cookery? or kitchen fuckery? you decide.

my brother and i often urge a certain family-member-who-shall-not-be-named to eat well and exercise more. this is often followed by: we love you!

today she responded, 'well, i love donuts.'

tomorrow i'm going to make an amazing beef stew with red wine in it. i'm so excited that my mouth is actually watering. between my obsession with anthony bourdain and my newfound love of wine, i think i'm turning into a foodie. not a very good one perhaps, especially since i'm going to the ubiquitous and often mediocre olive garden for lunch tomorrow, but i do love to cook. i've gotten to the point where i try to figure out which wine would be best with which meal. i have a list of things i want to try making. i consider it a point of shame that i have yet to roast a whole chicken. risotto no longer scares me. i know what an endive is, and i have a recipe i would like to try that uses one. or four. i consider my mom's chicken fajitas (which were once a big ordeal to make) simple enough that i now think of them as an easy weekday meal. (they're still my favorite thing ever.)

after i conquer beef stew (which is so simple i don't even know why i'm blogging about it. maybe it's the red meat obsession. nom.) ...i plan to make dumplings. yes, dumplings. i love dumplings. but not the stupid ones in those pre-packaged dumpling soups, REAL dumplings. the kind that are delightfully pasta-like, the kind that you don't eat just to get to the meat inside, the glorious kind that we've probably NEVER HAD at the local chinese/asian-american-conglomeration joint. maybe i'll even attempt to make the holy grail of all dumplings, the SOUP dumpling. (yes. soup. in a dumpling. amazing.) now, these things are tricky to make. i have yet to find a recipe for a real soup dumpling, and i don't think there is a restaurant in the midwest that serves them. but god DAMN do they look delicious! unfortunately, they also look delightfully out of range of both my talent and resources. alas!