Poached Pears

J & I made this over the weekend with three pears we picked up.

Peel and core pears, poach in 1 cup white wine, 1 cup water and 1/2 cup sugar for 8 minutes.

Remove pears with slotted spoon and boil down your mixture till it is a syrup (another 8 minutes or more - don't get impatient!).

Chop up at least 4 oz of semisweet chocolate and whisk it into the syrup. Pour over pears and serve with vanilla ice cream and bliss out.

I should really be taking more pictures of the food I blog about.

Veggie Paella

I had Nick and Jojo, back from the Virginia GOTV trenches, and Rupali and Nathan over for dinner last night and duh it was super fun and also yummy. Both couples got married this year and Nick and Rupali are in PhD programs at the NerdCircus so lots of fun things to talk about. N&J brought "good" and "bad" lettuce (both yummy!) and R&N made a cinnamon-nutmeg-chocolate cake which I am scarfing down at lunch today.

Kima showed off her brand new black fleece sweater which is keeping her super cozy, and I made veggie paella, which is both dairy-free and vegetarian! Well except that I used chicken stock, but Rupali doesn't mind, fortunately :)

Veggie Paella from Bon Appetit
Ingredients:
* 2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
* 2 cups chopped onion
* 1 cup chopped red bell pepper
* 1 cup chopped green bell pepper
* 1 tablespoon chopped garlic
* 1 1/2 teaspoons paprika
* 2 cups canned vegetable broth
* 3 large plum tomatoes (about 10 ounces), seeded, coarsely chopped
* 1 cup frozen peas
* 1 cup drained canned garbanzo beans (chickpeas)
* 1/2 cup chopped peeled carrot
* 1/4 teaspoon crushed saffron threads
* 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper


* 1 1/2 cups (about 9 1/2 ounces) couscous
* 6 canned artichoke hearts, quartered
* Sliced red bell pepper rings
* 1 lemon, cut into 8 wedges
* Chopped fresh parsley

Preparation:
Heat oil in heavy large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion and chopped bell peppers; sauté until vegetables begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and paprika and sauté 1 minute. Stir in broth and next 6 ingredients. Bring to simmer. Reduce heat to medium-low. Cover and cook 5 minutes to blend flavors. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Mix couscous into vegetable mixture (I added more broth before this and I think it helped a lot!). Cover and simmer 1 minute. Remove pot from heat. Let stand covered 5 minutes. Fluff couscous with fork. Let paella stand covered 5 minutes longer; fluff with fork again. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Transfer to serving bowl. Arrange artichoke hearts, red bell pepper rings and lemon wedges atop paella. Sprinkle parsley over and serve.

Snugglehound

From Kima

Definition of snugglehound here. And "Clunk". Eleanor, you may want to pay close attention. :)

Keys to easy fun dinner party

1) Invite fun people. (duh)
2) Easy-ish food items that cook for an hour in the oven. This way you can hang out with guests while things finish up or 'rest' or cool a bit instead of frantically sauteing things at the last minute (that's the 'tricky fun dinner party').
3) Get Anna to make freakin-good pomegranate fruit salad!
4) dishwasher.

I had a hankering to roast a chicken on Saturday night so I invited Rupes and C.N. and Anna and Katie over. The roast chicken you stuff with garlic and ginger and lemon slices and oil it all over with salt and pepper, and of course one must have potatoes, so to use up the rest of our local cream I made potato gratin, just layers of sliced potatoes with salt/pepper/gruyere in between, filled up with cream and baked for an hour. Josh made delicious roasted red and yellow beets and their beet greens that we picked up at the Mill Valley Center in the morning. Super duper yum. And Anna brought the fruit salad and wine was brought by guests and it was like, a super fun evening!

Of course now I have another dinner party coming up and can't just be a one trick pony so roast chicken and potatoes are out out out. I have been recently starring fun recipes in the food blogs I read so perhaps I will turn to them for inspiration...

Words I don't like, part 349

"Colorways".

Working from home

I had a dentist appointment this morning and a Kima-nails-cut appointment this afternoon and figured I may as well just take the day off um, work from home.

Of course it is Draft City in our living room thanks to the a/c unit in the dining room. So I shrink-filmed that sumbitch right up!

From Design

Can you spot the cord and remote control sealed in their winter tomb?

That helped a whole lot but there was still the front door to contend with. Fortunately, my new blogs had a solution, and there were even extremely detailed Flickr instructions on how to do it. Nonetheless, I totally sewed the first tube too small and had to start over. Good thing I have 9 million yards of Mali Family Planning cloth to work with.

From Design

But wait there's more!

From Design

Double tube action!

Now Kima and I are toasty. And yes actually I did get a lot of work done today!

Caramelized or Carbonized? And how to slice a pizza

I wasn't sure what to make for dinner last night - I had a little bit of broccoli that was slowly turning brown, some leftover mozzarella floating in water, and a lot of tomato sauce. Among other things. Some sort of pasta bake? Well, we're all out of non-spaghetti pasta. Maybe pizza?

The answer to Maybe pizza? is always yes.

I whipped up some dough and started caramelizing onions (part of random resolution #41, making something you've never made twice a week). Everything was looking good until I got off the phone with my parents. People! Do not call your parents, put your dog in a down stay, and then forget to check on your onions because you're too busy checking if your dog is still obeying you!

I left them about 2 minutes too long and there was much blackness, but not so much that I wasn't going to use them on my pizza. My other thought was, if I make myself eat these, I won't ever forget about onions again.

