Food, glorious food!

I cooked dinner tonight...wanted to try out one of the recipes in my foxy new cookbook (above) So I made Swiss steak--




Not sure why I was particularly compelled to make "Swiss Steak" I think I heard my Dad waxing nostalgic about how my mum used to make it and how grrrreat it was. Also, I like to dabble in ethnically diverse cuisines and Swiss food was a new challenge. Although, even after making this, I can't quite pinpoint what's all that Swiss about it---seems more Italianate than anything else. I think maybe it's the coating of the steak cubies in flour that's Swiss. Perhaps I shoulda done a whole theme night--Swiss Miss to drink, Swiss Cheese appetizers, imported Swiss chocolate for dessert.... Nawwww, that would be too class projecty. Anyways let me assure you, the steak did NOT look like the steak pictured. It's sort of a kitschy novelty cook book so any food pics in it are the kind of horrific food photography that prevailed in popular cookbooks from the 40s-70s. Anyways it looked good, smelled AMAZING, and tasted pretty yummy too. Of course my Dad had to be 100% candid in his appraisal-- "It's got a really good flavor even if it is a liiiittle bit tough.." And, of course I hafta zero right in on the latter part of this sentence. UGGH. "Constructive criticism" is damned overrated if you ask me. Give me flattery anyday!! Oh, and he went on to say "When your mother used to make this--Ohh!!-- you could cut it with a fork! So tender!" Well, shit, Pa, maybe you used to have sharper forks back in the early 70s. ORRR, maybe you just don't weild them utensils as forcibly as you did in your heyday.
OK sorry, that was brutal, I guess I am a smidge hypersensitive when it comes to my culinary masterworks being slighted. Honestly, the difference in texture is probably on account of my Mom using top round and my recipe calling for cubed chuck steak. CHUCK STEAK. Not sure what part of the moo-moo that comes from, but it just doesn't sound like a cut of meat that can be fork sliced.

In other food news, our office had started a Fat Tuesday tradition in Feb 2006 of having a king cake on Fat Tues. Well this year nobody realized that today was Fat Tues until late morning when Lisa said something. Actually, y'know it was LISA who initiated the king cake tradition last year...she shoulda had her shit together. Anyways it was fun last year, Kevin found the plastic baby in the cake and even though I TOLD him that it was a good luck talisman plastic baby, he pawned it off on me. I guess (according to my wikipedia crash course on king cakes) you can put any sort of trinket you like (the whole king cake tradition seems a little unstructured and too open to interpretation for my liking) but we had the muy pequeno bambino de plastico. I think that's the most popular trinket. The cake Lisa purchased last year was pretty decent-- this ring all iced in Mardi Gras colors WITH WEE PLASTIC BABE INCLUDED AT NO EXTRA COST!! If I recollect clearly, it tasted fairly shitty, but that is NOT what it's all about,folks. So anyways today I was grabbing some groceries on my lunch hour (Swiss Steak ingredients) and asked Lisa where she bought last year's cake and she told me Price Chopper. Now, I was intending to go to Shaw's (just down the road from work) and Price Chopper is across town. I figured, well, if it's something they sell in the Price Chopper store bakery, they probably offer them at the Shaw's bakery too. TRAGICALLY NOT SO!! But I was going to be bummed knowing it was Fat Tuesday and we let our fledgling king cake tradition just DIE. So I decided to "make do". I bought cream puffs and shoved a gummy bear into one of 'em. Pretty damned pathetic. But, just the same, I was very earnest about the whole ridiculous ritual-- I offered the cream puffs at my desk, so that I could supervise the puff selection and ensure that people were not checking them over for gummy bear insertion points and then choosing (or avoiding- depending on their attitude) the special puff. They had to be just grabbed without calculation or preinspection. I was insistent that thing be left entirely up to serendipity...

And so it was. Laurel wound up with the "baby"--she sure could use the good luck. She ate the "baby" and I told her this was not a good thing... I don't know how much of that good luck she'll be able to absorb, after all, stomach acid is pretty tough on good luck, also she will poop much of the good luck out. I have a half a bag of gummies left at my desk so I may give her a replacement. I don't know if she will be able to hang onto it as a Fat Tues souvenir though, that Laurel LOVES gummie bears...