It's the usual semi-crazy holiday week, compounded by Cathy being in California. This does strange and peculiar things to my cooking schedule, but certain things have been accomplished, some I even planned to write about at the time before circumstances interfered.

Monday was gaming night, at Drew's, and I just brought the last of the Chinese BBQ Pork for sharing. People seemed to like it.

I have been known, occasionally, to do what Sandra Lee would call "semi-home-made".

The thing is, one of the greatest of Sandra Lee's many great, great crimes is to take the concept of embellishing convenience foods with real ingredients and completely discredit it by being a horrible pile of fake person who uses the time she saves for hideous table decoration.

It's sort of become its own tradition.

You see, every Thanksgiving, I go to my parents, for Traditional American Thanksgiving Food. And it is very good. It's especially good because it's the kind of thing I almost never get the rest of the time.

As a general rule, I'm not a breakfast guy. I don't like egg dishes, which comprise roughly four thousand percent of all breakfast foods, so I tend to skip straight to lunch. Or, in a pinch, brunch.

It has been, in the vernacular, that kind of week. A combination of my Old Man Back and Cathy's cold has made this one of those weeks where cooking has had to happen, but where the actual act of cooking, and correspondingly, the act of writing about that cooking, has been a fucking chore.

I call this "dirty rice", even though it's probably not really dirty rice.

It's a dish I make under certain specific circumstances. Circumstances that include laziness, having leftover cooked rice, and/or having leftover stock, all of which need using.

It's actually a shame I can't codify a recipe for this, because I'm really happy with how it turned out, but given its convoluted genesis and improvised construction, this is the best I can do.

For those of you who know her, or know her from the comments, this week is Liz's birthday. So I decided to take the opportunity to try out something we'd been building slowly toward all week - homemade squash and goat cheeze ravioli.

Cathy loves squash, and had bought a butternut recently for purposes unknown. We also had two of an odd, smaller squash from the last of the CSA in the fridge. So during the week, she roasted them off in the oven with nothing but oil, scooped out the flesh, and stored it in the fridge.

Were it not for "Mitsubishi" and "blend door", the word "simmer" would be my most hated word of the week.

The good news is, I have a healthy quantity of a tomato product in my refrigerator that tastes remarkably like my memories of the last time I had the ketchup at Hell's Kitchen here in Minneapolis, The bad news is how I got there - the kitchen that looks like an abbatoir, the horrific burns on my face, and all because of that one word. Simmer.