Weekend Update

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

Maya Angelou

 Maya Angelou is a person who knows the power of home, and the power of home cooking (an impeccable witness: her perfect banana pudding recipe, and the story that earned it the name "hurt me banana pudding"). So, when she's talking about the longing to find herself at home wherever she finds herself, one can assume she's talking about

a happy place of warm acceptance
 and relaxed adventure

and not

a place that fits like a whale bone corset.

Except a little more boring and restrictive.

The thing is, that unless you're a food editor who goes out to dinner every night looking for the  best in  home cooking, the food of home is just, well, the stuff you're used to. Everything exotic can become ordinary if it's dished up often enough:

"Aw, Pa, organic grass-fed beef steak
again? Why cain't a guy called Hop Sing
cook nothin but steak?"

meanwhile across the world:

Ocean fresh tuna sashimi again?
How am I supposed to fight imaginatively
on this tedious fare?

and even in the culinary capitol of Europe:

"Alas, my little crepe Suzette,
I offer you my sad regret.
I may be poor,
But I'll not yet
 choke down another fresh baguette."

At least that's the way it seemed this week. 

Although the food we ate would've been unusual to some, it was ordinary enough around here to very nearly escape being noticed. I realized somewhere around taco salad that actual, home cooked  home cooking is often 

not worth writing home about.

It seems only when one is far from the real or imagined tables of home that home cooking becomes the stuff of legend; the text of the bedtime stories that you tell your tummy when it just won't go to sleep:

"There's no place like home.
and nothing like Aunt Em's biscuits with
sausage gravy made from Dahlia,
that sweet old sow."

Fortunately, the home audience is not easily food fatigued-be it ever so humble, or strange, or familiar, he can get pretty happy about dinner.

This is a good thing, because his enthusiastic reception of a new dressing on a standard salad helped me tune in to what turned out to be three of this week's most interesting discoveries:

1. The  dressing of the taco salad! It was a pretty ordinary taco salad- leftover black beans, ground beef, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, avocado. It's often topped with a bottle of French dressing or sometimes  around here, salsa stirred together with plain yogurt. The creamy and vinaigrette dressings in this recipe both looked so good that, in a moment of indecision, I blended up a blend of both of them.  Two helpings of salad and three positive reviews later, this had become our new go-to taco salad dressing.

 Next time though, the Worcestershire may stay in the fridge- it turned the dressing a sort of old-avocado brown. 

2. The Slow-cooked Lamb!  Finally! A reliable way to cook a fall apart tender lamb roast. We'll be using this recipe all through the fall and winter, or at least as long as Costco continues its happy practice of pricing lamb at less than $4 a pound.   A word of warning: You know those handy dandy oven roasting bags?

Yep, those ones.

They're so great. They keep the meat moistly covered, eliminate all that tinfoil tent building, and they keep all that roasty juicy stuff from turning into  carbonized lumps that could teach barnacles a thing or two about being clingy.

 Don't use them in this recipe. 

If you do, you'll spend the first 10 minutes of cook time trying to convince yourself that the smell you're smelling is roasting lamb, not burning plastic. Then you'll READ THE INSTRUCTIONS and find out that the roasting temp of this recipe exceeds the maximum recommended temp for these bags by 50 scorching degrees. Rapid shifting of white hot pannage will ensue. And you may burn yourself a little. 

I didn't do this or anything, because I'm an experienced and careful cook.

I'm just sayin'....

3. (And please remember that I only claimed that all of this week's discoveries were... interesting...)
 The Donna Hay Greek Salad? The one stacked with the golden crispy slice of fried feta?

Well, my Australian friends, if you give this a go, could you tell me how it works? I wonder if Feta in your lucky country is made of sterner stuff than ours.

Because this is what happened when I tried to fry
three slices of feta.

Not quite the base to build a this on, is it.

But the salad survived. And since it was sitting right next to that lovely lamb roast, it probably would've felt inferior even if the fried feta had worked. 


I hope that this week, in your house
and at what ever table you find yourself,
you'll feel at home.
And I want you to know
That the things you do to make a home for yourself 
and the beautiful, brilliant
difficult people you love, those things matter.
It matters when you try to make home
(wherever it is, whoever it's for)
a place of  imagination, adventure, peace, and nurture.
Where people can learn who they are,
and live into who they wish to be.
I hope that this week that that's the 
kind of home you live in.

And I hope you never leave it.