Who Knew?

Apparently gray, rainy, bleak days *are* in fact more fun when you have a multicolored polka-dot umbrella.

Cookbook Project, Books #41 and 42

"Carribean Cooking For Pleasure," Mary Slater

I have no idea where this cookbook came from. I can only assume it was a hand-me-down from my husband's mother, since I know neither of us bought it (if nothing else, it's almost 40 years old and not from a secondhand store), and I'm fairly certain it's well outside my own mother's spectrum of ethnic cooking she's willing to explore. But it's interesting to look through, and the only real challenge in choosing a recipe was trying to figure out which ones didn't call for ingredients that would require hunting down specialty grocery stores.

But we found a few that sounded interesting, and finally decided to make West Indian Rice Pie, which, as far as I can tell, is veggie-free Shepherd's Pie, with rice instead of mashed potatoes.

Here's where the cheating comes in, though. I didn't do the cooking on this recipe - umbran did. I worked too many late nights in a row, and the prospect of getting home from work at 9:30 and only then starting to cook a dinner that took nearly an hour to finish just was too much. So I don't know if this counts as a successful Cookbook Project endeavor. The food was good, but... I dunno.

Or this could just be an excuse to subtly hint that browngirl should come over and we should go grocery shopping and then she should make salt fish and ackee with me, like she suggested about a hundred years ago...

"Cook Healthy Cook Quick," by Oxmoor House

This one I know came from my mom, by virtue of the old bumper sticker I found stuck between the pages. I must have rescued it from her at one of my recent visits, but I had never actually looked through it - I have a deep-seated aversion to most "healthy" cookbooks, on the basis that the majority of the ones I've taken the time to read tend to focus on taking regular recipes and substituting chemical-laden artificial fat-free ingredients, yielding rather icky and poor imitations.

This one, though, at least has decent meal plan, and a lot of the vegetable side dishes don't look too bad at all. I needed a main dish, though, and since scallops happened to be on sale at Whole Foods, and since the recipe didn't look too bad, I decided to make Scallops in Tarragon Sauce.

This recipe is broken. Badly and utterly broken, as I would have figured out if I had actually read it through in detail before making it, instead of just skimming. Because then I would have found the part where it tells you to take 1/3 cup of white wine and 1 1/2 tablespoons of lemon juice and reduce them until only 3/4 cup of liquid remains in the pan. As it is, though, I didn't notice this until I was actually reducing them.

Oops. That made the white sauce at the end fairly challenging to make, since that was supposed to be the primary source of liquid. Luckily, I've made enough white sauces to at least have an idea of what they should look like and feel like, and just started adding random liquid until it was sauce-y instead of wet-glob-of-flour-y. Wine until the teeny bottle ran out, lemon juice, a little chicken broth since we had it on hand....

The end result was awesome. Admittedly, we did cheat, and use actual butter and sour cream instead of margarine and "nonfat sour cream alternative" (what is that? library paste?), but this stuff was tasty beyond belief, quick as advertised, and fairly easy. It's a keeper, though next time I'll actually do my best to figure out the right amount of liquid before I'm desperately stirring a scarily-thick and rapidly-darkening roux.....