APRIL 2014
Wednesday 2014.4.30
Duck Anyone?
This week the featured recipe is a Duck Isabel I made as a tribute to the two late stars of the BBC cooking series Two Fat Ladies. I was very amused by the several comments from people who don't like duck, but nonetheless enjoyed the video anyway. Why amused? Because at the time I was working on another duck recipe.
A friend of mine asked me to work on a Duck in Orange Sauce recipe. It is one of his favorite foods. I happen to like duck. So I set about doing some research. In one of my cookbooks, The Fine Art of Italian Cooking by Giuliano Bugialli, the author goes to great lengths to prove that the Italians learned nothing about cooking from the French. The French took Italy's best recipes, added a sauce here and there, and then renamed it French cuisine. And so, the first sentence in the recipe for Duck in Orange Sauce explains that the recipe is Florentine in origin.
It might be true. I am not a food historian. Nonetheless, that author always makes me laugh.
I think the best research for a quintessentially French recipe like Duck in Orange Sauce is my Le Cordon Bleu at Home cookbook. That was where I began, making a few changes. Le Cordon Bleu is about the art of food as well as the cooking of it. Master everything in that book and you're on your way to being a chef at a fine French restaurant with a Michelin three-star rating. I cook at home; so I skipped some of the more complicated steps.
Everything went well until the very end. I messed up before I shot the best photographs of the day, my "Royals." Normally, I move the food to the dining room table, which is right in front of my largest windows. The natural lighting there is the best I have for food photography. Northern light would be better, but I have no large windows facing north. However, the dining room table has functioned well for food photographs during the last 3½ years.
The mistake I made was to start carving the bird before I did the final photographs. I never make that mistake. I always move the food to the table, shoot my Royals, and then return the food to the video camera where I shoot the carving, plating, tasting, whatever.
Those last photographs are the most important ones of the day; and so I headed out to buy another duck. The store where I usually buy them was out. I looked through four grocery stores before I finally found one. The following day, I mocked things up a bit. There seemed little point in working through an extensive recipe again. I'd saved the items I needed for the second shoot. So having the duck trussed and roasted like the first, I pretended it was the real deal and got the photographs I needed. Sometimes cooking projects go that way.
How will the recipe be received? Once again, I'll probably received a flurry of comments from fans who really like the video, but who want to say they don't like duck. I'm okay with that. Mostly I cook for myself, doing a video in the process. It's not that I don't care about what people like or don't like. I do. But when I am not paid for any of these videos, I feel justified in doing everything my own way. I enjoy having that level of creative control.
As for duck, I don't know when I'll ever return to it again. I have no immediate plans. If, however, I discover a recipe that really intrigues me, I'll buy another duck. I really enjoy the flavor of duck.
Sunday 2014.4.27
Bread and Soup
I've been uploading my videos to YouTube for more than 3 years. Today's upload is my 200th video. When I first started this web site in August of 2010, I never imagined I'd produce 200 videos. In fact, back then, I didn't even have plans to do videos at all. My goal was to write 200 recipes. It wasn't until a friend's son moved into town, with a video camera, that I expanded into videos at his urging.
It seems that breads get the most attention. I can understand why. There is something almost romantic about baking bread. I have all of Paul Hollywood's Bread videos. That was how I learned to make Ciabatta. He has a passion for bread making.
If I post a picture of bread or of soup on the Facebook fan page, it will typically get more "Likes" and more views than almost anything else I might upload. Just as baking bread is almost a romantic pastime, soup is comfort food, especially in winter.
And thus I chose to do another bread recipe this week. I buttered the bread and toasted it under the broiler, and then ate some with a bowl of my recent Mulligatawny Soup. I saved one bowl specifically for this purpose.
When I was a child, we would visit my grandmothers in Webster, Massachusetts a few times each year. My mother's mother, Josephine, who was born and raised in Naples, Italy, would always send us home with something good to eat. Her cooking wasn't phenomenal, but she made a few things phenomenally. One was her pepperoni bread.
