Baleful Chickens and Other Things

The Buff Orpington is not amused, neither am I.

Since this post devolves fairly quickly into me ranting about people doing health food badly, I thought I'd mention up front that I passed a very pleasant Sunday with my Viking cousins and their chickens.  The chickens are charming and dopey until you look them in the face and realize that not only are they dinosaur relatives, but also they probably remember being tyrannosaurs in previous lives.  The chickens are biding their time.  (Mostly by making daft noises and begriming their living space, but still.)

The Viking fed me squash and kale soup that was so good I think I have added another brassica to the list of cabbage family members that I adore.  He also sent me home with a tub of homemade coconut butter cream that he made for the Little Viking's birthday cake.  I'm supposed to come up with something fantastic to do with it.  I did.

However, it's spreading the butter cream on peanut butter cookies (which are surpassingly moist and chewy several days after baking.  I may have to revise my initial assessment of the recipe as nothing more than inoffensive).   I think the Viking had more spectacular things in mind.  Against that, I am toying with ideas involving crab apple sauce.  (It's a little known fact that crab apples and coconuts are friends.  I'm not even making this up.  JVW's crab apple and coconut tart is objective verification of my assertion.)

Secondly,  ginger ale mk. 2 was so good that it is almost gone now.  Heating the ginger and adding lemon seem to be the things that ginger ale mk. 1 was missing.  I'll probably have a definitive recipe ready to go soon.

Now that the preludes are out of the way, I come to the reason that there is an angry dinosaur descendant headlining the blog tonight.

Today I ate an unpleasant thing.  It was a portobello mushroom cap "pizza" picked up in the produce section of my local Safeway. Now this is not an automatically bad idea.  I wouldn't have bought it if had seemed like an automatically bad idea.  I like mushrooms.  I like pizza.  I like food that attempts to be healthful.

I mention this because the experience of eating my dinner was entirely unpleasant.  Everything people, who don't like mushrooms, say about mushrooms was on display.  Grey, faintly rubbery, and ever so slightly funky like toe cheese.  I like mushrooms (I say this a second time, both for emphasis and also to reassure myself that I do still, in fact, like mushrooms) and this was not a happy vegetable and cheese stuffed mushroom.  What went wrong here?  

Firstly, a mismatch in expectations.  There was NO garlic.  I have made and served pizzas without garlic to people with garlic allergies.  It happens.  But if you label a food as somehow being of the pizza nature, unless it explicitly says so in large friendly, neon-yellow letters larger than fourteen point, it had darned well better have garlic.  Even pizza margherita which dispenses with pizza sauce, and can be pretty casual about the cheese has GARLIC.   (These yahoos had dispensed with pizza sauce too.  This was probably a mistake.)

Secondly, as I have ranted before, in an attempt to be healthy, the makers of health food often strip the fat from their foods (I had to buy yogurt today too -- do I even need to mention my disgust at there being no fat bearing yogurt on sale?).  In this case they skimped on the skim milk mozzarella and skipped the olive oil entirely.  Fat in excess is not all that great for you. You know what is excellent for you, and will kill you in excess?  Water.  Fat is necessary.  The human brain is mostly fat.  Human fertility is fat dependent.  Yes, folks, the survival of the human race depends on there being enough fat.  (Not that a badly executed portobello pizza will bring the human race to a screeching halt because of amenorrhea.  Probably.)  And the kind of fat that should have gone into this pitiable excuse for a dinner was good fat, namely olive oil.  Olive oil would have helped the mushroom caps to brown, carmelizing and sealing in juices that would have immeasurably improved the texture and the flavor.  

So this is what I would have done, and what I probably will do later this week or maybe next, because while the execution was poor, the idea was sound, and filling.  I'd probably skip the sausage in favor of more vegetables.  Maybe a roasted bell pepper.  More cheese. Definitely more cheese.  Maybe some sauteed onions. 

Miscellany

Four Elements: Earth. Joachim Beuckelaer

Yet another Flemish genre painting this week.  And it's Joachim Beuckelaer again -- the guy who blends religious sentiment with cabbage.  Lots and lots of cabbage.  This painting celebrates the fecundity of the earth, and in the background we can see Joseph leading a donkey bearing the pregnant Mary towards Bethlehem.  Symbolism is left as an exercise for the reader.  Meanwhile a man sitting by a well is apparently sad because no matter how many times he lowers the bucket, all he draws up is vegetables.  At least, that's the way it looks to me.  Possibly because I'm feverish. 

Yes, I am sick again.  I even stayed home from school in the hope that a break and sleep will mean that I arise tomorrow ready to take on the world.  I'm still hopeful, but the headache and fever routine are old.   And I'm trying to do homework anyway, so I don't get totally behind.  It's really hard to think straight when you have a fever.

I know most of you are nodding and saying, "Yeah, Sarah, duh."  But really, really hard, and then you start thinking about enchanted wells the only yield cabbage and discussing what passes for high fashion* this season with totally uninterested male friends who happen to be online in the wrong place at the wrong time.**

So all that being said have a couple of links that are vaguely food related, and I'll go take more advil before attempting to think more about logo design.

1) When I'm well enough to be trusted with experimental cooking again, rather than merely heating things up, I am making GINGER ALE.

2) Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap Reviews of strange premade food.  Mostly things that I would never buy, but frequently funny enough to keep me working on school projects despite the variants on lousy my body keeps devising.

With that, I'm off to take the aforementioned advil, because it's eighty degrees in here and I'm cold. 
  
 *Booooooring.  I suspect that articles about the "new refinement" and the "new romanticism" are just around the corner, and that they will be approximately the same articles that they wrote in 2002.   Except with maxidresses and eighties shoulder pads.  I live in one of the cooler enclaves on the West Coast, and everyone always looks amazing here, and almost nothing like anything in the rag I was reading.  Also, Michael Kors, I know it's a runway show, but not even that can explain slouchy hiking socks with platform sandals. Actually it can, but it's still hideous. 

**But not in anyway that actually makes sense (I'd been perusing a recent issue of Harper's Bazaar for research purposes).  me: Conclusion on fashion magazines-- high fashion models exist to provide a scaffold to turn fancy clothes into interesting planar geometric propositions. The Tall Guy: like, 2-dimensionality is important?
 me: Apparently clothes look better that way. It certainly does nothing for the models, who look terrible.