El perro loco

After the crippled dog incident and resulting doggie physical, the vet suggested putting Preston on a low impact poached chicken and rice diet. So now I'm cooking arroz con pollo for the dog. Aie-ya! The things you do for the ones you love. So much more work than kibble. Preston picks out the chicken and doesn't like rice. He probably learned that from me. As our eating habits are gradually swapping places, I will be eating cereal out of the dog bowls soon.

Cous cous with the figs and pistachios. I've been putting handfuls of pistachios into everything lately. I must be nuts.

And since I was still hungry, supper #2 is baked stuffed quince. Just like they do in the ancient olden days. Also with pistachios.

Meat cake

It's meat cake day! No winter birthday celebration is complete without a layer cake in meat form. I formed the patties with a divot in the center, so when meat cake puffs up in the oven, we will end up a flatter top instead of the usual dome that would need to be trimmed off for cake duty.

Ta Da! Meat Cake. Frosted with mashed potatoes. With bacon roses. Thank you sous chef MK for wonderful chopping and shopping skills.

We would have encountered fewer structural issues had we used instant mashed potatoes and a more traditional dry meat loaf recipe. But we wanted a tasty moist meat cake instead of 15 pounds of novelty meat brick. A turkey and mushroom layer on top, a roasted veggie beef layer on bottom. And instead of the usual ketchup, there's a sun dried tomato and olive pesto in between the layers. Delicious meat cake.

And that's not all. Fish in cake form.

And veggie cake. Eggplant and squash with 3 kinds of puree filling. Sweet potato, celeriac, and garlic russet potato. Topped with a parmesan crisp.

And mushroom cake. (I know. stretching it. turn your head sideways.)

And butter in cake form. Thank you Stuart for assorted sodas that don't taste like sodas. Such flavors as cucumber and rose petals and espresso.

Somebody ate a mouthful of butter thinking it was cake! Ha!

Fudgie the Whale Carvel cake makes an appearance. Ice cream in cake form! The fluke and blow hole was especially delicious.

And to finish up Winter Birthday Celebration 2008, Megan brings red velvet cupcakes in entree form. Go Megan! The butter is a starburst candy.

That's a wrap

The very last of the Thanksgiving turkey holidays get used up. Rather than the usual turkey sammiches at this time of the year, we go Southeast Asian with rice paper. If the pilgrims had GM's corporate jets, they would have made these too.

Put a fork in it

Tonight, I'm taking a break from turkey leftovers. We attempt to make fried rice. And then I am reminded that I never learned how to use chopsticks correctly. I am such an embarrassment to my grandma. But fried rice is still tasty with a fork.

Second to last session of wheel throwing class tonight. Overworked Junzo finally fired some of my plates and lumpy vessels. There's some ugly ass plates this go round, probably because I've been in an ugly mood a lot lately. If I send you one of the ugly ass plates as a gift this year, it means you're on my shit list. Carol the instructor wanted to steal the spotted dimply vase. I guess nobody else does the spotted glazing waxing techniques like I do. It's not that hard at all. I thought it would be an obvious thing to do.

My favorite plate so far. I was going for a rustic kind of mid-century type of feel. The blue grey glaze came out really deep and rich. And the shape is exactly how I envisioned it. Very happy with this one.

And I did multiple color glazes on the bottom. Which is also something nobody else thinks to do. Even if you don't see the bottom all the time, why wouldn't you put in the effort to make it interesting also? I'm very happy with the yellow brown leathery looking glaze. And the combination with the shiny blue grey is nice.

Happy Birthday Doug

Cheap greens, shiitake, and bamboo fungus. Brown sauce. In the pan, the ingredients were beautifully fanned out in concentric circles. But then I realized I don't own a serving platter large enough to serve in. Aie-ya! Food styling be damned, we scoop and plop cafeteria style. I will make a large serving platter the next time I'm in the clay studio.

Hellfire and brimstone in Southern California means I lose my view of the mountains. It also means itchy eyes, hacking coughs, and sooty boogies for a week.

For supper #1, we serve gnocchi with gorgonzola shimeji cream sauce. Luscious unctuous heart attack on a plate. This would instantly kill my dairy avoiding lactose intolerant kin. The fat content would kill my dairy loving friends a day later. If I served this to guests, would this be pre-meditated murder?

For supper #2, we crank up the fat knob to 11 and make pork belly two ways. First, pork belly braised in tamarind habanero cilantro jus. Big pieces of pork belly shrunken into soft porky jiggly jello cubes.

And salt cured pork belly roasted with plum vinegar. With a crispy cap.

Tamarind habanero braised pork belly with hibiscus reduction. You can't eat just one.