It wasn't the kind of bread you'd toast and eat with your eggs at breakfast. In fact, it wasn't even good to spread with butter and eat as a snack. However, slather it with some butter and then toast it under the broiler — that was the best way to eat it. Alongside a bowl of soup or some good Italian pasta, like my mother's American Chop Suey (an Italian American dish of macaroni and beef ragù) — there was a feast of comfort food.
Friday was predicted to be a day of possible rain showers. The probability was only 20%, but I knew the day would be overcast and cool. It seemed like good baking weather.
My grandmother's Pepperoni Bread is not difficult to make. You almost don't need a recipe. Start with a basic white bread dough, typical of Italian bread, and work some chunks of pepperoni and mozzarella cheese into it. You could probably use the frozen bread dough sold in the grocery store, although I never tried this. The best pepperoni to buy is the stick that you can cut into chunks. I've seen recipes that are made sort of like a cinnamon swirl bread, only with slices of pepperoni and cheese in the swirl. It looks good and probably tastes delicious. But Grammy always used chunks.
And so I made the bread on Friday. It came out exactly the way I hoped it would. For the final tasting clip I buttered and broiled two slices, as was customary in our family. It actually tasted a little better than my grandmother's pepperoni bread. I make my bread with slightly less flour for a moister, more delicate crumb. My grandmother's bread was drier and more chewy, but still delicious when buttered and broiled.
A fan of my Facebook page suggested an Italian sausage bread, made in the swirl way. That looks good too, especially with some heated marinara on the side for dipping. That one is high on my list of projects too.
I've been trying to increase the number of projects "in the vault" for future use. I had two. Now I have four. Things are getting better.
Wednesday 2014.4.23
Good News
My tongue recovered quickly. The last time this happened I was without taste buds for many weeks. I can't explain the quick recovery this time. I had read somewhere that each time the body encounters a new virus, it creates a new antibody to fight it. Maybe last time my body armed itself and this time it was an easy fight.
More Good News
I am starting to build up my backlog of video projects in the vault. This reminds me of something I heard on the radio many years ago. The word backlog, which today refers to a body of undone work (often paperwork), comes from a time when a large log was placed at the back of the fireplace. It burned for a long time, such that when someone needed to get the fire going well again, they only needed to add more fuel and the back log would ignite it.
This past weekend I made a Sweet Potato Pie. It was fun and easy. All the filling ingredients are combined in a food processor (after the sweet potatoes are baked). One added benefit of using the food processor is that it whips some air into the mix for a lighter and fluffier filling. The pie was so good, I kept it all for myself.
I usually give food away. When I made the Tangia (slow-cooked beef), I called a friend and gave everything to him and his girlfriend. I only needed enough to do the final photography and the tasting clip for the video. As I said at the time, I'm not much of a beef eater.
This time, however, the pie was too delicious to give away. Because of the spice blend, the flavor is similar to pumpkin pie. The sweet potato makes it different enough to stand out on its own. This is a really good pie.
Yesterday I did another soup video. A fan of my YouTube channel suggested I try making a Mulligatawny Soup. It is Indian in origin and seasoned with curry powder, although there are many Western variations. The recipe I found used no turmeric; so I made a slight addition because I thought the color would be improved. It was. Toward the end of the week there might be a slight chance of rain showers. Feels like soup weather to me. I'm prepared.
Best of all, I did everything in one day. I started shooting the video in the morning. It was done before noon and I ate Mulligatawny Soup for lunch. Delicious. During the afternoon I did all the video and audio editing. I encoded the video for YouTube and DVD. Finally, early in the evening I did the conversion to XviD (AVI) format for the news groups. I even wrote the recipe and added all the photographs. Everything is done. I think this is the first time I completed an entire project in one day. And, as always, the Mulligatawny Soup recipe and video will be published here and on YouTube in coming weeks. You'll like this soup.
