Plans

This is a slow week in the kitchen for me. There's no real meals on the horizon that I intend to make this week. Mostly that's because we have a fridge and freezer full of leftovers and Bunny and I would really like to eat our way through them. I will throw out food, sometimes (when it's gone bad, or when it's just two mini roast potatoes that neither of us are going to eat that night, or what have you) but I really don't like to.

Anytime I clean out the fridge or throw out food, poor Bunny gets an earful. So we're trying to avoid that.

I'd be lying, though, if I said there wasn't a bigger reason that nothing's happening in the kitchen. It's this little itch in my hands, the back of my mind just begging for me to scratch it. Something sitting, still in its box, down in the foyer waiting for us to create space for it and start using it. Something that comes in beautiful, gorgeous Empire Red. Not to mention the hand mixer and the flan dish and mini casseroles that ALSO came home with us for Christmas.

Really, nothing can be done in the kitchen until Bunny and I re-organize a few things and create more usable space. First, we need space for the KitchenAid, and it needs to be both stable and near a plug. I don't want to put it on the bench table we use as a counter, because it's away from the walls and it isn't stable. Seeing as my mother is of the bigger-is-better mindset and bought me the biggest available mixer, I need to make sure it's stable.

So, plan at this point, is to bring Bunny's workbench in from the back balcony and move all his engine stuff to that so I can have the dining room table for the mixer. Yeah, we don't use our dining room table. Plus we will need to reorganize our cupboards and find space for the hand mixer, flan dish and mini-casserole dishes.

Next week, though, I have some kitchen dreams. They include:

• Risotto! I finally have arborio rice, and I'd like to pick up some fancy mushrooms.
• Fruit tart! I'm thinking maybe pears? And my own flan dish certainly calls for making my own pie shell. I could do a quiche in there, but where's the fun in that.
• Gratin of some sort. Maybe scalloped potatoes (I think I'm going to pick up a mandoline in the next few weeks), but some sort of beautiful gratin served in my new mini casseroles.
• So many mixer recipes - meringues (and then macarons, when I get the meringues right), cookies and cupcakes, mousses
• BUTTER! Because how cool is that, really? And then buttermilk pancakes with the leftover milk, of course

Surprisingly, the casserole dishes are lighting my imagination slightly more than the mixer. I look at them and all I can think of is having guests over for dinner, serving mini mac and cheese side dishes, souffles, so many ideas. Yum.