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I used to be able to multi-task, or at least I’m pretty sure I could. Reading, knitting, watching TV, keeping up a conversation; no problem. Working on the computer, talking on the phone, writing three lists; easy. And then we had a baby. I use that as the cut-off date for the many things that I used to be able to do (including showering daily, looking in a mirror before leaving the house, and changing any clothes with stains on them); mainly those requiring brain-power. Ongoing sleep deprivation, plus the relentless demands of a toddler mean that I feel like I can no longer even fire on half cylinders. Most days I need a jump start (and not in a good way). And so today, trying to cook and carry on a conversation about work almost doomed this meal to disaster. Fortunately, or tragically depending on how you look at it, tonight L was in a similar place, as the cold that he had last week ,which he presumably gave to me, now seems to be angrily coming back around to him. So between us, we almost made a right mess.

Fortunately however the Grilled Turkey Cutlets with Warm Cranberry Salsa and Sautéed Sweet Potatoes were very forgiving and we made a decent, in fact excellent, meal. L chopped the sweet potatoes into wedges rather than half-moon disks and put them on the grill pan. After we left them to burn quite spectacularly, we read the recipe, and realised that the potatoes were on the wrong pan at the wrong heat, and were in fact the wrong shape. We repeated the exercise with the leftover chopped potatoes and managed to brown them slowly in oil, season them with salt and pepper, and serve them with parsley. We ditched the extra butter as they were all ready quite fat-saturated. I’m sure they could have been oven-cooked for equally good results using far less oil, which can be an experiment for another day.

The cranberry salsa was pretty foolproof, involving red onions, dried cranberries, cranberry juice, a jalapeño pepper, chicken broth, honey, lime juice and cilantro to taste. We ditched the cilantro in favour of parsley, and I threw in a wee bit of my leftover Christmas cranberry sauce towards the end for good measure- it thickened the salsa and added a boost to the colour.

The grilled turkey cutlets were actually remarkably tasty. Today we played the hilarious game of one person has 5 minutes to attempt to read a book, while the other person has 5 minutes of pure torture trying to stop a toddler from tearing a book shop apart with their bare hands, and swap, and swap… Anyway, the point being, in my relaxation time, I grabbed the nearest book which was about whether or not to buy organic food. Wow, the parts I read were horrifying, specifically those relating to the meat industry. This was not new information, more like stuff I already knew but had filed under “feel free to conveniently forget”. Although I hadn’t considered the wider environmental impact of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones and so on further down the food chain. L also perused the book when he had time off for good behavior, and we agreed that we had to buy organic from now on. So we went to our nearest natural food coop on the way home, and found organic turkey. Grilled with salt, pepper and poultry seasoning on a grill pan, with a splash of lime juice to finish, the turkey was remarkably good.

Overall, this meal is a winner, particularly the sweet potatoes, which were fantastic. The cranberry salsa had a bit of a kick to it which added a little extra something to the whole meal. Even the poultry was good. We’re giving this meal our highest praise, as if we’d read the recipe in advance, this would have been ridiculously easy, relatively cheap, and extremely tasty. Much better than Christmas dinner. Tomorrow we are having a British meal, Fancy-Pants Bangers ‘n’ Mash. We failed miserably in finding British sausages, which I believe have way more starchy filler inside than their meaty American counterparts, but we have the blandest sausages we could find. I heart bangers and mash more than maybe any meal, other than beans on toast, so have high hopes for tomorrow, although the fancy-pants aspects sounds highly unnecessary.

This evening we made Lamb Patties with Garlic and Mint over Mediterranean Chopped Salad. These patties are essentially the same as the ones we made a couple of weeks ago, although the onion element in this version is shallot rather than white onion. Arguably, this isn’t really a new recipe, but they’re pretty tasty so we won’t go down that path. The only strange things about these patties was that an enormous amount of fat came from them. There was a splash of olive oil in the mixture and no more fat was added to the pan, but by the time the patties were cooked, there was about a centimeter of fat in the bottom of the skillet; not so nice. I don’t remember that happening last time we cooked these patties, so maybe the lamb we bought was just generally less lean.

