A Look Back at Today's Meals

I'm feeling paradoxically better and worse today.  My energy level has improved and nothing hurts today, but my nose will not stop running.  (I am so blog-crazed that I actually just now contemplated including a photo of my tissue-filled trashcan.  You can breathe a sigh of relief that I decided you would probably be happier with a shot of Freddy and Willy.)

Better than a hot water bottle!

Anyhow, I'm still eating like a sick person today.  Had my breakfast fruit/nuts sans yogurt again and made a kind of tea that doesn't require milk.  (By the way, the tenses are all over the place in this posting because I wrote part of it during the day it describes (yesterday, in fact) and part of it the following day (today).)

At lunch, I generously gave Peter the last few pieces of leftover kim-bob, even though he'd eaten up all the eggs but one the previous day.  I got creative with the single remaining egg, stirring it into my leftover spicy Korean soup as it heated.  The egg actually improved the soup as well as eking out the tiny amount left into a substantial portion — I'll have to keep this trick in mind the next time I am faced with insufficient egg or soup in the future.  (Ha! What used to be "running out of food" is now "an interesting culinary challenge to blog about.")

For second lunch — I told you yesterday that I eat a LOT when I'm sick — I had an old comfy favorite of mine which has been reviled by many who have seen me preparing it.  (Without tasting it, I might add.)  This favorite is bread with peanut butter and butter.  With the butter on TOP of the PB.  Otherwise, the delicate flavor of the (preferably salted) butter gets drowned out by the PB.  This technique also works great on saltines, but be aware if you decide to try it that your friends will turn their noses up at you.  Until they try it themselves.  (In the crazy hedonistic days of my youth, I would often add a top layer of spun honey to the mix.  If you're sufficiently young, crazy, and/or hedonistic, feel free to try this yourself.  If you pack it in a sack lunch to eat later, the honey will have formed a delicately crunchy texture which might make you swoon.  That's one of my only fond memories of 7th grade, by the way.)

And now, the moment we've all been anticipating. . .the serving of the eggplant/pasta bake!

Ta da!  Isn't that pretty?  Peter was kind enough to leave a generously appreciative comment on my blog after dinner, but I am not considering this attempt as among my most successful creations.  I will share with you several changes I would make when repeating this dish, but I think my lack of enthusiasm about the eggplant bake comes primarily from non-culinary circumstances.

First off, still feeling under the weather, I arrived at the table rather too exhausted from my cooking/photographing/blowing my nose 2 zillion times to even want to eat.  I would have been just as happy with a crust of bread and a nap.

Then, like me, the dish arrived at the table in less-than-optimal condition.  

Both because I underestimated the cooking time in my convection oven — I started with 35 min @ 350 degrees — and because the photo session that intervened between plating and serving went on a little too long, our portions were decidedly luke in their warmth and not gooey at all.   I was too tired to return to the kitchen and would have just choked down the partially baked meal, but Peter (the darling) grabbed up our plates and dumped everything back in the convection oven for an additional 10 minutes.  (For those keeping track, that would make 45 minutes in all.)

In the meantime, I just slumped at my seat, staring at my fork and sipping idly at my glass of 2008 Torre del Falasco Valpolicella:

I think this wine was pretty good, but I will abstain — not from wine, heavens forfend! — from writing a full-blown wine review, since in my condition my taste buds were not at their discerning peak and because I was drinking more for medicinal than oenological reasons.  Anyway, back to the now-reheated dish. . . .

If you are a cook, you are probably familiar with the disappointing phenomena that makes you — after spending hours thinking about, planning for, assembling the ingredients for, then preparing a particular dish — not want to even look at the damn food when it's finally ready to serve.  Well, add blogging about the dish and photographing the dish to the mix and you can imagine how much interest in my eggplant bake had survived all that preparatory hoopla.

So, keep in mind when reading the following tasting notes that your reviewer was suffering from illness, initially insufficient temperatures (of the food — my fever was fine), and apathy during the tasting.

All of you who feared that I added my herbs too early in the cooking of the sauce have been vindicated: there was nary an herbal note to be picked up in the final dish.  (Well, there was a subtle undertone of oregano, but not the heady punch I'd hoped for.)  Sometimes flavors emerge as a dish sits in the fridge — one of the reasons I adore leftovers — so I will be interested to see how the dish tastes upon reheating.  There was also in my opinion insufficient goo to the dish, even with its extra 10 minutes in the oven, so I'd add more mozzarella next time and probably ricotta or cottage cheese as well.  Finally, I'm not sure whether the rather bland eggplant was capable of carrying this dish alone.  It probably would have been more interesting with red peppers and mushrooms.  (Not to mention ground beef.)

Oh, by the way, the burnt bits of Asiago cheese on the top made me briefly forget I was sick — delicious!

Thoughts to ponder: Do you generally enjoy your own cooking as much as the other people eating it do?  What factors interfere with your full enjoyment?

A toast to all of you who have accompanied me and my pasta bake through our tortuous journey!

Peter raises a glass to your health