Tag: dinner

Announcement Here

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I know how much you all love Marigold, and I get it, you are starting to wonder- where is the food?  You used to post so much concerning this wonderful topic!  Get a glass of wine in this girl and she literally never shuts up about it!

Well my dedicated readers, I have heard you.  My food-loving fiends, I have not forgotten about you.  My ever hungry audience curious for more from this mastercraft of the whimsical, I am not ignoring you.

I am tickled to announce that a new food blog has already been born.  Marigold has a sister, and it is all about cooking!  While still under construction, this blog is more than a concept, it is a metaphorical location.

Stay tuned, and stay hungry.

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A Good Day To Eat

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So many tasty things went into my mouth today, and the ironic thing is, that this is me trying very hard to eat healthy, to get ready for summer by watching the foods I consume.

Breakfast:  Green Curry Soup.  Yeah that’s right, green curry soup.  No it was not leftovers, I purposefully cooked that this morning for no other reason than that is what I wanted.  I like soup for breakfast, its hot and satisfying. If you have stock on hand, which I do because I work in a commercial kitchen and there is always no less than 12 quarts lying about, and you keep it veg (or use quick cooking meats like chicken and/or bacon), the time commitment is minimal.  Chop some veg, sauté in butter, and the spice, the stock, coconut, cook until the potatoes are done, about 20 min.  In that time you make a list, set up you station, then you are ready to sip down as much soup as you like while starting out the day.

Lunch:  Family style served at the restaurant for the staff.  Today’s lunch included kale salad with poblano buttermilk dressing, radishes and pumpkin seeds, tomato soup, mashed potatoes and chicken with gravy.

Dinner: a late night dinner that used many leftover ingredients in the fridge.  Arugula salad with strawberries (going bad, mind as well mince them up) with olives and crushed cashews, dressed in fresh lemon and olive oil.  Pan fried flounder (in the freezer, wild caught from Aldi) topped with a sauce made from onion, cumin, tomatoes, mushrooms, and coconut cream.

Today was a good day.  Its times like this that I look forward to tomorrow, and all the deliciousness it holds.

Good Morning America

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With global trade accessible at our fingertips, quick and nationally available shipping, and affordable and lightweight tools, there is just about nothing in the culinary world that we cannot produce in our own homes or in community of restaurants.   Now with Amazon now and Google Express you can probably get that any ingredient or tool delivered right into your hands in less than an hour.  Talk about modern convenience, remember when the only delivery was pizza?  Talk about being spoiled.  On top of this access to endless ingredients and a million handy tools to aid in the processing of said ingredients, there is a modern and easy to use instruction book also at your fingertips, the all-knowing oracle.  You can find any recipe and there is a good chance that there is a YouTube instructional video.

Out of like a zillion possibilities, how come Americans are so determined to eat the blandest food with the longest possible shelf life?  I am talking about mac and cheese, dried pasta and jar marinara sauce, white bread with bologna and mustard, canned spaghetti O’s, canned soup, frozen TV dinners, vacuumed sealed meats.  Not only is this diet monotone in taste and excitement, it is completely devoid of nutrition, life sustaining energy, not resembling anything that was ever alive, all the vitamins artificially forced back in.  Eating good makes you feel good, and feeling good is pretty much the goal for everyone’s life.

We are spoiled people living in a spoiled society.  We have been given the world and this is what we do with it: eat cold wraps from 7/11, buy previously frozen food that the grocery store has reheated for you, satisfy that deep and eternal hunger with a blank white starch while we mindlessly watch TV.

It is time that we wake up and smell the fresh fruit.  We are missing out on one of the biggest joys in this circus we call life with these poorly made dinner decisions.

Dinner, easy and semi quick.

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Butter Chicken Comfort Dinner!

This is the way-about for making a delicious Indian comfort food in an electric pressure cooker.  This machine is amazing.  You plug it in, set a time, push a button, and walk away.  That is it. In an hour you have a delicious dinner that was so easy it leaves you guessing at why so many people eat out all the time.

A Marigold style recipe, which is basically a list of ingredients and steps.  How much of everything to add?  Use your intuition, your brain, and most importantly your tongue.  Don’t follow a list of items blinding, taste everything as you go along, and fit the recipe to your desire.

1.5 pounds of chicken thighs, marinated in 1 cup/ two large spoonful of tangy yogurt, a couple squirts of lemon juice, a dash of garam Masala, cumin, turmeric salt, and pepper. Like 2 teaspoons of each. Two cloves of grated garlic and a knob of ginger.

Mix together and marinate at room temperature or overnight.  How long you ask, up to a couple of days, or as quickly as two drinks can allow.  Cooking is about looking forward to the end product, so marinate yourself and get distracted by something inspirational while the chicken does its resting.

