something queer going on

I seem to have spent the morning lazily putting together the components of a salade niçoise, which I am now eating. Well, sort of a salade niçoise, as apparently the real thing does not include any cooked vegetables even though most English-language recipes call for potatoes and so on. Mine has potatoes, green beans, roasted red pepper strips, tuna, green olives, and tomatoes on romaine (aka cos) lettuce, with a dressing of olive oil, garlic, mustard, anchovies, and lemon juice. It's awfully nice, and I wish I hadn't let my nervousness of anchovies hold me back for so long from trying it. (At one point I was un-nervous enough with anchovies that I routinely made puttanesca sauce for pasta. Then I bought a tin of a different kind of anchovies that were fishy and disgusting, and I ended up throwing away an inedible batch of sauce. Somehow my brain decided that meant I'd been wrong and all anchovies were, in fact, horrible. But my brain was mistaken!)

The success of this experiment makes me excited about homemade Caesar dressing, which is next up on the salad agenda. And I still have half a tin of anchovies which should probably be used very soon.

I'm still puzzled by this unexpected interest in salad, but I figure I might as well go with it.

Other weekend food plans include making some bread (I'm going to try Laugenbrötchen, a German bread roll that is boiled like a bagel), cooking up a big batch of tomato-and-sausage pasta sauce to freeze, and baking something sweet, though I haven't quite decided what. I'm craving berries, but alas, despite recent warm weather that has reset my food cravings to "spring," it's still only February. Berries are available in the supermarket, of course, but they're expensive and probably not good. Anyway, I'm still trying to use pantry stuff I've accumulated, so maybe it's time to break out the pecans I bought on sale a while back. And on looking up the recipe for pecan-chocolate shortbread bars which I made a while back and adored, I find that I have all the ingredients on hand. That's a plan, then.


I would quite like to see Deadpool this weekend but I'll probably wait another week or two until it's less crowded. I'd also like to read something new but I'm not sure what. (I'm sure of the general specs--sff featuring men who love other men and get to have reasonably happy endings--but I don't know of anything fitting the bill that I haven't already read.) Also also, I'd like to read lots of really good Hannibal fanfic, but my forays into the fic have been limited. A few times in the relatively recent past, canons have been soured for me by terrible fic, and I love Hannibal too much to want that to happen.

I do have S3 of Endeavour which I still haven't seen. Or I could just rewatch Rejseholdet. I haven't rewatched any of it since I started watching Hannibal, and I'm curious about whether the show will change for me from this new perspective.

BTW my ankle is better-ish. It's still sore and stiff and occasionally quite fussy about the angle at which I hold my foot while taking a step, but not actively painful most of the time. This is a big improvement but I'm looking forward to the not hurting at all stage of recovery.

I haven't been doing much in the kitchen, because with all the job stuff going on, I gave myself permission to not cook for a while unless I feel like it.

This past weekend I did end up making some choux buns. The original plan was for eclairs, but I decided I didn't want to buy chocolate (for the topping) because it was so hot, and it turned out that the pastry-bag substitute everyone says works great (snipping the end off of a zip-top plastic bag) does not work great. So I ended up with a certain amount of wasted choux paste, and some buns. They were rather nice when filled with cinnamon horchata ice cream and drizzled with dulce de leche. The ice cream was storebought; I sort of made the dulce de leche, if it counts as "making" something when what you do is empty a tin of sweetened condensed milk into a pan and stick it in the oven, in a water bath, for an hour and a half. Anyway, regardless of its homemade status, it's tasty.

Also last weekend I made a pizza using a batch of dough I'd made a while back and frozen. I topped it with roasted cherry tomatoes, some slivers of salami, and mozzarella.

The weekend before that I baked scones from Paul Hollywood's recipe, which were quite good except that I overbrowned the bottoms of the first batch. I still have some in the freezer, which is the good thing about baking as a single person.

Other than that I've been living on pasta and more junk food than I really wanted. The eventual plan for the work/cooking balance is to cook big batches of things on weekends. But the sort of foods that take well to this method are mostly stewy, and it's been too damn hot here. Not super hot (today it got to 86 F or 30 C), but hot enough that I don't want to make stew. It's the end of September, why can't the weather be autumnal?


In non-food related amusements, I've been watching the Danish police drama Rejseholdet, which aired in Britain some years back as Unit One. I recommend it, with a couple of caveats, if you like police procedurals: it has good writing (especially the dialogue and character stuff, not always the plots so much); interesting characters including a three-dimensional female lead with agency and nuance; excellent acting from everyone, including Mads Mikkelsen, later of Hannibal fame in the Anglophone world; and two highly slashable relationships, one between squad leader Ingrid Dahl and her friend and colleague Gaby, the other between Allan Fischer (Mikkelsen's character) and his friend and colleague Thomas LaCour, played by Lars Brygmann, a fine actor who is also exactly my type.

There are some less good points: it's dated in its attitudes towards queer people and towards certain gender-related issues (for example there's an incident of domestic violence that's not well addressed); less seriously, the characters have too much soap-opera style personal drama for my taste. But overall I like it a lot so far--I'm partway through series 3--and will almost certainly request it for Yuletide.

It's available to stream from Amazon in the US, widely available in Britain I believe, and findable around the internet.