zen.org Communal Weblog

It’s a little embarassing, but I have something to admit.

I have a major aversion to squashes. All kinds. No, not the drinks…the vegetable. A serious aversion, some might even call it a prejudice.

But, really, all the pumpkin stuff that’s happening now? Not such a big deal for me. Pumpkin pie? Ugh. Pumpkin soup? Uh-uh. Roasted butternut squash? No way. I will never choose one of those off a menu, and I sure don’t choose to make ‘em.

I did see the Good Eats episode about squashes. And I even got a little excited about making them. But I just can’t bring myself to buy one and prep it and do…anything with it. Last year, we got a couple extra pumpkins and I roasted them and then puree’d them. The only thing we make is pumpkin pie pancakes, which I like cause of the spices in it. But there’s still tons of puree in the freezer, and I have no urge to make something with it.

Anyone have any recipes that might sway me?

Sometimes I wonder while I work on this cookbook..how can I be a good cook if I don’t like certain things? Like blue cheese. Hate it. Bitter herbs and veggies. Hate ‘em. Most nuts…really not a nut person. But how can I be objective in creating food if I don’t like some food? And my own food allergies cause me to not be able to use some foods in the recipes. It’s an odd thing. I can create something, but I can’t taste it. Durn.

Just a brain dump .

I realized it’s been a long time since our last podcast. Wonder if we can get our act together tomorrow to do one? Raise your hand if you want more AcciCook!

For obvious reasons, breakfasts for us are hard to do. With no eggs, dairy, tomatoes or strawberries, lots of things are cut out right away. It’s difficult, cause making our weekly recipe list, we normally just blow off the breakfasts (cereal, porridge, occasional bagels with smoked salmon, toast and jam). But we like breakfast food. We do make french toast, pumpkin pie pancakes, and right now we’re having raspberry muffins.

What I would do to just whip up a proper fry tho….

…of Graham Norton, may I present: You are what you eat – ebaumsworld.com. My job takes me to the most interesting places!

Quick test post. Somehow I’d imagine all my posts will be logged under ‘accidental’, just the nature of the beast.

I saw the little pictogram pop up in the browser bar and scuttled off to my Kanji dictionary. It took a while to find as I thought it was a 12 stroke character, but it’s a 13-er – there seems to be a horizontal stroke missing from the square box on the right (it should be divided up into quarters according to the dict.).

Anyway, naturally enough, it’s the character representing ‘Zen’, which consists of the root element ‘god’ (the bit on the left), and a phonetic element ‘Sen/tan/dan’ (the bit on the right) which means ‘single’ when it appears on its own, gets pronounced ‘tan’ and is supposed to be a picture of ‘a single weapon with a forked end’.

Interesting, but will not help you get a cab when you step out of the arrivals hall in Tokyo…

Elana and I put together a new edition of our podcast The Accidental Cook. Over about 23 minutes we talk about lots of things including breakfasts and how to make the best cinnamon rolls ever, Jamie Oliver’s stew, and the start of the holidays.

The level of exhaustion I felt (our son was up at 5:30am) comes through really well in my babble. Elana makes sure to give shout-outs to some friends and has a unique way to innocently say “hi” to Dawn’s boyfriend Adam Curry.

Production notes are available in two formats: OPML and HTML.

Here’s our first show. We cook our favorite artichoke and tuna pasta, plus our recipe for Japanese salmon salad. All comments welcome (unless you’re a spammer).

The Accidental Cook 16 November

And here are the notes from it, including recipes.

After crazy effort, we got everything set up in WordPress so iPodder/iPodder-X/whatever get the RSS enclosure properly. Well, at least for us…