"Food" Is Just "Doof" Spelled Backwards

The release of this summer's Streep-apalooza "Julie & Julia" has caused many of my friends to examine, with renewed interest and hopeful appetites, my maniacal cooking habits. Some of them have compared me to Julie Powell, although I personally see no similarities beyond the two of us possessing both a nosy cat and ovaries. Additionally, I like to believe that I'm at least marginally sane and/or emotionally stable; at the very least, I do not talk to an imaginary friend while I pound out pie crust. I am very clearly screaming at the rogue pie crust as I hurl creative obscenities into the kitchen.

My kinder, gentler friends have made the more flattering comparison of me to Julia Child, and while all of them are on a special list to receive extra-large, flashy-like-Vegas Christmas presents, I have to disagree with this one as well. I am not now, and could never hope to be, the prolific pioneer that Julia was in shaping American cuisine as we know and love it today, and I can only cook because I have outstanding chefs like Julia to Xerox.

Also, I read her memoir, My Life In France, and would you believe that there is not a single fart joke in that entire book?

I just really love to cook, and coincidentally enough, Lawyer Boy and I love to eat, so most of my experiments don't last too long around these parts--except when I get carried away by the tides of kitchen creativity. Case in point: This weekend I became a bit, shall we say, overzealous about perfecting my mixing, chilling, and rolling techniques for pie crust...so I made four. (No, Mom, I did not eat them, and yes, I know what my cholesterol is.) Two of them became peach turnovers and two of them went into the freezer for future delight. For the future, when my cholesterol comes down out of the quadruple digits, circa the year 2034.

As the above-referenced crust capade might lead you to believe, my culinary explosions are not always practical, but I try to plan our weeknight dinners to include more balanced meals than not. Sometimes it works and I can turn out fare that makes 30 Minute Meals cry into its cacciatore in the corner; sometimes, like tonight, I discover that I've got canned cranberry sauce, taco shells, and Triscuits to spin up into a meal. For some reason, I just don't think a sprig of parsley and some creative plating are going to disguise that kind of horror.

Staring into my cabinets and wondering who bought chili beans and instant mashed potatoes (me and me, respectively), I thought of an experiment that the Bon Appetit Foodist had written about a few months ago: To cook dinner for yourself and, if applicable, your long-suffering spouse, for a week, using only the current contents of your kitchen. I find the thought of giving myself a week to dispose of the ridiculously random ingredients that have been staring me down for months vastly appealing, in a cleansing sort of way, and I find the idea of living at the mercy of my more unfortunate grocery acquisitions appealing, in a punitive sort of way. Seriously, I need to be punished for buying instant mashed potatoes.

And thus tonight, for better or for worse, for fantastic or foul, LB and I decided that this will be the week of The Food Doof Challenge, wherein we will bumble our way through disposing of the contents of our kitchen in the next seven days, trying to find the most appetizing ways to prepare what we've got. The only rules of The Food Doof Challenge are:

1) We can only use what we already have, period;
2) We have to, throughout the course of the week, use as much of the food that we have as possible (so no living on brown rice); and
3) We have to actually cook dinner each night (so no living on Cheerios).

As we begin our quest for gastronomic glory, the more useful elements in our corner include one pound of chicken breast, plain nonfat yogurt, artichoke hearts, capers, and two boxes of pasta. The more challenging items, however, include cranberry sauce, lard-free refried beans, three kinds of vinegar, and four jars of jam. And who bought seven bottles of barbecue sauce? I'm not naming names...but his rhymes with Lawyer Boy.

Day 1: The Food Doof Challenge Kickoff Event

Tonight we didn't do too badly. I roasted a pound of broccoli, which is both delicious and an appropriate detox mechanism after a weekend of pastry and pizza, and LB made a burrito with our lone tortilla (of questionable provenance and age), a can of black beans, cheddar cheese, and the salsa I made last week. Calling the tortilla cardboard would be unfair to cardboard, but LB's stomach is apparently quite the Viking. And seeing as I just plowed through a pound of broccoli, I'd better be hoping for some Viking digestive powers of my own. Normally I'd go for a more balanced meal than just a fiber tsunami, but I wasn't particularly hungry tonight.

I'll report back each night for seven nights to let you know what we ate, how we cooked it, and who was the first to gag. As a caveat, we are going to a wedding Saturday night, so we'll have a night off from chick peas slow-simmered in peach-caper jam (and if not, I'm having a chat with the bride), but we'll make up for that by driving this train through this time next week.

Bon appetit! If you dare.