Over the years, we’ve been known to spend hours preparing elaborate meals that get consumed in less time than we spent chopping the ingredients for. We know that will be a thing of the past come June, and we’ve slowly been preparing ourselves for our new reality. The fact that our lives have already become busier has made this transition more a necessity, but other times, we’ve been experimenting just for testing purposes. Can I really cook this meal that used to take me an hour to make in 30 minutes? What can I cut out, what shortcuts can I use, do I really need to de-seed those cucumbers and tomatoes? Our goal is to retain the same type of meals that we’ve been enjoying over the years without succumbing to the ease of take-out and things pulled out of the freezer. I’m sure all of you parents will laugh and say “Oh, just wait. You’ll see.”

But we do have some advantages: we’ve built up a repertoire of meals that we can practically cook blindfolded with one hand tied behind our back (which may come in handy), many of the dishes that we make can easily be simplified by cutting out some of the ingredients, lots of things that we make actually require minimal cooking or minimal attention while cooking, we’re planners and figure out what we’re going to make each night of the week and shop and prepare accordingly on the weekends, we have a well-stocked pantry, and we’re a little nuts.

For us, meals are never an afterthought. We never say, let’s just eat whatever and get it over with. We eat dinner together at the kitchen table every single night, and it’s something that’s enormously important to us. Yeah, it’s a time to talk, share, blah, blah, blah, but more importantly, it’s a time to eat really tasty food. Every day and every meal, we’re excited about what we’re eating. We actually say things like, “Ah, I can’t wait for dinner tomorrow night. It’s going to be soooooooo good.” My favorite part of the workday is lunch, when I get to eat my tasty leftovers from the night before. For most people, cooking is a chore, but we choose to make it special every night. It makes the day so much better when you know you have something tasty to look forward to.

With that being said, we know we have to be realistic about things. In a few short months, something that cries a lot, poops a lot, and eats a lot will take precedence in our lives. We know that things will completely change, and we’ll have to make many sacrifices along the way. I know that our meals will be interrupted, delayed, or flat out ignored as we tend to the needs of a baby, but I have to stay optimistic and at least try to keep up what has always been a huge part of our lives. Ask me again in July how I’m doing with this.

On a busy Monday night, we attempt to cook dinner in 10 minutes, and it’s a rousing success. You have to know when to use some help, so we enlisted the help of our good friends Trader Joe’s and Russo’s. This would be a quick noodle soup with lo mein noodles, shrimp, carrots, and snap peas, and to make things easy, we used some boxed soy ginger broth from TJ’s and freshly made lo mein from Russo’s. The only actual prep work required was defrosting the shrimp (from two pound bags bought at Costco), slicing the carrots, chopping the scallions, and um, that’s it. The broth goes into the pot to heat up, and once brought to a boil, the snap peas and carrots go in. I added a little more fresh ginger and soy to liven up the broth a little bit, and in went the shrimp and the noodles. Everything cooks in pretty much the same amount of time (all of about 4 minutes), and a little hot sauce at the end finishes it up. Done and done. With the exception of the chopping, it could literally be done with one hand, and you know what? It tasted really good, and it immediately entered into our permanent rotation. All it took was having the right ingredients on hand.

I’ll be honest, it all felt a little Semi Homemade, but if I ever really get to that point, you have my permission to kick me in the junk. You’ll most likely be seeing a lot more of meals like this from me coming up, but don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll be stupid enough to try to keep on tackling more adventurous meals, so stay tuned. Wish me luck.

• What a difference a couple of coats of paint make. For some stupid reason, when we painted the rest of the house, we neglected to paint about half of the doors to match the rest of the trim and doors. Left their natural stained wood color, they made the rooms feel dark, and for months, we’ve wanted to paint them. We finally got out our brushes and went to work on them, and a few hours later, the place looks completely different. We have a couple left to do, but who knew that white doors could make me so happy?
• Forget this whole baby thing. The Lovely Suse has already had the most exciting and momentous event of 2007: She beat me in a game of candlepin bowling. I have no excuses other than the fact that I was not yet at my two beer bowling sweet spot. It wasn’t that I played particularly poorly, but she just bowled an impressive string. We love the old-skool vibe of Lanes and Games, with both 10-pin (an hour and a half wait on Saturday night!), Candlepin, billiards, and most importantly, a lounge with cheap drinks.
• It was not a particularly good week of sleeping for us last week. Our little friend George decided to start waking us up crying at 3AM for a week and a half straight. Some days, it was 2:30, some days 12:30, and some days 4AM. Granted, we have yet to experience the sounds of a crying baby in the middle of the night, but is there a more annoying sound than the whines and yelps of a 4.5 pound yorkie? We’ve had two good nights in a row, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.
• I tried out my reworked cast iron pizza technique to great success on Saturday night. After a 2 minute bake in the oven on top of an overturned preheated cast iron placed under the broiler to completely cook the top and inside, a couple more minutes on top of the stove in a non-stick pan finally gave me the crispy bottom that I was looking for. It came out as close to perfect as I think I can get in a home oven. Come on, who wants to build me a wood burning oven?
• Scheduled Sunday afternoon naps are a very good thing. I think that will become a new tradition in a hurry.
• Another easy home improvement fix that made a huge difference in our lives: a single piece of aluminum sleet metal. When placed behind the radiator in our bedroom, it’s as if some one turned the thermostat up by 10 degrees. The heat that would usually be lost to the wall is reflected back out into the room to keep us nice and toasty. Thank you This Old House.
• Speaking of home improvement, my current favorite home improvement tv show is Holmes on Homes. This expert builder and contractor, Mike Holmes goes into people’s homes who have had shoddy work done by other contractors. He shows what they’ve done wrong, completely rips it apart, and rebuilds it the right way. It’s amazing how badly people get taken advantage of by contractors, and this show teaches you lots of things to look for and how to do things correctly. Hopefully, this helps us when we hire one to build us a closet.

I have a bit of a predicament on my hands these days. It’s slowly crept up on me over the past year, and I get the feeling that this problem will only get worse as our lives are about to get much, much busier. My problem? I’m drowning in a ever-deepening sea of media. Between the hours of shows on our Tivo, a stack of movies that we haven’t gotten a chance to watch yet, piles of magazines that barely get skimmed, the stack of books on my nightstand, the gigabytes of music, both streaming and downloaded, that I’ve barely gotten to listen to more than a few times, and the seemingly hundreds of blogs that I subscribe too, there’s not enough time in the day to keep up with it all. With endless choice in entertainment and information, I’m trying to swallow them all at once, but there’s only so much room in my head for them all. What am I supposed to do?

I realize that with the exception of the few hours out of the day that I’m sleeping, I’m almost constantly ingesting media. It starts at 5AM with checking the news, weather, email, and a few blogs before heading downstairs to work out. While on the bike, the newspaper gets read while watching the local news, and then I may watch something recorded on the Tivo, or read one of my seven or eight monthly magazine subscriptions. Back upstairs, I listen to my Sirius stream, which also streams to the Tivo in our bedroom for when I’m getting ready in the morning. During breakfast, I read more blogs before heading off for work. In the car, my Sirius listening continues, as it does throughout the rest of the morning. The afternoon listening switches over to KCRW, WOXY, SomaFM, or NPR. Throughout the day, I take breaks to read through dozens more websites and blogs, and the number I subscribe to increases every day. I do occasionally go back through my subscriptions to get rid of ones that I don’t read consistently, but my current number is 172. 172! Technology, people, photography, trashy gossip, food, sports, and now kid stuff add to my daily intake, and it’s getting harder and harder to keep up with them all. Maybe I have too many interests or get too involved with them, but with all of the information and entertainment to be had, I don’t want to miss out on anything. It’s all a bit ridiculous. More Tivo watching at night finished up the day.

So much of it is redundant (i.e. I read something on a blog, the next day or so it turns up in the newspapers and the TV news, then a few weeks later in a magazine.), but I feel the need to be the first to know. My head it a bottomless pit of useless pop culture knowledge, news tidbits, indie rock songs, recipes and restaurant reviews, and gadget previews. On top of it all, I’m trying to come up with my own content to put on this space. I know that come May 31, my free time will shrink even more, so something will have to give.