The patties were served with pita bread and a Mediterranean chopped salad. The salad, which really did need a fair amount of chopping, consisted of tomatoes, olives, peppers, parsley, red onion, cucumber and feta cheese, dressed in olive oil and lemon juice. It’s a good salad with strong flavours, crisp texture and great colour. I’m not a big raw onion fan, so I picked a bit, and L doesn’t like feta crumbles, so he picked a bit, but between us we cleared up.

Tomorrow, we will be eating Grilled Turkey Cutlets with Warm Cranberry Salsa and Sautéed Sweet Potatoes, which seems to be some sort of reinterpretation of Thanksgiving dinner. At least as far as I understand Thanksgiving dinner, given that we don’t participate in the day yet. We figure we will, as our little American child gets older, but for now it’s as good a day as any for takeaway.

This evening we made Pesce Spada Pasta for L, while I had some pasta and cheese. This is a relatively easy meal; we fried up chunks of swordfish while the pasta cooked, then removed the fish from the pan when it was browned. Garlic, grape tomatoes, zucchini, scallions, parsley and mint were sautéed together, the swordfish was added back to the pan, and white wine was thrown in. After the manic wine bubbling and spitting subsided, the cooked pasta was tossed together with the vegetables, and the whole lot was seasoned with black pepper.

L rated this meal a well-balanced winner, despite not being in the mood for fish. The vegetables were very spring-like in colour and flavour, with good textural contrast between crunchy and succulent. The fish was well cooked, and could only have been improved upon if it was cooked on the grill. Overall, a success, and very quick and easy to prepare. Tomorrow we’ll be having Lamb Patties with Garlic and Mint over Mediterranean Chopped Salad, which sounds remarkably like Garlic and Mint Lamb or Chicken Patties on Lentil Salad.

Nyquil. How I love you, with your delicious cold-numbing ways, and Dayquil too. And that Chloraseptic throat spray stuff that tastes so good, I like you too. Pregnancy, how annoying that you dictate that cold medicine can not be taken; warm drinks are not doing the trick. I suppose it was inevitable that I would get the cough/ cold/ sore throat thing that L and Baby A have been battling for the last week or so. And I suppose feeling extra sorry for myself is inevitable too (see medicine, lack of, above). Boo hiss.

Anyway, back to matters in hand; this evening we made Bel Aria Chicken and Pasta, named after a dish in a famous opera cafe in New York, where Rachael Ray’s mother received her nickname Mamacello. This is a pretty straightforward pasta dish- brown some chicken, fry some mushrooms and garlic in butter and olive oil, add some Italian hot peppers, white wine and a ladle full of starchy pasta cooking water. Toss with the pasta, Parmigianno cheese and the parsley, and serve.

We both felt that the chicken was superfluous, and that this would be a fine vegetarian pasta dish. The garlic, mushroom and peppers worked well together and the sauce was very subtle. It’s a light and tasty dish- not wildly exciting- but pretty good. Tomorrow L will be eating pasta with swordfish, Pesce Spada Pasta, maybe it’ll be more exciting than dinner tonight. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some warm blackcurrant juice with my name on it.

This afternoon we whipped up Chicken Mamacello and Asparagus Tips in a matter of minutes, whilst simultaneously cooking for, and feeding Baby A. The seasoning, flouring, egging, frying process is getting to be instinctual, and as mentioned previously, this is a really quick and easy process. The variation of the day involved swapping the spinach for asparagus tips boiled quickly in a little water with some lemon skin for flavour, and swapping the wine for Lemoncello lemon vodka. Some slices of lemon were also thrown in the sauce for good measure.

This meal is surprisingly good. We both agreed that if chicken always tasted this good, we might not be so hard on the poor animal. This may become our definitive method of cooking chicken breasts- they are so succulent and moist that, in comparison, all other methods of cooking seem to result in a shoe-like texture. The alcohol boiled off in a spectacularly messy fashion, leaving a subtle sweet lemon taste which went very well with the dish. The asparagus was a welcome change and very tasty. And we got to introduce Baby A to another small tree-like vegetable.

