All Quiet on the Western Front

The city is quiet today. Of course, this is coming from someone who didn't wait in line all night to be the first person through the doors of Best Buy to save a couple hundred bucks on a television, nor someone who went anywhere near a mall, nor someone who really left the office much at all. The internet is just as quiet.

I ended up making a pie filling from scratch and pouring it into a store-bought frozen crust. After scouring the internet for a good basic recipe, I landed on this one thinking, if anyone knows how to make a pumpkin pie, it's Martha Stewart. And Betty White. A winning combination if I ever heard one. For a vegetable, I was looking for something with green beans, and landed on this recipe (also Martha) which struck me as too funny not to try. Basically, it's the gross green bean casserole with canned mushroom soup and fried onions from a can, BUT this one is made entirely from fresh ingredients.

I was all, "Ha ha ha, that is SO funny. Won't THIS be fun!" And then I told J about it and his face turned white and he got a frowny mouth and said, "Ug, I hate green bean casserole." And I was like, "But this one! This one has fresh green beans, and there's no soup, and I fry up little shallots instead of ripping open a bag of Funyuns!" And he conceded that he would try it, but, y'know, don't get your hopes up. Then, sometime around the point where I'd snapped, washed, cooked, and blanched* 1.5 pounds of green beans while simultaneously cutting and cooking a pound of mushrooms and some bell pepper, I had this thought: hmm, mom doesn't really like green bean casserole either. And Jon's a picky eater. And you never know with Dave. Which leaves....me and Dad. Then the recipe seemed less funny. Because the joke only really works if you are like me and kinda like the gross version of the casserole but can't really think about what's in it while consuming it. With the new recipe, you can think all you want about the ingredients because they are all fresh and nice. However, if you hate the taste of the gross version, the fact that you've substituted fresh milk for canned globules of soup is a moot point.

But I cooked the whole thing because it was TOO LATE TO STOP NOW! I thought it looked perfectly lovely and brought it over to my parents' house, where it was greeted with wary enthusiasm. It went under the broiler for crisping at the same time as the smashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows. J was put in charge of pulling out the dishes before they burned. "Watch those marshmallows!" my mom intoned, "One minute they're brown, the next they're burnt beyond recognition." J kneeled down and squinted at the expanding white pieces. "Seriously, don't blink."

This freaked J out a little and he finally yanked them from the oven when they got delicately toasted, before they could turn on him. We all congratulated him on a perfect watch. Then, about four minutes later, my mom gasped and ran to the oven, where she pulled open the door to reveal my little casserole, smoking to high heaven. It had been forgotten about in all the marshmallow intensity, leaving my fried shallots to be burnt beyond recognition. I gave J some grief while my dad danced gleefully around the kitchen saying, "Ha! I'm just glad it wasn't me watching those! Ha!"

Luckily the burnt pieces flicked right off and the casserole was saved. For me and my dad to eat. Everything was delicious, including the mashed potatoes and gravy, which is my favorite part of the meal to eat leftovers of. We praised my mom's cooking, but I learned you have to be effusive and specific when complimenting the dishes. Apparently, no one said anything in particular about the mashed potatoes and when I went to pack up leftovers she looked at me guiltily and said, "I threw them out. No one said anything about them, so I assumed they were no good!"

But it's okay. I have enough casserole leftover to last me til Christmas.

* Somehow we don't have ice cube trays. I don't know how that happened, but "plunge into ice bath" isn't usually an instruction on a recipe that I trip over. Until I had the beans boiling and realized I had no ice with which to make a bath. So I improvised. With an ice cream maker bowl. This actually worked fantastically. In fact, a little too well. I came back 10 minutes later and had to pick the beans out of the layer of ice that had formed on the inside.