I will not impose on your emotional state, this once

Man, after Lunar New Year, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, and Pi Day, it sort of feels like St. Pat's is the first holiday of 2014 to fall on a non-ULM Official Posting Day and I have to admit, it's a little bit of a relief. I mean, aren't you guys sick of me demanding that you have a happy day of some type? Now the pressure's off! Have a regular Tuesday today, everyone. Have a nice boring March 18th. Festivities will resume…let's see…April Fool's Day, I suppose. Get those hilarious tricks ready.

In the meantime, check out the super low key Irish-ish dinner we rocked last night, via Cook This Now. Baked Stuffed Potatoes with Corned Beef and Dill Butter, roasted cabbage, Irish Soda Bread.

Turns out, if you don't feel like braising a giant hunk of beef all afternoon, you can walk up to a deli counter and ask for 1/2 pound of corned beef and they will just give it to you in exchange for money. Instant corned beef! The more you know! I highly recommend this method. It will give you way more time to scrub all the paint off of your rug OH YEAH DID I MENTION?

I would definitely have assumed that this was the work of an incontinent leprechaun had I not watched Ivy dump out of the entire jar of paint while staring at me defiantly. Also, we didn't even set up a leprechaun trap, so that would make no sense.

I KNOW YOU THINK YOU CAN BREAK ME CHILD BUT YOU ARE NOT MY FIRST TWO-YEAR-OLD.

Besides, I know for a fact that in two years or so you are going to turn nice and sassy.

I can wait.

Okay, now I'm feeling bad that I condemned you to an ordinary late-winter non-holiday, so to make up for it, here is all of the (un-pie) food we ate in Fort Worth last week.

Rocky Mountain, Glazed Doughnuts & Cafe. It just tasted like chocolate, no hints of crisp mountain air or anything. 

Maple donut tricked out with bacon slice and filled with Bavarian cream, Glazed Donuts & Cafe.  "Simplicity" is overrated as a life goal.

Cinnamon, Apple, and Cranberry Waffle, Brewed. Look, Dan didn't go with me to the Bacon Festival and he's still catching up, okay?

Serrano grits with scrambled egg, Brewed. Serrano in grits! Good idea!

ART BREAK. Sometimes you just get tired of food.

Whatever the fish special was at Café Modern that day. For some reason, Dan doesn't write down exactly what he orders at every meal. So. Live and let live I guess.

(Consults notes) Moroccan Chicken Salad, Café Modern.

Papardelle with butternut squash, prosciutto, and hazelnuts, Nonna Tata.  This pasta is fresh and it is good. Even run-of-the-mill pasta is good, really, so this is extra good.

Tortelli with eggplant, goat cheese, and pistachio butter, Nonna Tata.  PISTACHIO BUTTER I MEAN CAN YOU EVEN.

S'mores in a Jar, Brewed again. Too dark to get a good pictures of the layers, but there were layers. S'moresy, s'moresy layers.

Oyster Sampler, Waters. Let's see if we can just get a closer look at...

Yep, there we go! Perfect.

Mesquite grilled Arctic char with squash ribbons and heirloom tomatoes, Waters. I ate this and Frito pie within about a three hour period. I contain multitudes.

Of hungry people.

Oh, just a wall monkey at the completely normal bed and breakfast where we stayed. Maybe don't click that link if you want to maintain your boring, non-freaked-out Tuesday state.

Weight, vacation

A very merry Pi(e) Day to you, mesdames et messieurs! As you may recall, last year I presented you with a bit of an abomination and on that very day I solemnly vowed that I would never again do you like that. As it happens, Dan and I are currently on holiday (undisclosed location) (obviously) (paparazzi), but that did not stand in the way of my scouring the…ahem…greater Fort Worth, Texas area for pies. All of the pies. Such is my dedication to you, dear reader. BEHOLD:

Pie, classic.

Pie, fancy.

Pie, pizza, redundant.

And obviously, pie, BEST.

You have no idea how many food service professionals Dan had to confuse in order to make our pie mission a success, so you are welcome. And in case you are feeling a bit more hands-on than myself this year, here are some very intriguing pie recipes. PLEASE REPORT BACK.

Salty Honey
Lemon Chess
Peanut Butter Cup
Sour Cherry Slab
Momofuku Crack
Grapefruit Meringue
Sour Cream Apple


We left the girls with my parents, so I'm not sure what they're up to at the moment. Last I saw, half of them were having a pretty good time.