Overall, this is infinitely better with chicken than with fish (and I never thought I’d be saying that). Tomorrow, we continue our chicken affair with Bel Aria Chicken and Pasta.

This evening I got Baby A ready for bed, which these days seems to routinely involve torturing her in the name of administering various medicines. Between L and I we can usually manage to get her to take what she needs, but alone it’s much more hit and miss. Mainly miss; tonight everything both she and I were wearing got coated in a gloopy spray of sticky medicine. Nice. So after a hasty clean-up, I set about making Flounder Francese with Toasted Almonds, Lemon and Capers [recipe], substituting sole for the flounder due to supply problems.

Essentially this is the same recipe and methodology as yesterday, with capers and lemon added to the wine and parsley sauce, and fish substituted for the chicken. The fish I bought was the tiniest sliver it’s probably possible to buy, and this may have contributed to the fact that the end result tasted a little on the omelette-esque side. Presumably the ratio of flesh to egg coating was too low to override the egg effect. Other than that, I felt that the sauce was too harsh, somehow almost metallic in its acidity. The capers and the lemons with the wine were very jarring to the senses. The spinach was cooked with onion rather than garlic, which in itself was fine, but the fact that it was cooked in the same skillet as the sauce, meant that it unfortunately tasted very strongly of salty lemons.

In all honesty, I ate all the bread and a taste of the fish and spinach, before making myself a sandwich. For the sake of fairness, as it’s sometimes hard to tell if pregnancy or taste buds are dictating my current likes and dislikes, I kept the rest of the meal for L to sample. Unfortunately, eating old cold fish is maybe not the most conducive circumstance for a good review of a meal, but L agreed. This meal is not so good.

Perhaps with a more substantial cut of fish, the flavours would have worked better. As it stands, this was not an improvement over the chicken version, and it was marginally more complicated. Tomorrow we will be attempting Chicken Mamacello and Asparagus Tips, named for Rachael Ray’s mother who loves Limoncello, and is thus nicknamed Mamacello. In another world we could be Mamagin, and Papabeer. If it wasn’t for those pesky kids.

This evening, L did the chopping and I did the assembling of Chicken Francese and Wilted Spinach. This meal is so easy to make that it would be perfect if you had a roomful of very hungry people to feed. L chopped some parsley and garlic; I seasoned the chicken, dredged it in flour, and dipped it in beaten egg before frying it in olive oil and butter with some of the garlic. It looked for a while like a chicken encased in an omelette, which prompted L to say that he didn’t want to eat it, but we soldiered on. Once the chicken was golden, I removed it from the pan and added the white wine to deglaze. The heat of the pan made the wine erupt into a boiling, splattering explosion, which coated everything in a meter radius, but I have to say it smelled really good. Once it cooled down, and much more wine later, butter and parsley were added to the skillet to make a sauce. The spinach was wilted in olive oil and garlic, then seasoned with salt, pepper and nutmeg.

Served with crusty bread, this was a remarkably successful chicken recipe. L forgot his eggy preconceptions, and dived in. Compared to the tough chicken we’ve had recently, this was perfectly cooked; moist, tender, delicate and flavoursome. The parsley wine sauce was very light and complimented the chicken well. The spinach was tasty and well-prepared. Overall, this was like a classy restaurant lunch; fairly sophisticated and light. A winner all round, and a welcome resurgence for the humble chicken.
Us: 0 Chicken: 1

Tomorrow, I will be making Flounder Francese with Toasted Almonds, Lemon and Capers while L has a work dinner. I’ll check out the relative safety of flounder for pregnant people and make it or a suitable substitute. The following day we remake with chicken, but using Limoncello, served with asparagus, our first of the year.

This evening, supremely early for us as Baby A didn’t take a nap all day and so was in bed by 6pm, L and I made Ginger Vegetable Chicken Noodle Bowl. This is a pretty basic noodle soup with garlic, ginger, carrots, spring onions and beansprouts, in a broth seasoned with Chinese five spice and cumin. Oh, and how could I forget, there was chicken in there too, and vermicelli pasta. This dish literally took only a few minutes to make, with minimal chopping and stirring. In many ways it was everything you’d ask for from a thirty minute meal, but it was just a little blah.

