Hearty German Feast: Sausage and Mashed Potatoes with Glazed Onions

This week we tantalized our palates with a simple but highly satisfying, hearty meal. As a nod to our growing number of readers from Germany, we enjoyed a large steamy sausage and mashed potatoes with glazed onions. The most time consuming part was boiling the potatoes to creamy perfection. We left them cooking on high heat for approximately 45 minutes and made two potatoes per person. Once cooked, we peeled and mashed them, adding pepper and salt to taste. We bought the potatoes, sausage, and onion at TJs. The sausages that we cooked this week were the jalapeno chicken and the garlic chicken sausages. Both are repeat purchases, highly flavorful.

We cooked the sausages in a pan for a few minutes and then added sliced onions til caramelized to perfection. 
 
Note for our vegetarian fans: one of us is proud to announce her third week red meat free. 


Sorry, no beer for today: only Tazo Chai and TJ's Organic Green Tea. It is that time of the year--with finals approaching, we needed an extra kick of caffeine.

Food for Thought:
Given that this week we've been mostly consumed reading our classmates' drafts, we needed an escape from the banal to the fantastic in the form of Gunther. For those unfamiliar, Mr. Gunther is best known (to us at least) for his wonderful lyrical piece, "Ding Ding Dong," a masterpiece from his album "Pleasureman." Keep Gunther in mind next time you get the urge to reach out and touch someone's tralalala.

What's coming up? Feasts of the Russian and Latin American persuasion and much more! 

Curry Chicken with Rice and Avocado

 After a short respite from the blogging world due to a conference call in the northeast, we are back with a cooking vengeance. Since our travels prohibited a trip to Trader Joes this week, we made due with the contents of our freezer where we discovered with delight a hunk of curried chicken waiting to be devoured. Bought during a previous shopping frenzy at Trader Joes for a little over $6, it cooked quickly after thawing. We accompanied the chicken with brown rice, also previously purchased in a TJs in the northeast. The rice took just as long to engorge itself in its pan as the chicken took to come...to fruition, about half an hour (wink), don't be jealous. We further added to the flavor of the meal with some avocado slices, bought on sale at TJs. The creamy texture of the avocados contributed to how smoothly the food went down.
 
Overall, the chicken was not as delicious as the previous blogged about mojito salmon but it gets points for being easy to make and for its intense flavor. We would definitely repurchase it and recommend it for a quick and healthy meal after class. The entire meal took no more than 30 minutes to complete. Thaw the chicken in advance for faster preparation, but we don't mind taking our time, nice and slow.

What's on Tap?
This week's beer selection was a big disappointment. Again found in the interstices of our fridge: Oktoberfest by Josephs Brau Brewing Co. was very bland. Good for light beer drinkers, perhaps, but overall not very satisfying. ** stars (not disgusting but certainly not worth repurchasing)


Food for thought:
On one of our numerous drives, we discovered a song on the radio, Mr. Saxo Beat, by Alexandra Stan. The lyrics perfectly resonate with our current academic lifestyle that requires taking dance breaks to restore energy. As Gramsci says, studying is a job and a very tiring one.

You make me this,
Bring me up,
Bring me down,
Playing sweet,
Make me move like a freak,
Mr. Saxo Beat.

What can we make of this? We are not quite sure besides its literal connotation but we are subjecting it to intent analysis as we type, rigorous analysis, like children studying a dead thing, again from the wisdom of Nino, aka Gramsci.

Nutella on Pumpkin Break

First, an apology for our prolonged absence-- we have been called away from our computers into the dark recesses of the archives at our institution. However, we are back! To make it up to our faithful readers, we are doing an early week post on a delicious new discovery: Trader Joe's Pumpkin Bread mix. The aroma of baking this delicacy in the apartment brought us to feverish pitches (ay papi!) of ecstasy. And, the actual taste left us recuperating for hours in our swivel chairs.

Under $3, the mix simply requires two eggs, 1 cup of water, and 1/2 cup of oil. We added in chocolate chips for good measure but made up for it by reducing the quantity of oil to 1/4 cup without any negative results (we also tried a batch using applesauce instead of oil with favorable results; replace using a 1:1 ratio). The only difficulty we encountered was the hour that we spent waiting for it to bake while the wonderful aromas tortured our patience, in the like of the suffering of poor Demiens at the hands of the French (mon dieu!).

Salmon with asparagus side

Due to an unfortunate technical problem we our blog post for the week was lost without recovery :(.

Here is a pic of our meal! TJ salmon with mojito topping (amazing!) and simple asparagus plate.

