Tag: Martha Rose Shulman

Black (and Blue) Friday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Interdimensional gateway to a timeline where Beelzebozo lost the election? Naw, just our solstice tree reflected in a painting.

Turkey Day is done and dusted, and Black Friday is upon us like Nosferatu with the munchies.

We harmed no turkeys. But three chickens are missing thighs and I don’t think prosthetics or wheelchairs will help them cross the road anytime soon.

I cooked Melissa Clark’s sheet-pan chicken with sweet taters and bell peppers, plus a side of Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash with edamame. Herself kicked in a delicious raspberry cobbler for dessert.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla got a yummy StinkCube® with her kibble. When I make tuna salad for sandwiches I squeeze the water from the tuna and we thin it with drinking water before freezing it in ice-cube trays to give Her Majesty a couple weeks’ worth of tasty treats.

I should’ve taken some pix, but after a four-mile trail run and all that cookery we just sat down and chowed down. The grub was gone before I even considered preserving the moment in pixels. If I remember I’ll take some snaps when we wipe out the leftovers this evening.

Herself texted with her sisters, I did likewise with my bros (not blood kin, the chosen variety), and we rang up my sis and her husband to exchange holiday greetings and gnaw our livers over the Pestilence-Erect. Good times, etc.

Today I hope to buy a big bag of nuttin’. Either that or I may hit Page 1 Books for some fresh brain food because I find myself rereading old books again.

There’s nothing wrong with revisiting “Nobody’s Fool” by Richard Russo or “Essays of E.B. White.” But there are roads out there not yet taken.

Blank Friday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Chicken cacciatore with succotash.

Another Thanksgiving feast has come and gone (though leftovers aplenty remain) and here it is Blank Friday already and I haven’t snapped up a single solitary bargain, not one.

Herself had requested Emeril Lagasse’s chicken cacciatore for dinner, and I decided to add the traditional accompaniment, Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash.

Butter cookies.

Somewhere along The Path for reasons unknown we got detoured into butter-cookie construction, and as a consequence I was a wee bit tardy getting started on my own preparations, which are extensive.

These dishes are not complex — the succotash needs just four minutes in the wok — but they involve more than a few ingredients, among them Emeril’s Essence, a spice mix with eight components.

The cacciatore itself has 20 more. The succotash? Eleven. Many cups and bowls for the mise en place, many, many of them.

For the cookery I needed a large Dutch oven, a pasta pot, and a wok. Knives, spatulas, spoons, graters, cutting boards, colander, oven mitts, rubber gloves, yadda yadda yadda. Clean as you go, etc. Stand back, gimme room, and so on.

A memory with fewer holes in it would have been nice, too. For some reason I had it in my head that the simmering phase of the cacciatore would last only 20 minutes, which was 40 minutes short of actuality. This put a slight hitch in my culinary gitalong and thus we were late sitting down to the actual eating, which annoyed Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who is a stickler for schedules (her own).

Didn’t matter. We’d lunched on eggs over medium and pan-fried potatoes, so we weren’t drooling and ravenous. We didn’t have two-legged guests waiting, growing surly with drink, reawakened memories of past slights, and plans for vengeance. And we didn’t have to drive home afterward.

During the final cleanup, which was extensive, we sang along with Arlo, singing loud to end war and stuff. We hope yous all did likewise. There’s a lot of it about.

Heat it and eat it

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

If there’s any rain in ’em, it’s not for us.

Don’t let the clouds fool you. It ain’t even cool around here.

Yesterday we roasted another record with 102°, the old mark of 98° having stood since 1952, two years before this old dawg was whelped.

Naturally, being an eejit, I was out for a ride. Nothing strenuous — not quite 30 miles, a couple of hours in the saddle, a couple thou’ of vertical gain.

Getting big air over I-25 (with the help of a bike-ped bridge).

But I confess I felt a tad toasted by the time I got home. I’m glad I didn’t go for the extra-credit mileage I’d been contemplating. I’d be a rank smear of B.O. and bad ideas in the valley some’eres. Even the coyotes would give me a miss.

“Sheeyit, homes, smells like sunscreen and chamois cream ladled over old scars and regrets. Let’s hit the Dumpster behind Golden Pride.”