I'm not sure what I'll try next. There was a time when I'd plan 15 to 20 recipes in advance. Now I take them one at a time. I'll call that the result of slowing down in retirement. Sometimes I feel if I slow down any more all the clocks will stop. However, I think I keep myself too busy for that to happen. This was another week of other projects as well. Create a little part to fix the hinge on the front door of my computer. Solder a replacement jack into my sound system's controller to use my headphones again. Re-install my caddy bay into this computer so that I can swap hard disk caddies again. There is always something to do.
So, good news all the way around. All my projects so far this week were successful. And it's only Wednesday.
Sunday 2014.4.20 (Happy Easter)
Who Knew?
Recently I uploaded to YouTube and to my web site my recipe and video for shrimp with an artichoke pesto. One of the fans of my YouTube channel suggested I try making spinach pesto. I had never heard of it.
I like spinach when it is part of something, like my Chicken and Spinach Pie. My mother used to cook spinach and serve it with butter. I never ate it. And Popeye eating cold spinach right out of a can was gross, no matter how strong it made him. (What didn't they try back then to persuade kids to eat yucky stuff?)
I also like fresh spinach in a salad. Summer is nearly here, a time when I eat a lot of salads. I'm ready with plenty of mix for my Homemade Salad Dressing.
Spinach pesto, however, had never crossed paths with me. I tried to imagine how it might taste. My food imagination is usually pretty good, but nothing came to mind. There was no alternative but to research some recipes and then try making it.
As always, I adjust. When it comes to making pesto with basil, it is really important to crush the leaves to release the juice. It's that juice that gives pesto its delightful flavor. Friends have tasted my pesto and wondered why theirs wasn't as good. Simple. They dump everything in a food processor, whir it up, and call it pesto. No. It's minced basil. You need to crush the basil leaves. Pesto was traditionally made with a mortar and pestle. Pesto is an Italian word that means "pounded."
And so I crushed the spinach leaves the same way I would with basil — put them in a sturdy plastic bag and hammer them with a mallet until the leaves are well bruised and the juices are released. Then I transferred the crushed spinach to a food processor and made the pesto my customary way.
The flavor was magnificent. I had never imagined spinach pesto could taste so good. I had to cover the bowl with plastic wrap so that I wouldn't keep picking at it while I did the rest of the video. To use the pesto, I sliced raw chicken breast really thin and cooked it lightly — just until it is white and cooked through, no browning. I also made some fettuccine noodles from scratch, which I boiled. I combined the cooked chicken with plenty of pesto, then added the cooked pasta to the skillet. Turn to coat everything and serve. It was an incredibly delicious lunch.
This also solves an important problem for me. During the summer I usually buy basil at the farmer's market. I look for the plants that still have the roots on, even though they're a little more expensive. I avoid the cut basil because I don't trust some of the "farmers" at the market. Their vegetables look like they bought them at the wholesale produce market and then marked up the price for retail sale at the farmer's market. I want to know the farmer grew the basil.
And here's a consumer tip: During the spring and summer it is sometimes less expensive to buy the living basil plants at a garden center than at the grocery store. Keep the plants watered and then use them when you need to make pesto.
So what do you do in winter when the basil plants at the grocery store look like they've traveled a long way to get to market? Make spinach pesto. It's just as delicious and the bagged and washed spinach almost always looks good.
Pepper Again
Uh-oh. I woke up in the middle of the night with a strong flavor of pepper in my mouth. I went through this a couple years ago. According to my Blog archives, it happened in September, 2011. The doctor said it was caused by a virus that deadens the taste buds in my tongue. They taste sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. When they're dead, you can't taste those flavors. This morning I made my customary cup of coffee. I can't taste the sugar. My olfactory works. I can still smell fragrances and aromas; it's just the tongue that is gone. If this follows the same pattern as last time, it will be a month or two before the taste buds fully recover. If I remember correctly, sweet was the last one to come back.
Wednesday 2014.4.16
Gifts
I don't know of anyone who doesn't enjoy receiving a little unexpected gift once in a while. I'm no different.
A few months ago I blogged about a fan in Hawaii sending me some Hawaiian fabrics with which to make aprons. Different fans find different elements in my videos to enjoy. Some really like the clock on the wall. It tells them how long I worked (sometimes all day) on a recipe. It also reveals when I go back and shoot pick-ups and cutaways to cover problems or mistakes. Some days the clock jumps all over the place because I might repeat a recipe, doing it again the next day, and then use video clips from both days. One minute it's 11:45, then 3:12, then 10:18, etc.
The aprons are also a hit among some fans. I have over a dozen of them and I made almost all of them. When I was in college I learned to tailor. I was studying theater arts at the time and we were required to work in all areas of theater — acting, costuming, set construction, lighting, and run crew. In the first play in which I had a role, I actually spent more time shifting scenery than I spent on stage in front of an audience. I learned a lot. I built two decks on my home and they are constructed more like stage pieces — built to withstand traffic and movement — than like carpentry projects. There are almost no nails. Everything is fastened together with bolts and nuts or long wood screws.
Scenery construction was my favorite. What guy doesn't like working with power tools? But costume construction taught me how to run an industrial sewing machine and I also learned a lot about garment structure. I've gone as far as tailoring my own wool suits. Aprons, therefore, are so simple I could practically make them blindfolded.
The latest gift was a bottle of homemade wine vinegar and a bottle of olive oil made by a fan's relative in Italy. I was very impressed with the gift. I wasn't sure what to expect. Smuckers jelly jars? The little bottles were finished with a foil seal over the top and neck, just like a good bottle of wine from the store. Being homemade rather than commercially pasteurized, I was told to expect some "mother" in the vinegar. I did some research on the Internet and learned that the mother, mycoderma aceti, is common in many vinegars. Totally harmless, it can be ignored or filtered out and used to make more vinegar from wine. I'd like to blog some day about the experience of making my own vinegar. Even more impressive, rather than using bubble wrap to protect the bottles in the box, they were wrapped in a new tea towel and matching pot holders. That's class!
I usually attach a towel to my apron when doing a video. I looked forward to using this one. I used it yesterday, and it will last a while. I only use the towels to wipe clean water from my hands. If I need to sop up something messy, I reach for paper towels. Keep nice things looking nice.
I'm also expecting some kefir granules. I have never made kefir before. I've made yogurt. I even came up with an ingenious way to control the temperature inside the box in which the yogurt was working. I hooked up a light bulb to a dimmer. By adjusting the power to light bulb, I could raise or lower the temperature inside (monitored with a thermometer). The kefir seems a lot easier. The working temperature is quite wide. Room temperature will be fine. The granules will expand and can be used again and again. They can be dried or frozen. I can even give some away when I get enough of them. I know of one friend who would probably enjoy making her own kefir.
Maybe I'll make a gift of kefir and granules to her; pay it forward.
Sunday 2014.4.13
And a Good Time Was Had by All
I have one friend who has a good head for food. This became obvious the first time I made Lamb Briouats. When I invited him over to sample the food, I told him nothing about the meal. He took a bite, chewed, swallowed, and then said, "This tastes Moroccan." He was exactly right. The recipe came from my Moroccan cookbook.
I invited him over to taste the Duck Isabel after I had prepared it a second time, solving the problems I encountered in the first attempt. When I had told him about the first attempt, I rated the flavor as a five or six on a scale of 10. He asked, "Six according to your own discriminating tastes? Or six according to the people who love eating your food." I had to admit that the Duck Isabel, such as it was, would probably be enjoyed by some people I know. I'm not thinking of the Hamburger Helper people (I don't know any), but I was thinking of neighbors whose trash bins are always overflowing each week with empty packages from heat-and-serve meals.
I had already eaten my dinner; therefore, I could sit and observe his reactions to the food as he ate. Besides telling me it was delicious, his actions were in harmony with his words. I gave him a big plate of food and not only did the eat everything on his plate, but at the end he was scraping the plate with his fork to pick up any little bits he might have missed. At that point it wasn't about hunger. He was savoring every last flavor.
When I first made the dish there was the debate in my mind whether or not I should publish the recipe. It was good enough, but I suspected it wasn't up to the level I am accustomed to having on my web site. Part of the problem was that I am barely keeping two recipes ahead of my deadlines.
At one point I had as many as a dozen recipes in the vault that I could use during a dry spell. When I started to feel burnt out, I entered a dry spell. The problem was compounded by the building of the shed and the disorganization in my home as I stored some of my shed items inside. I made matters worse as I reorganized many of my possessions, deciding which would be stored in bins in the shed and which would be stored more comfortably on cupboard shelves. There was the will to publish that first attempt as is, filling another empty slot and keeping my head above the swirling water of deadlines. But I knew I could do better, and I therefore chose to reformat the camera's memory card, erasing the entire first video attempt with no backup.
As I said in Wednesday's blog, a full night's sleep helped me sort out the problems in my mind and I woke up knowing where I went wrong. Another trip to the store to buy another duck, another set up, and I began another video. This time it all worked right and my friend enjoyed his plate of food. On a scale of one to ten I would rate the flavor a high eight or a low nine. He might have given it a ten, but then we started talking about my Tuscan Meatloaf. In his mind that meal is a solid ten. So the Duck Isabel got a nine.
I like meals like Duck Isabel because they give the dinner guests something unexpected. Tell them they are going to be eating duck and they'll expect a roasted bird on a platter, maybe surrounded by roasted vegetables for good eye appeal, and bones. Instead, they see something that looks like a meatloaf wrapped in prosciutto and tied. It doesn't look like a duck. It slices like a meatloaf, but inside each slice they find a couple pieces of duck breast meat and a stuffing of meat and herbs. There are no bones. The flavor is rich and savory.
It's not an easy dish. You wouldn't attempt this recipe when you got home from work at the end of the day. But for special occasions — maybe an anniversary or when the mother-in-law is coming for a visit and you need to prove to her that you can cook — it would be a suitable main course. It is also unique. I did an Internet search for the name and found nothing. I didn't look at every duck recipe; perhaps there is something similar with a different name. Nonetheless, I think this is a meal that would pleasantly surprise almost any guest.
Wednesday 2014.4.9
Stuff Happens
The duck wasn't expensive. I would have felt a lot worse if I had wasted a goose. The last time I bought a goose for a video it cost $45. The duck, if I remember correctly, was about a third of that price. Nonetheless, it was the thought that counted.
The back story: Earlier this week a fan of the web site notified me of the sad news of Clarissa Dickson Wright's passing. If you're not familiar with the name, she was one of the stars of the BBC cooking series, Two Fat Ladies. She was 66. The other star, Jennifer Paterson, died in 1999 of lung cancer. She was a smoker.
I was saddened with their passing because the show was one of my favorites, probably only surpassed in my appreciation by the French Chef videos of Julia Child. I have all of Two Fat Ladies on DVD. Clarissa and Jennifer were the inspiration behind two of my recipes — Trout with Tomatoes and Mascarpone and Goose Isabel. The trout recipe was so popular, friends started making it for their family and friends. In "The Cambridge Eight" episode, Clarissa made a Rabbit Isabel for the rowing team at Cambridge University.
I tried to do another Isabel, this time with duck, as a tribute to Clarissa. Everything seemed to be progressing well, until I tried to wrap the loaf in prosciutto like I do for my Tuscan Meatloaf. The prosciutto started to tear. The filling crumbled. I couldn't get the loaf to tie up neatly. I managed to get it into a skillet to brown and from there I successfully transferred it to a baking pan. It cooked well enough, but slicing was the final undoing. When I started to remove the ties the loaf began to fall apart.
If I can alter a phrase, Time and tea heals all wounds. And so I sat down with a soothing cup of tea to think where I might have gone wrong. I couldn't decide on anything. Maybe it was just an unqualfied failure. It happens.
Failures sometimes amuse me. I like knowing that I can't do everything. I don't like making mistakes, especially when they are easy to avoid. But complete failures remind me that I am human. I don't even like using the cliché, Nobody is perfect. We're all capable of failure. That's the human condition. We behave exactly as humans are expected to behave. Therefore, we are all perfect humans. Perfection as a concept of being free from all failures is an empty dream. I say empty because if no one ever failed, no one would ever learn, and I like learning. Of course, even rats in a maze can learn. But only humans can appreciate the value of learning. (The rats only appreciate the cheese.)
I considered whether or not I would try again and, initially, I decided not to. You've heard the expression, I'll sleep on it. Such sayings don't generate themselves randomly. They are born of the wisdom of experience. This morning I woke up knowing where I went wrong. I pre-cooked the filling meats. They couldn't stick together like they would have when raw. Imagine cooking up some ground beef and then trying to assemple it into a hamburger patty. It won't work. I made the Gateau Paris Brest pastry cake 14 times to get it perfect. Of course, the 60 eggs I wasted in the process only cost about a third of the price for one duck.
One lesson is simple. Start with a recipe. Even if it is a recipe that is doomed to failure, as was the one for the Genovese Savory Pastries, the recipe is nonetheless a starting point. I fixed the original recipe and the pastries were delicious. With the duck, I started with only an idea in my head.
I'll still try to be creative from time to time. Not all of my purely creative efforts started off with failures. Some successful recipes that come to mind are my Linguine with Clam Sauce, my Pesto Lamb, which won honorable mention in a contest and ended up in a cookbook by America's Test Kitchen, my Chicken and Spinach Pie, which was actually inspired by a photograph in a cookbook, Pecan Praline Ice Cream, which was a challenge from a friend, or my Romaine Wrapped Scallops, or, finally, my Smoked Salmon Quiche, which I thought of one morning while riding my bicycle to work.
There are other successful creations, but I think I've patted myself enough on the back to overcome my feelings of failure with the duck. And to put the failure forever behind me, just moments ago I formatted my video camera's memory card. There was no backup. The video is gone. Tomorrow is another day.
Sunday 2014.4.6
A Thing or Two About Beef
As I've said many times in these blogs, I'm not much of a beef eater. If I want red meat I reach for lamb. The only beef I typically buy is ground beef or stew beef, which is cut up scraps sold by the butcher. That is what I bought this week for a recipe I videoed.
The recipe is another one from a Moroccan cookbook I like. This recipe is for a slow cooked beef stew, rich with herbs and spices, sweetened with a little honey and lemon. The recipe and video will be on this web site and on YouTube in coming weeks.
While I was in the warehouse store buying the cubed beef, I looked at the steaks. Most of them were marked "Graded Prime." My limited knowledge of the subject says that is the best quality you can buy. One of my textbooks says Prime is usually reserved for restaurants and butchers. The grade I see most often is Choice. I had to call a friend.
I have one friend who likes beef, as well as lamb. If given the freedom to talk (a freedom I seldom give him because there are only so many hours in a day) he will talk interminably about Kobe beef from Japan. I asked him about the various cuts and he said, technically, filet mignon is supposed to be the best part, the tip, of the tenderloin, although some stores sell beef tenderloin as filet mignon, even if cut further from the tip. Greek to me.
Stew beef I understand. Chunks. What else is there to know? I buy it every fall when I start getting that familiar craving for my Real Texas Chili recipe — a chili that is made with beef, no beans, and plenty of flavor. Just thinking of it now makes me want it, but it is best suited for a cold winter day, preferably when it is raining outside, rather than a warm day in springtime.
The stew beef comes from the tough part of the animal, the neck and shoulder, known as chuck. It is inexpensive, and therefore economical, and it works well in dishes that require long slow cooking, such as braising. The prolongued cooking time tenderizes the meat.
The Moroccan beef stew recipe was, thankfully, an easy one. It takes a long time to cook in the oven — 3½ hours — but the preparation is easy. Chop a few things, assemble everything in a deep pan, cover it, and bake at a relatively low temperature. No need to brown the meat pieces first. No need to reduce any liquids. Just assemble and bake.
