Steak and Veggie Chili

Let's take a moment to talk about mise en place. Mise en place is a fancy-chef way of saying: Prep everything before you begin, and put in all in little bowls. There's a lot of positive things to be said about this method, my personal favorite being that you won't be stressing out as you create a dish or meal, frantically chopping things or discovering you're out of something you thought you had once you've begun. Everything is ready to go, right there in plain sight.

However, I don't always practice this very rigourously, and I'm here to tell you that's okay. Pete Wells of the New York Time's "Cooking with Dexter" column wrote a funny piece about the impracticality of rigid mise en place. And here's an interview with Mark Bittman that touches on the same subject. Both men mention television as a culprit. Many cooking shows show us the pretty picture (things in tiny bowls!) without much discussion about how necessary those tiny bowls are. 

Weekend Eats

 This weekend I was DETERMINED to make Smitten Kitchen's mushroom lasagna. I'd even bought the pound-and-half of mushrooms and they were in my fridge, probably creating more mushrooms. Can mushrooms do that? 

Two things that made me think of:

     1. Benoit Mandelbrot has died. He is responsible for, of course, the Mandelbrot set, and for fractals. Fractals are incredible, and the videos in that link will give you a nice mind-break. Also, there's this fractal-broccoli that I never buy when I see it. What's wrong with me? Mathematical gorgeousness + cruciferous vegetables = I should be all over that.

     2. The little girl I babysit thinks mushrooms are icky, so when we find some in her yard she stomps on them. One day she was really going to town on all the offending fungi (band name!) with a stick. I looked over and noticed a greenish-yellow dust floating up from her target. I told her to stop (just in case she inhaled the spores of whatever-the-crap-that was) but wasn't too concerned. Upon hearing this anecdote, my mother told us about a time in her youth at Girl Scout camp, when some others scouts had eaten some mushrooms and become so ill they had to be taken to the hospital. This sounds awful when I write it out, but it struck me as really funny too. This is probably related to all the other "at Girl Scout camp" stories my mom has. Like losing a chicken underground.