Jaden's Steamy Kitchen

The next time anyone asks me, "don't you want another kid?" or "are you going to have another baby to try for a girl?"

All I have to do is flash them this photo:

The playroom that was I had spent the previous 2 days sorting, scrubbing and organizing:

I think they are building a secret railway from our home to DisneyWorld.

Thank you Scott for cleaning up this mess afterwards!

Update: AHA!!! Found this article today! "Stay at Home Moms Worth at Least $117K/yr"

from my Tampa Tribune column

I'm sure that a vow to eat healthfully was at the top of most New Year's resolutions lists. Sigh. It certainly was on mine, but I've been doing a lousy job of fulfilling my goal of losing 15 pounds.

I even made it super-easy by limiting myself to just ONE resolution. I typed in my journal that if I could get there by the end of the year, I would pamper myself with a spa day at The Met in Sarasota.

It's May, and I'm so not there yet. Maybe I need to re-evaluate my prize because, as we all know, a change in behavior is only sustainable with a promise of good loot at the end. The words "losing 15 pounds," even the thought of a haircut and four-hour massage, is not enticement enough to turn away that decadent swirl of chocolate frosting or the irresistibly curious bacon toffee. Sugar? Butter? Bacon? Cannot resist.

So I'm thinking that my newly revised prize should be grand, like one in which hordes of people are holding me accountable for my success. Hmmm ... maybe a massive food/wine/music-filled block party to which you are all invited? You're welcome to e-mail me ideas as long you're not selling me diet pills.

But, hey, I did find a nutritious recipe for Potatoes Anna from Cooking Light magazine that I simply love. The super-thin overlapping slices of potatoes are baked in a skillet. The top and bottom layers peel off like crisp potato chips. I've seasoned my version with a combination of ground cinnamon and coriander. At 200 calories per serving, I could almost eat, like, the whole thing.

***

My favorite mandolins

Having a mandoline slicer really helps with cutting the potatoes into thin, even slices. My favorite is one by Pampered Chef for $60. It's beautifully designed for the clumsy in mind, with a food holder on safety rails and an unexposed blade. You food (and hands) slide effortlessly guided by the safety rails. It also folds up nicely and the 4 blades (crinkle, V-shaped, regular and grating) are stored in a plastic holder that also slides onto the mandolin for storage. The blade is triggered by a spring action - each time your food guide passes over, it triggers the blade to be exposed. Food passes, blade flush. Simply beautiful. Limitations: no blade for cutting shoestring fries and the wide food holder is 3 1/2" oval shaped and your food has to fit in there.

If you're the daredevil sort and don't use the food gripper anyways, then get the Oxo brand. While it has a massive food gripper that keep your knuckles and fingers away from the blade, it does not have safety rails. It does cut nicely and is very sturdy. One time I went slicer-bezerk and slid off the "runway" and, well, you know what happened. BUT - it cuts shoestring fries! And you get to watch a nifty video of Mario pimping out the product. I own both the Pampered Chef and Oxo - and would never give up either one of them.Unless you offered large sums of money. Or an evening with Rocco. Or my very own Darth Vader voice changer mask. I'm easily bribed by evil temptations.

You know those thin, plastic Japanese style mandolines by  Benriner? I wouldn't recommend them unless you are adept at handling juggling knives on a unicycle. Without a stand that holds it erect, you will be balancing the mandoline with one hand at an odd angle and sliding the food back and forth with just a plastic holder doohickey the size of a credit card.

Spend $10 more and get a good quality mandoline.

Cooking Light magazine gave me three gorgeous Cooking Light The Complete Cookbooks to give away! Would you like one? Come over here to enter. The random drawing takes place Saturday (May 10th) morning. It's got 1,200 recipes with 630 color photographs and a companion DVD.

It is an awesome book, and my copy is littered with Post-it notes of recipes I want to incorporate into my, ahem, healthy lifestyle, like this recipe for Potatoes Anna!

Recipe + photo setup after the jump

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Today is Saturday, May whatever. This morning I woke up and FINALLY gave myself permission to be sick. After uttering those words to my bedside lamp, the already straining cork that had been clinging on for dear life where head meets nose the past 4 days, holding back the gush of mucus (gross), finally popped.

