A Gracious Hostess

And…it’s all over.
My Thanksgiving timeline – which, by the end, had taken on the scope of MRP for a small company – didn’t steer me wrong: I always keep on task when held accountable to a piece of paper. My boyfriend came over after work on Wednesday to help me get ready; he was greeted with a mountain of Brussels sprouts, a raw turkey, and a festive Togo’s dinner. But weren’t we efficient? So much of the meal was prepared ahead of time that my sister and I spent most of Thursday in a DVD-induced stupor, with intermittent bouts of grooming.

Then: chaos.

No, of course it wasn’t that bad. But I always underestimate the last-minute-ness of so many things and never figure in the time it takes to pry the cooked turkey from the v-rack to which it’s become cemented, scrape the burned bits from the roasting pan before making the gravy, and ferry nine hot serving dishes to their designated trivets.

And, there was the Tofurky.

My sister (a vegetarian, you remember) called a few days before she arrived and asked if I could pick up some fake chicken patties as a turkey stand-in. Sure, no problem – until I couldn’t find them. It’s hard to imagine a run on soy chicken-substitute, but the freezer shelves spoke for themselves. There was, however, no shortage of Tofurky, which should have been my first warning sign.

The Tofurky (“Serves and Delights 5”!) was nestled in a small box with a tub of mushroom and “giblet” gravy. It was a fat little roast, almost spherical, and it came tightly wrapped in plastic that was secured, summer-sausage-style, by two metal grommets. Unlike chicken patties, which fare perfectly well on a paper towel in the microwave, the Tofurky required a baking dish and an hour in the oven. These specifications had not been incorporated into my oven configuration, as everyone was soon aware. But since I’m an infinitely adaptable type of person and my sister surely would have gone hungry with only seven meat-free sides from which to choose, we worked out the logistics with minimum fuss.

The Tofurky sat high in its tiny dish on a bed of onions, doused with olive oil and soy sauce, and was shuttled between the big oven and the convection oven. The gravy took a spectacularly long time to make, but didn’t taste too burned. The casseroles were hot in the center. We forgot some of the stuffing in the turkey but found it upon postprandial disassembly of the carcass. I didn’t spill my wine – or anybody’s else’s.

There is still Tofurky in the refrigerator.

My Anxious-Sunday Syndrome began in grammar school and continues still, almost comforting in its reliability. I hope that someday Sunday afternoons and evenings will feel like weekend, not the night before an interview, but by now I should know this is a false hope.

It was under the panicky anticipation of this week-as-yet-unstarted that I tripped over a power cord stretched between outlet and portable DVD player (resting innocuously on my bed), pitched forward into a door, and caught the fall with my face. It was quite a shock: I lead a cautious and deskbound life, so it’s been years since I’ve drawn blood with anything besides a kitchen knife. I cleaned myself up and started wailing about it as soon as there was somebody around to pay attention to me. This happened to be my brother, who is something of a self-made expert on split chins and was satisfactorily indulgent: “Hmm, bet that really hurt!” The cut was hardly big enough to warrant a Band-aid, let alone a butterfly (my family’s traditional proxy for a trip to the emergency room), but I do have a big bruise that makes my chin look like a peeled russet with a bad end.

This all happened after Halloween, thank goodness, because Laura Petrie would never be so clumsy; that, of course, was Rob’s job. And I was right: getting costumed early in the morning – for work, no less! – seemed impossibly daunting. Instead, I wore a set of my sister’s scrubs with a white coat over, which was very much like wearing PJs to the office and made the whole day seem festive.

I had more time to prepare on actual-Halloween, and I needed it. I haven’t spent so long getting ready since prom, and my makeup skills haven’t improved much since then. The false eyelashes were a big surprise – they looked kind of good! I could hardly hold my eyes open, but such is the price of looking like, upon inspection of the pictures, myself with curled hair. (The effect was improved when I met up with my boyfriend, who, trooper that he is, had found a tweed blazer and appropriately skinny tie; he wouldn’t trip over an ottoman for me, though.) All that, and I opened the door to three groups of trick-or-treaters.
Where’s my martini?

We still haven’t gotten a fall cool-down around here, but the time change has made weather-incongruent meals more palatable as dinnertime now falls under the forgiving cover of darkness.

