Lots of it. Pile it on. In fact, while making my dip, I took out a piece of lox, put it in the cuisinart. The next piece of lox went in my mouth. And so on. There was a point there where I was concerned there might not be enough lox in the actual dip. But as it turned out, I got all of the leftovers, and man they were good!



The spinach dip was a raving success. But the problem is, I can't recreate it. For me, so much of cooking is experimentation. But I was never much of a scientist....I don't keep track of my amounts. I now cannot properly recreate the spinach dip! I made it again for a work potluck this week, but it just didn't have the personality that it did the first time I made it. Part of that might have been that I only had cooked garlic in there when the original had both cooked and raw garlic. As I told some people at work, it didn't matter if the Valentine's night dip was super pungent b/c we were all going home alone to our cats. :-) But the dip also had red pepper flakes....maybe I didn't put enough of them for the redo? Either way, I've realized that my first estimations were a bit off, so this will take a bit of tweaking, but when I rediscover the magic that was the spinach dip, it will be called "Single Girl Spinach Dip."