April Postmortem

So Gretchen had the baby - and we'll see how that changes what I'm cooking.  Already I find myself using the weekends to prepare for faster weeknight dinners.  Pizza and pasta dough gets made on Sunday, bread already got made once every week or two, I'm doing a lot more cooking beans, grains and greens ahead of time; you know all of those stupid hints for busy moms....I'm using them.

Well - I'd like to think that I'm just working more like a restaurant - they have all of that stuff prepped before service too, don't they?  A lot of it is just assembly.

Weekend Evaluation: the long weekend was not long enough

The past couple of years we've had people over for Gretchen's birthday.  I usually try to take a dish or ingredient that she's really liked over the past year and put some kind of creative spin on it.  This time I started with the short rib croquette and worked backwards, and went with a German-leaning menu again (after the Alsatian/Germanic food last year: tarte flambe/sweet potato spaetzle).

Although I wanted the food to be good, I also really want to make sure I can hang out when we have friends over.  The past couple of times we've had people over I feel like I spend too much time in the kitchen, and I think from that standpoint dinner was a success. 

The food was okay, definitely not great, but scaling to larger quantities is not something I'm used to.  So to feel like things weren't horrible and my planning was good; it went okay.


Since we had all week off, I'm including two weekends, I just didn't have time to finish the post last week.  We're also coming up on the end of the normal CSA share - the final share is this week- and then the winter share starts.  Get ready for rutabaga.