So what do I give up? Is this the time in a person’s life when they become completely out of touch with culture? Am I suddenly going to be 50 years old and still listening to the same music that I am today, just like those kids in high school who latch on to classic rock and never listen to anything else for the rest of their lives? Will my son or daughter make fun of me for not knowing who the latest pop star tabloid celebrity is, or for still using one of those ancient “cell phones”, or for jamming to that “classic indie rock” from the early 2000’s? Or will I be able to keep up with the times? Will I be one of the much publicized Grups? Will I still be hip when I’m old? God, I hope so.

I know my media consumption will take a hit, but I guess I’ll need to figure out what goes to the chopping block. What “important” pieces of information am I willing to give up knowing? Will I suffer if I read GQ and not Esquire, or Gourmet and not Bon Appetit? Will my life be less complete without celebrity nip-slips and crotch shots? (Um, yeah.) Will my Tivo forgive me if I delete programs without watching them? I guess we’ll see what happens. Priorities will work themselves out, and hopefully, I’ll make it through this without becoming an out of touch fuddy duddy. Ok, I have some 845 blogs and the NYTimes Food section to read and some new albums to listen to. Back to work.

• There’s nothing funnier than 30 Yorkies running around a room like crazy. Apparently, George already has quite a reputation.
• We want to build a closet in our front hallway, and we’ve had a couple of contractors in to give us estimates. The first one came back with a ridiculously high price, so high is was laughable. Probably about 5 times what we wanted to spend. The next one came back at about a two thirds less, but still more than we wanted to pay. If others can’t give us a more reasonable price, I think a trip to Ikea will be in our future. Jeez, how hard is it to put up two walls, install two doors, and put up a hanging rod?
• We made homemade chipwiches yesterday. Homemade vanilla frozen yogurt sandwiched between store bought chocolate chip cookies, which were a big hit. They didn’t quite take the sting out of the Pat’s loss to the Colts, though.
• We went looking at strollers this weekend, and I think we found the one that we want. It’s pretty incredible the amount of stroller envy that can go on among parents, but it’s no different than any other type of envy. Those same people who are going out and buying gigantic SUV’s to do their grocery shopping are the same ones who are spending a fortune on a stroller. Some of these things are just monstrous, weigh a ton, take up a huge amount of space. I guess they need their big SUV to carry their strollers, right? We wanted one that was light, easy to handle, folded up easily, was sturdy enough, and didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Sure, those Bugaboos are really cool looking, but really, they’re just unnecessary and complete overkill for us. Oh, and they cost $800. Maybe if we were planning on going offroading with the stroller, it would be worth it, but to walk up and down our sidewalks and around malls, I think we’ll be ok.
• I think the older I get, the fewer laces I want on my shoes.
• Borat is as great as all of the reviews and hype had said it was, but I think it would have been a lot funnier had we never seen the 8 million previews, clips, interviews, and his segments on Da Ali G Show. A lot of it is stuff that we’ve already seen. Still, I’m just glad that Sascha Baron Cohen won a Golden Globe and I hope he wins an Oscar. No one else has the balls to do what he does.
• Mobile Web on my cell phone is pretty cool. It’s even cooler when it’s free.

• The Lovely Suse would like everyone to know that for a total of 20 hours, she had the superior cellphone technology in the family. After waiting months for the phone of our choice to go on sale so we could get it for free, this week was finally the week. I began to have second thoughts about what phone to get, and in the meantime, she took the plunge and made the upgrade. After playing with her phone for a few minutes, I was overcome with jealousy and went out the next day to get the same phone. I will not be bested when it comes to technology! I feel much better now. I also realized that I”m soooooo behind the times when it comes to cell phone use. I barely text message people, I don’t use my phone to listen to music or watch movies, I don’t browse the web, and I don’t care about cool ringtones. I just want to call people and look cool while doing it.
• I yell at people a lot when I’m driving. Not other people in the car, but other drivers. I have a really dirty mouth, and I’m realizing that I’ll need to clean it up soon so I don’t pass on my potty-mouth to our future child. Otherwise, his/her first words might be “Green means go, jackass!” or “Nice turn signal motherf!*^$%^er?” Luckily, I’m an excellent driver.
• Based on scientific observations, I’m willing to bet that the majority of nose picking occurs in the car. Have studies been done?
• Yes, the above photo was taken with a cell phone. Who says I’m behind the times?