And sliced roasted pork belly. These would be awesome in sammiches- perhaps in a baguette. Or Korean style wrapped in a lettuce leaf with shiso and kochujang chili paste. A bit crunchy, a bit soft and squooshy, a bit chewy, and a bit tender. Pork heaven in a bite.

I'm setting myself up for failure by attempting to bake birthday coconut cake. Distracted by eating delicious pork, I've over baked the coconut layer cake and burned the shredded coconut. And I would probably ruin the coconut buttercream tomorrow. I am such a horrible horrible horrible baker. Why do I even try? Perhaps if I tried to make a pork cake, I will have success. We WILL have meat cake in the future! Meat cake!

Pumpkin pulpit

I wonder how Barack O'Lantern sales are doing? I have yet to see one in the neighborhood. And they were never there when I walked Preston over to buy one.

Camarones chimichurri con arroz. I had to pack away my organic local seasonal pulpit and admit that every ingredient came out of the freezer. Frozen shrimp. Frozen chimichurri marinade. Frozen rice. Yes, I keep my rice in the freezer. Trying to eat organic local and seasonal takes a lot of time and effort. I'm often lazy.

Hari-kari

While having my coffee at the dining table this morning, I see out of the corner of my eye a brown blur aimed squarely at my noggin. Feeling like prey first thing in the morning wakes you up much better than any cup of Costa Rican. The labrador retriever in Preston wants to fetch the dying kamikaze dive bombing hawk that smacked itself against the window. This appears to be a somewhat endangered-like sharp shinned hawk. Can any of the bird watchers in the audience identify this one? If the other hawks are similarly prone to committing suicide with windows, they'd be extinct soon.

Unagi from the frozen section of Mitsuwa Marketplace. These are surprisingly good for frozen food that takes seconds to heat up. It has umami.

Embalassed

Simple salt pickles from the Japanese picre press. Cucumbers were a bit bitter, so I will peel them next time. But carrots have a nice bite. Picre presses open up all sorts of opportunities for experimentation. Juniper berries. Pickled onions. Coriander. Pecks of pickled peppers. Eggplant. All sorts of new pickle inventions. And the inevitable failures. Massive massive pickle failures. Pickled bacon anyone? 

Fried rice - peas and bacon and corn. I just can't seem to make Chinese food correctly. One more thing that makes me an embarrassment to my people. The list is getting pretty long.

Energy stores

Tiny champagne grapes require much too much effort to eat. I was tired eating just this one bunch. Why did I get the 4 pound carton of champagne grapes from Costco? But champagne grapes may be a good way to tire out sugar frosted bomb enhanced ADHD children.

Increasing the thai yellow curry stockpile. It pays to have curry rice stockpiles lying around- a life saver for when one is too tired to make a meal from scratch. Too tired from eating tiny bunches of champagne grapes. Or too tired from chasing after ADHD children.

Plane crazy

The airport "limousine" is optimistically named. Sigh. Less than 3 days on the ground, and I'm heading back to California already. I'll just have to squeeze all my restaurant hopping in the limited time I have at the airport. 

Korean draft beer is good.

So-so bulgogi. I guess most airport food is of similarly overpriced quality all over the world.

I found a gelato stand in Korea! Black sesame and yogurt flavoured gelato. Surprisingly good. And the yogurt gelato texture was spot on. I got two spoons so I can share with myself.

Black bean tea tastes like dirt. The dirt that the beans grew in. Blech.

Colonel Sanders looks Asian. I'm not sure this will go over well in Kentucky.

And one last fiery seafood tofu stew pot. Then onto the airplane for the 12 hour flight back to LA! Aie! (And yes Meg, I did eat all that.)

Thai peanuts

Red curry and yellow curry with chicken thighs, purple dragon carrots, and potatos. Trader Joe's curry bases were made for delicate white people taste buds, so I'm zinging them up with hot chilies, galangal, and kaffir lime leaves from my sad looking kaffir lime tree (twiggy shrub.) If Charlie Brown was born Thai, he'd adopt this tree.

Delayed gratification

Beef roast with porcini braised overnight with Pinot Noir at 220 degrees rather than 3 hours at 350. Instead of waking up in the middle of the night to deal with the roast, wafting porcini smells flavored my sweet dreams.

Camarones ala chimichurri. I used the shrimp liquid from last night to make the rice. When I took the first bite, I realized that I ate pretty much this exact dish a few years ago at the El Avion restaurant in Costa Rica. Mine might be better, though less scenic.

Crimini mushroom ragu. Has potential to be delicious. We'll know for sure at some future time.

Sketchy

Camera died. So we will communicate visually using alternative methods.

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Peas and bacon fried rice. The secret to it's deliciousness is celery seed. And I cooked the rice in pineapple juice. And it had ketchup and bacon. (Especially the bacon.)