Diary of a divorcee 

Piroshky

Last night's cooking adventure was piroshky, which if you haven't had, are lovely stuffed Russian buns. Well, I could talk more about lovely Russian buns but instead I will keep with cooking. I used a recipe from Please To The Table, and made three types of filling: cabbage, potato, and fake beef. My eight year old helped roll and fill them, and we made many variations of filling mixes.

They turned out well. The egg wash made them turn a lovely golden brown, and they got rave reviews from my 8 year old, who ate many of them, and then some more as a snack.

Now both girls are back with their mother, who left some M&M cookies she made as an offering of joy. Usually her cookies are excellent, but these are way over cooked. So i can feel a little bit of pleasure from that as well, especially as she managed to make sure I knew that I am a horrible person.

I might make another soup tonight. I have cabbage and beets and carrots in the fridge, so I might try borscht again, this time from the Please To The Table book.

Apple Pie

I recently bought a new dessert cookbook that was recommended at the local book store: Caprial's Desserts

I started off by baking their Pear Pie, since I had some nice organic pears from the market basket. I mixed in some Granny Smith apples to give it a slightly different flavor. Ended up with a very tall pie, overflowing like in a nice dessert restaurant, and made with *lots* of butter.

Was pretty good. Brought it into work where it got decent reviews.

Meanwhile, just bought another Russian cookbook. For this weekend I will either make a shephards pie of sorts or maybe try my hand at piroshky. Not sure. Of course, will start of with some simple pasta for the kids I'm sure.

I was going to go to bed early tonight and catch up on sleep. But, I ended up helping a friend with her website, staring at various things on eBay, and just feeling cold and lonely. Well, really more cold than lonely. Had some orange juice with gray goose in it. Nice stuff of course. A mix of vitamins and vegetable juice :)

Anyway, doesn't anyone want to send me some nice sexy email? Their nude photos? A sports car?

Bialy's and Carrots

Well, the dough still wasn't right. Not enough added gluten and too much of a whole wheat flavor. Rather than try endless variations, I bought some official high gluten flour, as the recipe calls for. It should arrive in a week or so I hope. If I need more, I'll call a bagel store, since it was $3 for the flour and $7 for the shipping.

This morning, inspired by multicolored carrots, I cooked three types of carrot soup: a curried orange soup, and tomato base & red carrot soup, and a potato/milk/white carrot soup. Each with a unique flavor. Sweetie hated the curried soup. We'll see how the others fare tomorrow. They were, at least, pretty.

Right now I'm making raspberry ice cream for her, and a fresh sweet pepper and feta salad.

The kids are coming again soon, and I am thinking of making a shephard's pie for then.

Bialy do over

Well, after consulting with my mother, I decided that I had made them with 100% gluten instead of high gluten. Since the local store doesn't carry high gluten flour, I bought the highest gluten flour they carried (King Arthur) and mixed in Bob's pure gluten. The mix has a very different consistency. Checking the web, I find that there are all types of variations as to proportions of bread flour, normal flour, gluten, etc. I could have put in a bit more gluten than I did, but we will see how this batch turns out. They should certainly taste more like something made out of dough.

Meanwhile, work is an endless source of frustration. I would prefer to be a full time artist. Unfortunately, this country doesn't seem to be very supportive of artists, and it isn't something I can pull off yet.

Brought flowers as a surprise to my sweetie. She will discover them tomorrow morning. And if these bialy work out, well I will bring one too. The last set are, sadly, in the trash.

Bailys

Today I attempted to make bialys, using a recipe from a lovely cookbook called Artisan Baking. This recipe calls for high gluten flour, which I've never used before. Not only is it very expensive, but it is very strange. After mixing the dough in a food processor (a mixer isn't strong enough) my 8 year old grabbed one side and I grabbed the other and she could pull with all of her weight and it still barely stretched the dough. It is an otherworldly substance.

After letting it sit all day (it is supposed to rise for 5 hours but I had other stuff to do), i finally got around to cooking them. Wow. They blew up like balloons, and then sunk down as they cooled.

The verdict: Kossars has nothing to worry about. Maybe I will try again and mix in some normal pastry flour. i'm not sure if the flour that I used was all gluten or high gluten... and that could make a pretty big difference.

