Cheater Pants

The Cheater Pants page is dedicated to those meals where I deviate... veer from the crapshoot of random selection and... well, cheat.  

My big plans for spinning the roulette wheel for dinner were foiled last night because I realized I had to do my crapshoot before shopping, not after. And not at 4:45 with children asking me, "What's for dinner?"  So, it was kind-of-sort-of a crapshoot.  I knew I had pork tenderloin so I made the first recipe from the first cookbook I grabbed...  Robin was going to rescue my dinner, right?

Turn to Page 81...

Cajun Pork Tenderloin with Quick Side Dish: Creamed Spinach

Luckily, this is definitely a "pantry" recipe: just herbs and spices for a nice rub and a quick roast.  I actually even had the frozen spinach.  How fortuitous.  

The quick rub consists of sugar, thyme, cumin, paprika, onion and garlic powder, ginger, dry mustard, cayenne, salt & pepper.  One quantity of the rub was plenty for two tenderloins, though the recipe called for just one.  Here are my tenderloins in the pan.  

I just dumped it over, rubbed it in, and kind of mopped up the dregs in the pan with the meat.  Then I sprayed the pan underneath them.  I like the lack of clean-up here.  No need to dirty a cutting board with your rub.

All rubbed in and ready to go.  Then 25 minutes in the oven at 400 degrees.  

Here it is with the creamed spinach.  

I actually didn't even thaw the spinach as Robin suggests, so it was a little less creamy, but still tasty and great in a pinch.  I made peas and cheater pilaf, too, one of the few pre-boxed sides I ever make.  I often find myself making two veggies, because you never know what your kids are going to like, and I like to give them a choice.  

This was a perfect example of why the spin of the roulette wheel will give you a surprise now and then.  Who knew my 5-year-old would tell me he loves spinach? (One of his new favorite books is Little Pea by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, an adorable book about a Little Pea whose favorite food is spinach, but hey, whatever works, right?)

The Ratings:

My kids also love to "judge" dinner.  We are big Top Chef fans and I encourage the feedback.  The 7-year-old said the meat was "well-seasoned".  The 5-year-old said he liked the spinach because "it was all cooked and soft".  And the 2-year-old said, "Very good, Mama!" after gobbling the meat (she is not afraid of spice). They are fans of numerical ratings as well, and this dish received a ten.  But they are very generous with their tens after all.  :)  A quick dish in a pinch and yes, Robin Miller rescued my dinner.  

Cookbook Crapshoot Rules

So how does a cookbook hoarder decide what to make for dinner?  I've decided on a new tactic I like to call Cookbook Crapshoot.  Here's how its going to work, along with some basic rules if you decide to try this along with me.

1. Randomly select cookbook.  There is always the "close-your-eyes-and-spin-around-and-point" option. That works fairly well. But I know where my favorite books are.  You probably do, too.  Aren't they are on that third shelf, in the second set of shelves?  I might just drag my finger along those books on that shelf, two, three, four books in, to get to that fifth book that I know is my go-to-in-a-pinch book.  So here is where the kids come in handy, and it is fun for them as well. I send them into the cookbook library and tell them to pick a book.  If they come back with one called "Big Book of Cookies" or "Chocolate Heaven", then that will be my baking book for later. (If you are like me and your dessert books are sort of shelved together, urge your helper to go to another shelf and try again.)
2. Randomly flip to page.  Again, the "close-your-eyes-and-flip" works. Or have someone, child or otherwise, choose a number between 1 and however many pages are in the book. Flip to that page.
3. There is dinner!  If it is the second page of a recipe, that is still the chosen recipe.  If there is more than one dish on the page, you can have some free will and pick your favorite. Or make someone else pick a number between 1 and 3, if there are 3 recipes on the page, and that will be your chosen recipe. If the roulette recipe is a side dish, you have chosen your side (or salad, etc.), so repeat step 2 to get your entree.

I think to make it not totally fractured (I am fractured enough), I will focus on one cookbook for a period of time.  A week or two?  Depends how often I'm cooking during that period, I suppose.  That way we all get a good idea of how good or how crappy the book is.  This will be a sort of trial-by fire cookbook review.

