Cooking Today

It’s embarrassing enough that I watch Cougar Town. It’s appalling that I enjoy it. And I’m going to have to kill myself now that I truly am looking forward to Lisa Kudrow guest starring this week.

That I’m thankful to hulu.com’s advertisers for interrupting After Hours to tell me about it means I’m already dead and paying for my sins in hell.

Currently playing on the screen of my laptop, which is perched on a dedicated kitchen shelf, is After Hours with Daniel Boulud on hulu.com. It’s a tv series that aired on the Mojo network for three seasons, from 2006 to 2008. The premise is that the famous and charismatic French chef, Daniel Boulud, invites other famous chefs to dine decadently with him after-hours at a series of rotating restaurants in NYC, LA, New Orleans and Miami. The guest list, which also includes the random actress, sports figure or author, also changes with each 25-minute show. The show features the prep and the dinner.

I’ve sort of been devouring it.

There’s a moment that has stayed with me from the Season 1 episode at Cru in NYC. It’s not a food-related moment. The invited author Jay McInerney takes heat from the other guests for name-dropping when he’s telling a story and says, “My hostess, the Princess of Malaysia, she only drinks first growth Bordeaux, so automatically there were only eight wines...” blah blah blah

(Yes, incidentally, that’s a direct quote, and the award-winning writer did use the redundant pronoun that always frustrated my mom about my elementary school grammatical habits.)

The rest of the guests hassled McInerney for name-dropping, but I’m completely absorbed with the apparent reality that being an award-winning author gains you entree to dinner with a princess. For real? I was impressed that McInerney had scored an invite to the After Hours table. Princesses? Who knew?

This tells me that I have not been trying nearly hard enough to get my writing published. My only defense is that I didn’t know I was risking dinner with the princess.

On tonight's menu: Smoked Oyster and Bacon Stew. It's a pantry-based recipe, as in, I don't feel like going to the grocery store, what's in the pantry already? We'll see how it goes.