Thursday, January 04, 2007

Self Portrait of a Cook

The Stuffed Grape Leaves met rave reviews. Alright, so it was just me and Jason as the self-titled food critics. But, nonetheless a scrumptious meal. The egg lemon sauce came out really well after a temporary disaster with clumping corn starch. I highly recommend having some cheese cloth on hand for emergency straining. I actually used to have a wonderful fine mesh strainer that I picked up in Chinatown, but that alas was thrown over the edge of our deck by Nikolai and has not been retrieved from the forsythia bush. Nikolai, age 2.5, loves to throw items off of our deck. No punishment seems to dampen the apparent exhilarating joy in watching various household objects launch overboard. Maybe he imagines himself the captain of a ship on the high seas lightening his load amidst stormy waters...

Tonight's meal will feature Greek style meatballs of my own concoction - ground beef, eggs, English muffin toasting bread processed into bread crumbs, grated onion, freshly chopped parsley, freshly chopped mint, salt, pepper, freshly grated Parmesan cheese and feta. (Side note on the grated onion... please share your input on how to avoid dramatic tears during this common cooking task. I have tried refrigerating the onions, burning a candle near my chopping board and today I tried grating an onion with my eyes closed. Let's just say...not a good idea. Does anyone recall the episode of Martha with guest Donny Osmond? They provided him with some funky cooking goggles. Not exactly my style...do they make cooking contacts?)

I promise you that you are not going to have to come over for dinner to enjoy Simply June. I'm still designing and creating and hope to have some new products up on the website in the next few weeks. I'm also enjoying creating a few things for myself and my home.


1 comment:

lgaumond said...

Yum, can I come for dinner? Use the freshest onions you can, cut them in half between the stem and root, and grate from the cut side toward the stem/root side. STOP before you get within an inch of the ends as that is where the bulk of the eye-torturing gasses lurk. Try it, it works! Also, the older the onions, the more the burn, that's why I say get the freshest ones possible. Have fun!