When the cat's away...

this mice will play with options in the kitchen. Lauren is out of town for most of my first week of Spring Break, in Ohio doing legwork for our wedding. I'm taking the opportunity to eat make and eat things I wouldn't otherwise, since when I cook now I'm almost always cooking for both of us.

The first thing I made was a lunch expedient. You see, to look at our kitchen cabinet, you'd think we were stockpiling cans of tuna against a zombie attack. Really, it was just on sale and we weren't entirely conscious of how much we already had. In any event, we have a lot of it. The question then becomes how to use it. One way we've been eating it is in a pasta sauce. Obviously tuna salad is probably about the most common application of tin-canned tuna fish to the American diet, but I wanted to avoid the high fat content of that preparation and, anyway, I didn't think we had any mayo. So I came up with another idea, a different sort of tuna salad: it was just a can of tuna, some ketchup, and some hot sauce (I really like the Sriracha brand). That's it, and I think it's pretty good, but Lauren thinks it's disgusting. I'm not sure why it's fine in one tomato-based product (pasta sauce) and not here, but I suppose our sensibilities about food are often irrational like that. Historically, I've taken the same kind of stance towards some foods, and probably still do though I can't think of any off-hand. I still have more cans of tuna that Iraq had WMDs, so if you have a favorite canned-tuna recipe to share, I'd appreciate it.

Today for lunch I made mashed potatoes and hamburger gravy. This one just doesn't fit into Lauren's diet and she's not that fond of it anyway, calling it bland. Probably so, but to me it has a taste of home--it's very comforting. So I'm eating that, too, while she's away.

Finally, for dinner tonight, I tried out a corn bread recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice. Wow. The main elements to the recipe are these: the cornmeal is soaked overnight in milk; it has quite a bit of sweetener, from white and brown sugar to honey; it includes actual corn kernels; and finally the pan is greased with bacon fat and crumbled bacon is added to the batter. Wow. It was great just with butter and positively divine with some honey on top as well. I'm sure Lauren would love this one, but it doesn't fit into her diet, and I try to lead her into temptation as infrequently as possible (though sometimes I can't help myself). 

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit