When I received this month’s issue of Vegetarian Times, I knew immediately that I would have to try the recipe pictured on the cover, Paella Primavera. I’ve had paella before, in various incarnations, and I’ve always enjoyed it. And I assumed that this meatless version would be equally enjoyable. But I came to a realization that has ruined the dish for me: I do not like saffron, the ingredient that essentially defines paella. Maybe I just had a bad batch of this shockingly expensive spice, but it assaulted my tongue with a plasticky taste that medical-grade mouthwash would fail to fully annihilate. I don’t know why it never bothered me before, but I am Done, with a capital D, with saffron.

At any rate, here is the recipe as it appears in the March 2012 issue of Vegetarian Times, along with my one suggested adjustment (though of course, if you are, in fact, over the moon for saffron, by all means go ahead and use it to your heart’s content).

Paella Primavera

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 tsp. olive oil
• 3 cups broccoli florets
• 1 red bell pepper, chopped (1 cup)
• 6 green onions, thinly sliced (1 cup)
• 3 cups low-sodium vegetable broth
• 3 cloves garlic, minced (1 Tbs.)
• 1 tsp. crumbled saffron threads (I didn’t even have a full teaspoon to use and the flavor still overwhelmed me. My suggestion? Replace the saffron with cumin, or something spicy, like cayenne. I realize this negates the dish’s inherent paella-ness, but I would have enjoyed it much more without this petroleum flavored ingredient.)
• 1 cup short-grain white rice, such as Valencia (Valencia rice is pretty hard to find, but I used Arborio and it did the trick.)
• 1 cup fresh or frozen baby peas
• 1 cup halved grape or cherry tomatoes
• 12 pitted green olives, halved (I don’t care much for green olives, so I used all black.)
• 12 pitted black olives, halved
• 1 lemon, cut into wedges
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

Check out my awesome mise en place:

Directions

First, heat the oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. I used my cast iron pan. Add the broccoli, bell pepper, and green onions and cook for about five minutes. It looks ever so colorful and pretty and healthy:

Once the vegetables have begun to soften a bit, add the broth (I used water and vegetable bullion), garlic, and saffron (REALLY wish I’d used cumin…) and bring it to a boil. Then sprinkle the rice over the ingredients, reduce the heat to medium-low (since I was using my cast iron pan, which tends to get hotter than my other pans, I turned it down to low), cover the pan, and let it simmer for about 10 minutes.

Then, sprinkle the peas, tomatoes, and olives over the rice mixture. Again, so pretty! Then cover and cook for eight more minutes, or until the rice is tender. Remove from heat and let it rest, covered, for five minutes before serving. Season with salt and pepper, if you’d like. Then dish it out and serve with lemon wedges and a sprinkling of parsley. Voila:

Oh, how I wish I’d enjoyed this more! But I’ll certainly try it again with different spices, maybe even some crushed red pepper.

Anyway. To go with the paella, I decided to try my hand at some vegetarian tapas. They came out OK but are also in need of some adjustments.

One of the most traditional Spanish tapas dishes is tortilla, which is not the more commonly known flat Mexican thing that comes in corn and flour varietals. It’s a simple potato and egg dish, sort of like a cheeseless Spanish Quiche. I found this recipe on the Vegetarian Times website.

Spanish Potato Tortilla

Ingredients

• 2 Tbs. plus 1 tsp. olive oil, divided
• 1 lb. fingerling potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced (I did a little research and found that peeling is not traditional. Also, hats off to you if you can summon the patience to peel a pound of tiny potatoes.)
• 1 medium onion, quartered and thinly sliced (1 cup)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced (2 tsp.) (I also read that garlic is not traditional, but I think the dish would be a little bland without it.)
• 5 eggs

Directions

Heat two tablespoons of the olive oil in a nonstick skillet over medium heat (I really don’t think you could make this dish in anything other than a nonstick skillet). Add the potatoes and cook for five minutes, or until they begin to soften. I made the mistake of buying red fingerling potatoes, which are actually red all the way through and look like beets when thinly sliced. This ruined the appearance but not the flavor of my tortilla.

Then add the onions and garlic and cook until the onions are translucent and the potatoes begin to brown. In my case, it was nearly impossible to tell if my red, sausage-like potato slices were browning. Sigh…

Once cooked to your liking, transfer the potato mixture to a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Whisk the eggs in a separate bowl and then stir them into the potato mixture. Heat the remaining teaspoon of olive oil in the nonstick skillet over medium heat and spread the egg-potato mixture in the skillet. Let it cook for about five minutes, until the edges are crispy, the bottom is browned, and the eggs are set halfway to the center. Remove the skillet from heat and carefully flip the tortilla onto a plate. Then slide the tortilla back into the pan and cook the other side for about five minutes. It’s done when both sides are brown and crispy. Let it come down to room temperature and then cut it into wedges.

Due to my poor choice in potatoes, mine came out looking like some kind of disgusting mélange of eggs and sliced hot dogs. But I swear, it was tasty once you got over the visual ick-factor:

My advice would be to use any kind of potatoes you like. I prefer Yukon Golds and will be using those in the future.

Next up, Marinated Red Bell Peppers and Manchego Cheese, also from the Vegetarian Times website.

Marinated Red Bell Peppers and Manchego Cheese

Ingredients

• 2 medium red bell peppers
• 8 oz. Manchego cheese, cut into 12 triangles (Have you had this before? I hadn’t, and once I tried it, I wasn’t a fan. If I made this again I would completely adulterate the recipe and use mozzarella instead. Spain meets Italy? Further comments below…)
• 3 Tbs. olive oil
• 1 large clove garlic, minced (1 tsp.)
• 1/2 tsp. cumin seeds (I didn’t have cumin seeds so I just used cumin powder and I think it was fine.)

Directions

Turn on your broiler, place the red bell peppers on a baking sheet, and broil for 20 minutes or until blackened on all sides, turning periodically. Remove them from the oven, place them in a bowl, and cover with plastic wrap, allowing them to steam for 15 minutes.

Then, remove the stem, core, skin (I left the skin on), and seeds and cut into 12 strips. I tried to get fancy and cut them into 12 triangles to roughly approximate the shape of the cheese triangles. Arrange the cheese around a dish and top each piece with a slice of bell pepper. I accidentally put the cheese on top of the bell peppers, but, hey, to-ma-to, to-mah-to. It’ll taste the same either way.

In a small bowl, whisk together the olive oil, garlic, and cumin seeds (or cumin powder), and season with salt and pepper.

Spoon the resulting mixture on and around the cheese and let it refrigerate overnight to allow the flavors to blend.

This dish sure did look nice, but, as I mentioned, I’m not crazy about this cheese. It has a very strong flavor and is rather hard. It might be good in small slivers on a cracker, but I think a softer, lighter cheese, such as mozzarella, would work better in this recipe, at least for my tastes. But I did like the garlicky marinade.

Finalement, I made stuffed avocados, which I liked the best of my “tapas,” which I’m putting in quotes because I don’t think stuffed avocados are technically “tapas,” just a finger food I decided to throw into the mix. A quick Google search led me to this easy recipe. It’s sort of like reverse guacamole, if you will.

Tomato-Stuffed Avocados

Ingredients

• 2 plum tomatoes, seeded and chopped
• 3/4 cup thinly sliced red onion, quartered
• 1 tsp. fresh basil leaves, julienned
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. pepper
• 2 medium, ripe avocados, halved and pitted
• 2 tsp. lime juice

Directions

This one’s very simple. Mix all of the above ingredients together in a bowl (except for the avocados and lime juice) and then spoon the mixture into the avocados and drizzle with lime juice. And you can add more or less of any of the ingredients so it’s to your liking. Here’s how mine came out:

In the end, what I was hoping would be a delectable, meatless, Spanish feast was something of a disappointment in many ways. But I’m confident that, with a little ingenuity, I could pull it off with greater flourish some other night.

And of course, be sure to top off any Spanish meal with a fine, sure-fire glass of Tempranillo.

The one benefit of going for a stroll before anything is open is that you have everything to yourself. The streets were empty, save for a few garbage men and early rising chocolatiers, the latter of whom fill their storefronts with impeccably crafted and arranged confections such as these:

I wanted to see Luzern’s famous Lion Monument, and after a long, uphill hike and an unnecessary detour, we found it. But it was 7am and the uncooperative sky was still black as midnight, so the sculpture, though drenched in a sort of ethereal, misty quietude, was barely discernible, and our trek was all for naught. We made the long journey back to the city center and stopped in a small cafe where we dropped 13 francs on two small cups of coffee and three dry but quickly-devoured croissants.

Before heading back to our hotel, we visited the Jesuit Church, one of Luzern’s most distinguishing landmarks. We went inside and were the only ones there, the silence adding to the hair-raising creepiness that always overwhelms me in any church, especially old ones (except for Notre Dame in Paris, which I love). The sanctuary was filled with the echoes, gold leafing, and various adumbrations of eternal piety typical of most European churches.

Our Luzern itch sufficiently scratched, we returned to our hotel room, packed up, and walked to the train station, where we set out on our first ride on the Golden Pass, one of the Swiss rail system’s scenic/panoramic routes. It did not fail to please, and I can’t imagine a ride on the Polar Express would be more magnificent, awe-inspiring, or surreal. The journey from Luzern to Wilderswil (via Interlaken) climbed up, up, up through mountains that heaven itself would have difficulty replicating. Cozy chalets and fairytale villages dotted the snowy landscape, topped by chimneys exhaling inviting plumes of smoke into the cold, clean Alpine air. Children could be seen sledding down hills in their own backyards, and foggy-breathed livestock huddled for warmth aside rustic barns. It was a feast for the eyes, and I couldn’t help but feel consumed by gratitude for somehow being lucky enough to experience such a beautiful place.

Once we arrived in Wilderswil, we walked all the way up the tiny village’s main road, at the terminus of which our hotel, Hotel Baren, was located (I would like to make an aside here to note that the Swiss seem to be preternaturally obsessed with bears; this was one of three hotels we stayed at which were named after said beast). It was a quaint bed and breakfast with ascetic but clean accommodations. It was getting to be late in the afternoon by the time we’d checked in and cleaned ourselves up, so we explored the village for a while after dark, picked up some rations at the grocery store, and holed up in our room for the night, drinking wine and eating bread and cheese and watching movies on our laptop. Perhaps not the most adventurous way to spend an evening in a foreign land, but it suited me quite well.

The next morning, we got up early and decided to take the train to Grindelwald to see what kind of wintry trouble we could get into. We’d heard that Grindelwald would be crowded, and indeed it was, but not to the extent that we didn’t enjoy ourselves. It’s an adorable village with plenty of shops and restaurants to keep you busy even if you don’t feel like hitting the extensive slopes in the surrounding area. Michael was hoping to get some skiing in, but since I have all the grace of a cracked-out, epileptic Rhesus monkey on even the most delicately pitched of bunny slopes, he took pity on me and we rented two sleds instead. And oh what fun it was!

A bus filled with the fracas of a half-dozen foreign tongues and the wailing of children took us up a series of precarious hairpin turns to the top of a mountain. The view on our ascent gave me that almost fearful feeling I get whenever nature manifests itself in such a large and consuming way. The stunning peaks seemed to stare down at my small, insignificant self with ancient authority. When we reached our drop-off point, almost above the tree line, we fetched our sleds from below the bus and took off down the trail. Any nerves I had about careening down the mountain were quickly calmed when I realized how immensely fun the sport was and how incredible my surroundings were. As much as I loved gaining speed, I had to pause periodically to take in the landscape.

Eventually, we made it back down to Grindelwald, returned our sleds, and explored the shops before getting on the train back to Wilderswil. We spent the evening in our cozy room and ended with a nightcap of Switzerland’s finest one-franc brew:

I wouldn’t say it was “Lager Hell,” but I don’t think we’ll be importing it any time soon.

Next post: Day 4 – Murren and Bern

But my husband, who lovingly refers to me as a “vegetarian hippie,” surprised me when I found him watching the movie this past weekend. Unlike Food, Inc., the documentary that single-handedly turned me into a vegetarian and which I forced him to watch, Forks Over Knives actually made an impression on him. As the end credits rolled, he declared, “Let’s just eat lentils tomorrow.”

Alas, his plant-based convictions were short lived, and I awoke to the smell of bacon sizzling in the kitchen the next morning. He did, however, mention that he wouldn’t mind a meatless dinner at least once a week.

For me, every day is meatless, but the “Meatless Monday” trend does seem to be gaining some traction across the country. In that vein, I decided to make a delicious meatless meal last night, which just happened to be Monday. Here’s how it went down…

I recently came across this recipe on boston.com:

Vegetarian Pasta Fagioli Soup

Ingredients

• One large onion, diced
• 3 carrots, chopped
• 3 celery stalks, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 bunch Swiss chard leaves, chopped (I used a half bunch of spinach)
• 1 28-oz. can of diced tomatoes, with juice
• 1 14-oz. can of cannellini beans, drained
• 1 14-oz. can of kidney beans, drained
• 6 cups of vegetable broth (I used 6 cups of water and added 3 cubes of vegetable bullion)
• 1 tsp. chili flakes (I didn’t measure it out — just added a generous sprinkling because I think the soup is best when it’s spicy)
• 10 sprigs of thyme leaves
• Parmesan rind if you have one (I didn’t, and I think it’s fine without it)
• 1 1/2 cups of small pasta (I used the smallest shells I could find)
• Olive oil (I always use extra virgin)
• Salt and pepper
• Grated Parmesan cheese

First, heat some oil in a large soup pot and add the onion, carrots, and celery. Cook for a few minutes, then add the garlic and some salt and pepper and cook for a few more minutes, until the onions are transluscent. I also like to make sure the carrots have softened a bit.

