What’s cookin’?

Think you’re a foodie? Take a quiz and prove it.

I saw that on the MSN home page the day after Thanksgiving, and being the food snob that I am, I absolutely had to play. I clicked on the link and discovered the All About Food trivia game.

While Dave was doing all the shit work on the Christmas tree (untangling and testing all the lights) I was working my way up to a Master’s level 9 playing badge with a score of 56,800.

The first round was so easy I almost lost interest. It was unchallenging and asked things like “which T.V. chef coined the phrase EVOO?” (Rachael Ray) and what is the main herb ingredient in pesto (basil). Pffft, next.

Level 2 was a bit harder and still I got every question right. Do you know what flower vanilla comes from? I do (it’s orchids). Apparently there is no level 3 which sucked because I was not ready to stop playing.

My friends don’t call me Martha Stewart for nothing. However I am so completely elitist and obnoxious about food that I’m surprised they can stand me at all.
One time at a restaurant, Amy asked what farfelle was and I replied “bowtie pasta” with such a “know it all” tone I can’t believe she still wants to be my friend.

I am a perfectionist in the kitchen. Whenever I host a dinner party I will go through all my cookbooks and search the internet to make sure the recipes I’ve chosen are the best I can find. But if anyone tells me how much they like everything or how good they think it tastes I find myself unable to accept their compliments graciously. Instead I will tell them all the things I think I did wrong and how I’ll do it better next time. My dad does the exact same thing when he makes his AWESOME barbecued ribs so I’m guessing it’s genetic.

I brought a salad to Thanksgiving dinner. It had spinach, dried cranberries, toasted walnuts, and red onion tossed with walnut cranberry vinaigrette. I wanted to make candied walnuts but that would require egg whites and Lauren is allergic so I had to leave them plain. I got to thinking in the car on the way to dad and Debby’s that I shouldn’t have used red onion but I really should have added blue cheese and it was all I could do not to convince Dave to stop at a grocery store so I could pick some up. Then I proceeded to tell all of this to my dad when we arrived and he and I analyzed the salad for a little longer and this is CRAZY. Trish LOVED the salad and told me so but I still could not stop thinking how I could have made it BETTER. Christmas Eve dinner is at my house so I will be doing the salad again and this time it will ROCK.

Yesterday we celebrated Thanksgiving with Dave’s side of the family. There are so many people that they always wait until Saturday of Thanksgiving week to celebrate and they rent a hall big enough to hold everybody. The turkey always looks like the one from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and is so dry I have to dump a bunch of gravy on it. Until Dave met me and started going to my family’s Thanksgiving dinners he said he thought that’s how turkey was supposed to taste. Also their stuffing looks like hairballs so I don’t eat it.

I’m kind of glad Thanksgiving is over. Even though I am thankful for the time we have spent with our families, the offspring have been fighting all week and it’s time for them to go back to school before I am pronounced clinically insane. It’s going to take me a couple days to get back into my routine and clean up all the messes they made.

And then this foodie’s got some trivia to play.