cook: back on the bandwagon

Winter break was sort of a fail on cooking my own healthy meals though I did manage to run or cycle or dance despite hangovers (and that’s another fail--to get sober curious). For Christmas I rolled dozens of wonton egg rolls and bought lumpia for frying and was gonna make mini meatball sliders, but when we arrived, the holiday table,  was already laden with a crockpot of meatballs (did she think I was gonna flake?), empanadas, puff pastry stuffed with meats and cheeses, and lots and lots of cookies and chocolates as well as a dark chocolate Bundt cake. And so I left all the frozen meatballs and lumpia in my sister-in-law’s freezer as well as the brioche and butter rolls and marinara and mozzarella for the sliders I was gonna make. Patrick brought home his chocolate lava cakes and my liquors for the nutty Irishman cocktails. I did however pop into Maggie’s oven the macaroni and cheese I made beforehand from her mom’s recipe. Patrick will only eat Shirley’s macaroni and cheese, and I figured Maggie’s grandkids would also eat it with the ham that was also served. This mac'n cheese is so simple that I can do it without looking up the recipe: cook a roux of butter and flour with sprinkles of salt, nutmeg, dry mustard; add milk to make a béchamel to which I add grated cheese to make a mornay sauce before folding in the noodles to combine and then sprinkling more cheese on top. You could add buttered breadcrumbs, but Patrick likes his macaroni and cheese creamy. Probably because it reminds him of Stouffer's macaroni and cheese which he ate for years and years.  

And really all I have been eating over the vacation are carbs when I had the intention of eating salads like one I prepared with a steak dinner.              

But yesterday I did cook up the leek, celery, turnip in my vegetable bin into a split pea soup made with peppered bacon in my freezer, and half that peppered bacon was cooked with lots of chopped onions and frozen clams and seafood stock on sale at the supermarket into a clam chowder. Soups are my holiday gifts to the neighbors. And this Sunday, I'll be returning to my Thistle routine.        

Next year I’m just making salads and cooking vegetable sides for the holidays. But tonight a meat and potatoes and veg meal.