Sick Day

Uuuuuuuuggggghhh I woke up maybe 30-40 times last night with a seriously sore throat. I didn’t want to get up to get a glass of water because whenever I leave the room it wakes Megan up. Finally at about 6:15 in the morning I had to. All day I’ve been feeling sick sick sick!

So I got almost nothing done today. The barest bit of studying got done but even that flew right out of my head. I didn’t buy tires today because: A) I really didn’t want to get up off the couch all day and B) Megan needs new tires as well so we might do that together. I did make it out to the grocery store however. Dinner tonight was chicken breasts done on the stove top simply in olive oil, salt, pepper, and rosemary. On the side we did sweet potatoes, carrots in dill (stole that from my mother), and green beans. Very satisfactory, not much effort.

While at the grocery store I found myself eyeballing the bottom round and thinking about doing another beef stew. There are a couple of variations in the book that I thought sounded very tasty so I might try one. Overall I have to say that my new cookbook has really impressed me.

The cookbook I have been using is called “Cooking Know-How” by Mark Scarbrough and Bruce Weinstein. It’s phenomenal. The book breaks down every step of every recipe. For the beef stew recipe each step takes up half a page to a page. It starts with describing how using different fats will effect the overall flavor profile of your stew. After the 5 pages or so of directions there are two pages of recipes. They are set up in a spreadsheet format that is very easy to read even with four recipes to a page! Once I knew what I was doing on a recipe I could just use the last page and flip to each specific step if I had a question about something.

I was so impressed by this cookbook I googled the authors and found out that they have a blog of their own! It’s http://www.realfoodhascurves.com/. I thought that was an extremely cute title. I saw that there was a little tool for sending a note to the authors and wrote up a quick paragraph telling them how much I enjoyed the book. Amazingly enough Mark responded to me within half an hour and was SUPER nice. He even asked me to “Let me know what else you cook from the book. And if you

ever take a digital photo of one of those dishes, send it to my real address above and I'll be so happy to post it on the blog along with your notions on how to customize it to your taste.”

I have taken photos with my iPhone of things I have cooked before, but I think will do so with my regular camera more now to post here. Maybe the next thing will be another beef stew, who knows?

One other thing I would like to cook is a large roasted meat. I’m thinking of a leg of lamb or a standing rib roast. The problem there is that the ingredients are a little pricier and it is a good bit of food. I don’t know how I feel about having company over for a first experiment with a recipe.