Cooking Mag Mommy

I admit I have a little obsession with cooking magazines. At one point, I was receiving 5 different cooking magazines in the mail each month. One, Taste of Home, was a gift subscription and I didn't renew it when it ran out. The other, Gourmet, has ceased publication so I no longer get that one. The other three, Bon Appetit , Food and Wine, and Cooking Light are all great magazines, but for different reasons. The following comparisons are mostly my opinion but you may find them helpful if you are looking to subscribe to just one. (Gasp!) Bon Appetit Bon Appetit would classify as my long-term favorite, though month by month I choose my favorite magazines based on personal preference for recipes and interest in the articles. Bon Appetit has lots of creative menus and I like menus to help put similar recipes together. There are often several articles with a cultural theme (either country or region) with accompanying recipes. Bon Appetit did change their design style in th...

For those of you not in the know, today was Ho Chi Minh's birthday. I wouldn't have known this either if I didn't need an excuse to make 3 different dumpling recipes for my family tonight without looking like a lunatic. Check that... maybe I am a lunatic. But at least I know more about Ho Chi Minh than the average bear. Ho Chi Minh , the namesake for the current capital of Vietnam, was the leader of the Viet Minh Independence movement and the leader and president of North Vietnam at the time of the Vietnam War. He was a follower of Communist ideals and is credited with unifying the Vietnamese people under his leadership. And his birthday was a dang good excuse to make some dumplings. Food and Wine this month has an article "A Lesson in Dumplings" and I made all three variations. The Lemongrass Chicken Dumplings were our favorite. The fresh lemongrass and crunch cabbage was a good combination. My new food processor made quick work of all the chopping and Eyrle...

This title is not exactly appropriate for a food blog but I have to get this off my chest. I know Eyrleigh is not perfect but I can't tell you how very upsetting it was to me to see that she bit her little friend, Joanie. Worse, I didn't see it happen and only noticed a bite mark when I was telling Joanie's mom about another booboo she gave herself. I felt terrible that I hadn't even noticed what Eyrleigh had done. Thanks for listening. Some days , cooking just takes a backseat to the dramas of parenthood. I made a meal from Food and Wine but I don't have the energy and creativity to come up with any other blog topic. It was just the kind of day that makes you cringe. I really love Indian food but tonight's variations from this month's Food and Wine were a bit bland for my taste. I baked the Grilled Tandoori-Style Chicken Drumsticks in the oven. The recipe even allowed for it but I think grilling would have really improved the flavor of this d...

The fatal flaw of cooking fish is the strong smell that goes along with it. I did laundry today and I'm afraid I'll sleep with a faint odor of lobster. I'm reminded of a restaurant we ate at on the water in Bar Harbor, Maine this summer. Three days later, my sweatshirt still smelled of fish. I love the fish while I'm eating it but smelling it in your clothes the next morning is not quite so nostalgic. I've always wanted to make bouillabaisse. It's one of those classic dishes that just sounds delicious. My friend, Mark, would reschedule anything to attend his parents Christmas Eve dinner of bouillabaisse with friends. Now that I've made Ted Allen's Lobster Bouillabaisse from this month's Food and Wine, the bloom is off the rose, shall we say. I liked it but may not move it into the weekday rotation or even plan an event around it. It's a lot of fish and I found the flavor a bit overwhelming. My mussels may be at fault though. You will ...

I love to to read. As a kid, I would disappear to my room for hours to read a book. Thankfully, I read quickly and can create vivid pictures of the setting and events of books in my mind. I grew up with books stacked in every room in our house and now I have done the same. Over a decade ago, I joined a book club created by my friend, Kim, and when I taught at Rock Springs Elementary, I led a book club of staff members. When I stopped teaching, I didn't want to stop having book club so a teacher friend and I still meet. We met today and I made two cookie recipes from this month's Food and Wine for our snacks. The cookies were good but I thought the book was better. It was titled "Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism" by Temple Grandin . This book was very non-traditional, as you would imagine a book by an author with autism would be. The story was rarely narrative, more often written as a factual article, expressing the resea...

I love mysteries. I read the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books as a kid, Sherlock Holmes as a teenager, and Agatha Christie as an adult. But I don't like mysteries when it comes to my groceries. I know I picked up at least 3 things at Food Lion yesterday that never made it to my house. I distinctly remember picking up ham for the pea soup I made tonight, fillet for the Shaking Beef I'm making tomorrow, and bananas for Eyrleigh . None of these made it home. I checked the receipt . Thankfully, it looks like I didn't pay for these items either so some time between putting them in my cart and checking out, they disappeared. I have a few guesses what happened but no real clue. Eyrleigh could have taken them out... though I doubt that. I had one of those double carts with a smaller basket on top and a larger one on the bottom. I could have left these items in the bottom part, underneath the top basket. That seems really spacey of me to miss 3 items, one of them brig...

When I lived in Phoenix, I was only 5 hours away from San Diego and from there, it was only a quick drive into Mexico. One year a friend from Michigan, Eric Seelye , came to visit me and we hopped in the car and drove to the Baja . I laugh a bit now at how blase we were about the trip. So blase that Eric left his wallet on the top of a pay phone, we drove away, realized he left it and it was still there when we went back. That night we stopped for dinner in the town of Rosarito , below Tijuana. Our waiter, Ricky, was delightful and when we mentioned we had no idea where we were spending that night (I told you we were blase!), he offered to let us pitch our tent behind the restaurant. When we woke up to the ocean crashing below us and a beautiful view of Rosarito Beach, we felt like we'd spent the night in a five-star hotel. The next year, I took Richard back to Baja and just down the road from the restaurant we'd eaten at the year before was a little place called Ricky's....

