As you may know, over at YAD, I had a hosting drive to pay for the small but not insignificant annual hosting costs of my two sites. It was wildly successful, and so I feel just guilty enough to recommit to more content on Forkbastard. Specifically, more ranty stuff. Also more cooky stuff, but there's a lot of stuff I kept telling myself I'd get around to ranting about last year that I never did. So expect more of that in 2013.

And since it's a new year, let me offer a New Year's Resolution to all of America. STOP FUCKING EATING DORITOS LOCOS TACOS ALREADY.

So, what do you eat when you can't chop an onion?

Or, to put it another way, where the fuck have I been? If you read You Are Dumb, and follow it on Twitter, you may be aware that a couple of weeks ago, I sprained my elbow in a classic Minnesota slip-and-fall. Which left me with a left arm that cannot hold down an onion or a loaf of sturdy bread with enough force to keep it steady while the right hand chops through it.

A few notes from the weekend:

AREPA UPDATE:

After I made a dozen of the thin arepas, I froze eight of them. THis weekend, I tried popping a couple of them in the toaster like toaster waffles, and in a glorious success, they came out near-fresh. Drizzled with butter an honey, they were nice, but now I really want to make a hot pepper jam.

AMERICAN PIE:

This strip mall pizza joint was competent without being special, but the damndest thing happened duirng a wait for the check that, if I'm gonna be honest, was insanely fucking long.

Growing vegetables on the deck has been part of the plan since we moved in to the new house a year ago. Last year, we did basil and rosemary in a couple of window boxes, and it was pretty successful. This year, things are ramping up.

I have spent the last few weeks living off the land, as it were. Having blown pretty much all the disposable income on an iPad upgrade, and much of the food budget on a big Bollywood party (where I made a fairly standard chicken/veg curry, but there was a lot of it plus snacks), I have been turning to my freezer.

Right. It's been a slow winter when it comes to experimental cooking and restaurant exploration. Part of it is that most of my braising adventures got chronicled last winter, so there's no need to mention things like my scratch (OK, semi-scratch) version of my cheater banh mi chicken, which involved bone-in thighs, coconut milk, and store-bought red curry paste. Which came out insanely spicy, but good, by the way.

One of the founding premises of Forkbastard is that tacos are awesome. All tacos are awesome. But some tacos are more awesome than others.

The saga continues. In the back of my mind, I'm making sure I have at least enough time for three other projects today, including tomorrow's YAD and tonight's live-tweet of the Next Iron Chef finale.

1:45 PM: The squash is out of the oven and the fridge is clean. Everything seemed done at an hour twenty (the delicata came out at the one hour mark) so I'm now just letting that cool on the cutting board until I'm ready to deal with it further.

With one exception, I haven't cooked for a week.

One week ago today, I made up an epic batch of char siu. It took a triple batch of the marinade, six and a half pounds of pork shoulder, and had to be cooked in two batches so as not to dirty two racks. Some of it went into banh mi that night, some of it got stashed away for a near-future project, and most of it ended up in the freezer for future consumption.

No, this has nothing to do with Japanese meal boxes.

Also, while I do not believe in being one of those bloggers who posts about how they're not posting, I didn't actually intend to accidentally take almost all of November off from writing about food. And, indeed, if you enjoyed the live tweets from two of the last three weeks of Next Iron Chef, technically, I didn't take the month off. That said, the content-bereftitude here was largely the result of this being at the bottom of the time/energy priority list, so when work gets nuts or I spend a week with a cold...