Next, add the tomatoes and beans and cook the resulting mixtures for a few minutes.

Then, add the Parmesan rind if you have one (I think I’d have to go to Central Market for that), a healthy dose of chili flakes, thyme, and broth or water and vegetable bullion. Bring it to a boil and then reduce to a simmer. The recipe states that you can let it simmer for as little as 30 minutes or as much as two hours. I prefer to let soups and stews cook for as long as possible, but both times I’ve made this recipe I’ve been in a rush and 30 minutes has been perfectly fine.

When you’re almost ready to serve the soup, add in the Swiss chard or spinach (or your preferred leafy green). Cook the pasta separately, not in the soup (I’ve always added dry pasta directly to my soup and now I realize that it soaks up too much of the liquid), and add it once everything is done.

I forgot to take a picture of the soup with the spinach and pasta added in, but here’s how it looked when it was nearly complete:

I served it in large bowls, topped with a sprinkling of Parmesan. Mozzarella might also be good if you aren’t bananas about Parmesan. I also made some basmati rice, and my husband poured the soup over that to give his meal a little extra substance.

After reading the comments on the original recipe on boston.com, I learned that this soup is actually more of a cross between pasta e fagioli and minsetrone. Ridiculous semantics aside, I think it’s an easy, healthy, and delicious recipe that even a meat eater will happily devour.

As a side dish/appetizer, I made Cheesy Quinoa Cakes, which I discovered awhile back on Pinterest. Here is the original recipe, and here is my spin on it:

Cheesy Quinoa Cakes

Ingredients

• 2 cups cooked quinoa
• 2/3 cup grated fontina cheese (I used a full cup because I freaking love this stuff)
• 3 tbs. all purpose flour
• 2 green onions, thinly sliced (I used about four, because I also freaking love green onions)
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper (do NOT add this much unless you really like pepper; the first time I made these, I used the full two teaspoons and all I could taste was pepper; this time, I just seasoned it to taste)
• Red pepper flakes to taste (my own addition)
• 2 1/2 tbs. extra virgin olive oil
• Salt to taste

Mix all of the above ingredients except the olive oil, creating this gloppy mess:

Mix it together. Then, heat the olive oil in a pan. Form 1/4-cup patties with the quinoa mixture and place them in the heated pan. The original recipe says to cook them for five minutes on each side, but I just keep an eye on them and cook until they’re just golden brown on each side. Here they are in progress:

There’s also a recipe for Garlic and Lemon Aioli to dip the cakes in, which I made once and didn’t like because I found the lemon taste to be overwhleming. But it might be good with the lemon components reduced or left out entirely, and roasted garlic makes your kitchen smell like heaven. The hubs and I ate the cakes plain. He commented that they’re sort of falafel-esque, and I do think they’d be good in some pita bread with lettuce, tomatoes, and a little Tzatziki. At any rate, here’s the finished product, with a few bites taken out:

All in all, I think my Meatless Monday was a great success. Bon appétit!

But before launching into a blow-by-blow account of my most recent European adventure, let’s go over Switzerland 101:

• There ain’t no recession in Switzerland. On the contrary, the Swiss franc is doing so well that they’ve been trying to keep its value down so its citizens doing business outside the country don’t lose money when exchanging back to their native currency. According to Wikipedia, Switzerland also has once of the world’s lowest inflation rates, and the Swiss have the world’s highest average wealth per adult at $372,692. These folks are rich, which means that…
• Switzerland is EXPENSIVE. One never expects a European vacation to be cheap, but when faced with the equivalent of a $75 price tag for breakfast for two, it’s a bit overwhelming. My advice: stick to the grocery stores, gorge yourself on cheese and baguettes, and revel in the fact that Switzerland is going to force you to lose those pesky five pounds you’ve been complaining about since Thanksgiving.
• The Swiss are hands-down the nicest, warmest, most welcoming people on the planet. I had not one even remotely rude encounter throughout the duration of my stay in their magnificent country. And they are made all the nicer by the fact that…
• …they all speak English. I only encountered one or two people (rail or restaurant workers) who spoke not a lick of my mother tongue. Of course, you can’t (and shouldn’t) expect anyone in a foreign country to speak English. But it certainly does make travel easier.
• Switzerland has four official languages, which I suppose may explain why everyone speaks English — they had to find common a common denominator. In the north they speak Swiss German (a variation that is infinitely more pleasing to the ear than Germany’s), in the southwest, in and around Geneva, they speak French (of which I took several years in high school and college; I was excited to flex my francais muscles, and I think I got along quite well, except that people kept figuring out that I was American and then they’d just start speaking English…domage…), and in a small area in the south, they speak Italian, or an Italian dialect called Romansh (we didn’t go to that region so I didn’t get to use my four words of Italian; piacere!).
• The Swiss are train addicts. They are also obsessed with punctuality and efficiency. This results in a fortuitous confluence of Swiss preferences if you’re a tourist. We never had to wait for a train. Every train literally arrived exactly on time, to the minute if not the second. Before crossing the pond, I printed out timetables from this website, which gives you door-to-door directions, including which platform you need to be at. It’s like HopStop for Switzerland. (On a side note, there are plenty of things in Switzerland that will convince you, unwaveringly, of its superiority to America, and their rail system in particular makes you realize what a bunch of gas-guzzling a-holes we really are.)

OK, there’s your crash course. Onward…

Day 1 – Luzern

The further west your distance from the East Coast of the U.S., the more of a b***h it is to get to Europe. Especially when you have an almost crippling fear of flying, as I do.

We generally fly Delta, which means we have to stop in Atlanta nine out of 10 times we go anywhere. On this particular occasion, the pilot on our flight from Dallas announced that the turbulence we began to experience early on in the flight would last all the way to Georgia, and the preparatory drinks I’d thrown back in the Sky Lounge were no match for this airborne roller-coaster. For some reason, my husband and I didn’t have seats together on this flight, which meant that I was trapped in the center seat between two elderly gentlemen from whom I tried my best to hide my white-knuckled trepidation. Alas, turbulence on the part of the plane lead to hyperventilation on the part of Stephanie, and I closed my eyes, planted my forehead on the back of the seat in front of me, and started counting to 100 over and over again, my one meager coping mechanism in such circumstances. (Running up and down the aisle screaming, “Make it stop! Make it stop!” as my instinct compels me to do would not likely go over well with the TSA, and I travel too often to risk being added to the No Fly List.)

Once we had landed safely at ATL, we booked it over to the Sky Lounge for more liquid courage and then boarded the much less bumpy flight to Zurich. The movies were decent, the food less so, and a cocktail of sedatives, red wine, and nascent jet lag lulled me to sleep for at least some of the nine-hour transatlantic journey.

We landed in Zurich around 7:30am, and I have to say, it’s the best of the European airports I’ve been to so far. It’s clean and modern and incredibly easy to navigate. We collected our bags, had our Swiss Passes validated (we got the eight-day multi-traveler pass, the best deal if you plan on traveling extensively while in Switzerland; it gives you unlimited travel on trains and other public transportation, as well as discounts on mountain cable cars and free access to more than 400 museums…wow, I sound like a Swiss tourism ambassador, a job which, in all honesty, I would happily take…), and got on the train to Luzern, our first stop. Less than an hour later, we were here:

Luzern is a breathtaking, historic, ambient town of bricks and cobblestones and exactly the kind of chalet-style architecture you’ve imagined in your Heidi-inspired fantasies.

We made the mistake of taking a taxi from the train station to our hotel, thereby losing 14 of our precious francs, but it’s difficult to get around on your own when you’ve just landed in a new country. But in case you’re wondering, the Hotel des Balances, where we stayed, is only a 10-minute walk from the train station. If you can avoid it, do not take a cab.

Checking in at the hotel gave us the first of our many experiences with Swiss hospitality. The girl at the front desk let us check in early and upgraded us to one of the slightly more expensive river-view rooms (we had a balcony and a direct view of the Jesuit Church). She also gave us two vouchers for drinks at the hotel’s tres chic bar. We went up to our room, cleaned up a bit, and then napped off some of the jet lag (which we never fully overcame throughout the week).

Once we were feeling a little less dead to the world, we bundled up (as you can imagine, Switzerland is rather frigid in late December/early January) and went exploring. Luzern’s most iconic landmark is the Chapel Bridge (which you can see in the above picture), so we started there. It was originally built in the 14th century, but a lot of it had to be replaced in the 1990s after a fire destroyed it, ignited when one of Europe’s two bazillion smokers failed to properly extinguish a spent cigarette. My favorite part of the bridge are the paintings you can see as you walk through it, if you look up:

After the bridge, we walked to the newer part of the city and checked out the Rosengart Collection, a smallish museum where art dealer Angela Rosengart’s sizable private collection of Picassos are on display. We also hungrily peeked into Starbucks and McDonald’s and confirmed our suspicion that even our American go-to fast food joints were going to be too pricey for us franc-less vagabonds…

But we did have two free drink coupons to cash in at the hotel. My oh my, Hotel des Balances is home to a deliciously posh restaurant and bar. After the nine-hour flight and a day of trekking around in the cold, my hair and makeup left something to be desired, and sitting next to all those impossibly polished Swiss ladies wasn’t doing my confidence any favors. But the bartender was happy to whip up two proper and quite delicious cocktails in exchange for our vouchers, and we sat there for a long while, lounging and sipping and people watching.