In the interim, I'll eat them but they won't make it to the shared with others list.

The girls also got to make their own ice cream today. 8 year old's choice, so she made vanilla ice cream with sour gummies and coke bottle candies in it. Rich, strange, and definitely much better for them than for me.

And in other news, I got to work with a model today at my art studio, so I was very happy. Started a painting that has been in my head for many months.

The beginning of it all

This is a blog about cooking. Well, really, it is a blog about life, and life happens to involve cooking, so that is as good of a starting theme as any.

I am almost divorced. For those of you who haven't gone through this process, it isn't much fun, but it is way better than an unhappy marriage. And my marriage wasn't really so happy. Among many things, my wife really didn't like me, and constantly blamed me for all evils in the world.

For example, she told me I was OCD. The reasons were quite evident... I didn't like dishes sitting in the sink for more than a day. So after cooking I meal I would clean up. That would piss her off. I also don't like counters to be dirty. I like to be able to see them, the table, and the floors. I think laundry should be put away, and not just left in piles in all rooms. And if a dirty dish, say a pan used for cooking eggs, were left out for a week and started to grow, well that would really drive me crazy. So as you can see, I am OCD. (I should reiterate, I was happy to do the cleaning myself... it isn't like I was forcing her to do so.)

There were many other things she blamed me for, including being antisocial, arrogant, unemotional, accusatory, and so forth. Maybe. But since this is my blog, this is my point of view.

Many, by contrast, would consider me a good catch. Self made millionaire, athletic, artistic, very well educated, and generally a nice guy. And now that I have my own place again and a lovely set of friends, I can consider myself to be a good catch again and not fundamentally flawed. It is a nice feeling.

But I am heading away from the topic.

As part of being on my own again, I am able to do things my way. So I keep my house clean (yesterday my 4 year old and I cleaned the fridge out head to toe, for example) and I cook meals from scratch.

Perhaps part of this is from how I grew up -- my mom always cooked from scratch -- and part of it is a reaction against the meals my kids (two girls, 4 and 8) typically get at their mom's -- Kraft & cans. But also, I fundamentally believe that food is an important part of life.

There is a scene in Diva in which one of the characters -- I believe Gorodish -- is cooking and he talks about the Zen of the art of buttering bread. I really liked that line, and for me it represents and important part of cooking. The energy you put in to cooking comes out as you eat. So if you approach cooking with a positive and healing energy, that will become part of the food. If you serve food from a can, well you are serving the energy of can.

Now, you may think I am nuts. If so, so be it. You can always talk with my ex.

But if you think this makes sense, read on.

Because I now have my own kitchen, and I can stay up late cooking if I want and not be criticized, well I do. So in this blog you will learn about what I am cooking, as well as many other things. And if you were my girlfriend, this is what you would be eating :)

Now, I should mention that if you are interested in that position, you are welcome to drop me a line. But it is currently filled by a very very very wonderful person, so while I am happy to write and meet new friends, I'm also very much hoping that I never need another girlfriend. But that is also a topic for another day, and certainly not one I want my ex reading about.

Since I have the kids this weekend, I chose a meal that I thought would be reasonably kid friendly, yet still be fresh, nutritious and a little different. This evenings recipes come from Spa Food, which is a lovely cook book and for some reason no longer in print and hard to find.

So, for dinner tonight we had Leek and Potato Soup, Broiled Tomatoes with a Garlic/Herb Sauce, Grand Marnier Souffles, and Strawberry Ice Cream. (Made with Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker, which I also highly recommend.)

This was a relatively easy meal ... probably about 40 minutes or so of cooking in all and then of course all of the clean up work ... so certainly much simpler than many of the meals I've made lately.

I thought it was quite good. My kids on the other hand:
8 year old: The soup is really good, but I prefer it from a can.
4 year old: I hate tomatoes.
8 year old: This souffle tastes like eggnog. It is too rich.
8 year old: This ice cream is as good as the stuff from a box.

So you can see, it is all worth it.

But, if you happen to join me for dinner sometime, and you are over the age of 8, you might appreciate it.

Tomorrow I'm hoping to make Bialy's, using the Kossar recipe. And who knows what else.