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I’m thinking food. I’m thinking Christmas food, especially, ever since I called home two weeks ago and – after having a substandard version in a diner – requested lemon meringue pie for Christmas. It got a really reaction – lemon meringue does make appearances, but not every year, and I’ve never asked for it.

Then, last night when on the phone with Mom, I got asked for my meat vote and promptly said ham. Ham will almost certainly win.

It’ll be accompanied by either green bean casserole, scalloped corn, or asparagus casserole, cranberry salad and riced-and-mashed potatoes.  There will be my requested lemon pie, and pumpkin, and possible a blueberry torte or a mince meat. There will be scads of cookies and candy, and on Christmas morning we’ll have cranberry orange muffins out of a University of Illinois Extension “cookbook” printed on pink paper thirty years ago.

It’s all very Illinois, and home, but there is one piece that I’ve always been sort of curious about: the Christmas Eve toutierie.

Toutierie is, as any food blog will tell you, a French-Canadian meat pie made from ground meat, potatoes and onion served traditionally on either Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve. They’ll also tell you that it’s not just Canadian, but that it’s mainly served in the northeastern parts of the country that border French Canada.

Christmas is in Illinois, which isn’t quite smack-dab in the middle of the country, but it’s close. Yet we’ve made this every year for as long as I can remember, and I’m not sure why. It’s traditional, and tradition doesn’t necessary make sense.

Hanna Rosin’s got an interesting article in Slate’s XX about the rise of the kitchen bitch, and frankly, after reading it I’m not sure that I’d want to marry a man who likes cooking as much as I do. And it’s entirely because of what Rosin describes: I have a feeling I’d end up with a guy picking (gently or no) at my techniques, ingredients, and recipes, and it would drive me up a fucking wall.

It seems like when guys march into the kitchen, a lot of them make it a competitive arena. The ingredients have to be fresher, the techniques have to be fancier, and the tools have to be the most badass tools available for the job (I blame Alton Brown for the last. Have you seen his immersion blender?) And for myself, I tend to cook the way my mom does. I don’t have problems with canned vegetables. I do tend to bake from scratch, because I like to bake, but my tuna noodle casserole is most certainly not made with sushi grade ahi and cremini mushrooms. It’s made with Chicken of the Sea and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom. I cannot evenly chop an onion to save my life. I use pre-chopped garlic from a jar. I own a Rachael Ray cookbook.

But I still love to cook, and it’d piss the hell out of me if someone was standing over my shoulder critiquing my technique; if I wanted that, I could go to culinary school.

I’m not saying all, or even most guys are like that, and maybe I’m getting all New York Times Styles here and building a trend from a couple of random data points. I don’t really think so, though. Food Network has gotten increasingly testosteronized over the past few years – the only pure cooking show left in primetime is Good Eats, and while I dearly love me some Alton, we’ve already mentioned his propensity for superpowered kitchen equipment. Other than that, it’s approximately 10 million competition shows and a few reality shows. The faces of baking is Ace of Cakes‘ Duff, mentioned by Rosin, and the dude from Cake Boss. I don’t watch Cake Boss, but he’s a burly Italian guy from Hoboken.

The fact is that increasingly, there are less and less female voices in the culinary press and pop culture, and as a woman who likes to cook, I worry about that. Do I want to be tethered to the stove? Not really. Do I want cooking to be yet another arena where I get mansplained to? No. I’ve got plenty of those as is.

Before I get too deeply into Rachael Ray and my issues with, plus ridiculously easy tomato soup, I feel like I should point out one thing: I have a baking blog now. It’s called Live Every Week Like It’s Cake Week. That is all, carry on.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m really not all that fond of Rachael Ray – I can’t watch her on tv, she just grates, endlessly – but to give her her due, I did rely heavily upon her approximately five years ago, when I was fresh out of graduate school, 1500 miles away from my mother’s cooking, broke as hell (heh, some things don’t change), and in need of dinner seven days a week.

I made a lot of Rachael Ray recipes those first two to three years, and while she’s slowly been phased out in favor of Jamie Oliver, Tyler Florence, Dave Lieberman, and Ina Garten, plus lots of food blogs and the ever popular Recipes Sent By My Mother…there are still one or two 30 Minute Meals I make.

And yes, they’re all soups. You know me so well.

There are two great things about this soup. First, it’s adaptable. Out of shallots? Yes, an onion works fine. No vegetable broth? I’ve made it with chicken and just plain water with no adverse effects. Craving bacon? Fry up a few slices and saute the onions/shallots and garlic in the fat. Can’t stand spinach? No one says you have to put it in.

The second great thing about this soup is that it takes fifteen minutes to make, and the most complicated part is chopping the shallots. Seriously, that’s it. It’s a great option when you’re exhausted and broke (otherwise known as: me.)

