Summer vacation?

It's a weird thing about being a grad student; you get out of school for the summer and then discover that you need to catch up on all of the things you didn't do over the school year. Like food blogging!

Our story so far...well, you can read the rest of the blog for that. I love cooking Asian food. When I started this blog, I had a lot to learn about that. Now, I still have a lot to learn (since I did not grow up with this food being cooked in my own house), but there is a range of dishes from various Asian cuisines that have become easy for me to cook. In the meantime, I've branched out and started exploring various western cuisines. Also in the meantime, the food blogging community has grown by leaps and bounds and I despair of ever being able to keep up with it the way I did (geezer alert) back in 2004.

That is, when I have time to cook. Temping a full-time job and studying for classes on the side makes a pretty grueling schedule, even without the inevitable chores or need for some sleep. It is all too easy to go for easy food, both in the office and at school. If I had my druthers, I'd prefer to take my time making some good home-cooked food, but such a busy schedule puts a premium on time, too. So the good food gets shut out more often than I would like.

A day in the life: I'm making Chinese chicken stock today, since I've accumulated a good batch of chicken bones from a master sauce chicken (along with some chicken backs from the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers market). Today is a day off, so I have the luxury of relaxing and catching up on non-work things. My garden is full of sweet basil plants from a local farm, along with a patio tomato plant, some lettuce, rosemary, and the apple mint and spearmint that have been with me from day one of this blog, almost. I've been in a salad mood lately; just romaine and tomatoes from the supermarket with some low-fat ginger dressing from a  company whose face is a recently-deceased movie star. I love this dressing, which I discovered while having dinner with The Cruise Director and The Fireman recently. It is almost as gingery and sharp as the wonderful dressing I used to get at Dosanko in Midtown NYC, though it is brown, not the day-glo orange of the Dosanko dressing.

I'll leave you with a couple of items I've noticed today: a great idea to use leftover pasta sauce to make bruschetta from Tigers and Strawberries, and a warning about a major outbreak of late blight that I found via Bug Girl on Twitter.

A bit o' business

I've been remiss here, but I suppose you folks who visit the blog can notice the Foodbuzz banners and such (and yes, I know the top one is off-center, but rectifying that will require a heart-to-heart with the template, which I haven't had time for yet). Yes, I have signed on, and I have to say so far I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I haven't begun to dig into all the features it offers, but I look forward to it. Already, I've discovered that a blog I thought was inactive and had missed quite a bit is very much alive. I've also found new blogs.

Foodbuzz takes the model of social networking you might know from sites like Facebook and applies it to food. There are slots for blogs, restaurant reviews, chit-chat, recipes and more. Given that there are lots of foodies on the internet, and they're all passionate about food in various ways, it seems like a great idea for a social networking site.

Yes, there are ads, and I have to say that I gave this some serious soul-searching when I was first contacted by Foodbuzz, but I decided to gamble and try to get some sort of income stream from the blog. Call it an experiment.

More cooking coming soon.

Only in Japan

Natto. Fermented soybeans. Very healthy, yet the sort of food that will make the unprepared run screaming into the hills. It's the slimy surface. Natto might be an acquired taste, but maybe it's more a food that you need to grow up with. It's the Japanese equivalent of lutefisk.

I had natto once, served with rice. The sliminess was difficult to deal with, of course, but apart from that, it wasn't bad. I keep telling myself I need to try natto again, but I haven't quite gotten around to it.

Natto has become the centerpiece of a great food scandal in Japan, because excessive health benefits were claimed for the slimy soybeans. Maki has a good post summing up the situation at i was just really very hungry.

It's December

And what, pray tell, does that mean? Two things in food blogger-dom:

It's time for the Food Blog Awards, again. Nominations are open until midnight EST on Friday, December 15, so nominate your favorite food blogs for some recognition.

Then there's Menu For Hope III, a fundraiser that's fun, too. This year's beneficiary is the UN World Food Programme, so go have a look at the prizes and give as generously as you can.

Jeffersonian wine

Just a quick note, but I stumbled across this post on Vinography while scanning the RSS feeds. Thomas Jefferson as wine geek? What's not to love? (especially if you like history and fancy a glass of wine now and then, like me)

A stir-frying series to watch

I haven't blogged this week yet because I haven 't done much cooking worthy of note. Money is going to be tight again, so I'm half-seriously contemplating a series on "Cooking Asian on a Budget." And no, that doesn't mean stocking up on ramen.

But I didn't post to complain about my life, I posted to draw your attention to the second installment in a series worth watching on another blog. Barbara Fisher's blog Tigers and Strawberries is always worth reading for her knowledgeable and often opinionated posts on food and related topics. Barbara has just posted the second in her series on stir-frying technique, a post on stir-frying chicken in a wok. The first post, a more general overview of stir-frying in a wok, can be found here. When I read this sort of post, I feel like I should be doing more with my blog than just chronicling what I cook and what's growing in the garden, but it's hard to imagine outdoing quality work like this. I guess all bloggers have their own niches and that's what gives the blogosphere (even a focused section of the blogosphere like the food blog universe) its variety and interest. But it still makes me want to do more with this blog. Oh well, I suppose I'll add that to the list of things to ponder.

Aging wine

I am not what you would call a wine expert. Most of my wine knowledge, such as it is, is picked up from my dad, who is far more advanced at it than I am. I have a small group of wines that I enjoy drinking, and I idly consider starting a small cellar if I ever have enough spare cash to lay a few bottles away. I like Merlot, I like [yellow tail]. On the other hand, I also like sake and beer. As a birder, I think that the number of bottles in the local liquor store with pretty bird labels are nothing but trouble; they encourage you to buy alcohol for its label alone (there are some beautifully-designed labels out there). My fondest wine dream is to discover a nice cheap red that is fine to cook with but won't tempt me to drink it up before I get a chance to cook with it.

Being the wine know-little that I am, I'm always interested in guidance. Today, thanks to LENNDEVOURS, I found this wonderful post on aging wines at Vinography. It does an excellent job of explaining the whole process. Thanks, Alder!