I am sick.

Which, in all honesty, just being sick actually feels better than my mind knowing that my body is sick but demanding, "Man up, soldier! YOU ARE NOT SICK." Yesterday was a big day, when Holly, my editor, flew all the way down from Vermont (brrr) to Florida (aaaahhh) and spent the day with me in the kitchen. It just would have sucked to be snottin' and sneezing all over the food. It was an absolute must that I was healthy - er- at least functioning fairly well for that day.

Our plan was to spend the day cooking, testing/writing recipes, photographing, eating and editing. Ok, really, my agenda was to distract her as much as possible in the kitchen, get her drunk so that we could forget about editing. Cuz me no likey editing. You could threaten to take a hammer to my cherished kiwi Le Creuset baby dutch oven and I still would choose THAT over picking apart words and trying to come up with a suitable phrases to replace my babbling, wandering musings and cussing.  <-- that sentence was a run-on and probably didn't make much sense.

But, I'm totally stoned on Nyquil right now. So back the hell off.

I wanted to show Holly what a "day in the life of a deranged, disorganized food blogger, cookbook-author wannabe" would be like. And boy, did I work her ass off. We created 4 new recipes, photographed them for the book and fed the dinner party for that evening. I had scribbled down recipes for 4 dishes that I had created in my SICK BUT NOT SICK head and when she arrived, I thrusted my notes to Holly and said, "here are my recipe notes!"

They really shouldn't be classified as "recipes," because they looked like this:

hoisin, honey, ginger but maybe garlic or maybe just omit both, how about orange marmalade? could use palm sugar too, 5sp, S+P, ribs, slow+low and glaze.

Holly looked at me with the "this is a recipe? are you fucking serious, lady?" look and then muffled into her sleeve, "bluejay calling mother hen...red alert..I REPEAT...red alert...operation steamykitchen is a no go....requesting permission to abort mission."

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My cookbook editor, Holly, is flying down to Florida and spending the entire day/eve with me tomorrow! I"m really looking forward to meeting her in person, since we've been working closely together for the past few months.

We'll be spending the day cooking, testing, photographing, editing (ugh) and  feasting!

As you know, I've been spending a lot of time honing my food photography skills, and I just learnd from David Lebovtiz that professional food photographers can make about $1,000 per shot! Of course, that fee includes a professionally equipped photo studio with expensive lights, a gazillion props and backgrounds, photographer's assistants, catered lunch and food stylists.

Sadly, I do not have Food Fluffers.

And my studio is pretty ghetto:

no catered lunch either...I just eat the set.

If you're curious, the reason my ottoman is scarred...it's because one day I was too lazy to lug out the ironing board. And I only had to iron in big-ass wrinkle out of my dress. So I used the ottoman.

Let's just say that the extra $100 spent having all furniture sprayed with Scotch-Guard stain resistant spray burns quite easily. (yes, i know. grammer sux.  my subject-modifier thingy is all wrong. Too busy to fix)

and another shot...

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I know this photo sucks - my kids played with the camera and did something with the settings and I didn't find out until after the food was eaten!

from my column in Tampa Tribune

Two weeks ago, I took a trip to Los Angeles to teach a couple of cooking classes and to visit family. So, I thought it would be a great idea to bring both of my boys along with me since tickets were only $250 each round-trip for a direct flight from Tampa to Los Angeles.

It was a deal too good to pass up, as I'm a Wal-Mart shopper and easily wooed by a bargain. I wouldn't normally buy tangerine-flavored fingernail polish, but if it's on sale for 35 percent off? OMG. I cannot resist. Give me the entire lot of them.

So, when I saw that the airfare was practically half off, I quickly purchased the tickets, not really thinking of the consequences of spending five hours in a small, enclosed flying contraption with no easy access to reinforcements, aka husband, teachers or relatives. Tag team, FAIL.

Thank goodness for the rolling minibar and $3 Snickers. That newlywed couple in the next aisle going to Hawaii for their honeymoon? My money says they probably swore off having children for the next 11 years. Who knew that flying with kids would be such great birth control? Next time your teenage talks about sex, have 'em sit next to us on an airplane. Cheaper than an intervention.

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