Sunday: Shepherd’s pie, salad
Monday: Baked fish, rice pilaf, salad
Tuesday: Pasta puttanesca, salad
Wednesday: Sloppy joes, chips, fruit
Thursday: Takeout

A strong start, anyway.

My shepherd’s pie (a shepherd’s pie/cottage pie hybrid, actually) comes from a recipe that looks a lot like Alton Brown’s, by no little coincidence. It’s pretty standard, with peas, carrots, corn – really, just another way to ruin would-be hamburgers. My most recent preparation of the pie, however, led to a wonderful discovery: mashed potatoes can sit on the stove, fluffy and quiet and hot, for a long time. Like, half an hour, or maybe even more! I stirred in some (additional) hot milk and they were ready to go. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders, since potatoes have always caused a disproportionate amount of my Thanksgiving stress. When to start boiling? Will they be ready on time? Or overcooked? How can I mash them and make the gravy at the same time?! It’s a wonder I could even function under the pressure.

So about the vegetarian thing: it’s not been a complete crash and burn, since most of our meals are still meat-free, but a full-blown transition to the ethical and environmental high ground hasn’t happened. Color me not surprised!

With that out of the way, let’s talk about meat – or, more specifically, what goes on it. If my free trial of SPSS hadn’t run out a year ago, I’d include a neat scatter plot to show, in no uncertain terms, that my family prefers their meat dishes to have a sauce. It took me eight years to wrap my head around this striking and entirely obvious correlation. Why try to make something that people like when I could just as easily make something they don’t?

Well, because I like sauces, too. I use the term loosely, since I’ll count anything that’s damp and kind of pourable. Over here we run the gamut from mango salsa (popular with some) to gravy and pan sauce (popular with all). Last week I bought some pork tenderloin, seared it in a skillet, poured in a mixture of Dijon mustard, white wine, and something else (chicken broth?), and stuck it in the oven. It was all I could do not to make it again the next day.

…Instead, I used a “simmer sauce” from Trader Joe’s. It was even easier! It looked a little gelatinous after bubbling away with the chicken in the oven (this was not the Trader Joe’s-sanctioned method of preparation), but a good whisking fixed that. We ate it with crusty bread, not the recommended pasta, which meant one fewer pot to clean and, consequently, a happy cook.
Too cute for sauce!

The Halloween potluck at my office is tomorrow. We’ve been encouraged to “dress up and make the day a little more fun.” Last year I went as a cowgirl – with boots, hat, the whole deal. Who even knew that Brooks & Dunn had a women’s Western wear line? My sister is braving the mean streets of Chicago in the awesome boots, however (and she should send me a picture to post), so I came up with a new costume idea: Laura Petrie! Capris, pearls, flipped hair, false lashes…I think it sounds totally cute, except I could never pull that all together at 6:00am on a Friday. If I could, it might weaken my justification for looking so sloppy every other day.

Finally: rain. One radio DJ said that this might be the biggest storm southern California has seen in 70 years. Here’s hoping. I’ve tried to pack as many cold (“cold”) weather meals as possible into the week in anticipation of the inevitable October switch back to summer temperatures – 85° by Friday, as meanly confirmed by weather.com.

See, these are nice, warm, rainy-day meals:

Sunday: Meatloaf, baked potatoes, salad
Monday: Frittata with potatoes; salad
Tuesday: Gnocchi, salad
Wednesday: Tomato basil soup, crusty bread, cheese
Thursday: Curry and rice…and salad

It’s true, there is no lack of bagged, prewashed lettuce in the crisper.

My parents and I really like meatloaf. My boyfriend and brother seem to agree that if I’m going to bother mixing ground meat with other stuff and cooking it at all, I might as well make it into burgers. Perhaps they don’t understand that meatloaf is so much cozier, and that meatloaf means I don’t have to scrub the grills on the barbecue. I won’t get either of them started on the post-Christmas ham loaf.

