Bun In The Oven!

Oh it’s true!  These are heady days for TheChickenDumpling household because we are, indeed, having a baby!  Truth be told, we’re actually not sure yet if it will be a chicken or dumpling (we’re old-fashioned suckers for surprises that way), but if you’d like to check in on what’s cookin’ in the uh, other oven we’ve got around this house, Daniel has set up a whole new blog to keep interested friends and family updated on our kiddo’s progress into the outside world and beyond.  Thus begins the era of The Little Dumpling.

I’ll try to post over yonder as well, but I gotta tell you, my desire to write/cook has been WAY overtaken by my desire to sleep and eat soft serve ice cream.  It’s as if my appetite has already been taken over by the baby, because I not only have a wicked bad sweet tooth, but all I really want to eat is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,  fruit smoothies, cereal with milk,  grilled cheese, etc.  I’ve been trying to work myself into a enough of a frenzy to make this awesome looking fennel-crusted pork roast for about, oh, the full 5 1/2 months I’ve been pregnant, and I just can’t seem to do it.  Cheese making is out the window, because it’s just no fun if I can’t use raw milk, and I’d probably fall asleep face-down in a pot of curds halfway through anyway.  I don’t know how my habits will change when the kid finally does appear, but I’m hoping that my love of strong coffee, stiff drinks, and elaborate, savory meals will return.  At the moment, both my pants and my pantry appear to belong to a stranger.  A fat, simple-minded stranger at that. Yikes.  The awesomeness of our new lives is way better than all these piddly complaints may indicate by a long shot though, and I can fill you in on all the details in the new blog if you’d like to hear yet another pregnant woman make self-deprecating jokes and babble on about how amazing her kid is (the kid is amazing, trust me).

To inspire and motivate myself, I like to check in on Jo over at the Little Ffarm.  I have no idea how she has the energy to both farm and blog, but she’s kind of herculean in both efforts.  And right now, she’s knee-deep, literally, in the miracle of birth. It’s baby goat and lamb season!  She make James Herriot look like a total cream-puff.  And so, today I muster up some Jo-like energy…to…bake a cake.

It’s a big step, I know, back to my old self, but here goes.  I’ve dusted off another cookbook out of my way-back machine. Another important addition to my development as a cook and a person.  It’s the ASUCD published “Coffee House Cookbook” straight from the University of California at Davis’s grungy on-campus cafe.  And again, I’m not sure you could find this on on Ebay, since it was basically a Northern California rip-off (in style and substance) from Mollie Katzen’s classic beginner-hippie-chef  Moosewood Cookbook.   I got to Mollie’s book much later (in the dreaded vegetarian stage of my life), and realized how much The Coffee House Cookbook was based on her earlier work. It’s kind of how The Silver Palate is built out of Julia’s work, but less artfully.  In terms of self-development however, the Coffee House pretty much marked my young college years in ways no other cuisine would.  I began working there not for the love of food, but for sake of a crush I had who would always be behind the baked goods aisle. That and the need for beer money.  But oh how it opened my eyes!  The kids there were cool, they were in bands, they went to protests, they shared a lot of drugs, they were lesbians… and they could make a mean batch of cookies.  And just to clarify, this was the old coffeehouse we’re talking about.  The small one made out of wood where bands like REM would play to a crowd of 65 people, not the mega-plex airport waiting cafeteria that is on campus now. Word.  I took to the whole place reasonably well. I never caught my crush, but I got a tattoo and eventually took over the lunch shift, making soupy lasagnas and mildly successful chili for 300 people at a time.  To fully date myself yet again, picture me in there somewhere, wearing Dr. Martens, cut-off madras shorts, and an a-symetrical bob,  rabble-rousing the management because they wouldn’t  let us call a recently invented chocolate cake “Fear of a Black Planet Cake”. Oh yeah, people, it was like that.

Till next time….Bon Appetite!