No food today.

Hi. I just wanted to tell you that there would be no food talk today. I give you flowers instead. I wanted to describe to you the delicious pesto I made last night ( I love pesto, don't you?), but I can't. I can't bear to think about food today.
At about 3:30 am Andrew woke up not feeling well and at about 3:31 am I was frantically trying to find something for him to puke into. He had to settle for the bathroom sink, which I offered to clean when he was through as part of that old "in sickness and in health" promise I made. Photos of partially digested pasta. . . not fun to look at. Actually, hearing about it probably isn't that fun to read. Sorry. Should I delete that? No, you can handle it. Be back tomorrow. For now, I just sit and wait to see if I, too will be struck down. I don't want to be struck down, but it would be great to lose a couple of pounds before Paris.

$24.03 - - The Review

So as you saw yesterday, I made a really pretty little tasting plate for Andrew and I. Unfortunately, Andrew couldn't join me. I think it is because he saw the olives on the plate (file olives under "Food Andrew Hates."), but he said he was just really busy with work. Fine, so I guess I'll just have to drink both glasses of wine, and eat all of the olives. So I brought everything into the dining room and put the plate on the floor by the window to take a polaroid. After I took the polaroid, I sat down in front of the plate to wait for it to develop. I was planning on waiting to make sure that the photo came out ok, but then I started smelling all of the food and just dove right in. So there I sat on the floor, facing the wall, like a scolded little child, hovering over this plate of food worth $24.03. I'm sure it was a strange site.

The first thing that I realized about tasting stuff is that I seem to be much more critical about the food when I am serving it to myself. Make sense? Probably not. I'll explain. My first bite was a piece of cheese. I smelled it (hmmmmm? not wonderful) and then put a little piece on my tongue, and just let it sit there. I have absolutely no idea why I did that. But that is what I did. It didn't taste great, it was okay, nothing more, nothing less. It was creamy, yes, but a bit too tangy for my taste (kind of the "old shoe" cheese syndrome -- i just made that up ... that's not a real syndrome, but you know what I mean). I thought to myself, "I wouldn't buy that again. Would I? No, nope." Then it occurred to me; If I was at someone else's house, having a tasting or even at a fancy restaurant and this was part of a cheese plate, I may not diagnose it with "old shoe" syndrome. In fact, I would probably say something like, "Ooooooh. Uh huh. Now this is interesting." And I would proceed to eat several pieces of it, liking it more and more with each bite. So I guess I mean that it is somehow more difficult to be objective about the taste of food when you are serving it to yourself. Merely just something for you to think about if you decide to do something like this at home.

Now the olives were good. I especially liked the giant green cerignola olives. They were like eating a tiny piece of fruit. Really meaty and salty, but in a good way, because meaty and salty- - - not always good. The funny thing about olives is that they are a food I hated for as far back as I can remember. Maybe it's because I thought there were only two types; the green ones in the jar with the little red dot and the black ones that come in a can and were served on pizza (which i would pick off, removing half of the cheese in the process). In recent years, my eyes have been opened to a variety of olives, all of which have pits and none of which are served in cans. And now, I am happy to add picholine and cerignola to the list.

Oh. I guess I kind of skipped the crackers. Well, they're not just crackers, are they? They are crisps - - a highly evolved form of the cracker that always comes with a higher price tag. I would buy these again and again. So delicious. So flavorful, and damn if they didn't make the old shoe cheese taste good.

The wine. The mystery wine (sorry about that). I am new to wine tasting. I have been wine drinking for quite some time, and never realized that I was supposed to taste it, too. I still find the whole process quite intimidating. All of those "wine words", it's like an elite club I cannot join. I'm not actually sure that I want to join, because honestly, those "wine people" really bug the crap out of me. Nonetheless, the system does have it's value, and it is fun to appreciate what you drink. That being said, I can tell you that the wine was a really easy drink. Kind of like Bud Light or something (not sure that I am complimenting the wine). A bit watery, very light in flavor, but I still managed to finish both glasses in a record amount of time. Next time I am at whole foods, I'll make note of the wine, so that you can try it, too.

And now, the grand finale. The chocolate. The sweet, sweet little salty butter caramel filled butterflies. Oh, how I have patiently waited to eat you. And now. The time has come. And within seconds I will know how wonderful you are... Uh oh. I was wrong. The little butterfly was not what I thought. It was not delicious and the caramel that I thought would be buttery and salty and creamy (I kind of envisioned myself taking a bite and the caramel would fall out of my mouth onto my chin and I would carefully wipe it off with my finger and then put my finger in my mouth and ingest every last molecule of it). Well this was not the case. It was GELATINOUS. And it somehow reminded me of chocolate covered cherries. I hate chocolate covered cherries. Now don't get me wrong. I ate the whole thing and gave Andrew his (which he devoured in one bite, as I screamed "Wait, wait. No. Oh honey, you're supposed to taste it, not just inhale it). I just wouldn't recommend it. But I won't leave you empty handed. If you want amazing caramel chocolate truffles go here.

