Category: Cook

Lined up the ingredients for Spam musubi, a Hawaiian take on Japanese onigiri. I’ll pretend it’s healthy: the Spam has 25% less sodium, and the brown sugar is organic. The nonstick musubi mold is convenient, but a Spam can lined with plastic wrap also does the job.

Cycled to an Asian supermarket. The produce section has a large selection of vegetables familiar and exotic to me. Chinese eggplant was an easy choice for dinner tonight.

My walk today took me to three food stores: Kramarczuk’s for Ukrainian sausage for Sausage Saturday, Surdyk’s deli for bread, and Lunds & Byerly’s for supermarket stuff. In Palm Springs we prepared most of our meals, but cooking in our own kitchen is always the best.

We were a little deficient in the cruciferous department while traveling this past week. Today we started to redress the balance with roasted broccoli.

It’s Sausage Saturday, which means a movie with a frozen treat in the intermission. Tonight: vanilla yogurt riched up with heavy cream and honey.

Reheated tonight’s dinner in the microwave: lamb and root vegetable stew. I’d made it this morning because stews improve by sitting (in the fridge). I made a double batch so there’ll be an encore appearance mid-week.

Cooked in volume: stock in a slow-cooker and a large root vegetable/lamb braise still doing its slow magic in a stovetop Dutch oven. Plenty washing-up today, more to come.

I’ve lived longer than the allotted three score and ten, but don’t recall ever cooking with a vanilla bean. Today, I threw caution to the wind and used one in an ice cream base. It was spendy, so expectations are high.