Speaking of eats, it should go without saying that I’ve been rooting through my archives for recipes that require a minimum of cookery in this heat.

For breakfast, oatmeal is out, fruit smoothies are in. Lunch is something equally light, either sandwiches or leftovers from the previous night’s dinner.

Last night’s dinner was Martha Rose Shulman’s pasta with cherry tomatoes and arugula. I don’t object to boiling water for pasta; it helps humidify the house.

Night before last we had Melissa Clark’s shrimp salad, layering the shrimp and its sauce over a bed of arugula, red cabbage, red leaf lettuce, sliced grape tomatoes in a variety of hues, and various another crunchables from the fridge and pantry. I foreswore the diced red onion (Herself hates raw onion), but snuck in a few thin slices of scallion when she wasn’t looking.

Hetty Lui McKinnon’s tacos de papa require a little stove time, but not enough to have you sweating into your skillet, especially if there are some leftover taters on hand.

We’ll be revisiting Martha’s recipe this evening, with a side salad. Today’s record high of 100°, set in 1910, might be a goner, too, because by 3 p.m. it was already 100° at the airport.

X’dmas

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

This way to the Egress.

Well, that’s that. Another holiday crossed off the calendar.

I threw out my back just in time for the festivities, so I was not the usual jolly old elf as I tottered around the kitchen assembling Emeril’s chicken cacciatore and Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash while listening to my favorite traditional Christmas carols (“Christmas in Prison,” John Prine; “Merry Christmas From the Family,” Robert Earl Keen; “Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis,” Tom Waits; “Christmas in Washington,” Steve Earle; and “St. Stephen’s Day Murders,” The Chieftains and Elvis Costello).

Having a bad back is like having a bad dog. You can feed it and scratch it and take it for walks but you never know when the sonofabitch is gonna bite you.

Nevertheless, I persisted, and with an assist from Herself (lemon bars with whipped cream) we took a bite of supper with Herself the Elder and then relaxed with some 22-year-old standup from Marc Maron, Dave Attell, and Mitch Hedberg on Comedy Central.

Eye see you.

This morning it seemed some portal to another dimension had opened while we slept off the grub and giggles. You can see it up there to the right of the backyard maple.

And unless I miss my guess this other shot at right is either of the Eye of Sauron or Cthulhu’s bunghole. Red eye or brown eye, it’s not something you want to see before coffee, especially with a dodgy back that hampers your ability to flee in terror.

The sun is peeking out now, and I may go for a short hobble, see if I can jar all my scattered bits back into their proper places.

But I tell you what: If a chiropractor had beckoned to me from that interdimensional gateway, I’da jumped through it like a bad dog hopping a fence, howling, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn?” (“By any chance do you take Medicare?”)

Cooking, cameras and cutbacks

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

Ol’ Blue Eyes observes the paparazzi from the brick patio.

December days are like a short fuse. You light one at dark-thirty every morning and before you know it, boom! It’s bedtime.

The backyard maple crowds a shot of sunrise peeping over the Sandias.

It remains a constant source of astonishment how little a guy with no job can accomplish during one of these speed runs.

I’ve been revisiting a few recipes (among them Martha Rose Shulman’s orecchiette with basil-pistachio pesto and green beans) and sampling some new ones (a minestrone from “Dad’s Own Cookbook” by Bob Sloan was particularly well received).

I’ve also been playing with a new camera, a Sony RX100 III, after hearing nothing but raves about the series from pros and amateurs alike, including my man Hal up Weirdcliffe way, who has an RX100 base model. These shots came from the new toy.

Too, the Adventurous Cyclists and I have been chasing down review bikes for the new year, with varying degrees of success. And I just finished a “Shop Talk” cartoon for the January 2018 issue of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, which for the first time in a couple decades will not include a snarky “Mad Dog Unleashed” column by Your Humble Narrator.

Money is tight in the bike biz these days, and I’m not the first person to feel the pinch. Nor will I be the last.

Via Twitter, a reader expressed sympathy but not surprise, to which I replied, “The surprise is that it took so long for the damn’ dogcatcher to throw his loop over me. Send Milk-Bones and plenty of ’em, they gave me a real big cellmate. Looks to be part Neapolitan mastiff, part Baskerville hound.”