Okay. Back to our mystery retreat.

"Moving on" is not my strong suit

Well, we all knew this day was coming, and it finally did. I was finally forced by The Man the reasonable renewal policy of the Wells Branch Community Library to return In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite. At least I managed to sneak some spaetzle in just under the wire, and believe me, it wasn't easy. Nothing about spaetzle is easy.

But what else will hold up all my browned onions, chard, and emmentaler cheese?

I guess it's mostly my fault for interpreting Clark's story about how she went several years without making spaetzel because it is too difficult to do alone unless you have a spaetzel maker (288 shopping days until Christmas) as meaning that I should definitely attempt to make it alone and also maybe add in a broken foot and a two-year old climbing me like a tree. One could technically describe that as misinterpreting, I suppose. Anyway, it was…a process. That resulted in…food.

I'm tempted to attribute my semi-botching of that last recipe to a subconscious desire to make parting with Year of the Library Sub-Project Book #2 a little easier. After all, scanning the shelves this time around felt far more discouraging. What could replace such a happy presence in my home? No one seemed like the right fit. Not chilly Martha. Not my old frenemy Prevention Magazine. Ina was a contender until a casual skimming revealed that approximately 85% of her recipes contain lobster for some reason. Then something caught my eye: Cook This Now. YES. A commanding voice of wisdom and seasonality! The kind of voice that will literally tell me exactly what to make in the month of March and could also probably instruct me to clean my baseboards were she so inclined! Welcome home, Melissa Clark. I almost had time to miss you.

The first recipe in the March section is Gingery Split Pea Soup with Toasted Coriander. It was all I could do to refrain from delineating the differences among porridge, mush, and gruel for Anna. I'm hoping that in a few years she will come to share my passion on the topic.

In the meantime, I will use ground coriander next time because I seem incapable of crushing seeds thoroughly enough to avoid having weird crunchy bits all up in my nice mush. I just made the blech-tongue-scraping face thinking about it.

I had much better luck with the accompanying Butter Lettuce and Clementine Salad with Browned Butter Vinaigrette. That is a lot of serious flavor for one little salad. Plus who thinks to put butter on salad, haaaaaa oh man I just love her.

I have no jokes about this salad, I really enjoyed it. I'M ALLOWED TO EARNESTLY FIND THINGS ZESTY AND DELICIOUS SOMETIMES, I AM ONLY HUMAN.

In conclusion, In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite: A plus plus. Cook This Now: very promising indeed. Likelihood that I will hop a plane to New York and start full-out stalking Ms. Clark: low, but on the rise.

After Ivy revealed herself as the handy type, we told her she could have a big girl bed if she could put it together.

We already took the crib down, so I think the added incentive of having nowhere else to sleep is going to spur her to finish this within the month or two. Six, tops.

Summer hibernation will be here before you know it

You can keep your chirping birds, your tiny blossoms, your weird urban legends about eggs and brooms standing upright unassisted. I know spring is nigh because I have just ransacked every grocery store in the greater Austin area in pursuit of edible green things. That's right: Green Bunko has come and gone once again! Third time's the lucky charm, right? Right, guys? It's not easy being green, you know what I'm saying? Relatedly, this year's sub-theme was "Kinda Phoning It In."

Cheese plate: less ambitious.

Stuffed potatoes: less adorably tiny.

Broccoli salad: way less prep time than green deviled eggs.

…pickles.

It is still a lot of green in one place.

Not sure I had this cutting board last year. So that's something.

And I DID go a new and bold direction in the dessert category: POTATO CANDY. It completely exists. And looks exactly like a pile of dirty potatoes.

I'm sorry about all this, Ireland.

Anyway, I have no idea what people are on about with this turd business. If I wanted to make a St. Patrick's Day turd, you would know it. Trust me.

The girls have been watching a lot of Handy Manny.

So maybe that master bathroom renovation will happen sooner than I thought.

If it's Tuesday, this must be pancakes

Hello and happy Mardi Gras! Or, more accurately for our purposes, Pancake Tuesday! Laissez les bon temps be smothered in syrup. Fortunately for all of us, the blog project that I continue to be right on top of provides the perfect material for this hallowed occasion.

One of the best features of The Book Lover's Cookbook is that once in a while it makes room for the slower more deliberate reader by throwing in an eight-line poem, such as this one by Shel Silverstein:

Pancake? 

