Happy Blogoversary!

Believe it or not, Zinkthink turns 1 today!  I know it feels like only yesterday that I was an angsty youngster griping about how work didn’t challenge his creative side, and all of a sudden, I’m an angsty dude, one year older, boring handfuls of people with frighteningly verbose accounts of what I’ve cooked recently.  In the interim, I vacillated about what I wanted this blog to be, debated giving the thing up entirely, set varying obtuse rules for myself, and finally got to a point where I’m pretty satisfied with the blog.  That’s not to say I won’t suddenly get the urge to change things up again – give things another year and we’ll see what this space looks like.

Now, don’t worry, I won’t dredge up my old posts in some contrived “best of” montage.  But since I’m an engineer by training, here are some fun numbers.  In one year, I’ve written 45 blog entries, which amounts to a startling average of 3.75 posts per month, almost one a week!  That might not be interesting to you, but it’s neat for me to see, especially whenever I get the bizarre urge to set goals of X posts/week.  Max was 7/month, min was 2 on a few occasions, which gives us a lovely standard deviation of 1.45, whatever that means.

Wow, that was boring, even for me.  Anyway, since this blogoversary is so momentous, it certainly warrants celebration.  And in the Zink household, we even have a cake to mark the occasion.  Well, okay, it’s really a cake I made on Saturday for no real reason, but there’s a lot of it left, so it can be used for the 1-year party too.  Plus it’s a homemade cake, which is exciting and also a bit strange.  For you see, as much as I love to cook (you knew that, right?) I have never been able to get excited about baking.  Any time Stacia tried to get me into it, I’d end up getting bored and she’d bake the whole thing herself.  This time, the tables have turned.  But why?

Inspiration, it turns out, can come from unusual places.  Back when I was home over Christmastime, my family and I made sandwiches for lunch.  Now, other people may be able to throw baloney on a slice of white bread and call it good (which I can, sometimes), but when I really get going, my sandwiches end up elaborate, huge, and I dare say delicious, with pretty much any ingredient you can think of on them.  At the time, I modestly made a comment about how great I was at making sandwiches, and that I should quit my job and open a deli.  My sister then opined that she should open a bakery next door to bake bread for my sandwiches, so she could always have fresh-baked bread around.  We laughed, tried to think of companion stores for the rest of the family, and eventually shrugged it off.

Then I get back to Des Moines, and suddenly everyone’s blogging about baking bread.  SJ posted a challah that she made, and Sarah, who I don’t even know but found on my wife’s blogroll has had a new baked bread all year!  With the thought of fresh bread already in my mind, and pictures of it now showing up all over the place, I absolutely wanted to bake something.  I didn’t have any time, but I sure wanted to.  Then Stacia gallantly offered to go to a bachelorette party with her friends on Saturday, leaving me a whole evening with nothing to do but bake.  Go time!

Better Homes and Gardens’ plaid cookbook seemed like a good place to start for a first-time baker.  I was initially tempted by the phenomenal looking banana bread jelly roll thingy, but it sounded pretty hard to make, so I opted for the carrot cake.  It had a “best loved” emblem or something by it, and hell, who doesn’t love carrot cake?  No yeast to kill, so I even stood a chance of succeeding.

Baking a carrot cake turned out to be surprisingly easy and a lot of fun.  It was, if you’ll pardon the pun, a piece of cake.  Even a total novice can measure flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and canola oil.  Shred up a few carrots, beat some eggs, and mix the whole mess together, and you’ve got the makings of a carrot cake.  Then it only took half an hour to bake, which was great since I started the project at 10 PM.  I got the cakes out, and they looked great!  Usually I find a way to burn the crap out of the bottom of the cake or bread, but these came out beautifully golden-orange.

Making the frosting was a bit more challenging, but only just.  Cream cheese frosting has but three ingredients: cream cheese, butter, and powdered sugar.  The trick is sifting powdered sugar into the mixture, a bit at a time, and beating it together with a mixer without somehow sending the sugar flying everywhere.  I was pretty careful, but you’re bound to lose some of it, and that’s fine.  I even ended up with a very baker-like patch of sugar on the front of my shirt.  In the end, I used up all the powdered sugar we had making that frosting, layered and coated the cake, and even threw some crushed pecans on top.  It wasn’t gorgeous, but it was done.

And, spoiler alert, it was delicious!  Granted, I followed a recipe that BHG has probably had for 50+ years, but it was my first time baking and I made a kick-ass cake!  Sweet, carroty, nice and fluffy but with a slight crispness to the edges.  I did manage to get almost every single mixing bowl dirty, made a fairly sizeable mess in the kitchen, but it was a lot more fun than I’d been giving baking credit for.  Now I just need to finish this cake at tonight’s celebration and decide what to bake next.  And that whole bakery-deli concept sounds pretty tempting now, too.  At least we can have carrot cake.

Finally, happy blogoversary to me.  I’ll eat a piece of carrot cake for you, dear reader, to celebrate.  :)

The Boy(s) of Summer - Part I

The blazing sun glides low on the horizon, slipping between the manmade spires dominating the nearby skyline.  In a few hours, the crescent moon will stand vigil in a cloudless sky, gazing down on the hopeful throngs.  The breeze that has rustled with impatient furor all day has now begun to calm; soon the flags slacken on their poles in the resulting stillness.  Each breath brings cool, crisp spring air into the lungs of the six thousand people huddled en masse, rapt attention on a field of grass and dirt glowing beneath the vast banks of light.

Breath that is now held, waiting, as a three inch sphere hurtles through the air, impacting a well-worn leather mitt with an audible smack.  The umpire sends forth an unintelligible shout, punching his fist into the air, and the crowd lets loose their pent air with groans of discontent.  Strike three looking.  Game over, and the hometown team has given up the home opener.  The fans slowly rise from their seats and head for the exits; their grumbles about the umpires’ accuracy following them into the parking lots.  But through the muted rancor, there is still a sense of happiness pervading throughout.  No one can be too unhappy with tonight’s loss: regardless of the outcome, it means one thing – baseball season is back.

April 8^th never used to be a special day for me.  Many years I likely let it pass without notice, more preoccupied with school or work.  But for the past two years, that date has been figuratively circled in Sharpie on my computer screen’s calendar.  The days leading up to it have been counted down.  And www.iowacubs.com became so familiar to my browser that a simple typed “I” would bring it up in the address bar.  This year was the first that I’ve been to a season opener, but the journey leading to it started many years ago.

I never participated in organized sports as a kid.  I certainly could have, but never really had the ambition.  And in a household where no one watched baseball on TV, it was easy to presume that it wouldn’t become an interest.  But that all began to change with a pack of baseball cards, a bus trip, a book and a cap.  Oh, and ice cream.  Definitely can’t forget the ice cream.

I think the baseball cards came first, since they are the fuzziest in my mind.  I had never owned baseball cards before, but in 1990, my Dad decided for some reason to buy me a pack of Topps cards.  I don’t know how I reacted at the time, but looking back, they were an amazing piece of what’s now a bygone era.  I recall distinctly that there was a piece of gum in the package, awful, stale gum that I nonetheless hoarded until the day I finally allowed myself to indulge in its crunchy-turning-to-sticky sweet goodness.  But that’s just the gum.  The cards were a revelation too and started me on many years of collecting.  I flipped through them, reading the stats and bios, carefully studying the team names and uniforms to pick a favorite (incidentally, it was the Phillies, but only the 1970-1992 version).  I still have those cards to this day.

Shortly thereafter, the tastiest part of the story began.  Elgin is a fairly lucky city to be within a ten minute’s drive of no less than five Dairy Queens, and on hot summer evenings it wasn’t uncommon for us to be treated to ice cream for dessert.  And there was really only one item that I ever wanted to order: the sundae inside the mini plastic batting helmet.  I’ve always been susceptible to “collect them all” ploys, and combining ice cream with collectible helmets was too brilliant of a move by Dairy Queen for me to resist.  Every time we went, I’d get the helmet sundae, and we eventually amassed a stack of nested helmets that must have been three feet high.  There was no real use for the helmets once you had them, but I sure did my best to obtain one of each kind.

All of this was happening without me having even attended a real baseball game.  But with the help of the Elgin Park District, my Dad, older brother and I were about to change all that.  The park district had arranged a bus trip to Comiskey Park to see the White Sox take on the Orioles.  My Dad, having grown up in Baltimore, was game for it, and I definitely wanted to go.  My brother has never really been a sports fan, but opted to come along for the new experience and the camaraderie.  Making it a true father-sons bonding experience, we signed up.  I can still picture us about to leave the house – my Dad in his Orioles cap, me in a Sox cap we’d bought, and my brother staying neutral with a plain black baseball cap.

The game experience was a lot to take in for a kid, so my memories of that day come in bits and pieces.  I can vaguely see our seats from what I think was the upper deck.  I am fairly sure that I had a hot dog during the game.  I distinctly remember holding a fluorescent colored notepad over the railing toward the players in a fruitless attempt to obtain autographs, while my father encouraged me along.  And my Dad tried to teach me how to fill in a scorecard (that I still have), but ended up doing pretty much the whole thing himself.  I’m not sure I understood the rules of the game, much less the shorthand method for recording it, but I thought it was just the neatest thing.  And at the I-Cubs opener the other night, Stacia and I finally did fill in our first scorecard ever.

So, with all that said, you might think I’ve been a baseball fan from that day on.  Well, it didn’t end up working quite that way, though each occurrence instilled in me a little more of the love of the game.  And besides, there’s still the matter of the book and the cap that I mentioned before, right?  Well, you’ll have to wait ‘til next time for them.  I’m not quite back on deck yet, but I’ll be up soon.

March Filmfest

I had a great “Spring Break” week and a fantastic Easter weekend, but before I can even consider writing about them, I need to get the latest movie update done.  Even though the reviews are coming out five days into April, I did get the movies watched in March.  In fact, I did even better than usual this time around, seeing six movies instead of the usual five.  Not sure if that will continue, but in the meantime, here are the current six, from least favorite up to most.

6) The Last Picture Show (1971) – Allegedly a coming-of-age story set in small-town Texas, and starring a very young Jeff Bridges, I thought this one would be great.  Boy, was I wrong.  Turns out, life in small-town Texas is just really depressing, and everybody mopes around all the time, only interrupting their ennui to sleep around with almost literally everyone in town.  Or so this movie would have you believe.  And even that might have been okay, if there was some semblance of a point to it all.  By the end of the movie, there has been no overarching message about human nature or interpersonal relationships: everyone started miserable, learned nothing and ended up miserable.  It was just majorly unappealing

5) A Place in the Sun (1951) – I usually love stories of moral ambiguity and conflict, but for some reason this one was kind of uninteresting.  It’s a story of a regular guy who finds himself “entangled with two women” as Wikipedia puts it – one the pretty, rich Elizabeth Taylor, and the other an average girl from his work.  Things start to get very complicated, leading up to a rather unusual ending.  But I didn’t like it much, for two reasons.  One, the viewer sees everything, even about the mystery aspect of the film, so there’s no intrigue at all.  And two, the protagonist comes off as such a lecherous creep that there’s no way you can identify with him at all or feel bad when things go wrong.  You just think, well, you did this to yourself, so be it.  For a similar style story, I much prefer The Postman Always Rings Twice.   

4) My Fair Lady (1964) – The first time we started this one, we got about half an hour in and were so put-off by Audrey Hepburn’s screechy cockney accent that we just couldn’t go any further.  The second run went better, as the movie developed some steam as it went, but it just wasn’t a favorite of mine.  You probably know the story: Henry Higgins bets he can turn an ordinary flower seller into a proper lady, and of course things all go exactly as planned…  There were lots of fairly cute parts, a few laughs and some catchy songs.  It was pretty neat to learn that a lot of the songs my Mom sang around the house when we were kids were from this movie.  I did think the pacing was a little off; at 171 minutes, I thought the story could have been told more concisely.  Oh, and the ending I totally thought should have gone the other way.  That was a bummer.

3) The French Connection (1971) – Sigh.  Yet again I find myself thwarted by idiots who use library DVDs as coasters.  I tried two separate libraries for this movie, and each one failed around the halfway point of the film.  So it gets middle-of-the-road marks, though the part I did see was pretty average so it might deserve lower.  It’s a typical gritty cop movie, a la Dirty Harry, this one centered around a big drug shipment and featuring two cops instead of one.  You’ve got stakeouts, roughing up of the informants, chases – all the usual ingredients.  Gene Hackman works well as the loose cannon partner, but I had a harder time seeing Roy Scheider as the brooding cop.  Apparently that was kinda his thing at the time, but I’m more used to later characters from Jaws and SeaQuest, so it was weird to see him acting like a tough guy.  On the whole, this movie was generic enough that I probably won’t seek it out to watch the end.

