Tag: Food

My Mother’s Advice, 50 Shades Wrap-Up & Arugula, Spinach, Strawberry Salad

~ Katherine ~ 3 Comments

My mother and my biggest fan texts me the following after reading my last review of 50 Shades of Grey, ” Keep reading.  You’ll change your mind about Christian Grey at the end of the book. ”  And then she adds, “Who knows?  Maybe it will put a little excitement into your marriage…if it isn’t there already.  Wink.”

Ugh.

And finally when I don’t think I can take much more and am considering going off-line with my writing forever, she completes her motherly advice with, “Oh, don’t be such a prude.  I’ve read all the good scenes to your dad at night when we’re in bed.  It’s fun!”

Ewwww.

Final Thoughts on 50 Shades….This is a dark romance, a deep-down psychological challenge – a game.  Before reading this book I would ask myself the following:

Do you want to play?  Will you be honest with yourself and consider how you too might feel about riding pain to the edge – maybe way beyond your threshold for a chance to feel a rich pleasure you’ve never known?  Are you willing to take that risk?

Will you allow the author, E.L. James, to twist and bend your psyche, tighten your belly every time she puts her two main characters in the same room together?

Are you ready for James to show you who you really are?

Ana will let Christian spank her if he agrees to tell her more about who he is.   I can’t imagine giving up my ass so easily.  Here’s my offer to my husband-  I’ll let you spank me if, for one week,  you clean the house, do the laundry, wash the kids, go grocery shopping, make dinner, bake me a chocolate cake and listen with an abundance of interest as I tell you all about my day.  Oh and throw in a week’s worth of uninterrupted naps for me as well.

After a few days have passed, my mother calls me.  “I’ve made the Arugula, Spinach and Strawberry Salad and it is delicious!  You have to give your readers the full recipe.”  We are done talking about 50 Shades and back to talking about food.  Whew.

So here it is – Mary Ann Esposito’s recipe for Arugula, Spinach and Strawberry Salad.  Eat this salad and pick up a copy of 50 Shades of Grey before the last of summer’s heat is extinguished. Oh, and feel free to use my mother’s advice while I go make another appointment with my therapist.

from the June 2012 issue of Taste of Italia

1 tsp. unsalted butter

1/4 cup pine nuts (my mother used walnuts instead)

2 cups arugula leaves, washed and dried

2 cups spinach leaves, washed and dried

1 cup thinly sliced fresh strawberries

2 Tbsp. honey

2 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar

3 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil

1/4 tsp. salt

In a small saute pan, melt the butter and toast the pine nuts (or walnuts) until they are lightly browned.  Transfer the nuts to a small bowl and set aside.  Tear the leaves of the arugula and spinach and put them in a salad bowl.  Add the strawberries.

Heat the honey and balsamic vinegar together in a small saucepan just until the honey melts (I wiped the butter out of the saute pan that I browned the nuts in and used that one instead of having to wash two pans later).  Transfer the mixture to a small bowl and whisk in the olive oil 1 Tablespoon at a time until an emulsion is created (I added an extra Tablespoon of olive oil to cut down on the sweetness a bit).  Stir in the salt.

Just before serving, pour the dressing over the salad and toss gently.  Sprinkle the nuts over the top and serve immediately.

Makes 4 servings.

* To make this a delicious Autumn salad I’ll use thinly sliced green apples in place of the strawberries, toasted pecans in place of the pines nuts and add a sprinkle of gorgonzola cheese.

Enjoy!

A Change in the Weather and Summer Pasta

~ Katherine ~ Leave a comment

There is still a good month left to this summer.  We are finally getting rain in this part of the Midwest.  Thunder and lightning wake me in the middle of the night.  Thunder roars differently out here, I think.  Something with big meaty fists pounds our roof and then rolls away slowly, clumsily over its knuckles, glaring at me over its fat shoulder.

It snorts-Take that, Jersey Girl.

Lightning is fantastic in the big, big sky.   In an instant and without warning, white fills my eyelids like a camera’s flash, transports me right out of a dream and back into the blackness of 3 am.  Hopefully all this rain hasn’t come too late for the farmers who are relying on their corn crops.  After living here now for two years and reading the local papers, this is what I think about.  Maybe the farmers actually sleep better to the sounds of a storm.

Amid all the heavy roar and sharp cracks outside my window, I begin to drift off again.  There’s an old farm house out here somewhere waiting for me.   There’s a hot, orange sun beginning to set over a field, a wrap-around porch painted white wearing pots of lush ferns like earrings, a brightly-colored woven hammock sways gently in the corner.  And just outside a squeaky front gate, there’s a country road that goes on and on.

In the meantime, there is our apartment, a hub this summer for all our coming and going.  A place to hang up damp bathing suits and pool towels, a place to drop off the bass guitar after lessons and a dusty baseball bag after a night game under the lights.  An almost too big table that just fits on an almost too small back deck where we share our summer supper.  Where I notice the dirt still lingering beneath small fingernails and think to myself – Another good day.