Who wants a pancake,
Sweet and piping hot?
Good little Grace looks up and says,
"I'll take the one on top."
Who else wants a pancake,
Fresh off the griddle?
Terrible Teresa smiles and says,
"I'll take the one in the middle."

As the recipe included is quite standard and boring, I thought I would run the Silverstein test on Ivy to add a little interest to this section. I was right on the edge of my seat!

I'm not going to lie, this outcome was a surprise.

I also finished Cold Mountain, which means that so far I am keeping up my grueling pace of one to two books per month. The things I do for you people! ALERT--Since this is really the first grown-up fiction that I've covered, it seems like a good time to expressly lay out my policy on spoilers, which is: they will be raining down up on you fast and furious. All spoilers, all the time. Forget it, Jake. It's Spoilertown. END ALERT.

Considering the fact that this book is largely about death and destruction and the worst impulses of humanity, I was surprised to find that it was somewhat less bleak than I anticipated. It's even the type of human will to endure story that I generally go well out of my way to avoid! It's possible that after a couple of things written for children and one very unhappy memoir I was just so desperate for adult fiction that this felt like a relief, no matter how many people died horribly or how much bear cub meat got eaten. A couple of things near the end started to be too much for me, as children-in-peril always are, but for the most part it was a nicely-drawn world that I was eager to return to.

If I had to guess, I would say the real reason I enjoyed it was that Ada and Ruby's storyline scratched my productivity-porn itch left unfulfilled by Little House. Such thorough descriptions of hard work! Cleaning up! Planting! Clearing! Harvesting! Preserving! Lovingly detailed schedules and rules, aaaaaahhhhh that's the stuff. I need Ruby to come here and instruct me to scrub my baseboards. How can I scrub my baseboards if no one tells me to do it? Sigh. I also need her to come make some potato salad for me.

That noon, Ruby said she wanted to walk up and check on the apple orchard, so Ada suggested they have their lunch there. They made a picnic of the leftover pieces of last night's fried chicken, a small bowl of potato salad for which Ruby had whipped up the mayonnaise, and some vinegared cucumber slices.

Boom, perfect recreation.

Since nothing absurdly terrible happens immediately following this paragraph, I'm tempted to say that this is the most appropriate recipe-to-excerpt match so far except that there is not actually mayonnaise in this potato salad and again there is HALF A CUP OF WHITE SUGAR for no reason. Now, look. Setting aside the fact that people who can only obtain white sugar by finding the rare individual who stashed it away before the war and are willing to trade for it PROBABLY WON'T THEN PUT IT ALL INTO A POTATO SALAD, potatoes do not need sugar. They don't. I like carbohydrates as much as the next lady! The simpler the better! Potatoes do not need sugar.

Let's see how we do with the White Bean Soup.

Feeding herself was Ruby's to do as soon as she was old enough to be held accountable for it, which in Stobrod's opinion fell close after learning to walk. As an infant, Ruby foraged for food in the woods up and down the river at charitable farms. Her brightest childhood memory was of walking up the river trail for some of Sally Swanger's white bean soup and on the way home having her nightgown--for several years her usual attire, even in the daytime--get caught on the trailside blackthorn briar.

Immediately following: she is stuck there all night long, to the point that she has either a spiritual experience or an auditory hallucination. Also, it seems unlikely that Mrs. Swanger used an electric slow cooker for this soup. Small quibbles, though. I like bean soup.

It's beans and soup.

Did I like the ending of the book? I mean…when one character spends the entire novel in immediate danger of death and then has two entire pages of hopeful planning for the future…let's just say I was resigned to it. Also I was in the doctor's office waiting to get a boot on my foot when I read it. So obviously my own pain and suffering eclipsed Inman's sad fate, I mean, this thing is really pretty aggravating. I clomp everywhere!

Up next: The Accidental Tourist. I know absolutely nothing about this book except that Geena Davis is in the movie version. I guess I'm just hoping the body count is fewer than ten. Please don't tell me if I'm wrong.

Ugh, you guys, that was exhausting. I'm going to let Anna dictate the rest of the picture captions.

Ivy is completely wearing her mushroom hat and I don't know what she is doing but I think she is, um, chewing something and putting something in her mouth and she is wearing a shirt and I think she is also watching something. 

Ivy is wearing her hat again and she looks like she is looking at the windows and she is funny right now I think. She looks like her is chewing something. That's all.

ETA: I JUST LOOKED UP THE PREMISE OF THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST. I'm going to go lie down now. Happy Mardi Gras.