S'ghetti-less S'ghetti

Spaghetti Squasah.
This winter squash is 42 calories per cup, where whole wheat and white pasta contain about 3 times the amount. Spaghetti squash contains high counts of dietary fiber, Vitamin B6, Potasium, and Magnesium. It still contains carbohydrates but not nearly as much as regular pasta does.

To cook spaghetti squash, I cut it in half lengthwise and put it in the oven for 50 minutes at 350 degrees. Once you take it out, I let it cool for about 10 minutes and then use a big fork to scrape out the spaghetti-looking strands of the squash. Add sauce, butter, or spices, and eat and enjoy!!

I ate mine with a homemade turkey meat sauce:

1 28oz can diced tomatoes
6 finely chopped sun dried tomatoes (I use the dry kind, if using the oil packed, don’t add oil to this recipe)
2 large onions (only because I am an onion fanatic…1 would do the trick just as well)
1 pound of the leanest ground turkey (I like 97/3)
5 garlic cloves chopped into fine slivers
Dashes of extra virgin olive oil
1 small can of tomato paste


1. Add a little dash (1 TB?) of EVOO with the turkey in a large pot.
2.Cook the turkey until almost all is not pink and add the diced onions and sliced garlic.
3.Saute in the pot for about 5-8 minutes then add the all types of tomatoes – the diced can, paste can, and sundried. Mix together thoroughly and add another splash of EVOO if you wish.
4.Simmer on low and stir occassionally for 45 minutes – 2 hours depending on how much time you have.

And here's the final product! Spaghetti Squash with Turkey Meat Sauce and some Pecorino Romano Cheese

FJL’s Watery Soup

When you work at a chain restaurant, you feel like a tool. No ifs ands or buts about it, you just do. You are burdened with responsibilies that you wouldn’t dream of doing in your worst nightmare. Example: singing a variation of Happy Birthday to guests/strangers on their birthday with a cake and candle in hand, wearing a name tag, offering mediocre wine samples, and other atrocities of the sort. After working at a chain for many months, these types of phrases and requirements that come with the job and once horrified you, fade away and just becomes part of everyday life.

The restaurant I work at has some “funny” rules. If you get a guest complaint, you’re demoted to working in the back of the house. And let me tell you, the type of people that come to my restaurant are quite the complainers. I was at work last week, doing my normal serving thing working a double with a 30 minute break. It was kind of slow because it was right after the holidays, which is why I offered to stay on all day (Makin’ Chedda). It was right before we switched to dinner menus around 3:30 when some monster comes in with her two sons. She was wearing a fur hat and jacket and was from out of state saying I had to rush her meal because “she had a plane to catch”. I went over and greeted the table, did my normal shpeel when I got interrupted with a finger in my face. Her sons translated this rude gesture and said to come back in a minute. So, I cooled off in the kitchen, told some other servers about the Fur Jacket Lady, and went back out in the dining room. She ordered, and I was still polite to her although I didn’t want to be. I brought out their tap waters with lemon, their lunch specials and then checked back up on FJL and received a horrible look and a very rude comment (that I cant remember word for word) I was confused because I made sure their meals arrived really fast (due to the flight they had to catch) and that I was polite.
I like to adhere by the kill them with kindness routine. It almost always works and usually makes the rude person dumb and sorry. The reason they are being rude is usually because they feel bad about something, and making other people feel bad will make them feel better. The only way I can pull this off is maybe throwing a breadstick across the kitchen and venting to some other servers in the kitchen (kitchen made for cooking food? Ha I don’t think so; it’s a therapeutic place for servers to vent about lousy customers).