I have to say, Europeans are phenomenal drinkers. I think the whole of the continent maintains a constant blood-alcohol level. And yet, with the exception of the United Kingdom, you’d be hard pressed to find a belligerent drunk anywhere, at least not one of the volatile caliber you can’t throw a rock without hitting in the U.S. It’s really inspiring. As we sat at the bar, we watched the middle-aged couple next to us nurse a steady succession of drinks (at 17 francs for a glass of Veuve Clicquot, I can only imagine what their tab looked like at the end of the night) and split an entree. I just love how they lingered there, taking their time, drinking and eating and talking. They weren’t in a rush and the bar staff didn’t rush them. I would very much like more of that in my life.

After milking our free drinks for an hour or so, we ventured back out into the cold to seek more solid sustenance. Alas, there was none to be found, unless you were willing to pay a handsome sum. Exhausted and famished, we popped into a cozy Italian restaurant and shelled out 21 francs for a pizza and a bottle of water (16 for the pizza, 5 for the water — there’s no such thing as free water in Europe…or ice). Our hunger assuaged, though only moderately, we returned to our hotel and slept that fitful sleep that fills the interim between the end of a long journey and the beginning of a new one.

Goodnight, Luzern.

Next post: Days 2 and 3 - More Luzern, the Golden Pass, Wilderswil, and Grindelwald

I need to preface this, the first of my “In the Kitchen” posts, by mentioning that I’m a vegetarian and I’m married to an ardent omnivore. But I’ve chosen not to inflict my meatless ways upon him and I enjoy whipping up meat-ful meals for him on a nearly nightly basis, much like a teetotaling bartender (though just to clarify the analogy, I am decidedly not a teetotaler). Much of the time, I’ll make a dish with meat and then invent a meatless version of it for myself.

On January 1, 2010, one of my many New Year’s resolutions was to start cooking more often and to try a new recipe at least once a week. It’s pretty much the only resolution I’ve successfully been able to keep, and my husband is reaping the benefits. And I think our vegetarian/omnivore dynamic has helped me become a more creative cook.

I digress. Back to Mad Men and Beef Wellington.

A quick Google search informed me that this dish involves a fantastically inspired marriage of steak and puff pastry. I knew immediately that the hubs would swoon. But alas, it would require not one, not two, but three pounds of delectable but pricey filet mignon.

A few nights ago, itching to do some dirty work in the kitchen, I was almost prepared to shell out the first-born child such vast quantities of tenderloin beef would cost. And then, on a last-minute whim, I searched for “chicken Wellington” to see if such a recipe might exist. I assure you, Good Reader, it does, and while I can’t rightfully compare it to its bovine brother, I’d like to think it gives it a run for its money.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a recipe snob. I do scour the Food Network website for new meals to try, but I shun all things Paula Deen and Rachel Ray. Don’t even get me started on Guy Fieri. They’re all a little too butter-drenched and simian for my taste. But I do love Giada De Laurentiis — her Chicken Cacciatore revolutionized my stove top – pedestrian though her reputation may be. My biggest chef crush is Anthony Bourdain. I recently purchased his Les Halles Cookbook and I break it out whenever I feel like a challenge. So imagine my surprise when I retrieved this recipe for Chicken Wellington from, of all places, the Pepperidge Farm website:

Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry Chicken Wellington

Ingredients

• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp. water
• 4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves (about 1 1/4 pounds)
• 1/2 tsp. dried thyme leaves, crushed
• 1/8 tsp. ground black pepper
• 2 tbsp. butter
• 2 1/4 oz. sliced mushrooms (about 3/4 cup)
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped (about 1/2 cup)
• 1 tbsp. fresh chopped parsley
• 1/3 of an 8 oz. package of cream cheese
• 1 tbsp. Dijon-style mustard
• All-purpose flour
• 1 sheet of puff pastry

To go with the Chicken Wellington, I made red potatoes and green beans.

I always make these potatoes to go with this recipe for Provencal Roasted Chicken. I cut them into roughly half-inch cubes, put them in a glass baking dish, and coat them thoroughly with salt, pepper, Herbes de Provence (that’s what makes them super delicious), a few cloves of minced garlic, and an overly generous helping of olive oil. Then I bake them at 350 degrees for about an hour, stirring them up every 20 minutes, until they start to brown. Here they are in their before pose:

For the green beans, I start by going to the store and buying what at the time seems like a hugely inordinate amount of green beans. Someone will invariably give me a strange look out of the corner of his or her (probably her) eye, wondering if I’m the “20 Kids and Counting” mom because of all those green beans I’m shoveling at breakneck pace. I ignore her and proceed to the register with a plastic bag of vegetables bulging like Santa’s sack the year every kid was on the “Nice” list. When I get home, I spend about seven hours trimming them and picking out the sickly undesirables, yielding this:

Then I throw them in a pot of salted boiling water for a few minutes, drain them, transfer them to a skillet, and wonder in amazed disappointment at how they seem to have lost about three-fourths of their initial volume. After cooking them in olive oil with salt, pepper, oregano, and crushed red pepper over medium heat, I sigh and move on with my life.