Which is not to say that we didn’t enjoy it; it was certainly a welcome change from all the hefty meals we’ve been eating lately, particularly those with strange mashed concoctions. Noodle soup is always a winner. We got married in Vancouver and ate almost every night at a tiny hole in the wall Japanese noodle restaurant. When we got home, we ate replica Noodle King soup about three times a week for six months. It was good; it was our pasta pesto of 2001.

The problem with this particular noodle soup was two-fold. Firstly, the chicken tasted a little like an old shoe, probably a beige, lace-up, orthopaedic shoe. Secondly, although there was a reasonable taste and aroma of ginger, the flavour was a little one-dimensional. There could have been some spice, some kick and/ or some complexity. Soy sauce helped, but the general taste impression was a little bland. And I always find it strange that Rachael Ray uses variations of spaghetti in Asian dishes, when there are so many great noodles in the world. And other forms of protein for that matter. However, considering we’re all still feeling very much under the weather, this was a good meal for the evening, but I don’t think we’d ever reach for this recipe over getting take out.

Tomorrow, we make chicken in white wine; Chicken Francese and Wilted Spinach. The following day we are to remake the dish with with flounder. Preliminary research indicates that we may not be able to locate the required fish. As I am to be cooking and eating alone, due to L’s ongoing work obligations, maybe I could use that exotic tofu fish.

After a crazy day of juggling deadlines, traffic and a household struck down with various ailments and illnesses, we set about making Ropa Vieja Josés (Cuban Sloppy Joes) with Smashed Yucca, Sliced Tomatoes, Plantain Chips, and Mojo Sauce [recipe]. We swiftly discovered that I had eaten all the bread rolls this week in my bland white food fixation, so L went out to buy some more. (Is there anything more pathetic than a sick man going out on a Friday night to only buy bread rolls for a meal that you don’t really want to make?) Anyway, for the next 15 minutes, I set about attacking the yucca. I had no idea that a yucca root really is like a root; there was a small tree growing in the middle that was impossible to cut out, even with our one sharp monster knife. The yucca was eventually chopped then boiled in salted water for 20 minutes, then mashed with my mojo.

The mojo consisted of half an onion, 5 cloves of garlic, cumin, the zest and juice of half a lemon, a mountain of olive oil and some water blended in the food processor to make an oily garlicy paste. I may have rejigged the oil to water ratio as half a cup of olive oil in one meal for two people just seemed so very wrong. My mojo, unfortunately, tasted pretty vile. I wonder if that’s a personal thing.

Half of the mojo was put in a skillet and briefly cooked before the ground sirloin was added to the pan and browned. Pimiento olives, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, tomato sauce, grill seasoning and paprika were added to the mix and the whole lot simmered for a while. The meat mixture was served in our newly-acquired rolls, with sliced dill pickles. The mashed yucca was alongside with some sliced tomatoes. Unfortunately we couldn’t find plantain chips, so we substituted “exotic vegetable chips” instead. Neither of us could bring ourselves to drizzle my mojo over the chips as directed, I’m sorry to say. They’re just too nice without.

The sloppy Josés were pretty tasty. They were easy to make and we both enjoyed them far more than we anticipated. With the chips and the sliced tomatoes, this would have been a good, colourful, balanced meal. The mashed yucca seemed superfluous to begin with; this is already a pretty hefty meal. I have to say I sampled the yucca and couldn’t bring myself to eat anymore. It tasted like raw garlic in mashed turnip, something I just can’t do. L thought it was ok. The Danes eat a fair amount of root vegetables, so he was quite happy with the yucca. Unfortunately he thought that it was so bland that it was in danger of tasting like a Danish preparation of a root vegetable. Apparently this is not a compliment.