2) Goodfellas (1990) – I’m no huge fan of mafia movies, but this one is pretty enjoyable.  It was also one of the first “grown up” movies I got to watch as a kid/teen, so I’ll always be a bit fond of it.  Ray Liotta, in probably the performance of his career, plays an Irish-American quickly working his way up in the New York mob.  Naturally, there is a lot of violence and gore, but there are actually lots of funny bits centered around his interaction with Joe Pesci’s character.  However, I think the best part of the movie is the treatment of how things start to unravel as different toes get stepped on and loyalties are betrayed.  It seems Martin Scorsesi is good at showing a person’s rise to the top, as well as the fall from it, and this movie just about nails it.  It’s pretty long, but it’s a good ride.

1) The Apartment (1960) – Hands down, my favorite from the movie project so far.  Ostensibly a comedy, it’s about a lonely office worker who allows his married managers the use of his apartment for their affairs.  Not wanting to cause conflict, he juggles their schedules without complaint until their world starts to collide with his and the girl he pines after.  There are a lot of great moments, comedy-wise, but this movie does start to get heavier pretty quickly.  The lighthearted moments are balanced expertly with the crushingly gutting ones, all expressed brilliantly by Jack Lemmon.  Lemmon is remembered for comedy, but he emotes the highs and lows in this film as well as any reputed “serious” actor.  The movie is charmingly sweet and hopelessly romantic, with abundant witty lines and laugh-out-loud moments.  I love this movie.

Next month:

Sophie’s Choice (1982)

The Jazz Singer (1927)

Swing Time (1936)

Patton (1970)

The Sixth Sense (1999)

And maybe Easy Rider (1969)

Kitchen Zink - Disaster!!!

I love Rick Bayless, I really do.  But for some reason his food and my kitchen just do not seem to get along.  For those who don’t know Rick, he’s a celebrity chef type, owning the popular Frontera restaurant in Chicago.  Frontera has since branched out into salsas that you can buy at the store, and his TV show, Mexico: One Plate at a Time is on PBS and is really good.  Rick’s thing is Mexican food, and he is incredibly energetic about it to the point that it’s pretty infectious.  Add in how much I love Mexican food, and cooking from Rick’s recipes seems like a no-brainer.

The first effort was the Super Bowl carnitas.  There were a lot of problems here, few (if any) of which were directly Rick Bayless’s fault.  First, there was the bad mojo we incurred by not making Nachos as Big as Your Head on Super Bowl Sunday, as we have every year we’ve been together.  Then we had to use mediocre pork, since it was winter and we couldn’t easily get nice local stuff.  And carnitas is made from pork shoulder, which is fatty as heck to begin with, so it was a lower quality cut of a factory farmed pig.  And finally, the smallest pork shoulder we could find at Hy-Vee was like 5 lbs, so we had a ton of it.

The final product was quite tasty, though.  We made a tomatillo salsa, had some real Mexican cheese, some sour cream, and used authentic corn tortillas.  It was great… for the first three tacos.  Then we looked at our pile of meat and saw it was nearly as big as when we had begun!  Each of us was stuffed and we had hardly made a dent in the carnitas.  So over the next week, everything was carnitas.  And as tasty as some carnitas is, when you eat fatty pork every day, you do start to feel gross.  Much as I hate to waste food, in the end we just got damn sick of eating carnitas.  That was in February.

Fast-forward to this week, meal-planning time, and we’re on the subject of seafood.  We’ve had salmon (oily fish) last week, so non-oily or shellfish were an option.  We start bandying about ideas, and Stacia comes up with a great one.  There are ads all over the place for shrimp tacos lately – why not make our own?  The only question is how to season the shrimp so we get some zip to them.  I scour my cookbooks, peruse the usual websites, and eventually hit upon a recipe of Rick Bayless’s that I literally can’t even find as I write this – maybe it’s gone from the internet!  Anyway, all systems go, let’s make some shrimp tacos.

At the store we pick up some wild US shrimp (Seafood Watch “Good Alternative”) and a few very pale looking tomatoes – more about them later.  Cilantro, tortillas, cheese and we’re on our way back home.  The first step was to roast everything.  Four cloves of garlic, in their skins in a pan.  I’d never done this before, but it did roast them up and soften them.  Pretty neat, actually.  Then some onion, also dry, in a pan until it turned a little dark.  And we did the usual broiler method of roasting the sad little tomatoes.  As I worked on this, Stacia made the one appetizing result of the meal, some very tasty guacamole.  Kudos, Stacia!

