Friends who attend our occasional feasts sometimes suggest they’d like to sit at our dinner table every night. They probably wouldn’t eat much if they did. We’ve recently had to establish a daily dinner schedule just to make sure we don’t forage grumpily every night out of laziness.
Since this blog has languished for almost a year due to that very same laziness, I thought I’d try to apply a similar schedule to myself here. I will attempt to post at least one dinner’s worth of recipes here each week.
In the depth of winter I usually spent as much time as possible in bed with books forgetting about everything around me. My basement hovel is very suitable for hibernating, if not for anything else.
From time to time I remind myself to stop living like a disgusting hermit by inviting people over, which then inspires me to clean and cook and generally organize my life a bit more. Perhaps inviting people to read this website will have a similarly salutatory effect on its general structure and content.
I’ll begin this week with what I made tonight, two new dishes that took a bit of time and puttering but were certainly worth the effort: my first attempt at homemade gnocchi and a roasted red pepper risotto:
The gnocchi were much easier to put together than I expected and came out tender and much more flavorful than the store-bought ones, if somewhat malformed in comparison. The risotto tasted like late summer with its slowly simmered concentration of sweet peppers and tomatoes. We also had leftover bruschetta and a green salad to lighten the load of the starches:
In the kitchen, I am responsible for Monday. Here, I may use that meal or I may dredge up something from the “archives” I’ve been collecting on flickr. I’m quite open to suggestions, either in comments here or on the flickr photos.
If I’ve cooked for you and neglected to pass along a recipe, let me know and I’ll write it up here. If you want me to try out a recipe for you, I could do that. If you just want to see what goes into the big meals, I can try to catch up on some of those. If there’s something else – a technique, an ingredient, ideas and criticisms are all welcome. 🙂
The Kitchen Tourist 
I won’t say *who* but one of my roommates attempted to make gnocchi for her family and the result was so disastrous, we threw them in the trash before they arrived and pretended we had never tried. Ahem, Sam, ahem.
We did spinach gnocchi for Cooking Army once. It was incredibly tasty, but difficult to scale in a small kitchen since you can only fit a few handfuls in the pot at any given time. We ended up with cold gnocchi. It is deceptively easy to prepare, though.
Oh, and you may want to change your color settings for the website. I can barely see the lines and boxes at the top and under ‘Leave a Reply’. It’ll be hard for people to leave one if they can’t figure out HOW to leave one. I’m using Firefox 3.6.6.
We never lack for large pans in our kitchen and I started the water boiling early, so cooking them wasn’t a problem for me. I’m in the process of installing a proper kitchen in my basement studio and decided to get extra cabinets and a new(er) stove so I don’t run into trouble cooking. 🙂
Oh, and I agree about the comments section not being clear enough – I chose this theme as a placeholder until I could customize it as much as I want to, but I don’t like the lack of emphasis on comments. I’ll see if I can tweak it a bit to help with that.