03 May 2008

Small steps...

So, taking a leaf from Flylady and Mrs. Furious I've started to try to be a bit more coordinated in tidying, chores, and other life tasks.

In particular, I need to get used to (finally!) the fact that my refrigerator is too small, holds temperature poorly, that my freezer is tiny and clogs easily with ice, that I don't have a chest freezer, that my kitchen is smallish and overheats easily (so storing produce on the counter is short term) and that I have very little storage space and almost no counter space. The storage problem escalated this past weekend when we brought back the mini-vanload of boxes from my in-laws (almost all the rest of the food and drygoods products that came with our container last September) and started unpacking them.

Unlike Lynda, food delivery here seems to be generally terrible, starting with soup that is completely spilt by the time one receives it (lack of correct containers) and continuing through poorly spiced (compared to in restaurant) meals and scanty servings (compared to generous in restaurant portions) so I need to start making more meals and more "real" meals than I have been, or I will go insane.

To that effect, I have brought back many of my cookbooks and I am starting to make shopping lists and plan for meals because I need to recognizethat I will never have the things I need in house to make a specific recipe and I am just tired of one-pot sloppy meals.

So, yesterday I made Rosemary Chicken with Rice, an interesting recipe from The New Weight Watcher's Complete Cookbook which combines chicken, garlic, 1/4 c. of dijon mustard, carrots, 1 T of dried (or 2 of fresh) rosemary, carrots, pepper and 1/4 c. of orange marmalade (I only had grapefruit, so used that). It was very good and something I wouldn't have thrown together without using a cookbook. The girls had the left overs for dinner tonight.

Today I made baked macaroni and cheese with breadcrumb topping and it was great. Once again, I would never have thought to bake it withoout a friend mentioning his recipe for that in his apazine. And for dinner I made holishkes, or stuffed cabbage, from Marlena Spieler's The Jewish Heritage Cookbook . That was an interesting recipe, using cinnamon, white wine vinegar and sugar with the ingredients I am more familiar with from my family recipe. I prefer my mom's recipe though, which is more tomato-ey. This is the same book that I used for the charoseth recipe over Pesach.

Interestingly enough, a few days ago I made Knodel from a package and quite liked them and now I see that they are really a German variant on Kishke and Pierogies, a flour dumpling usually served with brisket. Luckily I won't need to use an actual animal casing these days if I want to try to make them myself.

Tomorrow I think I'm going to try Duisburg Bunny's homemade pickles (look in the comments)so I need to make a note as to what I want when we go to the Turkish Market (if it doesn't rain).

1 comment:

Lynda said...

Wow you are sure cooking up a storm. It took me a long time to adjust to just buying what I needed for the day in Germany - like my mother in law does... but they now have a freezer in the keller...thanks for the link, very kind! And Yes, my delivery is better than yours.