Meanwhile, everything of mine had roasted and been peeled, which was normal except for the tomatoes which had now lost all of their red color and were orangey-pinky mushy blobs.  Rick says coarsely blend it all in the food processor, so who am I to argue?  Now I have a pulpy orangey-pinky mixture with white specks, which I’m supposed to cook in a hot pan until it darkens and thickens.  Dutifully I press on, add some chipotles in adobo sauce, and finally throw in the shrimp as directed.  Looking into my pan, I start to have a bad feeling about what we’re making.

Because, and I apologize for being gross, but it looks like I am literally cooking shrimp in vomit.  But we’ve come this far: we’ve got cooked shrimp, a slaw we made earlier, yummy guacamole, cheese and tortillas.  At this point, sometimes you just have to say that you’ll try to eat the barfy shrimp.  So we did.  And you know what the surprising thing is?  Well, no, actually there wasn’t much surprise, because they tasted about how they looked.  Not sure if it was just very very poor tomatoes, the huge amount of garlic, or the addition of ground cloves to the sauce, but it was just quite unpleasant to eat.  Of course it didn’t look pretty, but wrapped up in a tortilla we could kind of avoid that aspect.  We each at 1 taco and most of a second (amazingly), before we decided to quit while we were ahead.

So you might think this was an abject failure, right?  Well, technically it was, since we made awful food.  But on the other hand, you can always learn from failures.  And in this case, I don’t think the lesson is that you need better tomatoes, or a little less clove, or you shouldn’t eat food that it looks like someone threw up, though those are all good lessons.  I think the bigger moral of this story is that recipes aren’t infallible.  I have no doubt that when Rick Bayless makes this meal, it tastes fantastic.  But that shouldn’t make me assume that his directions are perfect and following them rote is the way to go.

I am absolutely not a chef, and to a certain extent I’m not even sure I’m a cook.  The thing that I long to be able to do, and that I’ve been hesitant to try, is to be able to make up dishes on my own.  But if following directions leads me to vomitacos™ then maybe I can’t do much worse.  I need to do it in small steps, but disasters like these, strange as it may sound, make me think that perhaps I’ll be ready soon.  

Kitchen Zink - Spaghetti & Meatballs

Some days I get home and think to myself that there is no way that I feel like cooking.  Waking up at 6:30 in the morning, and then spending the day at my desk trying to figure out how the heck to do my job often leaves me tired out and I just want to flop on the couch, order a pizza and lounge around for the night.  You could call these days Mondays, for lack of a better word.

But some days, even if I’m wiped out, and on rare occasions because I’m wiped out, I very much do want to cook.  Cooking is my fun escape, and after a frustrating day it can be just the solace I’m looking for.  It’s hard to say for sure, but I’m hoping that these days are becoming more frequent as I develop better skills.

So it was a bit of a surprise, but not totally unexpected, when we arrived home after the drive from Dubuque to West Des Moines (3 ½ hours) and I immediately started thinking about what to make for dinner.  Add in that we’d dined out the entire weekend, and that Stacia was busy with catch-up schoolwork, and spending some time meal planning sounded pretty enticing.  On top of that, I had an insatiable craving for spaghetti, but really wanted to step outside the boil pasta, heat Ragu, and serve method.  So where to start?

The obvious solution (to me anyway) was Ellie Krieger and her Turkey Meatballs with Spicy Tomato Sauce and Whole Wheat Spaghetti.  I have had some sort of major food crush on Ellie lately, and in the past few weeks I have made at least three dinners out of her cookbook The Food You Crave.  Ellie’s a nutritionist, and her food philosophy of eating healthy whole natural foods, not depriving yourself, and avoiding bizarre chemical concoctions that reduce fat/calories is something I’m really on board with.  I have her book from the library, but will probably soon buy it since everything we’ve yet made out of it has been fantastic.  The cover, incidentally, shows her spaghetti and meatballs, so perhaps the book itself had been subliminally affecting my thoughts, but sometimes you just feel like spaghetti, darn it!

I ran to the store and grabbed some of the missing ingredients, allowing Stacia to get some work done before the tag-team cooking event began.  First we needed to make the meatballs, which were loaded with tons of tasty vegetables and greens: onion, garlic, carrot, parsley and thyme, to be precise.  It was a lot of chopping, I suppose, but strangely enough I enjoy that aspect of cooking, so it was kinda fun to get all the produce reduced down to size.  Then we mixed in an egg, some bread crumbs, and of course the ground turkey, and the delightfully squishy mass gradually got formed into balls to be baked in the oven.

