Nacho love.

I come from a family of champion spectators…we know how to watch sports, with food and friends and yell-’til-it-hurts loyalties.  Growing up, the Olympics provided a much-anticipated opportunity to hone our skills over weeks of competition.  My family would gather around our TV and watch hours of Olympics, adopting athletes from around the world and cheering them on in pidgin phrases we picked up from the crowd (is is possible that France played Yugoslavia in hockey at Sarajevo?  I have a memory of my mother chanting “Yu-Go-Slav-ia!” with my dad fist-pumping “Vive la France!”).

So this weekend I gathered my own family to pass along some of these hard-won skills.  We had dinner in front of the TV-a rare occurrence-and watched speed skating, cheering on Orange Pants against Blue Pants, and Red Pants over Gold Pants.  We ate decadent nachos and drank margaritas poured into snow-packed pint glasses.   I’m not sure if it was the kids’ excitement or the jumbo margaritas, but even my sports-phobic husband got into the spirit and may have even teared up when Hannah Kearney brought it home for the U.S. in a rocket-hot moguls run.

But let us return to those nachos.  My word.  The cupboard was still a little bare from the infamous snowstorm, but I was able to cobble together a most delicious meal from the odds and ends lurking about.  I began by whirring up some black bean dip out of a drained, rinsed 32 ounce can of black beans, 4 ounces of cream cheese, a teaspoon of ground ancho chile, a few slivered scallions, a clove of garlic, and some salt.  Buzz food proccesor, done.  I dolloped the beans on tortilla chips and sprinkled with a mix of grated cheddar and monterey jack.  10 minutes in the oven at 375, while I used the food pro again (when watching Olympics in Canada, utilize Canadian terms for kitchen appliances…so goes the adage, right?) to make a fresh pico de gallo out of a pint of grape tomatoes, an onion, some cilantro, and a squeeze of lime.  I squished up a couple avocados with more lime, cilantro and salt, pulled the nachos out of the oven, and a new generation of Olympic rituals was born.

categories Uncategorized | jen | datetime February 15, 2010 11:27 am | comments Comments (4)

Snowbound

It takes a lot of snow for me to consider myself snowbound.  Growing up in New England and spending 5 or 6 years in Michigan, I learned how to deal with snow by dressing appropriately, shoveling each morning, and steering into the skid.  I tend to think that caterwauling of mid-Atlantic residents about their annual flurry is a little…weak.  But this week’s 30-inch snow dump, with another foot or so predicted for tonight, is the real deal.  The roads are really a mess, trucks are not getting through to restock stores and schools have been closed since last Friday.  I’m grateful for the uninterrupted power, for the well-stocked kitchen, and for the company of neighbors to help pass the time.

I’ve made lots of food to share: broccoli cheese soup, and Mimi’s Minestrone, sourdough bread and chocolate chip cookies.  And Sunday morning, to fuel the herd for a day of deep-powder sledding, I made sourdough doughnuts.  By far the best homemade doughnut attempt to date, these were crunchy on the outside, light in the inside, and complex in addition to sweet.  I made mine with an established wild yeast sourdough starter, but the original blog post includes a quick overnight sourdough sponge made with commercial yeast.

Yes, we are all a little twitchy about our regularly scheduled life falling to the wayside for a week or so.  But the doughnuts kind of make it all worth it.

categories Uncategorized | jen | datetime February 9, 2010 1:43 pm | comments Comments (2)