Thising and thating about

I've been having adventures, you guys. In the time I haven't written I did some exciting stuff. In no order in particular, I've purchased pink popsicle molds, changed domiciles, begrudgingly made myself memorize the name and function of various tiny muscles, devised many schemes to visit Ikea, watched British murder mysteries, cooked lots of new things, killed my first houseplant, and pulled up the shade of my bedroom window to look contemplatively out of it while sipping a too-thick frozen-banana smoothie. I also went to Spain, and perhaps as penance for spending the week of Passover stuffing my face with delicious cured ham and crispy bread, I've taken very enthusiastically to that other fabled Jewish tradition: freezing everything.

Broccoli-Cheese Soup

Presently residing in the ice box are myriad bags of homemade dashi (would you like a bag? I have so many! help me), from-scratch beans, emergency ravioli, and what I can probably best describe as mystery meats because flakes of frost and poor memory have made them indistinguishable from each other.

Also somewhere deep within are these, this, and that. All really easy, delicious, and actually healthy.

I think part of the reason I am so bad at writing regularly is because while I have a compulsion to talk about food, I rarely "invent" recipes, and when I do, they're really loose riffs on things that already exist (that broccoli-cheese soup? Dice two peeled large russet potatoes into it and double the spinach, trust me,) or they're, like, smoothies, which I do not deign to tell anyone how to make for themselves. I don't see the point in writing restaurant reviews because 1. I am mortified of being caught taking pictures of my food and 2. It seems like bad manners to me to boast about what I ate without sharing. The exceptions to this restaurant-review moratorium (restatorium?) is if you are writing or looking to write professionally, or if you managed to replicate a recipe and you're gonna share. If your experience at the restaurant was hilariously bad, that's fair game too.

That being said, here is a shot of some fresh, airy churros and mud-thick dipping chocolate from Chocolateria San Gines in Madrid. I cannot tell you how to replicate them because apparently no one in the world can make them as well as they do here, so just buy a plane ticket (See? That is kind of rude. And totally delicious)

So basically, I need to figure out what should fill space on here. What I think I should post are things I did invent (I know I said no smoothies, but have you discovered the joys of blending a frozen banana? WOULD YOU LIKE SOME RELIGIOUS LITERATURE, MA'AM?), things I did not invent but I think are sort of brilliant, things I managed to sample and replicate, and most likely, due to my recent influx of star-shaped popsicle equipment, well, lots of popsicles. That are reasonably healthy.
 

Upcoming posts: Anatomical meatloaf, halal-cart style chicken over rice, and what to do with three gallons of shitake dashi stock besides obviously making it into popsicles.

Food I Made But Did Not Blog About: 2012

"You need better pictures. Or at least...you need to make things that look better when you take crappy pictures"

This was not delicious.

Limp Briskit?

Shrimp in awesomesauce. I literally have the recipe for awesome sauce.

Charming Swedish pancakes full of molten lava lemon curd. Ow :(

Yum, though. But ow.

Do this: Google "Francis Lam Ginger Scallion Sauce"

Swiss chard a la Rick Bayless

First pot of black beans from scratch! Edible!

Thai-ish green eggplant-chicken curry, infinitely more delicious than it looks.

Boyfriend's birthday tart: Almond paste with apricots and cherry preserves, recipe from Bon Appetit

Kidney bean & ginger curry

This experiment was not repeated.

Sticky brown sugar cake, courtesy of the kitchn

Peasant (eggplant) caviar

Working class caviar ;)

Butternut squash: Never Again

If you have to ask, I'd rather explain in person

Thems went in there...

Shrimp & pineapple rice and charred scallions

Tembleque that did not set, but we will revisit this gel in espresso cups thing.

Matzoh pudding batter with apples, courtesy of thekitchn

Deb Perlman's raspberry macaroons are as easy as she promises

Secret family recipe chicken

First pizza ever: Deb Perlman's dough recipe, Emeril Lagasse's tomato sauce, caramelized onions and ricotta

Second pizza ever: Potato, rosemary and caramelized onion

Ceasar salad pizza. What?

The Sassy Radish's Espresso and Chocolate cake, cream cheese frosting

Before I made those strawberries, these bowls had matching bottoms...

Iceberg lettuce and Chinese broccoli salad. It involved garlic.

Summery orzo salad, with a thing on my hand my dermatologist explained as "maybe a caterpillar fell on you."

I grew these!

and I have no idea what to do with them!

Shrimp with broccoli in tomato sauce

"I thought that was a bowl of candy" - Guy at work

Best banana bread yet, from the kitchn. The secret is old bananas. Not yellow bananas, which aren't old, I just think they are.

Mujadara! A big thanks to the gentleman at Khalustyan's for making me sample what I will never have to buy again.

White bean ragout with whole wheat Israeli cous cous. Less delicious than you'd think

Temperamental chocolate babka broke despite ginger-careful-dont-wake-the-baby handling; S'okay, it got eaten anyway.

See? I make stuff all the time. Sometimes I even photograph it. And even more rarely, I blog about it.

But if you want a recipe for any of these things, I can do that.