Week of Mar. 13 - 19

Monday: My week started off with the colossal disappointment of not doing Aprons cooking again. Again, it was a failure to ship the proper ingredients on the warehouse's part. It was supposed to be Reuben sandwiches with pesto potato salad. Since I have no cooking audience to share my talking points with, I'll share them with you. While the origins of the Reuben sandwich are debated, the classic Reuben sandwich consists of the following: rye bread topped with Emmentaler cheese and thinly sliced corned beef with Russian salad dressing and sauerkraut in between. The assembled sandwich should be grilled on both sides, but only until the outside is warm but the inside is still cool. Emmentaler cheese is perhaps the most famous Swiss cheese, recognizable by its marble or walnut sized holed that develop from carbon dioxide released inside the cheese during ripening. Pesto is the Italian word for "paste" and is made from fresh basil leaves, Parmesan cheese and pine nuts blended together with olive oil. Pesto is very versatile, and can be used simply tossed with pasta, or can be used as a rub for chicken or fish before grilling. Food research makes me happy.

Tuesday: I abated my disappointment at not cooking this week by buying a new pair of Rollerblades. This time I bought actual Rollerblades, complete with the brand name and everything. Just the logo on the boots alone makes them go faster. Sadly, I wasn't able to take these babies out for a spin; I had to get to work. On the plus side, Chris Cordone is back in town for Spring Break. Chris is a fellow stock clerk who does pretty much everything neatly, efficiently, and cheerfully. Between him and me we'll have our grocery back room looking ship shape in no time. As lame as it sounds, I'm fairly excited about getting things under control in the back. I have no illusions that our hard work will inspire the resident losers to start doing their job correctly, but for a little while anyway things will be as they should.

Wednesday: Holy crap these new blades are awesome! The wheels are bigger, and since they have no hint of bias just yet, they're like riding in a jacked up 'Slade on dub deuces. The faster bearings make a delightful swishing noise with each stride, sort of like the sound a knife makes against honing steel. The combination of these elements makes for much better skating. I used to skate about 7 miles with my old skates, and that took about an hour. Now I cover 9 miles, usually under 45 minutes. I feel like a champ!

Thursday: This week is shaping up rather nicely. CJ and Ashley are in town, and I went to hang out with them tonight. Nothing fantastic, just hung out at CJ's house and watched TV. Neither of us have very exciting lives right now, so there wasn't much to talk about, but it's always nice just to hang out for a while.

Friday: Happy St. Patrick's Day! What a fine day to celebrate the slave turned Catholic turned snake charmer! How weird is it that the real St. Patrick died on St. Patrick's Day? I bet he never saw that coming! I decided to take a shot at a traditional Irish meal of Guinness corned beef, colcannon, and Irish soda bread. I let the corned beef do its thing in the crock-pot all day, and baked the soda bread in the morning because it tastes better after sitting for a while. In between I went to have my retainer tweaked and went out to lunch with Mom and Dr. Anderson. I had a rosemary lamb gyro-style sandwich from O Bistro. It was quite good, but I didn't taste very much rosemary. Colcannon is a combination of cabbage and mashed potatoes with some sautéed bacon and onions thrown in for flavor. I think I browned the onions a little too much which gave the finished dish a different color than what I was aiming for, but it still tasted pretty good. The soda bread was interesting, but had more of a cake consistency than a bread. The corned beef was spot on, though.

Saturday: Last week we had the neighbors over to burn some Christmas trees, and this week we were getting the family together for more incendiary entertainment. Dad and I decided to tackle a new recipe for pulled pork that involved brining for 12 hours, rubbing with spices and smoking for another 8-10 hours. This was a lot of work, but brought with it some serious results. The pork pretty much fell off the bone, and had such deep flavor that its making my mouth water just thinking about it. Unfortunately we vastly over-estimated attendance, and made even more pulled pork in the crock-pot. We are now up to our eyeballs in pulled pork. If anyone wants a delicious pork sandwich, come on over, I promise we have enough to share. For dessert I made a variation of the well received plumb raspberry crumble that involved strawberries and bananas.

Sunday: Banana and walnut pancakes. Need I say more?

Winner & Loser

Winner: Tom Clancy. I have a huge pile of his books that I won on eBay and am slowly working my way through. I have about 5 under my belt and 6 or so to go, and they have all been tremendously enjoyable. If you have read Clancy, you know what I mean. If you haven't. I highly recommend you give him a try. Not the OpCenter stuff though, you gotta get the original Clancy.

Loser: Bums who treat my Aprons offerings like a soup kitchen. Although not much of a problem this week, they always shuffle in while I'm cooking, loiter around and scare off actual paying customers, and then grumble when I only give them sample size portions. If I could, I'd refuse to give them anything, and have Dale drag them out of the store by their toenails.