Just in case this hasn’t become abundantly clear, frittata is a personal favorite. Like quiche, but easy! Like scrambled eggs, but kind of dinner-y! A few weeks ago I had an unexpected, almost dizzying, spell of inspiration and bought a bag of Trader Joe’s frozen roasted potatoes with peppers and onions. I set my sister to cooking them in the skillet while I beat ten eggs with some milk. To the hot potatoes we added the eggs, a handful of cheddar, some chopped up roasted green chilies, and leftover chopped tomatoes; tossed it in the oven; and – brilliant! It looked like a golden, slightly overcooked Spanish tortilla. My brother, after painstakingly picking out every tomato, managed to choke it down with glares and copious lashings of Tabasco. I may never make it any other way.

Speaking of recipes that will remain forever unchanged, I recently planned The Great Thanksgiving Menu of 2009, which looks very much like those of all years prior. Since this took five minutes, I backed up into Halloween mode – no sense rushing the best fiscal and calendar quarter of the year…as anxiety-fraught as it so often is.

My mom loves Halloween. But as the day draws nearer and busy schedules render the house conspicuously un-be-webbed and bereft of (tasteful) gargoyles, run-of-the-mill anxiety can become full-blown, we-forgot-to-order-the-turkey-style panic. I was driving somewhere (interesting and important, no doubt) around, say October 3rd, and passed a house with a pumpkin on the porch. I immediately called my brother.

“We need to go get the Halloween stuff out of the storage locker.”
“Huh? Now?”
“Yes, now! I just saw a house with a pumpkin on the porch.”
“So? Why do –“ There was a terrified pause; I knew he understood. “Has Mom seen a house with a pumpkin on the porch yet?”

Ta-da! (Tastefully) decorated house!

The September issue of Bon Appétit arrived yesterday, its cover promising “Cozy Fall Suppers.” It’s been about 100° here for the last two weeks, with no sign of a cool-down, so it looks like the short ribs and shepherd’s pie will have to wait. That’s OK: the eating-vegetarian thing is, except when it isn’t, going pretty well. But come our fall (November?), when no one wants another frittata, I’ll be prepared. Unfortunately, no one will want short ribs, either.

This past week was red letter:
Sunday: Portobello burgers, basil mayo, red pepper tapenade, couscous salad (I made a last-minute swap last week, moving the mushrooms to Sunday and putting veggie curry in their place)
Monday: Takeout…yeah
Tuesday: Mac and cheese, salad
Wednesday: Leftover mac and cheese, salad
Thursday: Black bean tacos with broccoli slaw, feta, grilled eggplant, mango

As my boss might say about a poorly-executed project, let’s review our lessons learned:
• My brother has stopped being a good sport about portobellos. He opted instead for a fake-chicken patty that’d been carelessly wrapped and left lingering in the freezer since my sister’s visit two months ago. That’s hardcore.
• Everyone, including me, still likes takeout more than my cooking.
• The black-bean taco menu sounds gross, but it wasn’t, really.
• Lots of condiments in little dishes make a meal look more impressive!
• So does whiskey! (And it’s vegetarian to boot.)
• I’m much too uncommitted and conflict-averse to come up with a meatless Labor Day meal.

In news unrelated to food, I have at long last found a publication worthy of filling the void left by the folding of my beloved Cottage Living : this, my friends, is Midwest Living. Whether you want to visit Walnut Grove, Minnesota, make Danish pastry apple bars, redecorate your Lincoln Park condo, or peruse ads for walk-in bathtubs, the answer is but a page-turn away.

Me: Do you want to look at the magazine? I know you’ll love it.
Boyfriend: Why? I don’t have any gourds that need preserving.
Me: Wait, you already read it?

If you need to know why the Midwest is awesome, besides my telling you so, the magazine has provided a helpful list. No, I don’t work for them; but they know where to find me. Nowhere near the Midwest, incidentally.

One of the great things about the Internet, since no one’s ever pointed this out, is its capacity for providing instant gratification: accurate or not, information is current and instantly available! This is how I like my gossip. It’s not really how I like my bills, but we take the good with the bad over here. In the spirit of being relevant, I’m going to dive into my favorite weekly summertime event, the Concerts in the Park series.

The last one is tomorrow—we made it just under the wire.

