Take one youth football season (with it's thrice weekly practices and twice weekly games) and throw in with it a long-gestated corporate acquisition the scale of which will haunt me for years, four weeks of some kind of odd, exhausting respiratory illness for three-quarters of the domicile's inhabitants, and the further destructive machinations of another company that I never really did like all that much and what you get is a home cook that just hasn't been feeling it.
My name is Marsha (hello, Marsha) and my kids are eating an awful lot of hot dogs. Sure, they're local, nitrate-free hoity-toity dogs but that only gets you so far when they're on the menu as much as has been recently. Life hasn't been so terribly bad, I don't think, after all it's not as if they haven't been treated to a (swanky)PB&(homemade)J now and then. On bread that has 4 grams of fiber per slice! So there is that. (This is just between us, right?)
In the last day or so something seems to have snapped loose and Brainiac found me last night preparing a shopping list while sitting on the sofa and nearly buried in cookbooks. Some (Bistro Cooking and and the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook) were old friends, some (Make it Fast, Cook it Slow and Modern Spice) were newer favorites. For some reason it seemed terribly important to immerse myself in print rather than bytes for, although I considered running to Epicurious or All Recipes, I couldn't quite drum up the interest in what seemed at the time to be a very sterile, almost transactional, activity. I wanted to hold those books, cross-reference, sticky-mark, note the messages I've left to my future self reminding me to up the borage or leave out the tamarind or cook for ten minutes longer than specified or whatever.
I emerged two or three hours later filled with plans for, well, not hot dogs. Pho! Agrodolce! Amanda Hesser's Pasta with Yogurt! Rice and beans! (Yes, really.) Like the cookbooks that inspired them, so of the dishes on the list are old reliables to which I'm returning after a long break while others will be new adventures. The family is always a little suspicious when I start trying to shake things up (remind me to tell you about my very project-managed midlife crisis some time). As we shopped today and the kids tripped over each other to help pull ingredients off shelves, I talked about each and what we would do with it - the red curry and the walnut oil and the ginger all have a story to tell - and they took my ideas and my list and my recipes and threw back at me their own. Can we make a focaccia or maybe a socca? What about the dolmades? Can we make our own instead of buying from the "tapas bar"?
It looks like there is, indeed, life after hot dogs (and PB&Js).