You Know What?

I haven't blogged in...wow, a really long time. There are multiple reasons for this: in my family we have three birthdays between 10/29 and Thanksgiving. And then we have Thanksgiving. And then we have Christmas. It's pretty crazy at my house from the week before Halloween until New Year's.

So I must offer my sincere apologies and promise that I'll try to put something up between now and Christmas (I have a little dessert turnover that I took to Thanksgiving that's another of the "blank slate" type of offerings).

And maybe I'll muse on the various Christmas menus that we have coming up.

I'll be back!

Prolonged Absence!

Lawsy, I've been so remiss! I have a very good reason, however: I just started a brand new job, and you know how that is. First few weeks you have to actually be productive, prove yourself, learn everyone's name, figure out where the ladies room is. Stuff like that. Also, the computer I used to use for blogging belonged to my old company, which means I've been effectively without a decent computer to compose on and use for picture storage.

Now that I'm settling in, I promise to get back to posting more regularly. I've come to realize that I adore Fall and Winter vegetables even more than I like the Spring/Summer lot. Fresh tomatoes are great, but somehow I find myself much more excited about cabbage, cauliflower, endive, fennel, leeks, and butternut squash. I don't understand it, but I'm going with it. So far this month I've made:

• Oven roasted fennel
• Cauliflower gratin
• Butternut squash gratin
• Swiss chard gratin (yes, E, again)
• Sauteed cabbage with oven roasted potatoes, cream, and Gruyere cheese

Every one of them was outstanding, and now that I'm resolving not to be such a blog slacker, I'll get start taking pictures of them and posting the recipes.

Lame: Why I Haven't Posted in Awhile

So I received a politely worded complaint (Molly) that I hadn't posted anything and that perhaps the pea soup had lost the allure and glamour that it had a week or so ago.

Well, yes. Here's what happened.

I tried to make some Jam Thumbprint Cookies from a Shaker cookbook I have. I don't know if the Shakers were just more talented makers of Jam Thumbprint Cookies than I am, or if the recipe is a total sham or what, because these were a complete flop. They started out looking quite promising (as you can see), but after I baked them, the cookies refused to hold up their end of the bargain and contain the jam at all, and the jam melted everywhere and all I can say is thank God I used a Silpat, because everything came right off with no problem.

So I need to try these again (because they had awesome flavor and if I can just get the darned jam to stay in the darned cookie, we'll be good to go), and I need to write up some nice peanut butter cookies I made last week and I promise that I'll get a few things up here this week and next for your viewing pleasure.

I'm going on vacation for a couple of days this coming week so while I may not be able to post a lot, the hope is I'll be able to cook a lot and have something to post. Sometimes I think I'd have been better off starting a political blog; at least those write ups just depend on other people doing something and me forming my opinion of their behavior. Then again, that would involve my having to follow politics closely, which would probably cause me to start drooling and/or fall into a comatose state because I personally find politics to be stupefyingly boring. Food is way more interesting. And really, if all the politicians in the world were to disappear, would we continue to exist? What if all the food in the world were to disappear? See? So we can clearly deduce which is more important.

With that, I'm off the to the farmer's market!