The series features our wonderful municipal band, which specializes in movie themes, the official songs of each branch of the U.S. military, and everything in between. I’ve been going for years—decades, actually. The band visits five parks, each one on a specific day of the week, for two months. I’m not going to lie: my park is super awesome, and Thursday is the best night. This need not be taken with a grain of salt.

The concerts bring together some of my least favorite things – picnics, socializing, and prolonged clean-up – and make them into something wholly enjoyable. The adults wander around with glasses of wine, feeling, if they’re anything like me, a little giddy from doing the most illegal thing most of us will ever have the guts to do. (“Alcohol is prohibited in city parks,” comes the ominous but ineffectual announcement each week. “Please be circumspect in your actions.”) The little kids run around with dogs, balls, plastic weaponry, and a wealth of other accessories unsuitable for a crowded place. And we eat.

Apparently, back before my siblings and I were born, my parents would make tasty pasta salads the night before a concert, tuck them into unstained Tupperware, and cruise on down to the park unencumbered by mountains of deck chairs, yards of picnic blankets, and place-settings for five. My, how things have changed!

These days, of course, we bring enough gear to see us through Coachella. Our menu, though much different from those halcyon pre-children days, has been consistent for the last few years: homemade submarine sandwiches, deviled eggs, chips, fruit, and brownies. My mom, who is a teacher, has long been stuck with almost all of the preparation because she gets home from summer school in time to, well, prepare. Needless to say, she was getting kind of sick of it. So we have progressed to the best possible kind of picnic food: purchased.

Tomorrow we will be curled up on our deck chairs and picnic blankets, drinking wine, eating fried chicken, antipasto, potato salad, and strawberries. And it will be, as always, wholly enjoyable. Anyone who’s bored can see how many Crate and Barrel picnic tables they can count from a sitting position; my record is nine.

I’ve been quite the jetsetter lately: first, Washington, D.C., then Nashville… Seriously, Hillary Clinton has nothing on me – except, I’m sure, a highly dedicated staff that keeps her blog churning merrily along as she reviews reports, eats peanuts, etc. My own dedicated staff (hi Mom and Dad!) was stuck with the always-glamorous tasks of shopping and cooking. They handled this with aplomb, quickly shattering any fantasies I’d entertained of my domestic indispensability. I think I’m still the only one in the house who knows how to use the ice-cream maker, and to this accomplishment I must now cling.

So anyway, I’m back. We’ve transitioned into summer, which, frankly, is a lot like the rest of the year, only with better tomatoes.

Extensive published sociological research (“magazines,” you might call it) suggests that people like to grill in the summer. Since conventional wisdom has never steered me wrong, I also like to grill in the summer – and I have had quite the grilling extravaganza over the last week! My concept of success, as it applies to cooking and many other things, is pretty liberal (i.e. no one was poisoned), but these meals could be considered successes even by more exacting standards. I’m looking at you Cook’s Illustrated!

Grilled Turkey Breast
This one started as a great idea, took a sudden turn for the truly awful, and then rose, phoenix-like, from the (literal?) ashes. Inspired by my “Best Make-Ahead Recipes” cookbook, I made a spicy, citrusy, tomato-y marinade recommended for poultry. I thought a large turkey breast would make for a more dramatic presentation than four small chicken breasts. Was I right, or was I right?

My first inkling that this was not my best laid plan came when I couldn’t find a single recipe for grilling a whole turkey breast in any of my cookbooks. Undeterred, I turned to the internet, that vessel of reliable information. “Preheat grill to high. Place the breast on the grill, skin-side down. Close cover and grill until golden brown and a crust has formed, about four to five minutes.” I’m paraphrasing. But watch: if I remove the words “close cover,” (a) it is no longer a paraphrase, and (b) I would not have had a blackened football sitting on the grill after that crucial “four to five minutes.”

All was not lost! Some enthusiastic scraping and sawing revealed a lovely brown, if still carcinogenic, exterior and surprisingly moist meat. My brother likened the remaining marinade – set aside at the start to serve with the meal – to Taco Bell hot sauce, and I think we can all agree that no higher praise could have been bestowed.

