Rooster sauce!

You will nevermind, please, the intense mess behind the food.  And the fact that we’re always eating on TV trays. Dinner time is about the only time Kristin can take a break from school work to relax and watch some tube, so no judging, okays?

Steak, sweet potato “frites,” frisee salad w/ homemade vinaigrette, a really nice (and cheap) 2009 bordeaux (which I will be buying more of), not to mention fresh whole wheat bread and brie.  Holy North Carolina South Yet Somehow French, Batman!

I swear, sooner or later I’m going to stop with these probably jealousy-inducing posts and get around to some good old honest food talk, maybe share some recipes, that kind of thing.  Sorry folks.  In the mean time, I am in the process of planting one heck of a container herb garden.  More updates to follow!

I was reading this recipe for Drunken Beans from my favorite food porn radio show, The Splendid Table, and I got myself all confuserlated.  It calls for four cups of cooked beans, in their broth.  I guessed correctly that the broth means “liquid you cooked the things in, dummy,” but was confused by the absence of any sort of quantity.  I guess whatever fills in the cracks of 4 cups of beans.  But I wasn’t sure, so I did some Googling.

And came across this fascinating article about bean broths or bean stocks on a site called Culinate.  The article takes the idea of a bean stock to a more elevated level, suggesting that perhaps you add in some carrots, onions, bay leaves, and the like to the beans while they cook, as if you were making a more conventional vegetarian stock.

This is a real win, guys.  A twofer.  While you’re making beans for a recipe, you can add a few more ingredients (with no extra work), and end up with more flavorful beans, and a delicious, useful, and unknown byproduct!  Fantastic.  Again, measure out the stuff into bags and freeze for later.

I’m going to have to start reading Culinate, I think…

In the words of Pepin, Happy Cooking.

I’m sorry the photography sucks.  I never have enough light.  Contrary to what it looks like, this is NOT a breaded piece of offal.  It’s fish.  Tasty, tasty fish.

I call this “Kitchen Destroyer Cod.”  It’s another Cooks Illustrated recipe, which reliably kicks out recipes that are incredibly tasty, and occasionally more involved.  The breading on this sucker was huge and crispy and awesome, but it took a good deal of time to make, and dirtied about three dishes all by itself.  That’s why I call it the Kitchen Destroyer.  Here, have a look for your self. The black bean salad was a variation on an Alton Brown recipe, which kicked serious butt.

I’ve you’ve been playing along at home, you may have noticed a great deal of thyme being used in the past few recipes.  In fact, before I started the Foodblog, I had made French Onion soup, which ALSO used thyme.   So why all the thyme?  Because fresh herbs both ROCK and ARE EXPENSIVE.  Normally I try to grow my own, but I had to ditch my herb garden when we moved to North Carolina.  So when you have them, USE THEM.

The other thing of note with this mean is the fish.  Fish is great.  I love fish.  So do a lot of other people.  Lots of people have become really good at fishing, actually.  So much so, that populations are starting to crash.  Food doesn’t taste good if you know you’re doing damage by eating it.  So what you do is check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium website and print out their pocket guide and stick it in your wallet.  And use it.  Kroger and the like don’t always do a good job of telling you where your food comes from (and their seafood isn’t the freshest either), so your best bet is something more like a Trader Joes, or a local Fishmonger.  As my buddy Ian pointed out below, Trader Joes still sells fish like Orange Roughy that just can’t be fished sustainably – so you can’t buy without thinking here.  But it has been my experience that it is easier to find seafood that meats the Monterey Bay Aquarium guidelines here than at mass-market grocery stores.  It’s a complex issue, which is why you NEED to print out the pocket guide and tuck it in your wallet.  That should be a good guide.  If your store won’t tell you where it came from, go somewhere else.

Maybe you don’t really care too much about fish populations, but I think you should.  We’re running low on a lot of fish.  Consider orange roughy; this is one ugly bugger of a fish that we couldn’t catch until recently, because it lives so far down below.  Why are we bothering with this fish if its so hard to catch?  Because we’re starting to wipe out the easier fish species.  Oops.  The problem with orange roughy is that they can live to about 150 years old.  The fish you’re eating for dinner is older than you.  Couple that with their sporadic breeding habits, and you’ll find that there is practically NO sustainable way to eat this fish.  It will just be gone.

At any rate, there’s a good deal to this issue, and I suggest you listen to this really good Teri Gross interview if you’re interested.  Fish is so good, it would be a shame to crash it to oblivion.

Roughly based off this Martha Stewart recipe, if you also make chicken with it. Martha knows her roasted veggies – my recipe for oven roasted Brussels sprouts was one of hers originally.

This one is a win.  Kristin likes it too.  Yay.

Ed – I’ve decided to call this recipe “Why don’t I have any white wine on hand with which to make a pan sauce?” Chicken.  Because lord knows that would have just killed this sucker.