Exceedingly Mundane

I had salmon out and defrosted and ready to cook, along with some vegetables, for tonight’s supper. Tim got home about 6:00, and right as he walked in, he asked what we were having for supper. I told him, and he responded with an “ugh” and then a “sounds like a good night to go out and eat”. “How about Cock of the Walk?” he said.

Cock of the Walk is a great little catfish place not far from our house, on the Reservoir. They sell basically one thing – fried catfish with all the trimmings. I think they also offer fried chicken strips, but we have never known anyone who has ever ordered anything but the fish.

It’s a great place right on the water, very rustic; you sit at wooden tables and eat out of tin plates and cups. Lots of charm and character. You order catfish by the person, fish for two, and then they start parading out the food. First, you get the coleslaw and pickled/marinated onions, then your server (dressed in riverboat attire, complete with a hat and feather) brings out a small cast iron pan of cornbread that he flips and catches in the pan. If you’re lucky, he won’t drop yours! 🙂 Soon afterwards, they will bring out a big aluminum platter of fried catfish, french fries, and hushpuppies. (Are you now sensing that it’s not healthy, all fried!). Tim also likes the greens, so he ordered a half keg of those. I ate a bite, to make him happy, but I do NOT like greens. 🙄

Needless to say, it was all delicious and we ate till we nearly popped. We drove around in the new car and looked at some new houses going up around the Reservoir after that. A good, fun, date night. But then again, we always have those –Tim is the world’s best at fun and spontaneous. And he’s a great date!

I wasn’t feeling very good yesterday. Nothing specific, just the icks and general lethargy. I made a thai chicken dish that was good, but I didn’t even feel like eating. You know when I leave half my food on my plate, something is wrong!

I think I might have just needed some homemade chicken soup! I already had this on the menu and we just finished eating it. It tasted so good to me! 🙂 You can check out the recipe here on Hambones. Be sure to read my notes, I made some changes this time and it was better to me. I think it was just what I needed, I feel better already!

Not sure what we are going to do tonight. Maybe watch a movie or something. Knowing Tim, he will be back here on the computer soon, working on Hambones. He’s such a Type A.

I’ll be gone some tomorrow with my dad. He’s driving up to visit, run an errand and eat lunch with me. We’re going to try to go eat with Tim, if he doesn’t get busy and can get away. The more the merrier! 😆

I just posted the cookie recipe that I tried for the first time yesterday on Hambones. You can check it out
here

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I’ve mentioned it in passing a couple of times in different blog entries that my memory is atrocious. I really don’t remember much of anything from my childhood, school years, high school and college years. Heck, I just don’t remember that much about anything. Tim thinks it’s the Diet Coke I drink that is zapping my brain cells! I don’t know what to think – I used to have a pretty good memory and I still do about certain things (trivia, history, all-things-Tim) 🙂 But a lot of things just don’t stick in my brain. One of the worst for me is people – people’s faces, where I know them from, and mostly, their names.

One thing I am fairly decent about remembering, though, is food. I remember different foods I have eaten at certain places. I remember a few things from my childhood that relate to food, although probably not nearly enough.

I have thought of this often and have meant to blog about it. I read two articles last week in the local papers, plus this blog entry that Amanda wrote. The first article was in the Clarion Ledger, by one of the food writers (Robert St. John), and he wrote about “Pixie Sticks and Marathon Bars: A Sweet Childhood” (the article is here on the Clarion Ledger website, but I have serious doubts that it will be there long. They don’t seem to keep content for more than a week or two.) The other article was in the Madison County Herald, by a guy named Rusty Reeves. It was entitled “Old Food Joints fed more than just your stomach”. Again, I found the article online here but I doubt it will be there for long. Both of these jogged up memories for me (BEWARE – extremely long and rambling post ahead):

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I was just browsing through some of the posts at the Cooking Light message boards. That’s really my number one place to surf for recipes and cooking ideas. I have gotten a lot of good recipes from this website, their magazines, and cookbooks. Anyway, there are a couple of ongoing discussions there about two new books about “eating as the french do” and “the Fat Fallacy”, both of which talk about eating much smaller portions, really savoring what you eat, etc.

Good ideas, and ones I have been wanting to adopt for quite a while. Next month, it will be 3 years since Tim and I started our healthy eating lifestyle change. We’ve done pretty good overall. Up and down, up and down, but fairly steady overall. Holidays are bad, as we tend to eat a lot more. Winter is bad for me because I have a natural desire to cook comfort foods (chilis, stews, soups, cobbler, etc) and homemade bread. Winter is also bad for us because we are really limited in how often we can walk because of the weather. I don’t like to get sick, and so I often don’t want to walk if it’s really cold or misty or windy.

