Skip to main content

New Recipe

The Mild Wife and I have a running joke about the sensuous life. It grew out of a conversation with some friends of ours, and it basically turned into a tongue in cheek remark about trying to inject little touches of flair into our life. If you didn't read that initial post, we're talking about things like buying the dino nuggets instead of the regular, boring chicken nuggets. Let's just say that it involves some chuckling whenever it comes up.

Now, it's worth noting that the sensuous life is only remarkable because it's not the norm. If we ate super expensive food every meal and had diamond encrusted items lying around the mansion, that wouldn't be the sensuous life. That'd just be life. It'd be a filthy rich one (and I can't even imagine living like that), but it'd just be what we knew. Basically, we appreciate the sensuous life precisely because it is the spice of life, not the staple of life. In fact, my favorite way to describe our lifestyle is "casual with a touch of pinkies up."

Ultimately, we like a lot of the simple things in life. I love eating burritos, for example. It's not my absolute favorite food (that'd be ceviche), but I would happily eat burritos several days in a row. The Mild Wife was once visiting family in another country, and all she wanted for days on end was home cooking. Picture rice with steamed fish. In fact, she enjoyed that simple food so much that her relatives were playfully upset that she wouldn't let them cook fancy things for her. So yeah, we like to keep it pretty casual.

Still, we find little ways to add a bit of pinkies up. Sometimes, we talk about whether adding a different spice to the food would improve the flavor or if we would use a different ingredient altogether. It makes things a little bit more fun, to be honest. There's just some bit of joy that comes from taking those simple recipes and making them taste better with a little creativity.

It just so happens that we were talking about the humble mac and cheese lately, and we stumbled upon a way to add some pinkies up to it. No, we're not going to add truffles or mix in some ridiculously rare ingredient. Nope, we'll just change the name ... to French. From now on, we may very well start bringing "Pasta a la Fromage" to family gatherings.

Tell me that doesn't sound fancier. Hell, even if you know what that means ("fromage" is the French word for cheese), the fact that we describe the ingredients that way instantly adds class to the dish. I'm also picturing someone's face when they realize that it's *just* mac and cheese. Let's just say that I'm looking forward to the next potluck.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

From Scratch 2

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...

Inside and Outside

As I've mentioned before, the Mild Wife and I invested in a sewing machine during the pandemic. It was the most basic model we could find, but it was good enough for what we needed: to make a few masks. And now, over a year later, I still think that it was a good investment. Interestingly, even with restrictions being lifted a bit, we still find that we need masks. Some stores still require them, and neither of us wants to be in a position where we needed a mask and didn't have one. So, we still have to wear and wash them. And even though we've never run out of clean masks to wear, we did notice that we were close a couple of times. So, I recently broke out the sewing machine to make a few more masks. When we initially invested in supplies, we bought a pack of fabric squares. We figured we weren't going to need super high quality, and having a bunch of squares would give us options in case one of us screwed up (read: me). That also gave us the ability to add a little v...

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...