Whoohoo, cooking!

Now there's something that hasn't come out of my mouth in a very, very long time. Don't get me wrong; as a general rule I truly do enjoy putzing around in my kitchen, trying new things (cricket flour, anyone?) and preparing healthy meals...but lately I've been feeling, well, you could say uninspired but that doesn't really cover it. Bitter and twisted is actually closer - and the words 'fed up' come to mind but the cutesy pun it invokes makes me want to punch somebody. See, I enjoy cooking but what I do not enjoy is when, at the end of the day when everyone's tired and crabby, I say "how about stew for supper?" and everyone makes gagging noises. So I say "okay, how about sandwiches?" And they all go "meh" and I get mad and say "fine then, what DO you want?" and am met with a chorus of "food!" or "dunno" or (if you're nine) "olives!"

So clearly it's time to inject some life into my kitchen time. To that end,I have treated myself to two new cookbooks in the last week, and I promised you the verdict on one of them...but you're in for a treat 'cause you're getting the debriefing on them both!

Thug Kitchen Cookbook

Eat like you give a fuck is the tag line to this foul-mouthed tome, and if you've been around these parts for any length of time (or if we've ever hung out together) you will understand why I immediately decided that I needed to add this volume to my library after I saw the trailer on youtube....

This is a vegan cookbook, which under normal circumstances I would consider a deal breaker - I'm not vegan and do not aspire to veganism even a little bit. But inspiration is what I was after, and in order to achieve that, I needed to step out of my comfort zone. Also I kind of figured that it would be entertaining reading. I was wrong on that count.

Open up Thug Kitchen to any old page at all and you will find wholesome recipes, beautifully photographed, with delightfully foul descriptions and narrative asides. I admit it made me laugh out loud a few times, but here's the thing.

When I was in music college, one of my favorite teachers used to talk about using dissonance in composition and arranging as "the oregano on the eggs". Too much is too much, he used to say, and it makes the eggs taste worse. A little bit makes everything taste amazing. I know lots of musicians who will be sprinkling oregano on their eggs for their entire lives because of him!

Too bad the thugs will never be able to truly understand that analogy because they don't eat eggs. But I digress. What I'm really trying to say here is that the liberal use of bad language in Thug Kitchen is a little much, and very little creativity goes into the delivery so that it gets very old very quickly. A well-delivered f-bomb here and there is just enough to be shocking and funny. Five on one page, used in the same way, is just boring and speaks to the writers' poor vocabulary.

The recipes, on the other hand, are lots of fun! They combine some cool unexpected flavours and offer new ways to use ingredients that I keep in my cupboards anyway. Besides a few losers (sorry, chickpeas just don't go in sandwiches) the recipes are great. And if I can add an aside here that I've never heard anyone point out before? Eating more beans, unrefined grains, and legumes is the fastest way, bar none, to put a gargantuan dent in your grocery bill. A week's worth of apple-baked beans cost me about three dollars to make. And it was delicious. Served with BBQ pulled chicken thighs. Fuck veganism! (See what I did there?)

I'm sure that eventually our house will stop smelling like a litter box due to the sudden increase of beans in our diets. But it definitely served the purpose of shaking me out of my rut and getting me excited about cooking again.

Will it Waffle?

I picked up Will it Waffle? at my kids' Scholastic book fair. It looked like fun - a whole book full of ways to cook unexpected things in a waffle iron? Hell yes! The children were particularly excited about chocolate-filled waffle-ironed French toast, and in our excitement we ran home from the book fair, assembled the raw ingredients, and...

...then I realized that the waffle iron that Joel and I got as a wedding present (16 years ago) had finally given up the fight and was ready for the garbage.

So I'll admit that I haven't actually prepared enough of the recipes in the book to judge properly, although I did grill chicken breasts on the (new) waffle iron tonight, with delicious results. I am not, however, particularly impressed with the clean-up it's going to require. Still, this is a book that is ridiculously exuberant solely based on its subject matter and I will love it forever just because of that - and I will keep you posted on the results of red velvet cake waffles, waffled truffle omelets, and waffled mac and cheese.