Cooking Frenzy!

Tonight I've had another stupendous attack of The Cooking Frenzy. Total time: 3 hours of straight cooking and cleaning up!

It all started this morning when a co-worker friend Katie and I enjoyed a fabulous adventure at the Dekalb County Farmer's Market. Fortunately, I found incredible amounts of deliciousness, but unfortunately, I walked out $75 poorer. Worth it? Well, I think so.

So tonight the following was made, cooked, consumed:

• Pan Rustica with knock-off manchego (actually tastes more like queso blanco than manchego, haha)
• Lasagna a Different Way: a sautee mixture of spinach-creamed-corn cooked earlier in the week, mushrooms, onions, garlic, spinach, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper combined with a cheesy mixture of ricotta, sour cream, plain yogurt, oregano, salt, pepper, paprika, 2 eggs, cumin (will leave cumin out next time), lemon juice, and "sprinkled" with shredded poached chicken, all rolled up in really wide, long green lasagna noodles, each big log cut into three smaller logs, and then set up-right in a pan that has been pammed and olive oiled, and cooked at 425 degrees F for 15 minutes covered and 7 - 10 minutes uncovered. They look like delicious lasagna cinnamon rolls! Yummy ...
• Mushroom and Wine Sauce: sliced mushrooms leftover from the lasagna sauteed with diced onions, and garlic, add red wine and lemon juice, include the leftover chicken from the lasagna. Can't wait to have it on pasta! Actually, may even be tasty on its own!
• Chicken Stock ... Kinda: Salted water that the chicken was poached in, add sliced onions, two cloves smashed garlic, mushroom stems, simmer until the onions are translucent and the garlic cloves are falling apart.
• Focaccia with Olive Oil and Salt: Focaccia, grilled on the George Foreman, drizzled with olive oil, and sprinkled with coarse sea salt.

Can't wait to actually taste the completed lasagna and chicken stock! Hopefully I'll get some photos up at some point! While cooking I also listened to some fabulous Splendid Table, wooed into a food stupor by Lynne Rosetta Casper. She's a goddess. Truly.

Yummy!

So this is what happens when you read ...

Currently Reading: 1421: The Year China Discovered America

Current Page: 202

Total Pages not includeing multiple appendices, footnotes, indexes, and other scholarly crap: 491 (Reaction: AACK.)

Impressions of book thus far: INCREDIBLE! I absolutely love this book! So interesting, so great! Thank goodness there are multiple illustrations, maps, and chunks of pages of glossy fun color photos/pictures scrattered throughout. I get lost reading this book, and I can't imagine these people actually going out and doing all of this! The only thing that bothers me so far is the author's repeated requests that readers go to his "website" for more information. Dude - your book is almost 500 pages long. Just go ahead and add whatever it is we're supposed to find on your damn website. Put in another couple appendices.

I'm totally shocked that all of these incredible achievments have been essentially wiped off the history books, even in China! All these cool facts about: Asiatic chickens in the Americas centuries before the Europeans limped their way over; rose-pink beads from Central America and gold rings with enormous emeralds found on atolls in the Pacific Ocean; the most beautiful, delicate, and incredible porcelein that magically depicted nature and other scenes when water was poured in from the Aztecs that surpassed by leaps and bounds the porcelein skills of the Chinese and was centuries ahead of the Europeans (who couldn't even accomplish the simplest porcelein production until the 18th century); mylodon's from Patagonia (souther Argentina) hanging out in Australia; the backwardness, barbarous, primitive, dirty, ignorant, and uncivilized Europeans; the incredible precautions the Chinese took to ensure their seamen were well fed with nutritious food and were relatively well cared for (ex. grew bean sprouts on food ships to prevent vitamin deficiencies, had trained otters in "aquariums" in the holds that would go out and round up fish into the nets, dogs kepts on ships both to keep down the vermin as well as to consume); and of course the fact that the vast majority of the land masses, waterways, and place names of the world are from European tongues, rarely the original people's tongues, and absolutely none of the Chinese tongues. Incredible. Europe is so damn selfish. And the Chinese madarins were so desperate to erase any and all memories of the extravagance of Emperor Zhu Di, the Song of Heaven that they destroyed everything they could get their hands on. What else hsa been destroyed over time that could have completely changed the course of knowledge, history, and the world? What are we destroying now that may prove crucial in the studies of some academian or simply curious student hundreds of years down the line? *Sigh*

Anyway, here are just some of the fun creatures and things that I've learned from the book so far:

Mylodon: 151: incredible ground sloth from Patagonia (southern Argentina) that stood at least 3 meters (approdimcately 8 - 9 feet) on its hind legs, lived in caves, absolutely incredible looking, I would certainly like to meet one if they weren't extinct





Warrah: 169: fabulous little creature that appeared to be a cross between a fox and a feral dog (probably left behind by one of the Chinese vessels), noted by Charles Darwin, but extinct by the 1860s
- More Info: http://www.messybeast.com/extinct/warrah.htm



Kerguelen Cabbage: 185: saved the Chinese seamen when their beansprouts rations were almost nil at the southern end of South America (found on the Kerguelen Island in the Shetland Islands in the Atlantic)




As a parting note, I'm not surprised that the Chinese highly prize (and love) this fabulous edible: the trepang (a.k.a. the sea cucumber). Enjoy these photos of the delictible little creature. Don't they make you want to rush out, buy one, and take a big bite?! Yum ... ?

Anyway, more to come later as I gleefully wander around this fabulous book!