Hamburgers with Tomato Salad
This meal lacked the spectacle that made our previous entry so very thrilling, but I think reliability is an underrated virtue. Burgers are a mainstay at my house, and it was with caution that I stepped away from the beaten path this time around. For reasons long forgotten but, no doubt, completely valid, I always use ground sirloin, which dries out at the mere suggestion of heat. Switch to chuck, you suggest? Well, I just said I always use sirloin! What I suggest is this: mix in a handful grated cheddar cheese! It looks disgusting and sounds not at all original, but it was a revelation of epic, finickity-is-not-a-real-word proportion to me.

If you have suddenly found yourself with an unnervingly fruitful crop of tomatoes, only so many meals in a week, and coworkers who are nervous about produce that didn’t come from a store, have I got a recipe for you! I can hardly even call it a recipe: chop up some tomatoes and a seedless cucumber (which will still need to be seeded, naturally), slice half a red onion, and dice some feta. Add the salad dressing or vinaigrette of your choice, photograph, and post enjoy! I have yet to find a meal this didn’t compliment. Now, don’t go trying to find one – I haven’t thought about it that hard.

And finally, a gratuitous picture of my charming sister, who probably has not had time to garden since this photo was taken two months ago. Sweetie darling, if the doctor thing doesn’t work out, we’ll make you into a new-media superstar!

This is such a well-timed entry, since, by happy accident, I have a vegetarian in the house right now : my younger sister. Also in the house is my younger brother, and the two have, it seems to me, mutually exclusive tastes in dinner food. What an exciting challenge!

I probably shouldn’t have made my first menu so restaurant heavy, since it’s not how we usually eat. But let’s start with the exception, and then we’ll get to the rule.

Sunday: Homemade-ish pizza, salad
Monday: George’s Greek Cafe
Tuesday: Macaroni and cheese, salad
Wednesday: Leftover mac and cheese, salad (I’m sensing a trend.)
Thursday: Grilled stuffed portobello mushrooms, grilled zucchini
Friday: Super Mex take-out
Saturday: Up for grabs! By which I mean, I don’t know.

Notes on the week:
Sunday
Pizza dough and sauce were both from Trader Joe’s, which was miles easier than starting from scratch. We made three pizzas; this took considerable oven/rack coordination but yielded enough for five, with some leftovers. Terrified of a soggy crust (manifestation of general yeast-phobia), I used just a little smear of sauce, and this meagerness did not go unnoticed by my dining companions. Since the bottom crust was not lacking for crunch, next time I might (might) use more than a spoonful.

You don’t actually need any special equipment for pizza. If you’ll forgive my going all Alton-Brown-minimalist, the oiled back of a baking pan works fine. But special pizza equipment is just the best. I will mention that my boyfriend (who would probably prefer not to be mentioned) got me a pizza peel and stone a little while back; both were used with great success, particularly the peel, which gets bonus points for its unheard-of level of dough transfer accuracy and overall awesomeness.

Monday
Half-price wine night! Forgot to bring home the second half of the second bottle, not so surprisingly. The surprising part, really, is that the bottle was not finished.

Tuesday
My macaroni and cheese comes from a Martha Stewart recipe and includes tomatoes, which means tipping a few cupfuls of the plain mixture into a small baking dish for my brother, adding tomatoes to the pot of remaining mac and cheese, and then dumping all this into the larger, rest-of-the-family dish. I won’t lie: it’s a pain. I could be mean and make my brother pick around the tomatoes, but this is a concession I’ll make, if only to remind him of all my extra effort (failing to acknowledge that guilt is not his main source of motivation, as it is mine).

As an aside, I forgot to remove the pizza stone from the oven on Monday, so it was preheated to lava-hot by the time the mac and cheese needed to bake. Quick thinking girls that we are, my sister and I grabbed the oven mitts, extracted the stone, and whisked it outside to cool on the barbeque. And there it remains, possibly safe to touch by now.

Today
It feels abrupt to stop here without an analysis of the grilled portobellos, but we’ll save that for when Cook’s Illustrated comes calling. (Any day now!) I’ve made them more than a few times, to glowing-ish reviews; they have enough butter, parmesan, and breadcrumbs to keep even the mushroom-shy fairly happy. No one ever said vegetarian cooking had to be healthy!

After work: remove pizza stone from grill

My sister enjoys posing clipping rosemary in the garden.