Now, I'm off to work on a new Drink of the Week, and laundry. Lots and lots of laundry.

PS. The photo is of my new tasting notebook and today's breakfast (melty ham, swiss and tomato on sourdough).

juice it up

one of my many christmas presents to myself was a juicer. proof positive that i was becoming a foodie even before i started this blog. don't people that juice seem superior? they do, don't they? i just wanted to be one of them. i bought this amazing cookbook last year that was recommended to me by a real foodie, a gourmet even, named val. the book is called "the food i love" and it is by an australian chef named neil perry. this book is gorgeous. the photography is amazing, the recipes range from simple to exotic (that is if you consider squid ink paella exotic) and it all starts with a page on juicing. no actual recipes (if you stick with this story, you will find that was a problem), just this, "my wife sam and i usually start the day with a fresh juice." they already sound superior, don't they? i can just imagine them in their amazing kitchen with all of their good kitchen stuff like $900 espresso machines, sub zero fridge packed with fresh organic produce, and a counter top with a hole cut out of it so you can swipe in your cut vegetables sending them down a chute and into a compost bin so you can pack your fridge with more fresh organic produce from your own amazing garden that you have in your gorgeous backyard. i digress. mr. perry continues, " it makes you feel healthy on the inside, for the very simple reason that it is so good for you. . . we vary the fruit and vegetables to reflect the season," plus they probably have to see what is growing in their compost rich soil filled sustainable garden i'm sure, "and that always keeps us looking for the next combination." i wish my husband and i did stuff like "look for the next combination" of fruits and vegetables for our morning juice. we don't. he is not a fan of juice, especially not pulpy juice. actually he has a long list of food aversions, but i'll save that for another time. so, you can kind of see the allure, can't you? the new year was coming. i wanted to be healthy, thin, happy, glamorous . . . juicing was definitely the answer.

carrot, beetroot (aka beets), apple, orange and ginger. that was the first of their favorite blends. I don’t have a vegetable garden, so i myself over to whole foods and threw down about 15 bucks for the ingredients minus the oranges, because we do, at least, have the most fruitful orange tree known to man right in our back yard (ha!!). I come home, carefully prep all of the ingredients and then unpack the juicer. this thing looks scary, and as it should. i mean it is going to take a carrot and pulverize it, and turn it into juice for superior people. i kind of felt like i should have some supervision, someone to call 911 when my hair gets caught in the juicer and half of my face is torn off, but no one was home, so i just went for it. i turned the motor on and was both frightened and impressed by its power. now here's the problem. how much of each ingredient do i put in? why can't their “favorite combinations” include quantities? i'll just work it out. i cut an enormous carrot in half and popped it down the feeding tube thing . . . Wow! I swear this thing is not a juicer, but instead some sort of molecular reassembler, cause it went from carrot to juice much quicker than one would think. working my way through the color wheel, i opted next for the orange, but when i read that i had to peel the thing first i omitted it. It would take too long; I didn’t have that kind of time. I wanted fresh juice and I wanted it now. i promptly moved to the beets, three of them, and isn’t the color of beet juice so beautiful? it would make the most amazing lipstick color. then a couple of apples, and then, what i think may have been my fatal flaw, a 3-inch piece of ginger. So there it was, my very first pitcher full of superior people juice. it did look healthy and beautiful and delicious, but you know when you go and get a facial and they hit you with steam, and exfoliate you and squeeze out the badness and then slather you in sweet smelling moisturizer and you feel so good, and you know, you just know that your skin must be glowing, you must look young, and all dewy and then you get that first glance in the mirror and instead your face looks like it has been run over by a truck carrying thousands of angry bees that escaped and then stung you after the truck ran you over . . . that's what this juice tasted like. just like that. So much build up, and then utter disgust. Disgusting, really, really disgusting. I tried to talk myself through it. Come on, jen, you spent a lot of money on this juicer. This is so healthy, so beautiful; this is what superior people drink in the morning. DRINK IT! So I did. I drank it. A little itty-bitty bit of it, then I put the rest of it in the fridge assuring myself that it would taste better once it was really cold.

4 days later I poured the juice down the drain. So if anyone has any good juicing recipes, I’m all ears.