Homekeeping: September 2003 Archives

The weather here is just magnificent -- clear blue sky, a bit on the cool side outside but not too cold.... Soon we'll have that scent of leaf and wood fires in the air. How I love this time of year.

Today I took on another Napoleonic homekeeping project, and tried to bake a triple batch of pumpkin muffins and two loaves of banana bread, all before 11:00. I barely made it with the banana bread but didn't make it with the muffins. A triple batch (actually, I multiplied the recipe by 3.5) is really a lot of muffins, and I only have one muffin pan. I'm doing all this baking because I was in the mood, I wanted to get those bananas out of my freezer, and because I wanted something to feed the contractors (we are having some more work done around the Prussian Green Money Pit over the next few weeks.) Hambet loves pumpkin muffins and so does my husband, so I am going to have to be clever if I am going to have anything left for the contractors.

Erik in the comments box at the Culinary Ennui post said:
Also, I really don't recommend trying to cook lean. You will end up consuming more calories in the form of carbohydrates and sugars. Rather, vary the fats. I use butter, goose fat, pancetta, olive oil, and peanut oil. Probably the number one is olive oil, followed by pancetta/goose fat, followed by butter. Peanut oil is for special cases (Chinese food, for instance). Food satisfies more, tastes better, and is better for you when it is full of real ingredients and not modified food starch (the non-dairy whipped topping).

I think the very worst thing you can do is worry about the amount of fat, rather than the quality of fat.
Posted by Erik Keilholtz at September 25, 2003 06:12 PM

I agree. I did the "fat free" thing for years. I used this weird fat free psuedo margarine stuff, egg substitutes, cooked only with cooking spray, you get the idea. It was in my last pregnancy while I was nursing an pregnant at the same time that I started to use real butter, olive oil and whole eggs again. My family looks on to my cooking in disgust, but I am much more satisfied and I find it easier to maintain a decent weight eating like this. For centuries people ate whole foods and did not have the obesity problems we have now. What's the deal?

Oh by the way, my family will go through a one pound container of Light Margarine Spread every six days or so just using it as a spread (not cooking) and I may not even use a half a stick of butter in that period of time.

Usually I like cooking, but lately I've been in a real funk about it. I'm talking about the ordinary, what's for dinner on the weeknight kind of cooking (with two hot lunches on the weekend) That comes out to seven meals a week. It shouldn't be that difficult to come up with seven meal ideas a week, but my culinary Muse has forsaken me. I'm sick of my own cooking and bored with my recipe repertoire.

My past strategy was to have a kind of loose "schedule" -- pasta night, chicken night, meatless night, etc -- and fill it in using whatever was on sale at the grocery store. It worked for a long time -- it was a good way to stay out of ruts and stay within budget. Lately, though, the sales have gotten less and less helpful -- sorry, $1.00 off ribeyes or fresh lobster isn't going to help me that much -- and the selection at the markets continues to shrink. The cases are packed with the special of the week and precious little else. (Let's see, what kind of chicken would you like? Thighs, thighs, or.... thighs?)

I am also getting really, really irritated with the Invasion of the Brine at the meat case. I just came back from the supermarket, where they had a nice price on turkey breast. I was all set to pick up Sunday's dinner until I saw that the turkey was "self-basting." Sorry, I'm not paying good money for salt water. Same thing goes for all that pork injected with "flavor solution" and ground poultry with "up to 15% flavor solution added." Isn't there anything left for people who want to do their own cooking?

I'd love to shop at Whole Foods more often, but I'm trying to keep our grocery bill under control and I hate the creepy, "Earth First" vibe of the place. There's also the little fact that I really should be making an effort to cook more healthfully, but a lot of the "lean" recipes I come across rely on processed foods (fat-free non-dairy whipped topping?) or very expensive tidbits (yes, filet mignon is lean, but come on!)

So now it's 5:25 PM, my hungry husband will be rolling in in 20 minutes, and I have no idea what I'm going to fix. I did "breakfast for dinner" yesterday, so I don't want to try that again. Maybe I'll thaw out some pesto. No, that won't work -- I forgot the Parmesan cheese.

As it turns out, we did have a little Isabel damage: the dome on the roof that covers the attic fan was blown away. The fan itself fanned its last rotation this summer, so it's definitely time to just replace the fan. I was worried about this being some huge multi-step process, but I found an electrician that can do the work -- all the work -- today. They called about half an hour ago to let me know they were on the way. So now I'm just waiting.