Moodiness, Music and Food

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday) I was feeling sort of moody: disconnected and blue. Sometimes I get that way, when the imminent end of the weekend sneaks up on me. Makes me sad. There’s never enough weekend, between the fun stuff I want to do, the other stuff I wanted to do, the stuff I’ve been promising myself I’ll get to sometime soon, and the stuff I just have to do to keep the house from being a wreck and clean clothing in the closet.

My solution to this malaise is cooking for at least 2 hours. I often try to cook enough for about 5 nights of food.  When it’s done I feel better from the soothing activity of puttering in the kitchen, and I’ve accomplished something very real that will make my life easier for several days.  Plus I get to see a smile on Jeff’s face when he tastes what I’ve come up with and spend time with Audrey and Callie, both of whom camp out to see what I might do and if there’s anything for them.

I have a pattern.

• Long playlist of music and my kitchen speakers. I fire up an iTunes Genius playlist, perhaps centered on a Kings of Convenience song or one of the Frequent Flyer compilations, maybe Barcelona.
• My folder of recipes to be tried.  In a vain attempt to actually corral my recipe collection, I keep a folder of stuff that I’d like to try, or things I’d like to make a vegetarian version of.
• These shoes.  These are very silly-looking, but Mario Batali is right about Crocs: excellent for cooking.  I used to need to curtail my cooking to about 45 minutes, but my Croc knockoffs ($12!) mean I can be on my feet for 2 1/2 hours and just be a little footsore. Lovely!

Yesterday’s menu:

1. New recipe: Warm Butternut Squash and Chickpea Salad with Lemon-Tahini Dressing. This is a wonderful, happy, delicious recipe I procured from the Smitten Kitchen site. I was lucky enough to have a Meyer lemon for the dressing. But even if I hadn’t, this is a winner of a recipe. It is so delicious, I can’t explain, but if you come to my house I’ll make it for you and you can see for yourself.
2. Old Standby: White Chili and mexican cornbread.  A simple staple I’ve talked about before, but now made vegetarian.  I’m so familiar with chili varieties that I find it to be something I can easily throw in a pot without thinking.  This kind has black beans and white beans of some sort and is flavored with chipotle and hatch chilis.  I think chili is best when it cleans out your sinuses and makes you sweat.  I threw it together and put it in the refrigerator for slow-cooking today. It was MMM!
3. New recipe: Cheesy sweet potato pancakes.  Epicurious calls them “crisps” but I didn’t flatten them that much, and next time I’ll just make them into regular latkes and add a bit more flavoring and more interesting cheese.  They’re pretty good.  I think sweet potatoes are an overly-maligned starch, unfortunately associated with that eminently-Southern-but-disgusting marshmallow recipe that no one actually seems to like (forgive me if you’re that person).
4. New recipe: So I went completely overboard while shredding sweet potatoes. My Christmas brought a mandoline and a food processor to me (score!), both of which I’m being VERY careful with so as not to damage myself. Thing is, that 14-cup processor can shred five large sweet potatoes in under five minutes, and did. I didn’t want that many latkes. So I found another creative idea with Sweet Potato and Goat Cheese Muffins to use the rest of my shreds. Nice!

Do I have many pictures?  Nope.  I was just cookin’. And tastin’. Cooking is the best.