• Total Number of Projects Done This Weekend: 0. And I loved every minute of it. Ok, well, I did clean out part of the basement, but that was just fun. I like to throw stuff out. I’ve completely lost the need to save anything. If I haven’t used something in the past year, it’s gone. Streamline, baby!
• I picked up a giant cast iron frying pan to try out my newest pizza making technique with. It’s a 15 inch pan, and weighs as much as my neice. Seriously. As far as the experiments went, they were relatively successful. I”m definitely on the right track, and with some tweaking, I’ll get there. My pies ended up charred and puffy and beautiful on the top, light and fluffy and soft inside, but the bottoms are coming out too soft. I need to figure out how to get them crispy before the top completely burns. After reheating leftovers in a non-stick pan which resulted in a nice crispy bottom, my next experiment is already in the planning stages.
• We finally met the ever-elusive Juan on friday night. He actually exists! Congrats to Kirstin and Juan on their engagement.
• Oh, how I love Matt Murphy’s. Great Irish food and the best pint of Guiness Murphy’s around. The Lovely Suse craves their fish and chips periodically, and it’s the perfect place on a cold winter’s night.
• P-A-T-S! PATS! PATS! PATS! I wouldn’t exactly call myself a fair-weather fan, but I only really get excited about football during playoff time. Sure, I’ll watch all of the regular season games, but I don’t get too worked up over them. The playoffs are a different matter though. That’s when the Lovely Suse gets to watch chick flicks in the other room while I yell and jump around in the living room. I think I scared the crap out of George.
• Speaking of George, he has too many teeth. He’s got a little tiny mouth, but the same number of teeth as any other dog, which can be a problem. To pull out his extra teeth, we’d have to go to a frigging animal dentist, at a cost of several hundred dollars. I think we’ll keep on tugging on his teeth to try to rip them out of his head instead. On a happier note, he’s up to a whopping four and a half pounds. I guess the all-kibble diet that we finally got him on is doing good things.
• I finished refinishing another dresser last week, thereby redeeeming myself from the last disaster. Of course, this dresser is doomed for the basement, so no one is going to see it anyways. Probably for the best.
• I just ate part of a Clif Bar that I found on the ground on my office. I thought it had just fallen, but I think it was from last week. Oh well. I don’t think it will kill me. I tend to eat stuff off the floor a lot. Remember that the next time I cook for you.

• We had an ultrasound on Friday and saw that baby all moving around and stuff. And he/she stuck his/her tongue out at us. Definitely a Carpenter.
• I’m all for the environment and stuff, but if Global Warming means more 71 degree days in the middle of January, then I’m all for it. Walking around in jeans and a t-shirt and feeling warm, I thought I was living in California or something.
• Who knew that you could buy clothes for $0.97?
• Another pizza experiment was a smashing success. It involves cooking the pie on an overturned cast iron frying pan placed under the oven’s broiler so it cooks at crazy high heat from both sides. The pizza cooked in two minutes, as opposed to the typical 8-10 minutes, which results in a nice puffy charred crust that doesn’t get all dried out and stays soft in the middle. I’ve never been completely satisfied with any crust that I’ve done, but I’ve always suspected that it was due to the inferior oven temperature. Never having had the opportunity to cook in a real wood burning oven, this is as close as I’ve gotten, and I like what I see.
• I think I’ve redeemed myself with refinshing another piece of furniture. Not giving up after a somewhat disastrous attempt at another old dresser, I decided to take on a much easier piece that didn’t need stripping, and got much better results. Once I laquer it tonight, we’ll know for sure. Stay tuned for photos.
• I fired up the charcoal grill last night for my first attempt at indirect cooking with some barbeque chicken. It’s just amazing the difference between the charcoal and the gas, which the charcoal just adding tons of additional flavor and aroma. The threat of burning my house and yard down is much greater, but the payoff is well worth it. I think I’m a convert.
• woxy.com is my new favorite internet radio station. Check it out.

New Year’s Eve sure ain’t what it used to be. Drunken debauchery, disappointed expectations, and mediocre food used to be the standard, which I sort of just came to expect. That changed a few years ago, when the Lovely Suse and I started going out for a nice dinner to cap off the year, with back to back visits to Oleana, which dispensed with the usual overpriced and uninspired New Year’s prix fixe menu, and continued to serve their normal and fantastic dishes a la carte. After two years, it was time to try something new, so we decided to dispense with going out all together and staying home to eat and drink on our own terms. We could spend as long as we wanted cooking as we had the whole night to kill, so it was time to try some new things and indulge in some rich and extravagant recipes, along with polishing off a couple of bottles of wine and prosecco along the way.

