Happy Friday!

Listening

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and this is my favourite part… a fictional broadcast excerpt:

(And then he enthuses about coal.) "Consider a single piece glowing in your family's stove. See it children. That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fir or a reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe ten million or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light it could and transformed the sun's energy into itself, into bark, twigs, stems, because plants eat light in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years, eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like a stone and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight, sunlight one hundred million years old is heating your home tonight. [...] Open your eyes (concludes the man) and see what you can with them, before they close forever."

Eating

I’ve enjoyed making each one of the menus I’ve tried from Amy Theilen’s book Company. So far, they’ve been three: one Christmas-themed, with turkey, one called “More Time Than Money” kind of meal, with chicken, and one for Easter, featuring ham.

I like how when I pick a menu from this book, I’m surrendering my menu-planning decisions and letting her be the expert. I learn so much and the meal’s success turns out to be such a reward.

To use the leftover ham this week, I made this Ham and Tomato Penne, which sounds fancier in its original Italian: Penne al Baffo.

Reluctantly, I must sign off and get back to the real work… I leave you my dog as snack supplicant:

Nuts and bolts

Every year at Christmas, my husband would get a tin of “nuts and bolts” that a colleague of his would make as a special holiday treat. Invariably, it only lasted a day in our house. When my husband changed schools, I asked his colleague for the recipe. The amounts indicated are only suggestions!

Nuts and bolts
7-8 cups Crispix cereal
3 cups pretzel sticks
4 cups Goldfish crackers
3 cups Cheerios cereal
3 cups Crunchys (or Cheetos)
3-4 cups Ringolos
3 cups Bugles
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 sachet of Ranch seasoning
2 tablespoons dried dill
3/4 cup vegetable oil

Dump all the dry ingredients together, except the bugles, in a clean white garbage bag. Whisk together the oil, garlic powder, ranch seasoning and dill into the vegetable and pour over the ingredients in the bag. Knot the bag closed and gently turn and shake it around to distribute the oil and seasonings. Place all or half the amount in a rotisserie pan and cook it at 200C for thirty minutes, mixing halfway through. Once removed from the oven, add the bugles.

Five stars

Brussel sprouts, boiled or roasted are inedible in my opinion. But buy them when they look good, take off their dusty outer leaves, chop the core off, cut them in half and slice them, thin, thin. When your pile of Brussel sprouts looks like a mass of green-yellow paper confetti, put them in a mixing bowl, drizzle olive oil over them, squeeze a fresh lemon over them too, for brightness and add salt and pepper and shave parmesan and mix everything with your hand, till the leaf-shreds glisten. Top with toasted walnuts and enjoy!

(This Brussel Sprout salad originally comes from the cookbook Six Seasons.)