smitten kitchen

Someone asked me yesterday how I manage the day job, this site, cooking, hobbies and attempting some semblance of a social life, but I didn’t answer because the gritty truth is that I don’t. I’m horrible at time management, not because I’m a slacker so much as I lack an attention span of more than 12 minutes. Take tonight. I swore I’d leave work at 5:30, but left at 6:20 instead (still earlier than last night), I had planned to give you guys a pie crust how-to but instead flitted from one thing (side project) to another (Thanksgiving thumbnails in sidebar) and as usual it’s 11 p.m. and oh right! I haven’t updated yet today.

It’s not a complaint, mind you. Somehow it almost always works out in the end, so who cares if the path meanders? But I do have one rule only, and that is that I am not allowed to complain about being busy. Yes, I have done it before, but I try to shut down that line of thinking as soon as it happens, because I think it leads to revving motors in place/stressing about stressing/getting caught up in the act of being and not doing, oh, and also, it’s really boring to hear about. I mean, have you ever met a person not busy? Yeah, me neither.

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Because I am a complete and total Yankee, I really didn’t know a thing about grits until Alex and I took a trip to Savannah and Charleston earlier this year. But when I tried them, I fell hard. I found them in a small puddle beneath the most saucy, delicious chicken dish in a large-rimmed shallow bowl, shredded Brussels tangled around them and then the next day loaded with cheese and chives adjacent to my eggs. They seemed to be open and ready for anything put before them–on so many levels, exactly what I needed.

I swore I’d make my own when I got back, heck, I’d make them daily but somehow that “when” became “eight months later” and that pretty much brings us up to last night. I’d bookmarked Jonathan Waxman’s Creamy White Polenta with Mushrooms and Mascarpone a while ago, but forgot about it until last week’s chicken dish reminded me of how much I like chanterelles.

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I warned you, didn’t I? I have a lot of fresh pumpkin puree to use up. Call it my late German grandmother communicating her values to me from the great beyond, but I hate throwing away food. It literally makes me sick to my stomach, that in this land of excess and in a city that appears at times to have run out of ways to spend money so it churns out new ones daily that I am part of this ridiculousness, so frequently throwing away old eggs, milk days before its inevitable demise, fruit and vegetables we always forget about, elaborate dishes that bored me too much to eat twice.

This pumpkin, it’s gonna get used.

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As much as it flatters me when I get emails asking what my secret to taking pictures is, I rarely have a good response. I don’t think of myself as a real photographer, I never learned accepted techniques and I barely know what half the buttons on the camera do. If you like my photos, you’ll probably agree you can get far without this information (though I suspect you could get further with it).

The majority of food photography advice I have read boils down to two main points: don’t use flash and style the food attractively. Honestly, these days I rarely do either.

While I of course use available light when it is, uh, available, in the evenings, when most food for this blog is cooked, I’m at a loss. Though for a long time I used a combination of available light/long exposures, a tripod and remote switch for evening pictures, I was only satisfied with the results about half the time. Often less.

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Sunday night, along with roasted stuffed onions and that apple tart for dessert, I made Martha Stewart’s Silky Braised Chicken with Wild Mushrooms and Pearl Onions for my family when they came over for dinner. But if you want to know if it was any good, you’ll have a hard time getting a straight answer. I thought it was dry and could barely eat three bites of it. Everyone else didn’t mind, and even called it delicious. Then again, they may have just been polite.

I’ve come to the realization that there are some recipes I would rather never write up. Here it is Friday night, five days after I made this chicken dish and I would still rather do Molly’s dishes than talk about chicken. Five days! Five days in which I have updated daily. Five days in which I decided I’d rather cook and write up something entirely new than get to that forsaken recipe. I am that ambivalent about it.

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