June 17, 2009

Times I’ve chided myself the last five+ weeks about not doing any posts: 368
Times this chiding led to any action: .5 (I started a post that is still sitting in my draft folder)
Keys on my computer keyboard that are presently on strike: 1 (the “g” key requires heavy amounts of pressure)

Huge news to report tonight. Hell is freezing over. Not only did I cook a non-pancake, non-cookie dinner last night because Brian had a long day at work and needed to get a biking workout in, but I did it again tonight. He came home from a 140km ride all around the valley to sesame roasted green beans and carrots and skirt steak marinated in an amazing combination of spices I picked up in Morocco last week. I felt downright domestic. Scary.

So I'm not going to be a food photographer anytime soon, but evidently I can do things in the kitchen other than baking.

So I'm not going to be a food photographer anytime soon, but evidently I can do things in the kitchen other than baking.

I followed a basic recipe from Recipezarr.com, but tweaked it in ways I can’t divulge without killing you. I can tell you that I am generally heavy-handed with ginger though.

And the marinade for the skirt steak! I have never winged a non-baked good as much as I did this. A long squeeze of dijon mustard. A generous drizzle of olive oil. A heaping teaspoonful of cumin. An even larger spoonful of my new favorite spice mix ever, ras el hanout. Salt. Pepper. Water to thin it out. And perhaps a few other things. By this point of the process I was grabbing random bags of spices from the cupboard about the stove like they were the last Reese’s peanut butter cups in the world. It could have been a disaster. But it was delicious. Of course the only way to celebrate was to make a batch of cookie dough. And, tomorrow, transform some of into actual cookies.