The Lazy Lazy Chef

In NY eating out, or at home, was a virtual smorgasbord of ethnicities and cuisines.  If you went out to eat, you can have anything you desired.  From super dirt cheap Chinese, Michelin star restaurants serving the gamut from exotic meats to foie gras to super stinky cheese (yum), to real farm/rooftop to table establishments.  I remember organizing a dinner in business school at an Ethiopian restaurant, an ETHIOPIAN restaurant, simply because it was close and I was craving lentils and injera.  Turns out the place closed because of some money laundering issues, but that's besides the point.  The point is the variety of food was tremendous and gut busting.  Plus, when compared to the cost of buying and preparing your own meal, eating out was sometimes cheaper for a couple.  So for most of my life in NY, prior to having kids, we were a restaurant or delivery type of couple.  Sure, every once in a while I'll break out the Mauviel and cook a meal.  But it was usually cheaper and quicker to order in.  I even had a binder filled with a pretty large variety of restaurants who would deliver to our building.  It was broken out by cuisine and in alphabetical order (OCD thank you very much).  That binder was our Holy Grail at 6 pm - and we would agonize over cuisine and restaurant whenever we wanted to order in.  Than I had Little Man and started becoming a weekly (sometimes twice weekly!) Fresh Direct customer.  You could order anything in NY.  Groceries - check!  McDonald's - check!  Diapers - check!  Prescriptions - check!  Everyone offered delivery, and if they didn't, messengers were still around to pick up and deliver for a heftier fee.  I basically never left the apartment for real household errands.  I left for museums, for Kidville classes, lunch with my old co-workers downtown on Water Street or Union Square (depending on the time of the month - the end of the month was always busier since deals were closing), or shopping.  Oh how I miss shopping, the sample sales and the beautiful windows at Bergdorf.  But that's a whole other story.

So when we moved out to Satellite Village and I realized my dining options were chain restaurants or fast food joints, I realized something had to change.  That something was me.  Delivery is a joke here.  The only thing you can get is pizza, pizza, or pizza.  I think there are a couple of Chinese places that deliver but their food seems kind of sketchy.  I used to always get the fried chicken wings in NY, but they were no where to be found out here.  And what is this Egg Foo Young?  I thought that was an urban legend, I've never seen that on a menu before.  But it's here and there are about 6-10 different varieties of it.  As a result I've had to start cooking.  And with kids I can't really cook what I like and miss.  So I went out and bought a crock pot.  

To tell you the truth, I have never touched one before.  Growing up my mom never wanted to get one since she was convinced it would burn the house down since you were leaving an electrical appliance on ALL DAY LONG cooking food.  But I decided to get one and try it out.  Can I just tell you that I LOVE this thing.  You can pick one up super cheap and it is a dream!  I just plop in whatever I can think of, turn it on and walk away.  Granted certain things take a lot longer to cook, but it's easy and it's only one pot to clean up in the end!  Oh Crock Pot, where have you been my entire life?  Why have I fought you for so long, when you are nothing but a godsend to me!  Can you ever forgive me for doubting your prowess?  Than I discovered that there are blogs about crock pot cooking.  People even try to use it 365 days out of the year! How insane, yet totally ingenious is that?  So tomorrow night I'm going to try to crock pot some short ribs. There's some pseudo Korean recipe I found which I'm going to try.  I know it's pseudo since the sauce is made with onions and sugar and tamari.  But I'm going to try to authenticate it by adding garlic and chili flakes and scallions.  But regardless of the ingredients, I know it's going to be a lazy cooking day for me tomorrow.

The crock pot has made me a lazy chef, always searching for a recipe I could slap in the crock pot and walk away.  But the flip side is the extra time allows me to try to recreate the foods I miss most about NY.  Like the gougères from Churrascaria Plataforma, the rainbow cookies, black and whites and florentines from all those bakeries and delis dotting the city, macarons from Bouchon Bakery, bagels from H&H (so sad the one on the UWS closed) and anything else I can remember eating and missing.  I'm still hoping to find an Ethiopian restaurant out here but I am not holding my breath.  I don't know when I will ever get a chance to have injera again.  But maybe one day I'll try to recreate the lentil stew (Misr Wot) in my beloved crock pot.