So… (click more to read the rest)

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I know that I am not a person that could ever do an Atkins or South Beach type eating plan (read, that nasty four letter word, diet). I could never give up my carbs! I am a carb-loading fool. I love bread. Just watch me in action at O’Charleys or Fratesi’s when they bring out hot bread or rolls. Good grief, you’d think I hadn’t eaten in a year.

Anyway, I am rather particular about my breads. I am not fond of what Tim calls “loaf bread”, which is what I call regular sandwich bread. The psychologist inside of me says it comes from carrying a sandwich for lunch five days a week, 9 months a year, for 12 years of private school. Probably. I do, however, love homemade bread and rolls. Tim bought me a breadmachine back in 1999 and it’s still going strong. I recently moved it off of my counter (which was hard to do, I fought it for over a year) to make room for other things, and my poor bread machine was relegated to a cabinet in the garage. I have always made bread a lot more in the winter than the summer. A comfort thing. I just love making homemade bread with soups and chilis and stews in the winter. So, last week I pulled out my bread machine and made a new recipe for herb bread. It was deee-licious. Today, I just started some dough in the machine for yet another new recipe, a buttermilk honey wheat bread.

Now, herein lies the dilemma. I have new yeast, fairly new bread machine flour, but I didn’t buy wheat flour at the grocery yesterday. I have wheat flour at home, the little scrooge inside my head said. But, when I opened up the canister a minute ago to get out my wheat flour, it didn’t smell quite right. I went ahead and got the dough going anyway, and have a glimmer of hope that it will come out okay. The dough goes for 1 hour and 40 minutes in the machine, then I take it out, knead it a sec, and then let it rise. I’ve found a new trick recently for getting my bread to rise if the temperature and humidity in my house aren’t conducive for rising. I turn the oven to 250º, turn it off, then put my bread in my stoneware loaf pan in the oven for about 5 minutes. It really helps it rise. Anyhooo, I digress. I hope this bread comes out. I actually came back to the computer to look up on the Internet the burning question I have – can flour go bad? What does it smell like if it does? Does wheat go bad faster? Weighty questions, yes? 🙂

The good news is that Tim is not fussy at all, and bless his heart, I think if the bread doesn’t come out, he will probably be ok with eating loaf bread or crackers with his soup. He’s such a sweetie pie. 😆

I made us some of Dodie’s No-Bake Cookies. Very fond memories for me, and they taste pretty good too! I still have the same recipe card that I copied in my very juvenile handwriting from Dodie’s recipe card, and I remember her showing me how to make them. I must be in a nostalgic mood.

We had one of my favorites tonight for supper. Background – Tim ate out lunch today (they went to Roadhouse Grill) and was not very hungry. I had high hopes for going out to eat Chinese (my all-time favorite), but Tim didn’t really want to go. So, I made us some rumien. What’s rumien, you ask? 🙂

Rumien is a Tim invention. Born out of necessity when he was in the military and had basically no money for luxuries like food. 😀 It’s a very cheap meal, and very filling. I love it becauses it’s warm and comforting and is a Tim creation – therefore, it reminds me of him and that is the main reason I love it!

Here’s how we make it – boil some water and cook rice until nearly done. Add 1 or 2 packages of ramen noodles (we’re partial to the Chicken Mushroom flavor), depending on how voraciously hungry you are. When the noodles are nearly done, we add eggs (1-2), then the seasoning packs from the ramen noodles, and finally cheese. Lately, we’ve been using a combination of pepperjack and american (we usually just tear up slices and use, but you can use shredded too). We add more seasoning (usually Tony’s and black pepper, the seasoning packs have about 2 times the RDA of sodium in each one 🙂 ). That’s it!

No, it ain’t gourmet by any stretch of the imagination, but we like it!

And please, no snobbish comments. Be nice if you add a comment

Gail and I went shopping a couple of Saturdays ago, while Don and Tim went deer hunting. We stopped by the Williams Sonoma store in Northpark, and ended up buying a jar of Grilled Vegetable Sauce. I just looked on their website and I couldn’t find a picture of it to post (sorry :sad:) Anyway, Gail told me the other day that she had tried hers on tilapia, and so, I did the same thing last night. I pan sauteed some tilapia filets for us, and put the sauce on top. It was really good! Tim loved it so much, he went back and spooned out several more tablespoons on his plate! I have about half the jar left now. 😮

What was so funny was that we both looked at each other at dinner and said, you know, this fish tastes like chicken! With the sauce on it, it really made the tilapia taste like a boneless chicken breast. 😆

Anyway, it was a good dinner. We had the tilapia over whole wheat angel hair pasta, and also had some stir-fried cabbage and some sugar snap peas to go with it. Trying to eat more veggies, you know.