dragonlady7

I love the Achewood Cookbook. It is funny, but also, the recipes are good. Even if you're not that into the comic strip, it's totally worth it.
It's very slender, for $14, but it's spiral-bound, and every recipe is good. Except Vegetables Delight. Don't make Vegetables Delight.
Bits of it are online, so I shouldn't really quote a recipe in its entirety, but I am going to quote a bunch of the one we're having tonight. It's called Perfect Oven Fries.

Man, I know you've had some oven fries before, and you're thinkin',"Man, oven fries are a joke!"
I know! I know! Usually they are.
I totally agree with you.
Somebody makes you some oven fries-- they're all soft and not crispy and maybe not even cooked all the way-- no one likes that! What's the point of bein' healthy if you just gonna end up angry and eat a gross taste that you hate?
Pat makes some pretty bad oven fries. They're like eatin' hot slugs. He's so proud of them, bringin' them to every potluck we have. We have a thing we do where we throw them away.
One day I had had enough of bad oven fries. I was all like, "Look, I ain't got a bunch of oil at home to deep fry with. That is a hassle. But there has got to be a way to make crispy potatoes in the oven. Other crispy things come out of the oven."
And that was all the reasoning I needed.
Try this recipe. If you fail at it, it's because you didn't do it right. There are crispy fries waiting to come out of your oven: you just have to make them and put them there.

He's right. These are actually good. The secret is that he brushes them with olive oil, roasts them first (20 minutes) in a preheated 450-degree oven, flips them, roasts them some more (10 minutes), then takes them out, heats the oven up to 500 (takes 10-15 minutes), and sticks them back in for 15-20 minutes more. Two temperatures: all fries must be cooked twice, at two temperatures, in order to be crispy.
Genius.
As a bonus, it's virtually impossible to overcook them.

The other cookbook we're cooking from tonight is the Dinosaur BBQ cookbook. As cookbooks go, it's lavishly illustrated, beautifully put together, colorful and entertaining, and really, really, really way too elaborate. Every recipe is the sort of Dramatic Man Cooking that will take you all day and get your entire kitchen filthy. The results will be awesome, but approximately equivalent to your having bought the damn sauce off the shelf and made a recipe half as elaborate. (I once spent all morning making up mojo to cook chicken in, only to find that it was about the same as the stuff Goya makes for like a dollar for a 750-ml bottle.)

So we're having these oven fries alongside Dinosaur's "Drunken Spicy Shameless Shrimp", which is my favorite appetizer there. The nearest Dino is in Rochester, so I don't get there much.

In short, a nice evening. Of late, I've been doing all the housework, but Z's been doing the cooking because usually by dinner I'm just not interested in the kitchen or in making decisions anymore. He doesn't seem to mind so far. We'll see how it lasts. I made all the dinners last week, and was pretty creative about it-- I even made chicken pot pie from scratch out of leftovers from a roast-- so maybe the inspiration will come back.

At the moment, all day, I've really really really wanted a big cupcake, elaborately frosted. It's pretty awful. I was going to make cupcakes, but only have one muffin tin, which makes little mini muffins. It just didn't seem right. I'm trying to think of a reason to head downtown and go to Sweet Tooth. I can't, at the moment.

I also need to exercise tonight. I've only done light exercise today, gardening, and I'm supposed to Work Out Every Day In April. I just don't feel it tonight, though. Boo.