Of course if you have caramelized onions you do not need tomato sauce on your pizza, so there is still a large container of it in the fridge. The pizza, however, was delicious, with the onions and the steamed broccoli and a few tiny pieces of Philly's Best Pepperoni and some (ok, a little too much) red pepper flakes. And the mozz.

Back in my youth we used to get pizza from Timpone's, who were famous for their "campustown" pizza, thin crust, sliced in half and then into strips. This was an ingenious way to make pieces of pizza that are always 'mouth-width', and prevent a lot of the messiness of biting into a huge broccoli floret or mushroom or what have you, and it sliding off along with all of the cheese remaining on the slice. As I am partial to thin crust pizza myself, I think I'll start cutting up my pies like this all the time. I think they even taste better!

Doog

Kima is curled up in the recliner chair next to our dining room table, where I have spent much of the weekend watching Daily Shows and relearning how to use Mom's sewing machine (to make draft snakes and eventually potholders!). We went for a long hike today up at Jerusalem Mills where she was very well behaved, and now she is snoring softly, her face turned into the back corner of the comfy chair, like a little spotted pretzel.

Ding Dong

So this guy moved in next door to us last week - now we have neighbors on both sides. Cool! I haven't met him yet, but now twice, our doorbell has rung, and I answer the door, and NO ONE IS THERE.

But someone is standing at my new neighbor's door, presumably just having rung his doorbell. Are the wires crossed? Am I hearing things through the wall (no, it is super loud, in my house!) Is it possible that this is the fault of resonant frequency or some other physics-related phenomenon?

A mystery!

WaPo article on White House butler

You must read. As with many good things, it came via Atrios. And take his advice to read all the way through.

OCD

over possible holiday card options. Will break out by eating arugula salad leftover from Election Night party and working on $30 million budget.

What to do post-election to satisfy blog cravings

Thanks, Apartment Therapy and other design-y blogs, for filling the gap left by 538. Instead of lovely maps and graphs I can now look at:

Night Owl Paper Goods
Felt Coasters on Etsy

Totally addicted

to everything bagels and plain cream cheese. Guess it must be fall!

Making it happen

I was feeling pretty good after knocking on doors in South Philly (Point Breeze - looks like The Wire) on Sunday. J and I did two sections, about 35 houses, trying to find the newly registered voters the office had on their lists, and making sure they knew where they were going and what to do if they ran into any problems. We got two volunteers but only made contact with about 5 of the folks on our lists - lots of them had moved. Across the street from "Monique's" house, her neighbor was sitting on the stoop, and asked for a button.

"You tryin' to get 1542?"
"No, 1544 - Monique? Is she around?"
Her daughter came to the door. "Monique? She's not there anymore....and anyway, she's not 18!"
When I said that our list said she had registered, the daughter gave me this great look, raising her eyebrows a little bit and shaking her head. "Huh uh. She just turned 17."

The daughter then signed up to volunteer, and her mom looked at our materials to see how to vote straight ticket Democratic. The neighborhood was grim - lots of vacants, lots of pitbulls, but it was Sunday, just after church got out, and so there were also lots of folks dressed up, hats and suits, people checking us out and then smiling, or just sitting on their porch and nodding as we walked by with our materials and clipboard. "I'm ready to go," one man said. A young guy on his cellphone was strolling down the street, and told his friend to hang on.

"You guys know if Obama's still ahead?" He was, we said. "But make sure you go vote anyway! You registered?"
He affirmed. He knew where to go, he was all set. We continued on to our next zone and he picked back up with his friend.

We had a newly registered woman at one house, and when I rang the doorbell a little girl answered. I was surprised that she was white, about 7 years old. She only opened it a crack and I started my intro, and then her dad started yelling. "We know who we're voting for! Close the door! Close the door! Close the door!"

I wasn't sure how to mark them down - respect their desire to not be bothered, and check the "non-supporter" box so they don't get another visit? Or just fill it out as not having talked to the woman who had registered?

That night, I called home, and my Mom said she had just gotten down making 125 phone calls to Ohio, and she'd been doing the same all week. I'm so proud of my mom.

I done voted

Edith and I woke up early, like it was Christmas. And it feels like Christmas! Last night I just wanted to go to sleep so I could wake up and it would finally be election day. We trucked over at 7:01 to our polling place we used in the primary, meeting lots of excited folks carrying coffee mugs along the way. The line going into the cafeteria, for 7-12 was extra long (50 people? 75?), but our place was in the art classroom and the line was much shorter. The election judge was handing out oatmeal cookies to the longer line, especially the older folks. A guy in a scooterchair beepbeepbeeped his way to the front of the line. Two cops were present, hanging out. People's smiles were huge. After about 15 minutes we got up to the front.

And they didn't have our names.

"But we voted here in the primary," we said.

"Nope, nope - oh there you are. You're supposed to be voting at Brent-xxx School."

And they printed out a little slip of paper with the address and our names on it.

Oops! I guess we had finally changed our address only when we last voted, and sure enough, when we went back home, our MD sample ballots had the Brent-xxx School location on them.

Edith went off to school, to vote later this afternoon, and I puttered around, heading over around 8:30. Took about 10 minutes, moving quickly, but with fewer people, the festive atmosphere was also reduced. I'm always so convinced I have somehow hit the wrong button, so I double and triple checked everything.

Our local NPR, WYPR is reporting no problems so far in MD, just some long lines. On my drive into work (it is so nice out, I thought to bike, but the Surly's in the shop getting its cable disconnectors installed...and also I am lazy and scared of the increased number of car crashes on Election Day) one of the election judges was getting interviewed outside our polling place.

Party at my place tonight....Baked Alaska, arugula salad, pizzas, and lots of HOPE that we're finally gonna elect this guy. What a long road.