In case you were wondering, the light posting this week has been a direct result of my spending the past four days falling back on my repertoire of basic dishes - all of which I've already covered here in one form or another in the past year.

That's the nice thing about building up a nice assortment of standbys. If your pantry is set up and your CSA cooperates, you can spend the better part of a week essentially cooking in your sleep. Which is awesome when you find yourself damn near asleep at dinnertime for most of a week.

As I mentioned on Twitter this afternoon, the New York Times put up a profile of Guy Fieri that was essentially an IKEA catalog - if IKEA sold reasons to punch Guy Fieri instead of flat-pack furniture.

Here, in digest form, are all those punchable things.

In medieval times, chefs developed sauces in order to mask the flavors of meats whose quality had deteriorated over time.

On a completely unrelated note, here's an embedded commercial.

One of the biggest consequences of initially learning to cook by watching cooking shows is that I am inordinately obsessed with miss en place. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Pollanation (n); Pollanate (v): The process by which products Michael Pollan would consider "edible food-like substances" are deliberately marketed as what Michael Pollan would call "food", so as to avoid increasingly negative reaction to fast and processed foods as a result of health concerns, the slow food movement, the organic movement, the locavore movement, and Michael Pollan's own work. 

I did make a new year's resolution this year. Sort of. I don't really do the resolution thing, but I did make a resolutionesque decision, and I did it around the end of the year, so it pretty much qualifies.

And this resolution is a simple one. I will no longer purchase or consume ANY buffalo-chicken-wing-flavored product that is not in fact a buffalo wing. The years of disappointment and irritation end now.

I probably shouldn't be so hard on myself. They came out OK. I am assured by the other people that ate them that they were fine, and tasted like falafel. And except for the first couple of burned ones, they all got ate.

But it wasn't what I wanted, dammit. And so, falafail. Or failafel. It didn't quite measure up to the level of a failafail, at least.

So last weekend, I went to Pei Wei Asian Diner with my parents. If you don't know Pei Wei, it's a counter-service Asian restaurant run by the PF Chang people, and while I would never, ever set foot in a PF Chang, I'm fine with Pei Wei. I should do a post on it at some point, in fact.

Anyway, we're standing there, perusing the sideways flat screens displaying the menus, chock full of noodle dishes and pan-Asian stir-fries, when a manager-looking dude comes up to us and asks how many of us there are, and if we've been there before.

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.

Our last CSA box was handed to us on October 2, and now that most of the produce is gone, I thought it'd be a good time to reflect on how things went.

USAGE: B.