Progress. Breakfast: smaller portion of leftover fajitas with fixin's, as last night.
Lunch (eaten as a short break from building Ikea bed with my daughter, new bolt now procured): Whole Foods tequila-lime tortilla chips, Whole Foods pineapple salsa, spicy peanuts.
Lunch (eaten as a short break from building Ikea bed with my daughter, new bolt now procured): Whole Foods tequila-lime tortilla chips, Whole Foods pineapple salsa, spicy peanuts.
Dinner: At dinnertime this evening I made three different recipes: Jennifer Reese's fig bars (recipe published, oddly, at Fox News), Bon Appetit's Frisee-Lardon Salad (Sept. issue), and Madhur Jaffrey's Stir-Fried Dry Green Beans with Tien Jing Preserved Vegetables. I have to say, despite the amount of work and concentration involved, I am always very happy when cooking several things at once.
The fig bars: they were a little bit of work, but not so much as Reese warns ("These require concentration and manual dexterity"). The main difficulties were 1) getting the sticky cooked figs to blend in the blender, and 2) moving the large cookie logs from place to place (board to baking sheet, baking sheet to cooling rack) without twisting or breaking them. Disclosures: I was only partially successful on both of these points, and yet my fig bars are fine. They may not be wildly beautiful, being a little craggy and certainly not shaped like fig newtons, but they have a warm, nourishing, slightly crusty crumb and a sweet, figgy filling that walks just the right line between nutritious and decadent.
The fig bars: they were a little bit of work, but not so much as Reese warns ("These require concentration and manual dexterity"). The main difficulties were 1) getting the sticky cooked figs to blend in the blender, and 2) moving the large cookie logs from place to place (board to baking sheet, baking sheet to cooling rack) without twisting or breaking them. Disclosures: I was only partially successful on both of these points, and yet my fig bars are fine. They may not be wildly beautiful, being a little craggy and certainly not shaped like fig newtons, but they have a warm, nourishing, slightly crusty crumb and a sweet, figgy filling that walks just the right line between nutritious and decadent.
 Flours. |  Fig bars. |
I couldn't find any frisee for the salad-- this may have been a lingering byproduct of our blizzard last weekend, as many foods were still in short supply when I shopped midweek. So we had the same salad on boring old green leaf lettuce, which was the frizziest green I could find. Possibly this is why the salad felt like nothing special. The bacon vinaigrette dressing was fine, but a bit one-note for an entree-sized salad, which was how I served it. And I discovered that possibly poached eggs-- while I love them-- are not my favorite thing on salad. However, I will give the recipe credit for offering top-notch egg-poaching instructions. I always have difficulty poaching eggs and they came out right for once. I would clip the recipe for that alone.
Tianjin preserved vegetable in its attractive crock. We had the green beans with preserved vegetable as a side dish, which made for a sort of weird, overly green meal, but whatever. Jaffrey does not specify this in her recipe, but rinse your preserved vegetable (really, it is cabbage preserved dry with salt). When I opened the cute ceramic jar, I could see a nice pile of salt crystals sitting right on top, and questioned to myself: if I use 3 T. of this, won't the recipe come out insanely salty? Yes. Fortunately, I had the common sense for once to consult the internet on this point, and a number of people suggested that you "may" wish to rinse and wring out the preserved vegetable before use.
Camera-crazy?: green bean prep
Green beans with Tianjan preserved vegetable. So I did, and the recipe was plenty salty as it was. The flavor of the preserved vegetable is interesting; definitely an umami-producing ingredient, slightly fermented in tone, not unpleasant and not particularly sour. As I expected, my husband was not crazy about it.
Dessert: we enjoyed the heck out of those fig bars, while watching season 1 of Fargo.
Snacks: 4 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half. Also, the various stages of fig bar (dough, dried figs, fig filling) needed extensive tasting. Oh, and after I ate my two after-dinner fig bars, I was so extremely tempted to have more that I went back to the fridge and got the rest of the green leaf lettuce-lardon salad and ate it out of the plastic container. This was probably better for me than fig bars and it did take the edge off.
Snacks: 4 cups of coffee, 2 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half. Also, the various stages of fig bar (dough, dried figs, fig filling) needed extensive tasting. Oh, and after I ate my two after-dinner fig bars, I was so extremely tempted to have more that I went back to the fridge and got the rest of the green leaf lettuce-lardon salad and ate it out of the plastic container. This was probably better for me than fig bars and it did take the edge off.