All in all, the Estefan family tribute today was far better than yesterday, but it still seemed a little too convoluted. Without the yucca, this would have been quick, easy and pretty satisfying. With the yucca (not yumm-a, despite what the book says), this tipped into the realm of too much work for the result. Interestingly, on the 30 Minute Meals episode, Havana Breeze, the sloppy Josés were served with Mojito Mashed Sweet Potatoes, rather than a garlicy old boot.

Tomorrow, we move away from Gloria Estefan and family, so perhaps I can finally get the lyrics to the two songs of hers that I know out of my head. Still, it could be worse, it could have been food for Celine Dion. I’ve been meaning to mention that I dream about this project most nights. Between the morning sickness and the getting up to eat and the getting up to attend to Baby A who is sick again, I have some pretty interrupted nights. Each time I get up it seems I’ve been having some sort of dream about what we cooked or what we have to cook. It’s like having work dreams, but weirder. This isn’t the sort of pregnancy dreams I was hoping for I have to say. Anyway, moving on, tomorrow we make Ginger Vegetable Chicken Noodle Bowl. Back to the chicken grind- 4 out of the next 6 meals are chicken. Yumm-o.

So today, L came home from work early because he has some kind of flu/ cold thing. Fortunately for me, he was well enough to chop some vegetables for this meal, or I might still be in the kitchen days later. Tonight we had the dubious pleasure of a meal inspired by the Estefan family based on some techniques they taught Rachael Ray. Mashed Plantains with Oh, Baby! Garlic-Tomato Shrimp on Top, Grilled Flank Steak with Lime and Onions, and Quick Rice with Black Beans [recipe] was a lot, a lot of work for a less than mediocre result.

This meal was not terribly complicated, but it was certainly labour-intensive, with a long convoluted set of instructions. The two pages of directions and the ridiculously long title gave us a clue that that may be the case. The problem with many of the longer recipes is that different elements of the meal are often ready at completely different times. Even under a tent of foil, we ended up with cold steak and onions, and lukewarm rice. The steak was seasoned with grill seasoning, cumin and lime zest, and was served on a bed of seared sliced onions. This was the best part of the meal, the only part we agreed was consistently tasty and good. The rice and black beans were flavoured with onion, cumin, thyme and chicken stock. If you like that sort of food, they were probably pretty good. Unfortunately, neither of us are rice and beans fans, so we weren’t too happy with the dish. We had a difference of opinion on the garlic-tomato-shrimp element. I though that it was ok, although I preferred it as it was cooking when it consisted of onions, green peppers, garlic and chopped shrimp. The addition of tomato sauce, lemon juice and parsley made it strangely pungent. L thought it was absolutely disgusting, I thought it was ok but I wouldn’t bother with it again.

The unmitigated disaster of the meal was the mashed plantains. Gloria Estefan apparently taught Rachael Ray how to cook plantains in the microwave. After slitting the skin, the plantain was wrapped in wax paper and twisted at the ends, like a novelty banana Christmas cracker. 90 seconds was supposed to zap the flesh enough to mash it. I put the plantain back in the microwave two more times, and it was still like attempting to mash a pile of wet woodchips. Yet more olive oil and some chicken stock did not really have an impact on the consistency, and I had to use my hands to mush it together enough to serve it on the plate. Having never cooked or eaten a plantain before, I had no idea what I was looking for in the grocery store. The plantains all looked like big green bananas- maybe the one I chose was too green and under-ripe. Who knows? It tasted like seasoned wood chips. We were highly highly underwhelmed.

This meal took forever to make and there is an enormous amount of clearing up to be done. I’ll concede that maybe Cuban flavours by way of Miami are just not tastes that we crave or enjoy, but this was disappointing for the effort involved. Many of the reviewers of the recipe on the Food Network website seem to have really enjoyed it; we are obviously in the minority who just didn’t get it. Tomorrow we’ll give the “Este-fun” family tribute another go with Ropa Vieja Josés (Cuban Sloppy Joes) with Smashed Yucca, Sliced Tomatoes, Plantain Chips, and Mojo Sauce. We have a yucca standing by, and will report back tomorrow. And don’t forget,

At night when you turn off all the lights
There’s no place that you can hide
Oh no, the rhythm is gonna get’cha