When I'm not playing with wool, I'm playing with my food

One of my favorite things to do with my days off is cook.

Right after missing the people I worked with, the thing I miss most about the 1900 farm was having the chance to cook a great big meal every day and have it enjoyed and critiqued. Working with simple ingredients, basic tools like a wood burning stove, and poorly written instructions from hundred year old cook books taught me more about cooking than anything else I've done. Even more than my food guru Alton Brown. It was stressful at times, but incredibly rewarding.

I still love to cook, but it's hard to motivate yourself to cook something wonderful after a day of work. On my days off, then, I can put out a serious spread. Tonight we had a fall dinner. Brett seared us up a lovely appetizer of little bay scallops. We had a pork loin, seared in a little butter along with a couple Honeycrisp apples and a shallot, flavored with sage, thyme and bay, then braised in chicken stock. I turned the baked apples into a savory applesauce, and reduced the braising liquid into a gravy. I trimmed up a stalk of brussel sprouts from the farmer's market and made a sauce for them from chicken stock and cream. And I finally got to used a box of spaetzle Aunt Karen gave me for Christmas either last year or the year before. Now we're eating chocolate pudding. Yumm!

Of course, cooking big meals means lots of left overs. I'm seeing pork loin sandwiches and spaetzle n' cheese in our future.

But it'll have to be for lunch tomorrow, cause tomorrow night (if we're not watching game 7 Yankees vs Angels in NY. Brett got tickets through the Hall) we're going to have creamy polenta and bolognese sauce. I've never made polenta before, so we'll see how that goes. We're also probably going to carve our pumpkins, so there will be pumpkin seeds to roast. And maybe some creme brulee for after dinner?

I love days off!