While they baked, we made the sauce and pasta.  I suppose these were pretty straightforward, but there were some interesting twists.  The main one is that the sauce is a spicy tomato sauce, so we had a key ingredient to give things a little zip: chipotle peppers in adobo sauce.  I’d never heard of these until a year or two ago, but they are awesome little firecrackers.  The chipotles themselves are simply smoke-dried jalapenos, but they are then stewed in a zesty sauce of tomatoes, garlic, vinegar and spices to end up soft and rehydrated.  You can buy little cans of chipotles in adobo sauce in the Mexican section of any grocery store.

Now, chipotles in adobo pack a wallop.  I discovered this the first time I cooked with them, and engaged in my usual (bad) habit of licking the spoon.  Wow!  Very fiery, but if used in the right proportions with other ingredients, they lend a wonderful smoky zip that I don’t think you can replicate any other way.  Thankfully, Ellie only called for one diced pepper with the accompanying sauce, so I knew we weren’t about to be blown away by the spiciness.  Careful not to taste the peppers on their own, I minced one up and tossed it into the sauce.

Like I said, the rest was pretty simple.  Boil water and drop in some whole-wheat spaghetti.  Simmer the sauce together for a while.  When the meatballs had cooked for the allotted oven time, they were transferred into the saucepot to soak up some liquid and cook just a little more.  Miraculously, everything finished at the same time, and we were ready to plate.  Grate on a little bit of leftover Pecorino for a final flair, and it was dinnertime!  (Unfortunately it all looked so good, we just dug in without staging a photo!  But the picture on the web is probably prettier anyway).

As we ate, I decided that this may well be the best spaghetti I’ve ever eaten.  The meatballs were juicy and flavorful, which can be tricky to achieve with turkey.  I have to suspect the transfer from oven to sauce helped a lot with this aspect, so kudos to Ellie for that.  And instead of drab gray turkey, these were flecked with a colorful confetti of carrot and parsley, which made for a more visually appealing meal.

But as good as the meatballs were, I think the sauce even topped them!  Chunky and tomatoey, but with the little pinch of fire from the chipotles, it livened spaghetti up from what can be a very blah presentation.  I will say that it didn’t make a ton of sauce, which ordinarily might bother me (I tend to prefer a lot of sauce) but it really worked on this dish.  Rather than drowning the noodles in sauce, they were accented with it, providing just enough flavor with each bite without overpowering it.  And with the pecorino on top, there was a little added taste even sprinkled on the noodles without any sauce.

It was almost sad the other day when we finished up the leftover spaghetti, since it was simply so good.  It’s so much fun to make something so delicious, knowing at the same time that it’s really good for you.  As the front page of Ellie Krieger’s site says “To get people to eat well don’t say a word about health, just cook fantastic food for them.”  Not to get too full of myself, but I think this turned out being a fantastic meal.  For a day where I was tired out from driving, and really just craved spaghetti, it was a great way for things to turn out.  Easily a repeat recipe.

Skiing: Demon-sport of the insane and masochistic

(Okay, that title may have been slight hyperbole.)

Driving through the rolling hills above the city of Dubuque, Iowa, a strange sight rises out of the sodden cornfields of a mid-March morning.  The drab browns of dormant lawns and fields suddenly give way to a brilliant expanse to white.  Like a shipwrecked sailor clutching a plank for support, here in this tiny outpost, winter clings tight to a landscape where almost all other snow has finally melted away.  Even as the mercury rises near 50 degrees, one last winter wonderland can boast dozens of inches of snow depth.  This spot, Sundown Mountain, was our first stop on a long weekend escape.

I had never skied before, nor had I had much inclination to.  Scary stories of avalanches, hard crashes and ice spiders (kidding!) seemed enough to dissuade me.  Then, out of the blue, they decided to have a Winter Olympics, I decided to record every single event, and perhaps then the seed took root in my mind.  Totally separately, we decided on a long weekend trip to Dubuque, with several events and attractions in mind, but still a good many openings in the schedule.  Serendipitously, I stumbled upon the website for Sundown, and thought, “Why not?  Let’s give it a try.”

As a true amateur who had never been on skis, on a ski mountain, or even in a conversation about skiing, there was only one place to learn.  On Youtube.  Oh, sure, there were lessons available at Sundown, but they cost almost as much as the lift ticket/ski rental combo.  And with the wealth of “experts” putting videos online, it really was a much more frugal option.  Within minutes I was an expert on the difference between pizza and French fries, and considered myself ready to go.  We arrived at the mountain, and paid a moderately obscene amount for our day’s entertainment.