We are going to cook the chicken in an electric pressure cooker, which diminishes cooking time so dramatically, that you can take the time for your chicken thighs to tenderize.  You can always opt to braise on the stove, but you are going to added two hours to the process.  If you marinate ahead, or have the whole evening at your leisure, this is definitely an equally viable option.  But if you are like me, and it is already 8 by the time you get back from the store, modern pressure cooking is the way to go for the day.

Two drinks later, or an hour:  Put the chicken and the marinate into the magical machine.  Add a can of crushed tomatoes, a can of coconut milk or cream, 1-2 sweet potatoes, an onion, a large spoonful of nut butter (I prefer cashew, use what you will), and a stick of butter.  Set that timer button for 10 minutes and let the machine do its thing.

Finish with cilantro, and a slash of lime, enjoy thoroughly.

Olfactory desires and health.

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I love tacos to death do us part.  If I were to have a last meal, it would be tacos and tequila, hands down, maracas shaking, for sure.

Paleo tacos.  Shredded green plantain. Soak it is salt water, the fry like tiny hash browns.  It is crispy and tastes like sweet corn.  The smell is even reminiscent of the great corn tortilla.  Which says a lot because the smell of corn tortilla cooking and charring slightly is my favorite smell of all time.

What’s your favorite smell?

Eating in America Sucks #1

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Reason number 1: Grocery Shopping.

I am well versed in the art, efficiency, #foodlife, #cheflife, convenience of grocery shopping.  I am basically an all around bad-ass when it comes to grocery shopping, saving money, feeding everyone, being amazing in my personal eating life.  Extracurricular duties consist of bagging and personal transport of product to the house, non-conditional of stairs involved or personal weight limit. I am fortunate to live in a neighborhood where I have an extensive access to ethic and individually owned stores.  But, alas, jewel exists and you do frequent it.  And when you do, you remember…

Food here sucks.  This is one of my many installments “Eating in America Sucks.”

Today’s lesson: Potato, The Lost Staple

Seriously the only options for starchy veg at the Jewel-Osco is the potato.  This classification is further limited to seriously 4 varieties under the exquisite umbrella of potato.  Idaho, Grade B Red, Sweet Potato, Mixed Medley Of Very Small Potato Resembling Thing.

That classic baking potato, the Idaho.  The quintessential Midwestern mashed, the Irish Racism Potato, Idaho no You Da Hoe.  But like honestly, it is the most boring kind of potato ever.  Do no get me wrong, I love, love this potato, but this is number one boring.  More bland than a potato.  Get it?

Moving on to grade B potato.  This is like that golf ball sized red potato, that small red apple resembling thing,  that tastes subtly sweet with a delicately creamy texture.  The grade B red potato is like that, but a step down.  It is larger and it’s silky taste has been genetically modified into the semblance of the hoe from Idaho.

Sweet potato is great but that is the old stand by.  I had sweet potato yesterday.  I came to the store hungry and wanting something slightly different that the same thing I eat everyday.  Been there, done that sweet thing.

Alright are you bored yet? Drink some coffee because this dissertation on the cooking grade potato found at the chain, corporate grocery store in not yet over. Rounding up our potato misadventure is that small, almost rotten bag of medley potatoes that are you last choice, your life saver, the possible one!  First of all, the potatoes are so small that there is no way the potato had time to develop any flavor.  It looks like it would taste like a green strawberry.  Secondly, this potato is too tiny to have any flesh beneath the circumference of the skin’s orbit.  The skin makes up the just about the entirety of the miniature potato.  I am not entirely certain, but I do not think that the peel is commonly preferred as the favorite part of the potato.  In fact, I think that it is common practice in the USA to peel the potato and throw the outermost layer away.  Garbage.  Since most potatoes are peeled, and most peels are garbage, the fate of our skin potato is, how shall we say? Compromised? Delicate? Uncertain? Not me of course, I like the skin, but I still do not want a potato consisting mostly of skin.

Yeah that’s it.  Those are the only potatoes offered, sorry for the lack luster list.  Out of the 5,oo0 cultivated variety of potatoes agriculturally grown, our most influential food retailer offers up a humbling 4. (Seriously 5,000, ask Wikipedia). OMG boring.  But really more than uninspiring it is insulting.  Dear lord I am not paying $3 a pound for a shitty baking potato.  The Tiny Skin Potato Medley of Sorrows is a dismaying $4 a bag.  Are you out of your mind??

Anyway, no other options for a starch element to add tonight’s dinner.  There were no parsnips, turnips, plantains, god forbid a celery root, or rutabaga.  What the hell do you do with that?   I dunno, ask the damn Oracle and use it in place of the uniformly bland white guy.

I must imagine how foreigners and visitors and immigrants and travelers must feel.  Do they feel bad for us?  I mean if they do I understand.  I am an American and have lived exclusively in the Midwest and I still feel like I am missing out.  Missing out on variety. Missing out on freshness.  Missing out on spontaneity.