OK, now for the pièce de résistance.

I seasoned the chicken with thyme and black pepper and then cooked it in a tablespoon of butter in a skillet for five minutes per side. I could tell the kitchen smelled amazing because my dogs came in to investigate.

Once the chicken was golden and just cooked through, I put it on a plate in the refrigerator for 15 minutes. Then I cooked the mushrooms and onion and added in the parsley once they’d softened:

Next I made the cream cheese and mustard mixture, which, let’s face it, sounds a little white-trashy, but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Let me now just say that I’ve been known to be notoriously unobservant, and quick thinking is not always my strong suit. The next step involved rolling out the puff pastry from a small square into a big square. I don’t own a rolling-pin because I’ve never needed one (I only make the “heaping spoonful” kind of cookie recipes), so this posed a dilemma. Lush that I am, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I have a whole collection of makeshift rolling pins in the form of wine bottles. I chose my empty bottle of Skinnygirl Sangria, which I’d saved because I’m a sucker for cute packaging and hoped to repurpose it in some way. It performed spectacularly in its new incarnation as a puff pastry roller:

Once I estimated I’d rolled out an appropriately sized square, I cut it into four smaller squares. Then I put a fourth of the mushroom mixture, one piece of chicken, and a fourth of the cream cheese mixture in the center of each square. Then I wrapped up the puff pastry, brushed them with egg wash, threw them in the oven, and voila:

(At the last minute, I also made a quick mustard cream sauce based on a Martha Stewart recipe I tried a long time ago — I made it with white wine, heavy cream, Dijon mustard, and a little thyme. It went quite well with the red potatoes, à mon avis!)

The Chicken Wellington was a big hit with the husband and I was totally jealous of his meat-ful meal. Which is why I’m anxious to try out this recipe I found for Vegetables Wellington. I’ll let you know how it goes…

But I was the hold out. For me, the prospect of a roller skating party immediately generated intense feelings of trepidation. Due to what I was convinced were huge injustices inflicted upon me by my penniless parents (who, I will concede, were penniless at least in part as a result of sending me to the private elementary school where said roller skating party was to take place), I didn’t own a pair of roller skates with which to partake in the festivities. Indeed, I had never so much as tried a pair on.

So my mother’s response, when confronted with my ardent imploration for a brand new pair of the four-wheeled shoes I now coveted so badly, wasn’t entirely unwarranted.

“But you don’t even know how to roller skate,” she said. Logical enough, perhaps, but I was a very perceptive child and knew this was her way of trying to hush my incessant pleas.

“But MOM, I’m gonna’ be the only one who doesn’t have roller skates!”

“Well, we just can’t afford them right now.” This argument was not entirely irrelevant to me. I worried constantly about money because I was fully aware that we had very little of it. I dreaded field trips because I’d have to solicit five dollars — cash – that I knew neither my mother nor my father would have available, and I would inevitably be among those two or three students who waited so long to pay up that the teacher would begin threatening us with the possibility of not going at all.

Spending field trip day relegated to the back of a different teacher’s classroom with a stack of unappealing extra credit assignments was one thing. I could find a way play it off. “Oh, my parents gave me the money weeks ago but I spent it on my new Luke Perry poster.” But this? Not having roller skates for the roller skating party would provide actual, physical evidence of the poverty I was constantly working so hard to conceal. No, this was important. This was life and death. I. Needed. Roller skates.

At long last, the night before the big event, I was fairly confident I’d convinced my mother. She informed me that she would try to leave work, hunt down the objects of my desire, and bring them to my school in time for the party. Thus fortified with hope and excitement, I hardly slept that night. I could practically feel the laces tied up tight against my ankles and the wind flowing beneath my feat. Visions of perfectly-executed figure eights danced in my head and I was certain that, despite an unmitigated lack of experience, I would take to roller skating like a duck to water. I would join my classmates and speed around the playground, arm in arm (for some reason), smiles and laughter erupting intermittently between wheeled games of Red Rover. And, most important, with my feet appropriately clad, everyone would see that I was just like them, that I had what they had, that I was no different in any way whatsoever…

But of course, like most dreams, this one was quickly and disastrously crushed.