A place for me to write, a place for my books and shelves for my cookbooks and food magazines.  A place to make a quick, small meal last night, that-turns out- has big flavor.

It begins with pasta – small penne cooked al dente then tossed with bite-size pieces of fresh mozzarella cheese, fresh basil and juicy tomatoes all from the garden – chopped.  A clove of garlic from the farmers’ market – minced, a bit of salt and pepper, a drizzle of olive oil.

Summer in a bowl.

Recipe adapted from Giada DeLaurentiis

Stay Here in the Heat with Me

~ Katherine ~ 5 Comments

It’s going to be another hot one today in Madison, Wisconsin.  Temperatures are expected to climb and claw their way into the very high nineties.  Early morning and already the humidity is beginning to tease and tighten the tangles in my dark hair.  It is time to give in to the heat.

I didn’t make it out of Chapter Two of Fifty Shades of Grey last night before falling asleep.  Maybe it’s the thick air that makes my eyes so heavy and leaves my will tired and weak as soon as I turn on my bedroom lamp.   Or maybe it’s lines like “Ground swallow me up now!” and “-my mother is all about new business ventures.” that are like a double dose of NyQuil for me.  This is how I feel so far – twenty-two pages in.  I am not afraid of changing my mind.

This morning I am re-reading the first few pages of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  I’m sure the last time I read this was two summers ago and yet I can’t recall names or descriptions of any of the main characters.  This lack of memory worries me.  I know I read it because quite a few page corners are turned down to mark where his words come together in a way that gives me new understanding of the truth of our human-ness…

 “Little by little, listening to her sleep, he pieced together the navigation chart of her dreams and sailed among the countless islands of her secret life.”

Like I said it’s summer and it’s hot.  Rather than keep cool all day in the air conditioning, I prefer to sit still outside and read books that give off heat.  Authors like Garcia Marquez and Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street) inspire me to pick on fresh fruit and cheese right from the fridge then sip a cool drink – allowing its icy sweat to drip down my fingers while swinging gently in a hammock on a lazy afternoon in July.

For the Love of Truth and Balance

~ Katherine ~ 2 Comments

The last day of school was this past Tuesday.  All three kids are home now excited to begin their summer vacation.  It’s been three days and already we’ve been biking, swimming, reading and eating a lot to make up for those calories quickly burning off their small bodies.   I’ve refereed some fights, one involving Nerf baseball bats and administered First Aid for some minor cuts and bumps.  Have I mentioned it’s only been three days?

I’ve been putting off posting anything for fear that it won’t be perfect – at this moment I have half a mind on what I’m writing while out of the corner of my eye I’m watching to make sure my son and daughter don’t draw on each other with markers.   It’s early morning and we are sitting at our table on the back deck and I know I only have another twenty minutes or so before it will be time to pull them off each other and feed them breakfast.

Schedules change.  Routines shift.  Life moves us continually in different directions.  My life right now is about letting the kids stay up way too late to catch fireflies while keeping them well-rested enough to avoid the dramatic meltdowns.  My hope is to get them in the kitchen with me and cook up some granola, homemade pizza, and watch them put together a simple salad of their own desire.  I hope also to drop my expectations that my sentences need to be perfect and well-crafted and that I will just get the words out there because sometimes half-assed is better than no ass at all.

Here’s to Life perfectly as it is!

The Beginnings of a Tasty Affair

~ Katherine ~ 4 Comments

What happens when the love of your life refuses to try anything with mustard, frisee lettuce, beans, green vegetables or tomatoes in it?  Where does a woman, who loves to try new foods, who loves to cook and learn new skills in the kitchen go when her husband will only eat the same eight meals over and over?  When her man would rather throw a frozen pizza in the oven and head on over to the couch to wait for the timer to ding? When the only cheese he’ll put in his mouth is American or Cheddar, the only bread, white or crusty Italian?

And worse, when your perfect children watch their hero, their killer of spiders – the guy who can fix anything- shrink from the broccoli on the table?

I’ll tell you what she’s done.  Time and time again, she has cooked the meal she knows he’ll eat and put the kids’ chicken nuggets in the oven alongside the carrots (orange, not green, and so, acceptable) and potatoes for him.  She’s chopped up rainbows of raw veggies for the kids to pick over.  And, finally, she has sat at the dinner table with gratitude in her heart for her wonderful, quirky family and with a furrow in her brow for the many recipes out there she might never get to try.

But, one day she realizes that she has a small window of time between dropping off the kids at school and picking them up.  She has a small moment of solitude in the afternoon when her husband is at work and she is left all alone.  And then it hits her!  Wham! She’s pulls her dusty cookbooks and recipe box down off the shelf and decides she will use this time to create wonderful meals for herself.  And who has to know?  These are private moments she indulges in and keeps them all to her self.

Until now, until Mangoes and Mojitos.