We planned to repeat last year’s menu of olive and garlic crusted rack of lamb, lemon braised artichokes, and fennel gratin, topped off with chocolate mousse and homemade whipped cream, but with the pregnant Lovely Suse unable to enjoy undercooked meat, lamb was off the menu. Hell, what was the point of eating any meat that’s completely cooked to the point of being shoe leather? It was time for a last minute change of plans. For some reason, we got the idea of gnocchi in our heads, and after poring through a stack of cookbooks, we found the most complicated one we could find, from our good friend Bouchon Cookbook.

His recipe for “Parisienne” Gnocchi don’t use any potato as all, as the traditional Italian recipe does, but instead uses what is basically the same dough that’s used for eclairs and profiteroles, Pâte à Choux. Water, lots of butter (a stick and a half), salt, and flour are cooked together to form this wacky pasty dough, and then eggs and herbs (parsley, chives) and more salt are beaten into form a batter. Rather then cutting the dough by hand and shaping them with a fork, you simply pipe them out of a piping bag (or a ziplock bag with the corner cut off) and cut them into 1 inch segments directly into a pot of simmering water. After poaching for a few minutes, you fish them out to drain and firm up. They’re essentially cooked at that point, but you’ll be cooking them more later.

To go along with the gnocchi, we decided to go with a combination of butternut squash, sage, and pancetta, trying to stuff as many calories and fat as possible into the last meal of the year. the squash is cut into 1/2 inch cubes and sauteed along with the sage in a combination of butter and olive oil until browned on all sides. The pancetta is diced into small pieces and rendered until crispy and tasty.

Time to finish cooking the gnocchi and combine our butter-laden treats. In a non-stick pan (don’t use a regular pan as I discovered the hard way), add more butter and toss in your gnocchi. Due to the 6 pounds of butter, they should brown up nicely. Add a handful of the squash and sage and add come of the pancetta. Toss it all for a couple of minutes until warmed through, and plate it up.

Just like you favorite late-night infomercial, “But wait! There’s more!”. Butter, that is. In your pan, add a couple of teaspoons of butter, add more fresh sage and herbs, until lightly browned, and then squeeze in half of a lemon. Swirl it around, and spoon the sauce over the gnocchi. Prepare to get buttery. You have the rich gnocchi with the crispy exterior and light and fluffy interior, the sweet squash and salty bacon all playing off each other. Enjoy it while you can, because after two hours of cooking, you’ll be full after about 3 minutes of eating it. It’s just so heavy and so rich and just right to ring in the New Year.

Sorry this is a little late, but there were over 260 posts to sort through to come up with this list. Quite a year.

