I've had another baby and it means my time has been rather short lately, but two things recently sparked me to jump back on here... the first was reading
"My Life in France" by Julia Child and the second was trying a perfect mango.
The new addition to the family means that I haven't had time to cook a lot lately... in fact, every attempt I've made to cook REAL dinner has ended up failing miserably. Sometimes burned to a crisp, sometimes totally destroyed by my newfound inability to correctly measure my spices. I recently tried a
recipe for Southwest Scallops and instead of using two
teaspoons of cumin, I used two
tablespoons. Needless to say, the scallops went from "subtly spiced" to "could peel paint off the walls". (Also, I had never used cumin before, and had no idea it tastes like curry when applied in bulk.)
Clearly, (I thought) these experiences don't translate well to a blog about cooking.
"My Life in France" made me reconsider. Julia Child took so much obvious pleasure in her craft... not just her successes, but her failures too. She laughed about her mistakes and shared them with the same joy as her triumphs. And she shared exactly NO recipes... often, she would give a list of foods she'd prepared for some dinner or another, and sometimes she'd give a full description of how she went about making a dish, but no flat-out recipes. She spoke about food
experiences.
Full disclosure: I had also been considering re-introducing meat to my diet in small amounts. I had begun to notice the smell other people's meat dishes was REALLY appealing, and I figured maybe my body was trying to give me some signals... but Julia Child shut down any chance of that ever happening. She gave such
descriptive accounts of meat preparation (often including the butchering of the animals themselves) that I almost found myself slightly offended. (I am not an easy person to offend, which is why I say "almost"... if you ARE easily offended by animal issues, I would avoid this book entirely.) By the final page, I was completely reaffirmed in my vegetarian ways!
Which is how I ended up here, discussing books and mangos. As opposed to cooking for my whole family, I have mostly been cooking for the baby. My husband and oldest daughter end up with quick-prep baked fish or simple pastas... and sometimes, even that's too much. My oldest daughter is
super-picky and often ends up with the individual mac & cheese cups for dinner. As varied as her baby foods were, she has narrowed her focus to chicken nuggets, mac & cheese, spaghetti, corn and fruit. She's a carb-lover, for sure. We try and give her bites of what we're eating... she's three now, so she has to take three bites of everything. Often, this (and fruit) is all she will eat at a given meal until I break down and give her one of her preferred items.
The baby, on the other hand, is eating everything that doesn't run away from her. Yesterday, I introduced fresh mango. She and my big girl ate it up, but I was avoiding it entirely... as a kid, I had strep throat every year at Christmas, and my medicine was always mango-flavored. But as I was putting everything away after dinner, I noticed that the mangos I hadn't cut were starting to get mushy. I decided to go ahead and chop and puree them so I could throw most of them in the freezer. (I watched a youtube video on how to slice mango, since I had no idea there was a GIANT pit in the middle that appears to go almost entirely top to bottom.)
When a tiny, soft bite fell on my counter, I considered it for a moment, then decided to give it a go.
I emerged several minutes later from a mango-induced haze. I was actually gnawing on the pit from the one I had been slicing, and juice was all over my hands and mouth. I was like some sort of serial killer. Holy smoke, that stuff was good... and I keep wondering, how is a mango-rita? When I worked at a local Mexican restaurant, we sold plenty of them and now I really REALLY want to try it.
Mmmmm.
