Ends and odds

So... it's been busy.  I'm like a good solid day's worth of work away from being able to say that I have a 99.9% complete first draft of my paper.  There's still one problem that I won't be able to solve, but I think it'll be good enough to call a First Draft to send to my committee.    I've also had other things going on, but suffice it to say, I owe Community Supported Home Cooking about four posts now and I owe Lewis a post as well.  I'm hoping that I'll get to those over the weekend.

Anywho, last Sunday we went to Urban an American Grill for brunch as part of Austin Restaurant Week.  It was really good.  I'm pretty sure that adding brunch to Restaurant Week was one of their most brilliant ideas yet.  Who doesn't love brunch!? *Anywho* Colby got a bloody mary, Branch Ranch steak with fries, and strawberry shortcake bread pudding.  I got a tulip (cava+cranberry juice), salmon eggs benedict, and a trio of sorbets (olive oil, mint, and grapefruit).  I didn't have my phone on me at that point because it was dead, but everything was pretty and delicious.  My favorite part was definitely dessert.  The mint sorbet was alright, but the grapefruit sorbet was phenomenal.  It was really delicate and delicious.  The best part, though, was definitely the olive oil sorbet.  We went on the first day of ARW, so apparently the sorbet hadn't properly set yet, but that wasn't a problem.  It had a really velvety mouth feel and a creamy, balanced flavor.  I'd love to try it again when it's properly set.  The only reason I know any of this was because the chef came out to talk to us, which was totally cool.  We'll definitely head back there at some point to try other parts of the menu.

There's still another weekend for restaurant week and it's a really great way to try different restaurants that are prohibitively expensive.  Bonus!  Some of the participating restaurants donate part of their proceeds to charity.  You can find these restaurants here and a list of ALL participating restaurants here.  The last restaurant week, we went to Sullivan's Steak House and the one before, we found ourselves at Fogo de Chao.  They were both really tasty, but no longer an option for us... which brings me to why I really decided to post.

I just made pasta and meatballs for my weekly meal sharing project.  I had some grassfed ground beef in the freezer, as well as some ground pork.  The recipe I use is criminally easy and makes the most delicious meatballs I've ever had.  The only problem is that I have no idea where the pork originated.  I bought it from Central Market awhile back, but I honestly haven't put a lot of effort into sourcing where they get their meat.  This has become a priority for me after reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I'm not about to go vegan, but Colby and I have made the decision to enter into the realm of "ethical omnivorism".  For us, this means that we're going to be getting our meats from local farms that have higher standards than just claiming to be "all natural".  And this also means that we're likely done with chicken.

Right now, we have about 3 lbs of frozen chicken breasts, a half a pack of jalapeno sausage, and a brick of tempeh in the freezer.  I'll let you guess which one we bought most recently.  I am vehemently opposed to throwing away food, so we're getting through it, but we're done buying any more meat products that we haven't first properly researched and sourced.  The end goal is to stop eating food that has anything to do with factory farms, but we're doing this one step at a time and our first step is to stop eating animals that were abused, tortured, or generally mistreated on their way to a terrible slaughter.  I have so many more thoughts about this, but I'm sure I'll explore this topic in later posts.

I've started another one

I have yet another blog.  This one is called Community Supported Home Cooking and it's a collaborative blog with all the people with whom I'll be collaboratively cooking.  Our first exchange is Monday!  I'm hoping to post recipes and ideas for what makes for good, home cooked meals to share amongst friends.  I'll be posting my first recipe soon!

Ode to Big Lots

why yes I did just buy 15 pieces of tupperware

My parents were never into buying off brand products or going to discount stores.  It wasn't until I started to pay for my own stuff that I embraced Target clothes and non-designer label shoes.  While I refuse to shop at Walmart for social justice reasons, I've come to really enjoy bargain hunting. No store is better for this than Big Lots.

I had a really crappy day today and needed some retail therapy to make my world right again.  Normally I head for the nearest shoe store, but this cshc idea has really been screaming to get out of my head and into practice.  We went to Target to look for containers for the food.  At first I was going to get the flimsy plastic almost throw away ones, but they all looked like they wouldn't last for more than a few cycles, so we started looking for nicer containers.  Nicer containers are expensive, especially at Target, so off to Big Lots we went.  We found 9 cup Rubbermaid containers with snap lids for $3 a piece.  Comparable containers cost almost twice that at Target.

So now instead of being mopey about my shitty talk, I'm just super excited to start cooking.

Community Supported Home Cooking: Potlucks for busy people

I have to give a talk tomorrow.  I should be working on it right now, but I have an idea rolling around in my head that is trying to get out into the ether as quickly as possible.  I've wanted to start a supper club for the past several months, but it's a big time and resource strain.  I cook several times a week and usually I make waaay too much food.  The first night it starts out as the most amazing thing I've ever eaten and by the end of the week, I never want to eat (fill in the blank) evAr again.  So why not share those extras with some friends?

Here's how this community supported home cooking works with four people:

1) I make my overly large dinner that would serve a family of four with leftovers.

2) I eat dinner from it.

3) Those extra three portions? I pack those up in community tupperware and bring them (in my case) to school the next day to give to the other three people doing this.

4) The other three people also bring their leftovers to pass out.  We hide them in the refrigerators in the offices because sometimes the maintenance people (we think) steal food from the community fridges.

5) I take home dinner for that night plus two more nights that I don't have to cook from scratch and so do three other people.

My thoughts are that this would happen every other week.  This averages to having a home cooked meal two times each week.  This should work, in principle, because everyone cooks and no one needs to host a potluck every two weeks.  The only "cost of entry" is purchasing some cheap tupperware that you don't mind sharing with the other people.

The other side of that is that it takes the social aspect out of cooking for others, but to remedy that every 6 weeks we'd all go to one person's house, bring our contribution and eat their contribution that night.  Everyone who attended would get to leave with two more dinners worth of food and the person who hosted now gets three more dinners.  This amounts to hosting a super low key dinner party every ~6 months.

Obviously the dinners would have to consist of meals that re-heat well, but a lot of food does.  Off the top of my head I'm thinking of really good casseroles, Indian curries, and yummy stews.  The potluck nights would allow everyone to make something that doesn't *have* to transport and reheat easily (like, say, pizza).  My thought is that four family units is the perfect size (so Colby and I are one unit) because then you don't have to eat super old leftovers, but you still have interesting food waiting for you.

So what do you think?  Has anyone tried this?  Does this sound interesting?  Would you like to join me?