• Best new Kitchen Gadget: The Nine Stars DZR-42-1 Infrared Trash Can. I thought that this would take some getting used to, but I’m so used to it, I went to our clothes hamper the other night and waved my dirty clothes in front of it waiting for the top to open. Why isn’t the entire world automatic?
• Best TV show: Man vs. Wild. After watching this for the past couple of months, I feel like I need to start carrying a flint at all times in case I end up stranded in the middle of the African savanah. Also, if I ever end up stranded on top of a mountain range, I know know to keep going down (even if it means climbing down sheer rock faces with no ropes) until I find a river, and then follow that river until I find a path, and then follow that path to civilization or a road. Bear Grylls is my new hero.
• Best Effortless Recipe: No-Knead Olive Bread. I can’t believe I haven’t made this one again, but I think it was the single most impressive thing I made in the kitchen all year.
• Best Miraculous Car Repair: Fixing three of my car’s window regulators with $0.20 worth of plastic zip ties. What could have been a $1000+ repair simply took some online research and some faith.
• Best Meal (local): The Lovely Suse’s birthday dinner at Neptune Oyster. It took us about 3 seconds to fall in love with this little nook in the North End, and we had a pretty perfect meal there. Pressed tin ceilings, subway tiles, giant mirrors, penny tile floor, marble bar, limited seating, cozy ambience and a fantastic staff. This immediately enters the “dream restaurant” category for us as one of those places that if we could imagine the kind of place that we’d want to exist, this would be it.
• Best Meal (Non-local): Los Dos Molinos, some of the best Mexican/new Mexican food I’ve had, and possibly the meal that started our Mexican obsession for the year. Speaking of which…
• Best food obsession (non-pizza): Mexican food. I don’t know where it came from, but we became obsessed with all things Mexican this year. The constant aroma of limes, chilis, and toasted tortillas was a welcome addition to the kitchen.
• Best Food Obsession (pizza): Caputo flour. This stuff completely transformed my pizza making this year, so much so that I started buying it in 10 kilo packages. Seriously, who’s ready for some Peteza?
• Best “I’m living in a sitcom” Moment: The death of Fishy McFish.
• Best New Addition to the Family: George Danger Carpenter
• Best Workout (Outdoors): Building our patio in a single day. A full 12 hours of lifting, dragging, raking, shoveling, screeding, leveling, pounding, more lifting, more shoveling, and more lifting lots and lots of heavy stones, sand, rocks, and pavers that pretty much left me more tired than I’ve ever been in my life.
• Best Workout (Indoors): The Rumpus Room. Quitting the gym, turning our finished basement into a home gym, and never looking back. After years of spending time and money on a gym membership, I figured out that with an exercise bike, a pullup bar, a dip bar, and a balance ball, I could get all the workout that I needed. I always did hate lifting weights.
• Best Sandwich: The Panino Tonno (Imported yellowfin tuna in olive oil, black olive Tapenade. House marinated artichokes, baby greens) at Domenic’s in Waltham. It was the sandwich of the year as of January 1 last year, and nothing has topped it. It’s the bread that really makes it special.
• Best trend: baby making. There must be something in the water this year, as no less than nine babies were born to family and friends. 2007 is going to be a very interesting year for us, to say the least.
• Best Lifechanging Technology: Sirius Satellite Radio. At first, I thought I might miss local radio, but I haven’t given it a second thought. Never having to listen to commercials, constant variety, and Howard 24/7 has made my days and car rides bearable so much more enjoyable. I’m never listening to commercial radio again.

• A subdued New Years Eve for us. A butter-filled meal, very little booze, and a whole lotta Everest.
• The first run with the deep fryer was a smashing success. The fries were crispier and far less greasy than my past attempts, so this is a great addition to the kitchen arsenal. We also tried frying a pickle, which has some great potential. I think we need to have a frying party sometime soon, where everyone has to bring something different to throw in the fryer. Who’s in?
• Try finding a chimney charcoal starter and hardwood charcoal in the middle of winter. It’s not easy. But I did manage to find charcoal at Whole Foods, and the starter at the BBQ Barn, so we were good to go. My charcoal skills will need some work, as I had a tough time keeping the coals going once they were lit and put into the kettle. The airflow is the issue. After some trial and error, I finally got the fire going, and our first burgers were quite tasty. But I think winter grilling should be left to the gas grill for now. Oh, and it was 25 degrees out when I was doing this, all the while trying to deal with the deep fryer.
• The stupid frigging dresser that I spent last week stripping and refinishing better look good when it’s all done. The 5+ layers of paint and stain on the piece took three full days to remove, including stripping the details work by hand with a pick and a toothbrush, for crissakes. Spending three straight days covered in stripper and old paint is not a way to spend your vacation. Remind me not to do it ever again.
• I did manage to fix about four squeaks in our hallway with Squeak-No-More, which only leaves about 42 left to fix. Sweet.
• After four years of driving past it and saying we should go, we finally made our first visit to the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown for breakfast. We’re not big fans of going out for breakfast usually, and waiting in line for it is something that we definitely won’t do, but sleeping in and perfect timing let us walk right in and sit down to some fantastic blue corn pancakes, French toast, and freshly squeezed orange juice. I think we’ll have to go back soon.
• This happened a few weeks ago, but getting George on an all-kibble diet made our lives a whole lot easier. For months, we were cooking him real food (rice, ground meat or turkey, carrots) since he wouldn’t eat his dog food and then make himself sick by not eating anything. Finally being old enough to realize that when he’s hungry he needs to eat, he started eating dog food, and we never game him anything else. Success!