Tag: food

Happy St. Valentine’s Day

“>Magical Girl Concept for Dungeon Hunter Champions” by Xuexiang Zhang.

Happy St. Valentine’s Day. In case you don’t know, this holiday is in celebration of a Christian saint and martyr. The earliest hagiography has him martyred under Emperor Claudius II after he tried to convert the emperor to Christianity. A later hagiography asserts that he was executed specifically for marrying Christian couples, and another legend has him sending a love letter to his beloved, possibly a jailer’s daughter. Some of this may be fictional, but it’s possible that multiple Valentines were conflated, and it is also common for real, historal saints to accrete legendary material over time. His feast’s day is associated with romance in part because of a folk legend that birds mate on the fourteenth of February.

This Valentine’s Day has seen significant winter weather across much of the country. Here where I live, we were anticipating a bigger storm than we actually got. The predictions were so bad, my church encouraged parishioners to stay home this Sunday, which we dutifully did, though the actual “storm” turned out to be much milder than some considerably worse blizzards I’ve been out in when I lived farther north.

Staying home, however, gave me opportunity to cook brunch for my wife. She had recently used a bunch of egg whites in a recipe, so I decided to use the left-over yolks to make hollandaise sauce and serve eggs Benedict. It turned out reasonably well, though I don’t think this photo does it justice:

Eggs Benedict with potatoes O'Brien.

In any case, I am still working on preparations to produce volumes 1 and 2 of Jake and the Dynamo in the next few months. Being stuck at home does have its advantages. So stay tuned.

Spaghetti Night

I have a funny story. My wife is a nurse, and she works nights. The other day, when I was off work, I promised her that, before she left for the night shift, I would make her a spaghetti dinner.

I had ambitious plans including a complex, flavorful sauce, meatballs, and garlic bread. I briefly considered homemade noodles but ultimately decided not to be quite that ambitious.

The funny part is that I fell asleep in the middle of the day and woke up when it was time for my wife to go to work. I quickly roused her out of bed (she was running late) and had to send her off with a makeshift dinner.

Fortunately, she has a sense of humor, so this resulted in no particular problems to speak of. In the end, it was probably a good thing, because I finally made her the promised dinner on her first day off after a four-day run, and it took me considerably longer than I anticipated: I started about six, and with her help, got dinner made, eaten, and cleaned up at almost ten o’clock, when I’m writing this post.

Bowl full of spaghetti sauce.
We have a lot of spaghetti sauce.

Part of the reason I wanted to do this is because we got a food processor as a wedding gift, and I’ve been having fun with it. I made meatballs in which I hid oats, almonds, chia seeds, flaxseed, and the superfood blend I put in my morning protein shakes. In the sauce itself, I pureed almost the entire refrigerator’s worth of vegetables. I followed a recipe as a sort of suggestion rather than a rule as I ground up vine-ripened tomatoes, bell peppers, mushrooms, onions, and three bulbs [sic] of garlic, and mixed them with white wine, olive oil, and whatever spices I felt like. The result was quite flavorful and really good.

We ended up with a ton of this, which is great, because now we’re set for spaghetti for the next week or so.

The True History of Hawaiian Pizza

Featured image deliciously stolen from here.

I love me some Hawaiian pizza, which in my neck of the woods we call “Canadian bacon and pineapple.” I always have, and I always will. I grew up with it; it was what I ordered as a child whenever the family went out for pizza. And for most of my life, I have been blithely unaware that this is the most divisive of the pizza flavors. Continue reading “The True History of Hawaiian Pizza”