use real butter

Recipe: reuben sandwich

My first (food) love is sushi.

My second (food) love is a sandwich. It’s a beautiful thing, really. Totally flexible yet wholly satisfying and comforting. Sandwiches can be cold, hot, both, crunchy, mushy, gooey, spicy, tangy, sweet, open, closed, stacked, dainty, behemoth, you name it. I love me a Good Sandwich.

Oh, but a little business before I go on about my love affair with The Sandwich. Thank you to the person(s) who nominated this blog for the Death by Chocolate competition on Culinate. I am flattered, to say the least. Unfortunately, because of my treatment, I am unable to travel and feel it isn’t appropriate for me to enter. Not to mention, the entries are by some of my absolute favorite food bloggers like: Peabody, Bea, Helene, Anita, Jaden, and Meeta… just to name a few! I encourage you all to go and look, drool, and vote.

Thanks also to all of you for your kind words of support. I think my tastebuds are somewhat recovered (had an infection to boot). I’ve just accepted that my fooding will be boned until treatment ends in several months. So, no worries. I shall still attempt to cook and hopefully post. Things just have a way of improving or sucking very quickly here and I have to go with the flow day to day. Stick with me on this. We’ll go places, I promise. xxoo

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chinese hot pot

While I was pondering a non-trad Thanksgiving menu, HolyBasil reminded me of a favorite dish from my childhood: Chinese hot pot. Call it what you want, huo guo, shabu shabu, fondue… it’s delicious and fun. My mom prepared this on cold nights and it was perfect for someone as picky as my sister. I distinctly recall the steam rising from the broth in the electric wok, fogging the insides of every window in the kitchen. The wok was the centerpiece of the table, surrounded by plates and bowls of colorful vegetables, meats, noodles, and tofu – ready to be picked and cooked. My mother hand sliced everything with such precision and laid out all of the ingredients in beautiful fans.

Recipe: chocolate stout chili

It can get pretty cool where we live… sometimes down to -20F. I don’t mind the cold. I actually enjoy stepping out into the winter air and feeling the inside of my nose crackle when I breath in. The only real hardship of winter that we encounter is the wind (because snow isn’t hardship, it is recreation). And we encounter it up to 100 mph at times. So while I might not feel cold in 10F, I will feel chilled to the bone at 32F with a wind whipping away every unit of heat my body produces (and I produce a lot of heat – some may call it hot air). It’s blowing today and I can hear the loose sections of roofing flapping in the gusts. I sincerely hope the roofers call before the pieces go flying off into… Kansas.

Soups and stews are so utterly perfect for cold weather days. When I was a graduate student in central New York, I would rally a chili cookoff among the graduate students during this time of year. We always had an impressive array of chilis that included: curry, chocolate, beer, vegetarian, chicken, or the hottest hot you could imagine. It was always a geochemist who went for entering the hottest chili. That’s when my friend Ben thought he made chili from the butt of a pig. He kept chuckling, “Mine is made from Pork Butt.” We finally told him he was an idiot and that the pork butt is part of the shoulder. I should also note that the majority of our cookoff participants were men!

My most recent incarnation of chili involves two of those inspired variations from the cookoffs: chocolate and stout. Chocolate stout, to be precise. I have one of those prize-winning recipes that requires throwing in chorizo, a cow, and a pig, and a million other ingredients, but I like this simple recipe because it’s something you can whip up fairly quickly and because the guys at the local liquor barn get a kick out of my food-related booze purchases.