My ski boots were dead ringers for the magnetic gravity boots from Star Trek VI, and were probably just as much fun to walk in.  We stomped our way into the skis, and set about flailing around in the kiddie/beginner area.  After some experimenting, we felt ready to attempt the smallest hill, Sunshine.  It was tricky at first, but I remembered my extensive training, and soon felt confident in the “French fry position,” even doing some spiffy turns back and forth across the slope.  Granted, this slope was tiny, and didn’t even follow the main mountain, but I was feeling pretty good.

That meant it was time for Sunbowl, deceptively labeled “Easiest” on the hill map.  Stacia set off first, and then me, followed closely by trouble.  You see, in an attempt to slow the riders, Sunbowl was designed with a fairly sharp switchback shortly after the start.  As we approached, I saw Stacia attempt to turn, not succeed, and crash at the banked outside of the turn.  Not wanting to leave her alone (and also not capable of making the turn anyway), I followed suit.  Somehow I stayed on my feet up the banking, started to slide back and flopped down onto my face with my skis somehow angled out 90 degrees from my body.

With some work, I was able to extricate myself and get back onto my skis.  Stacia and I both thought little of this crash, since we knew the switchback was there, and the rest of the hill was more direct.  Unfortunately for us, it went directly downhill.  Once again Stacia set off first, I waited a moment and also got going.  And going, and going…  Legs firmly set in as big of a wedge (“pizza slice”) as I could, I found myself inexplicably gaining speed.  The wind whipped my eyes to tear up as I accelerated faster and faster, desperately trying to somehow slow myself down.

Then I crested a little hill and saw Stacia flat on her back on the middle of the ski run, looking for all the world like she was making a snow angel.  (Allegedly she crashed, but who knows? ;)  As I hurtled past at uncontrollable speed, I heard her yell “I’m okay!  Go ahead!”  Unable to appreciate the irony that she thought I could have stopped to check on her, I continued on to what felt like impending doom.  I was still going at what felt like an insane speed, but I could see I was approaching the bottom of the hill.  I was almost there.

Unfortunately, a diabolical set of circumstances arose to ruin my ski run from hell.  A man and his small child happened to be on the slope ahead of me, just as the run turned a gently S-curve.  Unable to slow down or really turn very well, I found myself heading straight for a light pole.  I could see it was padded, but I really didn’t want to hit it, so I decided it would be better to just crash.  Everything happened fast enough that I don’t know what I did to make myself crash, or what the crash was like, but somehow after the twists and spins I ended up on the snow, short of the light pole and separated from my skis by about three feet.

I found my way back into my skis, skied the few remaining yards down the hill and met up with Stacia, who had apparently gone by while I was getting my bearings.  We looked at each other and each said something like, “That was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done!”  In a daze, we rode the lift to the top of the hill, and returned to the baby hill for the rest of our time there.  Fortunately neither one of us hurt ourselves, but it was probably just luck, since you can really twist yourself up pretty well when you have three foot long planks attached to your legs.  Since luck had shined on us on our run down the Sunbowl, we decided not to tempt fate again that day.

As we left Sundown Mountain, I thought about the Winter Olympic athletes that had, in-part, inspired this trip.  I recall from the telecasts that the alpine skiers travel at something like 60 mph.  I have no idea how fast I was going, but have to imagine it wasn’t more than 20 or 30, and it was the scariest experience of my life.  With regard to skiing, I’m proud to say I’ve done it, and on a small enough hill it was actually pretty fun.  But I think the best way to participate in this sport is the way I did during the Olympics: from the couch.

Kitchen Zink - Weekly roundup

Is anyone surprised that my plan for a post every day lasted exactly two days before it ended up petering out?  I’m not really.  There’s a line between setting goals for my blog and making utterly unreasonable demands on myself, and saying I’d write here daily sets me well on the other side of the line, moving blogging from occasional respite to dreaded chore.  For some reason I’m preoccupied with defining exactly what I want this blog to be, forgetting that I started it just for the sake of writing every now and then as a sidebar from my very orderly and logical day job.  So, we’re gonna back things down here a little bit, and get back to my original intent.

