Cooking at Home

It's nice when you actually remember to defrost food the night before. Monday, I made rack of lamb from Star. It was awesome. I also heated up some of the leftover butter beans -- add some butter and salt and everything tastes better. I also bought some fresh shitakes and an oyster mushroom and made a sauteed mushrooms with cream recipe from Julia and Jacques Cooking At Home. The recipe is really simple: you saute the mushrooms, I think with minced shallots, and then add some wine, cook til absorbed, then you add cream, some port, and you're good to go! Actually, I thought the cream was too heavy so I added some half n half to loosen it up a bit. I would just use half n half next time. I also sliced one of the cherokees. Yum.

We had a nice 2006 Marquis Philips shiraz with it. Normally we have trouble finishing a bottle of wine, so we planned in advance this time by having J open it before I got home so it had time to breathe. We also used the new aerator. When you're paying for a bottle of wine, you at least want to finish it and not turn it into vinegar, you know? Not that I've ever made wine vinegar, but I will... I swear.

Tuesday night, I was pretty tired when I got home but I didn't really want to go out. Also, I had purchased some sausage meat and really needed to use it. So I finely diced some onions and sliced some onions and sauteed them, then added in the sausage meat. Then I added in tomatoes: one beefsteak, two on the vine, and one of the cherokees from last week. The sauce was sweet, but rich and delicious. Even with dry pasta, it was a pretty good meal.

Sunday, I had put together a gumbo with the intention of making "a small batch". Of course, after all the prep, I realized that I hadn't a stock prepared, so I pulled two frozen chicken stocks and grabbed the last of the crab shells and all the shrimp shells and set them to do their thing for a while. The roux mixture had looked so thick that I was really concerned about it getting too thick, so I added in another container of purchased stock. In the end, we ended up with the largest batch of gumbo ever. I had to cook it down for four days. It was good at the end, but the okra had pretty much turned to mush. The andouille -- which we had to get at Whole Foods -- tasted different from usual. I wasn't particularly pleased with it. So the gumbo was okay, but probably not really good enough to share with friends.

J is out of town this weekend which means I made chicken feet, natch. I usually buy way too much, so this time, I just got a pound from the farmers market. J insists that it's not the chicken feet he hates, even though he won't try them, but the anise (stars) that I put in the pot. In case you were wondering, yes, they were very tasty.