When I started posting to my blog about tonight's meal, I noticed that several of the visits on the live traffic feed were from bonappetit .com. Curious, I jumped over to bonappetit .com to see how someone got to my blog from there. Sure enough, just one click off the homepage of Bon Appetit , my blog is quoted and linked to. Fifteen months after I start this blog and 5 posts after I decide to switch up my cooking magazine from Bon Appetit to another magazine for the month, Bon Appetit puts me on their blog list. Alanis Morissette would be proud. Ah well, hopefully Bon Appetit is not like our local grocery store competitors. A Publix employee literally whispered "Kroger" when I told her Eyrleigh could tell the difference between grocery stores because of free cookies. She looked around surreptitiously as if someone would fire her if they heard her even mention the name of the "other" grocery store. Tonight's meal was from Food and Wine and in all...

Look closely at the picture to your left. That is not pepper you see. That is burnt stuff. It wasn't enough to make the dish inedible but it did contribute to authenticity. The dish I made tonight was called Smoky Paella with Shrimp and Squid from this month's Food and Wine. Mine almost got a bit smokier than recommended . When the recipe says "...bring to a boil over high heat 10 minutes" and doesn't mention stirring, I suggest you stir. I didn't and had to do a bit of scraping resulting in the black stuff at left. I love paella and truth be told, consider myself a bit of an expert, for an American. When I stayed in Spain in 1996, I had the most amazing paella almost daily with whatever fish was bought that day. Tonight's version was a bit disappointing. Something was missing, perhaps a few more types of fish or shellfish. The rice was rather thick with the tomato paste and didn't absorb the flavors of the additional fish. It wasn't terrible but ...

I'll begin this post by apologizing. These four tacos look exactly the same but you must believe me, they are not! Last night, I invited several families from our church small group over for Cinco De Mayo. I guess I started the margarita part of the evening a little early (while cooking, of course). In all the rush of cooking, hosting, and ... uh... bar tending , I didn't take any pictures. This picture was taken by Richard at lunch the next day. Pretty good looking leftovers if I do say so myself. This month's Taco World article in Food and Wine magazine has seven taco recipes but I didn't think I could pull off all seven. Three of the tacos I made for the party involved premaking a marinade and simply grilling the meat before serving. That's a pretty easy way to do a party. I had very little to do once people arrived. I just lit the grill and let the charcoal do its thing. I did have a vegetarian friend coming so my fourth taco was the tofu variation. The Chili-...

Cooking magazines love to use fancy names for recipes to make them sound more authentic and delicious. Tonight I made Buccatini all" Amatriciana , basically Italian for tubular pasta with bacon and tomato sauce. It sounds much fancier in Italian. I think everything sounds fancier in Italian. I need to learn Italian or at least go to Italy to hear it spoken for awhile. How I missed the entire country when I backpacked through Europe is beyond me. I think Eyrleigh and Richard would really love to go there too. Though Buccatini all'Amatriciana sounds complicated, it wasn't and the use of store-bought tomato sauce made it downright simple. I replaced the pancetta with low-sodium bacon and realized I had no more Romano cheese so I used Manchego . It worked. The flavor added to the store-bought sauce was an improvement. I may not duplicate this recipe exactly again but this recipe reinforced that anything can be added to a commercial sauce to give it an extra dimension. ...

You may remember the story of Benedict Arnold, the general who betrayed the American Revolutionaries and joined the British forces. So I'll admit my traitorous act was not that great but I have decided to change magazines for the month of May. I sat down this week to look at my new cooking magazines and I got to be honest, the line-up in Food and Wine just looked better and more doable. It's not that I can't make Caramelized Pork Belly and Shrimp with Spicy Fish Sauce and Padron Peppers Stuffed with Tetilla Cheese. It's just that it's hard to find those ingredients and I would spend an inordinate amount of time hunting high and low to make my recipes authentic. I also was a bit over butter and flour. The six cake recipes last month did me in and I swear my stomach is still flabbier as a result. The Food and Wine recipe list had fewer desserts and several of those were lighter in nature (like Poached Pears with Prunes, not exactly a high fat treat!). There is a who...

April ended for our family with a fun little road trip to Galveston to attend Richard's Ironman 70.3 triathlon. On the way there, we stopped in New Orleans to sample the world-famous beignets at Cafe Du Monde and take in a New Orleans Zephyrs baseball game. As you can tell, Eyrleigh approved of the beignets , though we traded out the classic cafe au lait for chocolate milk. We enjoyed the wonderful hospitality of our friends, Deb and Butch, in Houston and ate several wonderful meals with them. Deb even made the cover recipe from May's Bon Appetit for us. It was really good, though we all agreed cheese may have helped jazz up the pasta a bit. Richard was very pleased with his race. He finished a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, and 13.1 mile run in 5 hours and 54 minutes. We all enjoyed staying right at the race site, Moody Gardens Resort, with our friends, Jon and Laura. We visited another road food icon, Martin's in Montgomery, Alabama on the way home and had the bes...