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Last night, when I was role-playing with Annie, Adrian Veidt served up a plate of lemon-lavender shortbread to the the character I was playing (of course Adrian bakes! What are you saying!), and it sounded so good that I immediately wanted some.  Coincidentally, shortbread is also the only cookie I had the ingredients for.

It ended up working out quite well, although we had to make some modifications when the dough wouldn’t come together. This might not have been necessary if my butter had truly been at room temperature. Recipe is based off of Jamie Oliver’s from Cook With Jamie, and can be modified with the flavorings you want – I had no lemon or lavender, so I went with orange flavor, and it was pretty good.

This is a thick dough, about the consistency of pie dough, so you won’t be able to pour it into the pan. Technically you’re supposed to roll it out to 1″ thick, but I work in a kitchen with no counter space, so I just flattened it in the pan.

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I would be happy to celebrate but, well, I’m cleaning the kitchen today, and A&P isn’t bringing me my groceries until tomorrow. So celebration will have to wait until later this week, when I have bittersweet chocolate and espresso powder and a nice bottle of Jack Daniels for chocolate bourbon bundt cake.

But rest assured, this day will be appropriately celebrated. Just a little late.

I have been thinking about making chicken pot pie for years now.

It began when my brother bought me the Marshall Field’s Cookbook shortly after (may it rest in peace) its untimely demise at the hands of Macy’s, something that Chicago will collectively never forgive Macy’s for. The cover recipe of the book is, of course, the dish that started it all: the Marshall Field’s chicken pot pie that was first served to two well-off Fields customers by an extremely accomadating saleswoman.

I’ve worked in retail, and hell would have frozen over before I gave any customer at Sears my lunch. But I digress.

Pot pie is somehow something I’ve never gotten around to. The Fields version involves fussy chicken preparation and individual ramekins and really, at heart, I’m lazy. Extremely lazy. As it is, pot pie is strictly a weekend meal, and my version isn’t even that difficult.

My version is cobbled together from various versions floating around the internet with some inspiration drawn from Nick Malgieri’s recipe in The Modern Baker. It has a biscuit top, loads of tender dark meat chicken, onion, mushrooms, carrots and peas. It’s time-consuming – probably 6 hours in total – but easy as (wait for it) pie.
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A couple weeks ago, I made the apple spice bundt cake off Martha Stewart’s website, and it was delicious. Spicy, fruity, tender and moist. It also fell apart the moment I took it out of the pan (I probably didn’t let it sit long enough, honestly), so this weekend I decided to modify it to something a bit more foolproof.

Also, I live alone and I don’t need to eat a 12 cup bundt pan’s worth of cake. I like my jeans to continue to fit, thanks.

Muffins were the natural vehicle – they’re portable, work for breakfast or dessert and can be shared more easily than a large cake, especially when you rely on public transit, as I do. However, a 12-cup bundt probably would make at least 24 muffins, far more than I needed, so I also halved the recipe and make one or two other changes – such as omitting the vanilla in order to keep it more muffin-like rather than cupcake-like, and leaving out the salt, which wasn’t really necessary.

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I do actually eat things other than soup and various cake like items, honest. Just…not a whole lot.

Soup’s so easy, and hearty, and it’s getting to be that time of year when easy and hearty are pretty much how I eat. (In summer, it still has to be easy, which explains the many feta and mushroom pizzas and salad sandwiches that I consume from May to September) Anyway, I decided that I was in the mood for black bean soup this week. Given that I 1) get home at 7:30 and 2) am epically lazy, it was going to have to be in the crockpot. So I searched for crockpot specific recipes – there are a lot, but none of them were calling to me.

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My mother’s reaction to what I was making for dinner was the skeptical “…onion soup?” that a lot of my food experiments get. Not sure why, as onion soup (particularly the French variety) is a standby in every Applebees and TGI Friday’s across the country. I think she’d be pleasantly surprised by this one, as it’s reminiscent of potato soup except, you know, without the potatoes.

It’s based mostly on Kayotic’s recipe with a couple of modifications: I only used two onions because one of my Spanish onions was approximately the size of my cat’s head, dill rather than thyme because dill is the best thing ever, and a shot of light cream towards the end, because that’s never a bad thing. Top with crumbled herbed goat cheese and you’ve got a pretty awesome dinner.

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Crate & Barrel is having a sale on Wustof open stock knives at the moment, which normally wouldn’t actually have me spending my lunch hour trooping up to 59th and Madison, but my cheap as shit Henckels Eversharp chef’s knife is a pain in the ass to clean.

I spend way too much time getting food out of the little serrated teeth. Way too much time.

Naturally, I chose the BIG one.

Am gamely resisting the urge to brandish it menacingly at irritating consultants.