As promised, my mother came through with the skates. Shortly before the party was set to begin, a large box was delivered to my classroom, and all eyes were on me as the package arrived at my desk. My hopeful grin was of the ear-to-ear variety. And then, as I inspected the contents of the deceptively bright and shiny and not entirely cheap-looking box, my excitement melted away and was transmuted into equal parts embarrassment and terror. I didn’t want anyone to look at me, and fortunately, given the limited attention span of the average third grader, my wish was granted.

Now I didn’t want the roller skating party to happen at all. I prayed for an act of God — an earthquake, a flash flood, a violent asthma attack, anything to keep this from happening. I couldn’t put those…those…THINGS on my feet.

What lurked inside that box was to roller skates what a unicycle is to a Porsche. These were not roller skates. These were roller skates’ inbred, troglodytic half cousins. To my horror, my mother, in a decided and I’m sure necessary effort to save money, had purchased strap-on plastic squares, an inch thick and two-thirds the size of my foot, which had small wheels that protruded ever so slightly from the bottom and which seemed determined not to spin.

My shame was easily detected. I reluctantly carried my box of disappointment out to the playground and sat on the sidelines, motionless and holding back tears, as I watched the other kids slipping into their far superior footwear. This being the early ’90s, some of them even had roller blades, a product so cool and utterly beyond my reach that I couldn’t even look at them.

“Come on, Stephanie! Why aren’t you skating?” my friends asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I…I don’t want to put these on.”

“Just put them on! Come on!”

“Well, OK, I guess.”

My face undoubtedly brighter than a cherry, I slowly attached the thick plastic sqaures to my shoes. They were purple and were designed to stay on with a series of Velcroed straps. It was impossible to get them on tight enough, and that, along with the fact that they were inexplicably smaller than my feet, meant they wouldn’t remain stationary. I was terrified, but the masses were waiting.

I stood up and, for a moment, was struck by the fleeting hope that these atrocities crudely tied to my shoes might do the trick. For a split second, I saw myself somehow turning out impeccable figure eights and joining arms with my friends, who would be so impressed with my skills that they wouldn’t even notice the hilarity going on below my ankles.

But alas, this was not the case. Trying my best to remain nonchalant and attract no further attention, I cautiously struck one foot out, and then the other, fully expecting to fall down from the speed of the wheels. But I didn’t feel at all unsteady, so I decided to try to pick up the pace. One foot out, the other foot out. One foot out, the other foot out. This wasn’t so bad. I was moving along and I wasn’t losing my balance. But then I realized why. These “skates” weren’t for skating. They were for, at best, slow-motion skootching.

One foot out, the other foot out. One foot out, the other foot out. Despite my best efforts, it was impossible to gain any kind of speed. A leisurely stroll through the park with my 76-year-old grandmother would have effected a faster clip.

“Hey, your skates are like mini skateboards!” The taunting began. “You can’t go very fast!”

This episode having taken place about twenty years ago, the details of the fallout escape me. But it was painful, to the extent that, upon recounting this vignette to my husband awhile back — the first time I had told it to anyone — I burst into a glorious flood of tears.

But now I look back  on the trauma with a kind of amused nostalgia. There is of course the moral of people being more important than things. My mom did understand that the roller skates were intensely important to me, and she did her best to make me happy. And I knew that even then. On that particular occasion, her best wasn’t good enough, but I love her so much for trying.

I also learned a lesson in working hard for what you want. Undeterred in my desire for a real pair of roller skates, I started saving every dime that came my way. Once I’d managed to accumulate a tidy sum, I hinted (with great candor) to my grandmother that I only needed a mere twelve dollars in order to get the roller skates I so desperately wanted. Grandma, a sucker for my adorable nine-year-old self, promptly wrote me a check for the aforementioned difference and I was zipping around my cul-de-sac in killer pink wheels shortly thereafter. I can still feel the laces tied up tight against my ankles and the wind flowing beneath my feet. Though I never quite perfected my figure eight.

As for the fate of the strap-on roller skootchers, I tucked them away in the back of my closet and never wore them again. They were probably thrown out years later or donated to some poor girl who only got second-hand roller skootchers for Christmas. And I can’t help but think, gee, at least I wasn’t that kid.

I’m getting dangerously close to 30 and feel preternaturally compelled to start sucking the proverbial marrow from life, something I’ve failed to do for far too long.

Here, I hope to share my adventures abroad and in the kitchen, pick apart my favorite books, pine away for useless things I can’t afford, use French haphazardly, and just generally develop a chicness more befitting of an almost 30-year-old and an audacious literary voice befitting of an at least moderately successful writer.

Now read on, intrepid reader. Read on…