Fish on Fire

I love cooking shows.  I love the brainy ones that actually teach the in's and out's of cooking like Good Eats, America's Test Kitchen, and Barbecue University.  I like contests of skill, like Top Chef, Iron Chef, and Chopped.  I even like sensationalized "reality" cooking like Hell's Kitchen.  But there is one show I just can't get into.

Man Vs. Food.

Quick and Easy Banana Ginger Oatmeal

Last weekend, I made Ginger Spice Brownies.  Even though I started from an old Nestle' recipe, I spent a lot of time fine tuning and worrying about the flavors I was creating.  I was going out of my way to try and make something that could be appreciated, both by anyone who was reading this blog, and by Mouse, who had asked me to combine brownies and ginger in the first place. 

This is not that blog.  While I'm sure I will approach the next thing I bring you with the same level of detail as I paid my brownies, this is a story of throwing things together, and being pleasantly surprised with the results. 

Ginger Spice Brownies

Lately, my mind has been on health. Diabetes has affected both mine and my wife's families, and as we put our twenties behind us, it's clear that we aren't in the best of shape either. In addition, while looking at innovative kid's food on Macheesmo, I followed a link in the comments to another blog about the deplorable conditions of school lunches; more links followed, and soon I was watching the entire first season of "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" on Youtube. I'd missed the show when it came out initially, because it was advertised as a companion to the cloying, in-your-face inspiration porn that is "Extreme Make-Over: Home Additon." While sometimes I find that "Food Revolution" does get a bit heavy handed with the importance of what they are doing, Jamie Oliver has a message I can get behind. It also helps that he's not this guy:

Bar Gernika (Review)

I've been broke enough long enough that I feel self concious when people offer to give me things, but that being said I'm only human, and being able to turn down a free meal is a talent I don't have. Such was the case Saturday morning. Wife and I had been out hitting the yard sales, with Boy reading his comics irritably in the back of the car, but our end destination was my Mother-in-law's house, where Grandpa intended to take Boy to an airshow in Nampa. Wife and I had intended to return to the sales, but soon she was helping her mother assemble a file organizer kind of like this one, and I was drooling over a Pampered Chef catalog, admiring Himilayan salt and knives that presumably don't suck.

By the time we were finished, we didn't really have time to do much but eat lunch before visiting our friend in the hospital. Not wanting to go home, we contemplated having lunch at Mother-in-law's, before realizing that anything worthy of our efforts would take longer than we had. I had the feeling one of us was seconds away from putting up the white flag of surrender to Top Ramen, when MIL said the magic words. "I'll spring for lunch."

Carmel Apple Bread Pudding (Recipe)

Every summer it seems, we wind up having guests who for all intents and purposes live with us. While our refrigerator contains enough food for myself, the wife, and the kids to get by it isn't quite set up to take on additional comers, and given that most of our friends are for lack of a better word "hippies" the budget doesn't expand much with their arrival. Fortunately many local churches offer food boxes for those without an income, and while the merit of giving said food boxes to traveling road kids is probably debatable, my family and I certainly aren't going to turn up our noses at incoming food, no matter its origin.