What's on Tap: 
Bad Penny Brown Ale
4/5 stars
Very smooth brown ale, refreshing and versatile.  Plus, it's local (for us!)

Fettuccine Alfredo with Chicken

What started out as a very tough week attempting to fight the hegemonic discourses that be, climaxed in a dialectal fashion to our end goal: our best meal yet. As usual, we cooked in a very egalitarian fashion, making sure to not alienate ourselves from the product of our labor. Our set up included marinating the raw chicken breast with lemon, salt, pepper, and basil leaves. We then left the ingredients interpenetrate for about 5 minutes.  We put the chicken on a pan with minced garlic and a splash of olive oil. We covered the chicken and let it cook for a few minutes, flipping it over a few times to make sure that both sides obtained a perfect golden hue.

The fettuccine was the easy part--we wouldn't insult your skills in the kitchen by teaching you how to cook pasta. Be sure to heat up the alfredo sauce on a very low heat to prevent a volcanic eruption in your kitchen.  Mix everything together and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Cost: under $10 for 4 meals
Time preparation: 5 minutes prep and 25 minutes cooking time

Ingredients:
Fettuccine pasta (.5 lb)
Alfredo Sauce
Chicken Breast
Garlic-about 4 large cloves
Salt-a pinch
Pepper-a dash
Lemon-half a lemon
Basil leaves - a dash, crushed


Food for thought:
"The male industrialist continues to work even if he is a millionaire but his wife and daughters are turning more and more, into 'luxury mammals.'" (The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, pg. 293).
Clearly, Mr. Gramsci, unlike Joan Scott, you fail to see how gender serves as a category of analysis to disentangle a unitary conception of class. You are helping to solidify women's roles as luxury mammals by failing to give women a more central role in the proletarian-led revolution that you call for and also failing to develop an analysis for how women too can break free from the chains of hegemony. What relational norms exist that lead some women to become so-called luxury mammals and what should she do to break free from mammalian bondage? And, what can be done to stop the young mammalian aspire-es from devolving into the full expression of their prognosticated condition.

What's on tap this week:
Unfortunately, due to an illness the only thing we are drinking is tea. :(

Wednesday sneak peak

After our trip to TJ today we decided to make fetuccino alfredo with chicken at our next Wednesday feast :).

Note: pasta will be from Whole Foods due to the dirth of pasta choices at TJ this week.

For our Saturday meal, we settled for a brie and baguette lunch. We bought the Traditional French Brie Cheese, double creme from TJ, which sells for $7.99 per pound. Overall, we rated the cheese 2.5/5, due to its bland taste that did not correspond to the potent pungency that it gives off. We did, however, appreciate its creaminess and spread-ability. It tastes better baked on the TJ classic baguettes. Bake in 400 degree oven temperature until the cheese is melted to your preference, approximately 4-5 minutes.

 

Homemade Pizza, under 20 minutes

After a laborious three hours of class pontificating about The Making of the English Class (insert sarcastic smile for all those intimately familiar with the beast at hand), we came home to what has become our weekly tradition of cooking together on Wednesday evenings. While neither of us enjoy cooking, both struggle with it, and have little time to spend exploring new recipes, we are also "fourth" wave feminists (in the making) who believe it is important to be self-sufficient both outside and inside the home. During our weekly trip to TJ (Trader Joes, not to be confused with the famous borderland that is ever present in our collective psyche) we picked up an orgy of ingredients for the making of a perfect pizza (mama mia!).  Twenty minutes later this emerged from the interstices of our oven.  Our appetites climaxed as we bit into the welcoming dough, the basis of this week's  meal.

The meal took under 20 minutes to make and cost under $10 and easily fed the ravenous appetites of growing scholars.

Ingredients (all TJ):
Pizza dough
Marinera sauce
One turkey-based sausage
Onion
Garlic
Green Bell Peppers
Mozzarella Cheese
And of course... lots of love :)

Directions: Let dough thaw, stretch out on pizza pan, spread marinera sauce (be frugal as it will get runny), chop up ingredients and distribute them evenly on the dough. Cook for about 12 minutes or until cheese melts.



What's on tap this week:
Sierra Nevada Torpedo
*Rating: Much too hoppy for our liking. 2/5

Food for thought.
-Excerpt from this week's reading of "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd," Past and Present 50 (1971) by E.P. Thompson:
"These women appear to have belonged to some pre-history of their sex before its Fall, and to have been unaware that they should have waited for some two hundred years for their Liberation."
This quote highlights E.P. Thompson's failure to engage gender when discussing womens' participation in food riots; alas even EP has his shortcomings.