In the past week or so, while I’ve been thinking things like “I need to write something about these burgers!” we have actually done some pretty cool cooking.  So today’s post is going to be the Cliff’s Notes version of the past week or so, and then the next entry might even be non-food related.  Who knows?  I sure don’t!  In the meantime, here’s what we’ve cooked lately:

Greek-style turkey (chicken) burgers – BHG cookbook (the red checkered one).  This is a recipe we’ve made a few times now, and it’s always awesome.  It’s a fairly simple turkey burger – we used chicken this time – with some presumable Greek spices and seasonings mixed in, cooked up on the handy George Foreman grill.  We picked up some pita pockets this time around, which made for a fun and mildly authentic wrapper for the burgers.  There’s a Greek salsa they have you make, comprised of cucumber, tomato, kalamata olive, and some vinegar and spices.  Put some of that into the pita with the burger, top with crumbled feta (yumm) and presto!  Greek burgers.  I love the way the salty feta and the sour but fresh salsa flavors mix with the lean burger patty.  It’s a great mix of flavors, and it’s going into our repeat repertoire.

Moroccan chickpea and vegetable stew – Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker.  I’ve never had real Moroccan food, made by real Moroccans, but every Moroccan-themed dish I’ve ever made has turned out great.  There’s a distinct set of spices they use, including cumin, cinnamon, paprika and turmeric, that meld into a really phenomenal and unique taste sensation.  Couple that with the fact that there’s usually some dried fruit (raisins, apricots, dates or similar) that add some sweetness to offset the spices, and I just wonder why this cuisine hasn’t taken off in the US.  Anyway, all that said, I thought this recipe was a little bland – maybe it needed a little higher quantity of the spice mixture for the amount of stew it made.  It was fine, I just thought it needed a little more punch.  However, I did accidentally use undrained tomatoes that should have been drained, so maybe it’s my fault things got diluted.  It’s a maybe re-try.

Homemade Mac and Cheese – Made up.  I always loved the restaurant-style macaroni and cheese, like the one you can get at Old Country Buffet or Bonanza.  I’ve also never liked the basic one from the box, made with fluorescent orange cheese powder.  I know you can buy boxes of the deluxe one, but it’s been an ongoing process to try to recreate it on our own.  We’ve had pretty good success using Velveeta, but wanted to try “real” cheese for once.  I did the whole process, making a roux of flour and butter, adding milk to make a white sauce, and then adding shredded cheese once it thickens.  Unfortunately, the Colby we used turned really gritty and grainy in the sauce, much like every other non-Velveeta attempt.  It may be time to bite the bullet and just stick with Velveeta, even though it is something like $5 a box.  It was interesting to find out, though, that Velveeta is made of real cheese rather than the horrible chemical concoction I was envisioning, so maybe it’s not so bad to just use it.

Avocado Frozen Yogurt – Fine Cooking magazine, Feb/Mar 2010.  We own an ice cream maker, and have made pretty good use of it, primarily following the recipes provided in the manual.  That’s slowed down a bit since it is winter right now, but I’d been itching to make some ice cream anyway when the last Fine Cooking showed up.  They had a feature on avocados (very good for you) and one of the recipes was for a frozen yogurt, which we just had to try.  This one was quite a bit more complicated than the ones Cuisinart came up with, and right in the middle of the process I discovered our avocados had gotten too old and were total mush.  So I had to: measure all ingredients and get ready, open avocados, throw avocados away, run to the store for more avocados, heat milk and sugar to boiling, add eggs, stirring constantly so they didn’t curdle, cook to a custard, mix in avocado, add lemon and lime juice and zest, cool in ice bath, pour into machine and run for half an hour to make ice cream.

A mere two hours after I started, we had avocado frozen yogurt!  :)  It was awesome, actually.  The avocado didn’t add a ton of flavor, but really made the ice cream smooth and creamy.  The lemon and lime flavors came through pretty strongly, giving it a very refreshing taste.  You probably wouldn’t want to eat a lot of it in one sitting, but as a light dessert, it was awesome.  It was a ton of work, for sure, but that doesn’t bother me when the end result is really good.  If it had been gross, I would have been ticked that it took me hours to make, but this way it was just a lot of fun.

The funny thing is, I’m not even all the way caught up with the past week’s notable meals yet.  There are two that I really liked, perhaps even more than the ones I’ve written about, but they have a common thread that lends itself to its own post sometime.  I will plan to write that on Wednesday of this week and have it posted Thursday at noon.  (Just kidding!)  Maybe it will happen, maybe not.  I’m not going to force myself and I’m not going to stress if it doesn’t happen.  That’s the plan… for now at least.