Friday, February 15, 2008

Food. I Like It.

Well, Valentine's Day was kind of a bust. By the time the outlets were done and the cleaning up was out of the way, it was pushing 10:00, so we kind of ended up not doing that whole dinner-and-DVD thing. Whatever, I have a fully functioning office/craft room now, with working grounded outlets and everything!

And I had really good company while the men worked:

It's okay, I'm not comfortable without them

(Stock photo, but this is about right. None of them wanted to leave me alone on V-Day. Indiana even stuck her head downstairs and meowed at me.)

My main reason for posting is to share a few recipes. I'm always talking about the cooking I've been doing lately, and there's a few in particular that I think are worth you giving a shot, so I'm sharing the recipe links. The black bean tortilla pie that I mentioned the other day is worth almost any sacrifice. (Psst...the recipe calls for beer or water - if you're okay with it, go for the beer. It totally makes the whole thing.)

I like to serve a simple thrown-together sour cream concoction with the tortilla pie, or any spicy mexican/tex-mex/southwestern dish, or with chips, or with a spoon. (I love sour cream maybe a little too much.) Mix together about 8 ounces of sour cream, the juice from half a lime, a few finely chopped green onions, and a few pinches of salt. You can add some finely diced jalapeno too, if you want a little heat. I tend to buy two containers of sour cream, and I leave one plain and mix the other one up this way so I have it on hand. (Seriously, SO good with potato chips. I went through a lot of this during the Super Bowl.)

I also want to point you to this Emeril recipe for the beer cheddar soup I mentioned yesterday. (Not all my food contains booze, it just worked out that way in this post.) I'm normally not an Emeril fan - I don't follow the dogma that in order to be good, food must be drowned in rich sauce, fried, covered in salt, and topped with more rich sauce. But this soup is delicious. The recipe also mentions fried broccoli - I don't bother with that, obviously. 'Cuz I kind of figured all the cheese and whole milk was enough without adding fried greenery.

On the knitting front (there IS knitting): The Project carries on, by the way - I keep a very detailed progress report going on Ravelry, if you're interested in reading how things are coming along.

I'm proud to be a federal employee today - I'm looking forward to my three-day-weekend! (For.....what is it? Some holiday....something about presidents, maybe? Whatever.)

Happy weekend!