There was no mention of anything with which to serve the stew, but the picture showed couscous on a plate, onto which the cooked beef was arranged. I thought rice would work well; so I used it.
As for the flavor: On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give it a 6, maybe a 5. It didn't taste bad, but it wasn't delicious either. Again, I'm not much of a beef eater; so it simply didn't appeal to my taste buds. Maybe if I had used lamb. On the other hand, those who enjoy beef, especially slow cooked in a rich and aromatic stew, would probably love this dish. I ate one plate and then called my friend who likes beef. He took all the remainder home with him.
The idea of lamb, however, conjures up other ideas. What if I used lamb, thickened the sauce, and then arranged it into a shepherd's pie sort of configuration with garden peas and mashed pototes? What to name it? Mediterranean Shepherd's Pie? It's an idea…
Wednesday 2014.4.2
Quick and Easy
Lately I've been focusing on recipes for meals that are easy to make. You know the kind I'm talking about — you get home from work and there isn't a lot of time to put a meal onto the table. The kids are hungry and your husband or wife is due home soon. Partly this is because I don't feel like cooking as much as I used to. Burnt out? Or just getting old?
My favorite quick and easy meals are still my Minute Meals, which I still eat, although not as regularly as I used to. I'm trying to get back into the habit of relying on them again. They contain good balanced nutrition and they make me feel good, which is important. As I get older I don't want to fall into the stereotype of being someone who spends most of his time talking about his aches and pains.
Sunday's Feature Recipe will be Spicy Shrimp with Sugar Snap Peas and Curried Rice. It was yet another recipe I found in a restaurant trade journal and modified to my liking. One change I made was to the peas. The original recipe called for using regular frozen garden peas. I have friends who dislike them. For years I watched them at lunch in a Chinese restaurant as they used their fork to meticulously push all the peas to the side of their plate before they ate their meal. I know one person who refuses to eat anything green — even pesto. (No wonder she has health problems.)
Sugar snap peas, besides being bought fresh rather than frozen, look better on the plate, especially when combined with shrimp. Both foods have curvy shapes. And I think the fresh green color of the sugar snap peas works well with the pink color of the cooked shrimp. It is purely aesthetics, but any restaurant chef will agree with me — one part of good cooking is to make the food look good, and therefore appetizing, on the plate.
I mention the Spicy Shrimp with Sugar Snap Peas and Curried Rice because with a little efficiency you can cook the peas and shrimp in less time than it takes to cook the rice. And if you use brown rice, which takes as long as 45 minutes to cook, rather than white rice, you'll have time to also watch the evening news before sitting down to eat.
One of my objections to some of the cooking shows on TV is that they are more for entertainment than instruction. We enjoy watching a chef like Anne Burrell, Giada De Laurentiis, or Ina Garten prepare a delicious meal. I sometimes wonder how many people cook the meals they see on those TV shows. I rarely do. Or do they just watch for the entertainment value? I still can't fathom what is so entertaining about watching Guy Fieri eat in restaurant kitchens. Nonetheless, there must be some attraction because his show is almost ubiquitous on Friday and Saturday evenings, filling nearly every time slot from 6:00 to midnight.
As for me, I enjoy the cooking. Like everyone else, I enjoy eating, especially if the food is good. And I like to see a written recipe (and thus write my own) because it helps me to detect possible problems. I used to be in theatre when I was in college. I can't tell you how many times I read some scripts before auditioning for a part. I studied one play so much, when it came time for auditions I had already memorized all the lines for the character I wanted to portray. I was given the role and for the first day of rehearsal I was off script. It really does help to see things in writing and study them for a while. I do the same with recipes.
But it's the cooking process that satisfies some creative urge in me. I like seeing a recipe work correctly. And I like knowing that if someone else follows the same formula, they'll get the same results. So I am slowing down a little in my old age and I am looking more at meals that require less effort. As long as the results are satisfying, I think that's okay.