So, the FJL and her family have finished up eating and I went around the corner to drop their check and gave them best wishes on their flight. I went back to the table minutes later as the Wolf ran past me as she bumped into my shoulder softly body checking me into the wall. I asked her if she needed change and she threw her hand and nose up in the air and replied,
“No, I am going to the FRONT!!”
Oh yeah, the front, where the hosts are. They really know what’s going on. I saw her walk up to the host stand, grimacing, as a host walked back over to me.
“Whoa, is she from your table?”
“Yes”, I replied, “what’s going on?”
“What a bitch, huh? I have to get a manager for her…sorry,” as she walked into the back of the kitchen to the office. One of our managers walked out and we made eye contact and I looked down. It was then that I realized I actually like my stupid-corporate-chain-restaurant-tie wearing tool-faced job. I saw her squawking away to him and I think she may have caught me spying. I waited in the kitchen, as they were my only table at 3:45 there are not many people coming into the restaurant. My manager came back with a very stern look on his face.
"So, you got a customer complaint,” he says as he hands me the exact change for their bill without a tip.
“Okay…”
“Bwahahha did you see her Princess Jacket? You’re not getting in trouble for this one, Claire. Do you know what she said?”
“phew! Oh man, I don’t even know she was so rude to me!”
“She said,” as my manager mimicked her, “’My waitress watered down all of our soups!! And she didn’t put any dressing on our salads!! She had absolutely no personality!’ Haha, let’s go check her salad and soup that she left on the table,” he said as he walked towards table 51.
“Take a look at this…this salad is SOGGY with dressing,” I said as I lifted a heavy forkful of wilted waterlogged iceberg.


We laughed and checked out the “watered down” soups I severed her, had laugh and then went back into the kitchen where I had to relay the story to other servers who wanted to know what FJL was doing bitching at the host stand. We all had a good laugh and then continued to serve semi-normal people for the rest of the evening.


So, I got to keep my job, and for those of you reading…try to be nice to people you don’t know. Don’t treat them like scum because you may or may not have more money than them. We’re all innocent until proven guilty, and if you’re rude to a server they will remember it, and tell all the staff about it, sometimes laughing at your expense.* So save yourself the embarrassment and wasted energy and be kind. Or don’t be kind. Just don’t be rude and mean.


*Also remember that servers are bringing you your overpriced food. They handle YOUR food. If you piss them off, you never know what they may do. (In all honesty I’ve never done anything like that, but its crossed my mind.)

A New Year.

My friend calls them “Resolutionaries”. My gym is packed with them right now. I have to wait in line for the treadmill. And the weights. And the ab rockers. And the lateral pull down. And the toilet. To define these people, I have found a very credible source called Urban Dictionary ;-) defining them as, “People who join a gym after the New Year, only to quit going within 3 months. i.e. I couldn't find a free treadmill, the place was crawling with resolutionaries.”
Hopefully it will die down soon, but until then, there’s a line.
I do have a couple of ways I would interpersonally like to change within myself for the “new year”, although I start assessing this internally in December.
1. Think more positive.
2. Run a 5k for a cause.
3. Eat to live, not live to eat.
4. Be better at staying in touch with old friends.
5. Save money/pay off loans/get new job.

Okay, I know these are pretty generic as well, but let me go over them with you.

1. Positive: also includes: not being quick to judge, looking for the good in people, developing a small altruistic view on life. I suppose this also stems from having a low self esteem, but mine is rising again (Thanks to Planet Fitness, the original judgment free zone)HA.

2. I could have said a ½ marathon, which would be nice, but I would like to run for a cause and raise some money. I have done no research on this topic so that is all. I know this may be the most standard and nonspecific resolution, but hey, it looks good on paper.

3. Eat to Live: WOW okay, this is definitely the hardest one for me. Food is amazing. I love cooking it, eating it, playing with it, taking pictures of it, presenting it, force-feeding others to try new foods (sorry Mom and Es), and so on. I heard this phrase from my mother when I was in High school and going through some young teenage diet fad, and she told me not to think about food and diet so much, just ‘eat to live…not live to eat.’ Apparently my enlightened mother was quoting the one and only Buddha. He also said that hunger is the worst illness because we are born with it and can never cure it until our lives are over. There are a couple more eating principles that Buddha has such as respecting the labor that people have put into creating the meal, to commit good deeds worthy of sharing the meal, arrive at the table without negative feelings towards anyone, eat in order to achieve spiritual and physical well being, and be dedicated in pursuit of enlightenment. My only qualm is that Buddha is usually portrayed as fa….er…having a big belly?

