Tabloid Portraits #1: Bret, LiLo & A Shout Out To Magazines.

This post has nothing to do with food. Zero. If you are a dedicated food reader only, go to the archives, or come back later.
I repeat, nothing about cooking here, except in the rather roundabout way where last night I had dinner simmering on the stove & was waiting for Owen to come home from work at the restaurant. 
Note: our kitchen table is currently (frequently) covered in trashy celebrity magazines, thanks both to my lovely co-worker who donates me hers & to my own personal difficulty in resisting the lure of the magazine rack at the 7-11. Also present on the EnD table: ample food magazines & piles of New Yorkers (family lifelong subscription). If you are old fashioned & still enjoy print media, please come on over to our house.
I was having a pleasant time listening to the Silver Jews & drinking wine & messing around in my sketchbook.
As I do, I got to drawing. Normally, I do this with my magazines, but sometimes I like to mix things up. 

"I'm Glad To Be Here/Living In Fear"

 "Wasted Again"

Maybe painting a portrait of Bret Michaels indicates that I have too much time on my hands. IDK. I did grow up in the 80's. I though Poison was pretty great when I was ten.The reality show/stardom thing does confuse me a bit though.
I have been known to fixate on celebrities, if they are the good ones. (I think I summed up what I mean by that here). But my great love of magazines & a print media isn't about that, really. I've always been an old school magazine reading kind of girl. Take that internet! I wish this blog was a zine (yup, I did attend high school in the early 90's.)
Magazines: you can cut them up, you can hang the pictures up on the wall, I find them way easier to draw from than the internet, you can read them in the bath or on the beach or on a boat or any other place you wouldn't bring a laptop, you can write in the margins, you can draw mustaches on people, you can photocopy them & use them for silkscreens, you can make wallpaper... What the hell can you do with an internet page, exactly.
Celebrity news means nothing to me if I can't involve scissors & glue somehow.
That's the collage artist in me, but that's also the reader. Of books with pages. & the general object-loving thrift storing hoarder that I am.
Here's to thanking Christ that we don't live in a completely virtual world yet.
I like it tangible & messy.
(Oh & thanks Amy for the Stars).

Remember DnD?

I know y’all do. Home of so much past brilliance.
So... last Friday night Jed of Drinking & Drawing fame made a special appearance back in Noho at the EnD kitchen. & Owen, in Jed's honor, made an insane meat concoction. How insane? Well, he started with sausages & bacon in a cast iron skillet, poured the grease into the deep fryer, ground the meat in our trusty meat grinder (a free pile find), battered them in cornmeal, & deep fried them in our trusty deep fryer (a $2 Hospice Shop find).

5.13.2011: Friday the 13th with Jed & Pabst. 

All accompanied by ample PBR, aka the official beer of DnD. (although we do enjoy others). There was dancing, there was the Deuce, there was an after-party, there were the bizarre snacks Jed brought us back from his recent trip to Korea, consumed at 4am. Sounds like DnD.
Since Owen & I have become tame, early rising, stay at home, dog owning people, this night was much needed & appreciated but required some recovery the next day.

5.14.2011: Rainy Saturday Night Dinner.

 Otherwise known as "Recovery Dinner." When you, well ok, I, am rather hungover from a 4am+ kind of night, & then get caught in the rain on a walk with my hound dog, I like to turn to my comfort foods. This time, mashed potatoes were on my mind. Post-rain storm & soaking wet, I mostly wanted to cuddle on the couch with Walty & read trashy novels all night, so I felt like throwing something delicious into my beloved red Le Creuset baking dish & leaving it in the oven for a while. Third source of inspiration? Being in dire need of a vegetable after last night's fried meat fest, also in need of a touch of flavor complexity.
Hence, Miso Chili Ginger Baked Tofu, Cheesy Garlic Mashed Potatoes, & Kale Sauted with Garlic & Cumin Seed.
It was pretty good. EnD, your source for hangover tips. Three cheers to the whole weekend. Jed, come visit again soon.
& Hey everyone, in case you were wondering, it is still raining here...