Some caveats*:

• If the selected dish is ridiculously out of season, you may randomly choose again.  For example, if it is December, and the dish calls for fiddleheads and morels... I mean, come on.
• If the selected dish is prohibitively expensive or fiscally irresponsible, you may randomly choose again.  For example, if it calls for duck confit and foie gras that you could only get from d'Artagnan, this may not be the perfect Wednesday night before soccer and rehearsal meal.
• If the ingredients for the selected dish are impossible to come by due to the peculiarities of your geographical location, you may randomly choose again. I live in Eastern Oregon, which may as well be an island. We have to drive 70 miles to get to Costco or Target. This is a challenge for me, having moved from a metropolis where the mammoth Asian supermarket was 8 miles away. Sometimes I just can't expediently or reasonably get things here. This can quickly turn a dish into "prohibitively expensive", having to drive 140 miles round trip to get some peculiar ingredient.
• If you are allergic to or religiously and/or morally opposed to an ingredient, of course, you may randomly choose again.  
• If you don't like an ingredient, ahh, here's where that fine line is drawn. What do you do if the dish has things you "don't eat" or "don't like" in it?  Now ask yourself, do you really not like it or have you just never tried it?  My sister has a list of the seven foods she doesn't eat (more on this in another post, I'm sure), which she quantifies as those ingredients that make her gag.  Peas don't make her gag, she just doesn't love them.  Did she flip to Risi e Bisi? Well, looks like she's having risotto with peas tonight!  I'm encouraging you to try things you might not necessarily have been drawn to automatically, so give it a shot. You may find out you like parsnips after all.

*Please note, I reserve the right to change the rules, especially if I am feeling particularly peevish.

Confessions of a Cookbook Hoarder

So here I am, starting this blog thing, feeling crabby and hungry as usual.  It's not that I don't know what to make for dinner... okay, so I don't.  It's just that it seems like so much work to wade through the WAY too many cookbooks I have to figure out just what that might be.  The kids are at least not pulling my leg yet, asking, "What's for dinner?"

I did count, you know.  The cookbooks, I mean.  I counted them with the help of the wonderfully compulsive website, eatyourbooks.com, which enables you to have a lovely virtual bookshelf of your cookbooks and recipes.  I'm up to 727.  Cookbooks.  Yes, cookbooks.  (And this does not include the ten or so latest arrivals from Amazon and the Good Cook Cookbook Club that I have not yet uploaded onto my virtual bookshelf.)

So, I confess, I am a cookbook hoarder.  Part of the hoard is my mother's, enabler as she is to my addiction, but I take full responsibility for the shelves laden with cookbooks. Want to see?  Here they are...

Oh and here are some other shelves.

And there are these cabinets.  I'm sure you can guess what is behind those doors.

Oh, and all of these lovely tomes don't keep me from taking books out of the library either.  Sometimes I like to peruse a book before committing to buying it.  So there are always a few of those library books knocking around, too.

Oops, I forgot this shelf in the kitchen. But hey, there are only a few on that one, right?  

(Do I need to take pictures of the boxes of food magazines in the...?  But no, I digress.  This is about the books, after all.)

So how does one go about using all these cookbooks?  How does one avoid going to the same tried-and-true recipes time and again?  How does one keep from picking up the same book rather than a new book?  And which book does one even pick up?  I face these questions daily.

This is why I have decided to start this blog and share my experiences.  Maybe you face the same dilemma.  Maybe this will inspire you to try to take a stab at my method.  Maybe you'll just have a laugh.  This isn't really a recipe blog. This is a cookbook and cooking experience blog.  If you are searching for a particular recipe for a specific dish you just HAVE to make, this probably isn't the place you are going to find it.  If I find a gem, I will share it, of course.  If I find a dud, I will share that, too.  Get ready for random, because that's how I'm going about it.  Intrigued?  Get ready for my next post.  An explanation of the rules of The Cookbook Crapshoot...