4. Staying in touch. It’s not too hard, and now that I have upgraded from

THIS:

TO THIS: (env3)
texting is a lot easier now, therefore, so is staying in touch.

5. Save money/pay off loans/get new job has been a goal of mine since I was 12. So just out of habit, I must include this. (and the fact my loans are a LOT bigger than ‘pay Kelly that $1.50 I owe her').

All this said and done, we’ll see how I do this year. Good luck to all of you with your new year’s resolutions, but please stay away from my treadmill time. :)

Amazing Fall Dinner

A couple of months ago I went over to a friend's house with mr. to eat a salmon dinner. Our friend made us a cranberry mustard salmon and it was absolutely delicious. I looked at her recipe she had and then found it online a month later.

I highly recommend this recipe, and it's a great way to use some cranberry relish/sauce leftover from the holidays.

Ingredients:
Nonstick vegetable oil spray
3 tablespoons olive oil (or walnut oil)
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 Eight oz Salmon fillets (or 4 smaller fillets) with skin
1/3 Cup cranberry relish (if you don't have leftovers from the holidays buy the canned stuff,but make sure it is whole berry. I used this kind.)
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar


Preparation:



Preheat oven to 450F. Spray baking sheet (or whatever you're using to cook salmon on) with the spray oil. Use a cup and whisk together the oil and mustard.






Sprinkle salmon with salt and pepper and place on the baking sheet. Spread the mustard mixture over the salmon, and pop in the oven for about 13 minutes depending on thickness and size of your fillet.
Whisk cranberry, red wine, and shallots together and turn the oven up to broil during the last 30 seconds on the salmon's bake. Take out the salmon and generously spread the cranberry mixture over the top, and throw back in the oven a couple of inches from the broiler for 30 seconds - 1 minute.

Alright, the picture probably doesnt make it look too appetizing but it realllllly is.

I served it with a butternut squash au gratin, and I will be posting the recipe for that later.

Try this recipe out!!

Snowing

A lot has happened since my first official weblog entry; some of the big-eating holidays, working 25 days in a row, the first snow-fall, my five year high school reunion, and other random acts.
First thing’s first: Thanksgiving.

It was good I suppose. Ma was sick so it was a father-daughters Thanksgiving. We made our homemade family pierogies (stuffed with Farmers Cheese, of course, we wouldn't have it any other way), stuffing, mashed taters, and (GASP!) a roasted Turkey breast!! My sister and I have both been vegetarians for many years, so this was our first Turkey filled Thanksgiving since middle school. Dad took over and made some miso gravy, cranberry chutney, spiced purple cabbage, and a pumpkin chiffon pie. As a three-man team with Sis and Dad we made THE chocolate mousse. This chocolate mousse has been requested for birthdays, holidays, special occasions, and even DEMANDED during very extreme chocolate cravings over the years. It's usually hand crafted by Mom, but since she was very sick, the three of us took over. It ended up all right, a little thicker than usual but delicious nonetheless. It was all delicious

Second thing’s Second: The day after Thanksgiving.

Fat, full, and frighteningly famished I reached to the fridge to make a leftover turkey sandwhich and realized I had a commitment for tonight. My 5 year High School Reunion. All I've learned from the reunion is that the music needs to be louder, the lights dimmer, and a larger spot to dance. I got real sick of relaying the same story over and over again, so less talk, more dance.

Or maybe I was drunk and wanted to dance.

Who knows.

And yes, that is an ice cold BL being drank as we craft these ancient Slavic dumplings.

Hmmm....

Hello!
I have never ever blogged before. This is all new to me, and I am excited. I am a 23 year old food loving, recipe hunting, ex-vegetarian (10 years!) gal. Residential counselor by day, and chain restaurant waitress and bartender by night. The purpose of this little blog is to share delicious recipes, tell some funny and ludacris waitress stories, give out hints and tips of food and exercise. and whatever else I feel like sharing(?). The holidays are around the corner which is a perfect time to discover new recipes for the season. Speaking of which, its already November 6th, and it hasn't substantially snowed yet up in Vermont. which is kind of odd.....