Cooking: Mushroom, Spinach, Pea Fettuccine Alfredo

Not wanting the mushrooms in the fridge to go bad, I asked the hubs if he wanted fungi pizza (what I wanted) or fungi pasta. He said we had pizza already too many times and so Fettuccine Alfredo on the menu. I ran to Trader Joe's and bought some shitake mushrooms too. 

I had watched Jacques Pepin cook a Swiss chard, mushroom, and hardboiled eggs gratin and followed his cooking method of sautéing the mushrooms and greens first (only he didn't throw them both in the pan but cooked them separately before layering into his gratin dish). And I didn't make a béchamel, but cheated and bought a container of Alfredo sauce.

Cecilia had also given us some fresh lemon thyme sourdough, and hubs commented that she does a good crumb. And the next day was clay.

I had been glazing all morning and was yearning to have my hands dirty with mud and remembered I wanted to make some bud vases, and so the afternoon was enough time to cut out the slabs and then score and slip them together. My afternoons are sort of like a great pottery throwdown in that there's this time constraint where I have to stop cleaning and refining my leather (if it's even allowed to get to that stage depending on the humidity and the temperature) greenware. I like this classical Greek shape and can't wait to make more of these little slab vases.

Sunday happened to be St. Valentine's Day, and I was hungover from drinking the whole bottle of Chardonnay the previous night. Whenever I've partaken of too much alcohol the night before, the morning after of a sumptuous breakfast gets me through. And so I made Ina Garten's Herb-Baked Eggs.

Weekends maybe because they are such a pleasure are a blur because my afternoon was just a dog walk and a trek to the Asian supermarket for fresh chow mein noodles, and last night's dinner was my mashup of a Valentine's Day and a Chinese New Year feast. I took out the Trader Joe's mini pork bao and honey walnut prawns (I was delighted to discover them in the freezer section and liken it to the delight I used to have when seeing new merch at World Market).

I couldn't find the regular Mapo Tofu recipe I usually turn to, and so I just devised a sauce of all the Chinese condiments and spices in my Asian drawer--soy sauce, chili oil, black bean chili paste, oyster sauce, sesame oil, Sichuan peppercorns, Shaoxing wine, and Chinkiang vinegar and could smell the 5 spice in one of them. Short cuts are A-okay because the mini pork buns were delicious and had the proportion of doughy to savory I liked, but I'm gonna pass next time on TJ's honey walnut prawns, which have too little resemblance to the same dish ordered from a Chinese restaurant.

I used to hate Valentine's Day as a child being the only Asian in my elementary classroom in the 1970s. I would get the fewest number of valentine's in my shoebox fashioned into a V-day postbox, and six or seven of those valentines would be of Eskimo kissing or a Japanese girl in a kimono. I didn't have the language to say to my classmates, you white people suck. But it was definitely an example of white supremacy culture and micro aggressions that to this day make me feel like a professional imposter.

And now's it's the Monday President's Holiday, and I'm off to a new adventure. But here are my favorite Shirley Chisholm quotes to inspire.

“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring in a folding chair.”

“Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society because that talent wears a skirt.”

“At present, our country needs women’s idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.”

“We must reject not only the stereotypes that others hold of us, but also the stereotypes that we hold of ourselves.”

“Be as bold as the first man or woman to eat an oyster.”