Oh Midwestern Winter

Oh Midwestern winter, you do nothing for my photo skillz.

Here we have Smokin' Red Beans and Rice from the pressure cooker. It was a good dish, altho' the beans were a tad underdone. It seems like every time I make something in the pressure cooker, one aspect of the dish is off. If it's not the beans, it's the rice, if the rice is done, then the beans are a little, shall we say, al dente. Although I did have fun the other day putting in 8 C of chopped winter root veggies and pressure cooking them and when I opened the lid, ta dah! they were, like, 1/4 of their former mass.

here's the Smokin' Red Beans and Rice recipe...

3/4 C red beans, soaked overnight
3 T veg oil
2 garlic cloves, sliced
1 large red pepper, diced (I just used some frozen roasted red pepper I had in the freezer 'cause I'm thrifty like that)
1 C Minute Rice
1 can diced tomatoes
1 3/4 C veg broth
1 t thyme
1 t adobo in sauce

Saute garlic, add everything else. Bring that sucker up to pressure, then keep it at pressure for 10m (next time I'll try 15m see; underdone beans). Allow pressure to drop naturally. Add salt and tabasco sauce as needed.

I will really try this one again, because it's! all! in! one! pot! so, it's almost like a casserole, and you know how much I like my casseroles, or as they say here in Minnesota, hotdish.

On the reading front, well, to my shame I am still working through Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. I cannot believe I have been reduced to reading such dreck. It is, however, great for just reading a few pages right before bed and not getting hugely engrossed in. Man, I should be reading Murakami or something. Geez.

Ah, little blog, how I have neglected thee...

Ah, little blog, how I have neglected thee...

was it the two year old, who, every time I sat down at the computer, wanted to climb up into my lap, severely interfering with my typing?

was it the uninspired 'get-'er-done-quick' meals?

was it a tad too much of volume after volume of 'in a series' sci fi/fantasy?

Who can say?


The above picture is one meal that stands out in the desert of pasta + sauce + veg/rice + sauce + veg that has been the modus operandi around here as of late...

I won't post the particulars, but it was penne pasta, glued together with a fake cheeze sauce, tediously vertically aligned in a spring form pan and baked, topped with sauce and fake mozzerella cheeze and sprinkled with dried parsley.

truly epic.

perhaps if I had used, you know, the flat ended kind of pasta, what's that called? instead of one that was cut on the diagonal. But who knows?

and what of all the reading that has surely transpired during this long blog drought? Well, the one that stands out was "Ship of Destiny" by Robin Hobb (yay!, a woman writer!), the last in a series 'The Liveship Traders' which I began, in my mind, to call 'Ship of Density' because, lo, truly, it took. me. forever. to finish. Bedtime would roll around and I'd think to myself, "Better get to reading 'ship of density'!".

I read the Harry Potter series somewhere in there and loved it.

Well, folks, that's all I've got for now, but I will try posting more often, especially as a)I'm still reading and b)I got a pressure cooker for Christmas and I'm inspired to cook again.