In Which Monday Menu Mayhem Comes Back With a Vengeance.

Friends, blog-ees, countrymen.

First if all, thank you for your epic amounts of patience with my absentee-ism.  It's been a long-ass two weeks (Two out of the last three Mondays I have dined at the Legal Seafood at Logan Airport.  And those are not the only two times I have been to Logan in the past two weeks).  I had intended to be back in full-force last week, but this was one of those "vacations" that doubles as the exact polar opposite of a vacation, and I'm afraid I had to spend all of my spare time last week sleeping, decompressing and... reading :)

Yes, I have five book reviews in my back pocket.  No, I'm not going to break them out right now.

NOT ON MONDAY MENU MAYHEM!!

So.  As we bust through the first half of 2011 (holyhellhowdidthathappen?) we bust through MMM paradigms.  We are not a Nigella-only establishment any longer.  We still heart Nigella, and we will still cook from Nigella Kitchen like nobody's business.  But enough of this self-limiting nonsense, yes?

This weekend was filled with cooking and cooking and more cooking, which is a little shocking, because I'm on this new diet (I promise not to mention this excessively... I can really think of nothing more boring than that... I'm also not an advertising campaign for anything except books, so I'm not going to name the diet.  I'll just say it's working).  ANYWAY, I'm on this new diet, and I basically can eat... chicken.  So this cooking thing was surprising and heartening, given that I was afeared the MMM would have to go away for a while.

I made kale chips.  Dude, I don't even know what came over me.  I've been hearing a lot about them recently, and then a friend on Facebook made them and posted about it, and basically my thought process was "If someone I know in real-life is making them and it's not only the food of my faux-BFF Gwyneth Paltrow, I must be able to make them too."  In other words, it became less an ambrosia, and more of a mortal food.

It was super easy too!  Tear up some kale.  Toss with olive oil.  Roast for about 10 minutes at 400.  Also, use considerably less salt than I did.  Potato chips these were not, but as far as toasted leafy greens go, they got thumbs up from none other than a seriously skeptical Boy Scout.  After announcing that they were just "aiight," he proceeded to keep stealing pieces out of the bowl while lecturing me on the fact that I was removing them from Scout Camp to my office for the week.  I'll take that as a "like."

There was also the traditional roasting of the tomatoes, which is truly one of the great seasonal ironies.  Must roast fresh tomatoes.  When are tomatoes the best?  In the broiling summer sun!  How do we roast tomatoes?  By turning on the oven for HOURS at a time.  This is also a Gwyneth recipe: more chopping, more tossing with the olive oil (also salt and pepper), and then thrown on a cookie sheet face up for about 3 hours on 275.  Voila.  I really try to save these for things... salads, sauces, soups... but then I just eat them out of the bowl in about 10 minutes.  They're that awesome.

That's not all we made this weekend, but that's about all I'm prepared to sum-up for the time being.  My hands are out of practice with all of this typing...

Happy Monday, everyone.  And thanks for having me back.