Asparagus City. Population: Lentil Soup.

What? Ok, I am taking liberties with my titles. The asparagus has nothing to do with lentil soup. Nothing at all.  Except for being part of my early morning random train of thought when I was first writing this post.
Maybe I have mentioned-I am ready to eat fresh food. I can really get into the whole winter thing-big heavy meat dishes roasted in the oven, ducks & lamb, pot roasts & whole chickens, curries, the "coming in from the cold Sunday dinner" food that one doesn’t even think about in August. Last year we were a lot better at preserving our garden food than ever before, so all winter there were also little bursts of summer goodness-canned salsa & tomato sauce, green tomato pickles, pickled jalapenos, homemade chili paste & habanero hot sauce.

But now it’s May & I want to taste different things. We are having a rainy spring week, so last night it was back to soup (curried red lentil) & coziness but even my taste in soup is changed as spring progresses- a little less meat (although by no means none! hells no!), more flavor, more brightness. I topped the lentil soup with fried ginger root, herbed goat chevre & arugula pesto, & daydreamed about my future thai basil patch in the garden & when that will be my garnish.

 5.16.2011: Red Lentil Soup.

 A few notes regarding this soup (as this is a food blog after all): Adding the arugula pesto was kind of a crazy idea, but we had some leftover from this meal. We keep ample homemade chicken stock on hand in the freezer (when I roast a chicken I always make stock-chicken fat is a terrible thing to waste), & I personally find that in lentil soup, a good chicken stock is essential. & the fried ginger root-well, I learned a few things from my more than ten years of subscribing to Martha Stewart Living & that lentil soup garnish was one of them. That & the fact that an immersion blender is nice to have on hand when making soup. Thank you, Martha.

So the "food grown in the ground outside relatively near where I live" season is only just beginning. What do we have? Well, here in the Pioneer Valley we do have local Hadley asparagus for a very brief, delightful season, & I realize that forgetting to give it a nod would be a terrible error.

Fresh asparagus is best super simple, so this is more of a celebration than a recipe. Olive oil, garlic, salt & pepper. That is all you need, well a good cast iron skillet helps too.
We had it over pappardelle noodles with cheese. We had it with a fried egg on top. We had it with pumpkin seeds thrown into the mix. We had it with grilled eggplant in a burrito made up from the burrito topping leftovers.

May 2011: Hadley Asparagus Season. 

 What else? The leftover lentil soup made a very good lunch. It is well after 9pm & I have yet to eat my own dinner tonight, so I should think about that. Walt prefers that we NOT eat vegetables, but we do anyway. I like spring rain & am not sick of it yet; I am however sick of people complaining about the rain. IT ALWAYS RAINS A LOT IN MAY HERE. Let it ago. At least the temperature is remaining steadily above 50. This date on various years marks the day of both my parents' birth & of my grandparents wedding anniversary. So May 17th is a pretty cool day.
Some miscellaneous thoughts from EnD. Hey, why have a blog if I can't share this stuff sometimes? Eat your asparagus.

And Life As We Know It Will Never Be The Same.

1.18.2010: The Great Chocolate Bacon Blue Cheese Burger Experiment.

Yup. That kind of says it all, doesn't it? Long story short, a drive home from work on a January night, past Burger King, OMG BURGERS, impulse trip to Stop & Shop for ground beef, come home to realize that the fridge happens to be full of free blue cheese from work & the fabulous Izaac's chocolate bacon (delivered to my register at work along with the OMFG chocolate parmesan). & in the freezer, some crappy frozen steak fries that I had recently bought on a whim. So....what did we do? Why, this.

Truly a life changing experience. Chocolate, bacon, cheese, red meat, combined in one bite. I'm gonna just leave you to contemplate that one.