And some cooking

I did cook an Easter dinner for myself. (I got the last pack of lamb chops the Kroger's had on Friday. They weren't the greatest I've ever had, but they weren't awful, either*)

I made a batch of red cabbage - bought a small head (my garden cabbage is not ready yet, and I admit I look at it nervously every hot day we have...will I get heads out of it before it gets so warm that the cabbage bolts?). I modified the recipe I always use (shred the cabbage, add a couple cut-up apples, add a couple Tablespoons sugar and two-thirds cup vinegar...), this time I used one of those small (6 oz.) bottles of moscado wine in place of some of the water. That was a good change. (I don't drink wine myself, so I buy the four-packs of tiny bottles for cooking. No idea if it's "good" or "bad" wine, but I don't really buy into the wine-snob argument that you should never cook with a wine you wouldn't serve...)

I also made spaetzle for the first time ever. And I was successful! I used the recipe in the Settlement Cook Book after looking at the one in my Luchow's German Cookbook** and seeing that it called for a pound of flour, and I just didn't feel like doing the math necessary to cut it down. (I did add nutmeg to the spaetzle batter - which Luchow's recommends but the Settlement Cook Book doesn't mention - every restaurant version of spaetzle I've had has nutmeg in it).

I also forced it through a colander (which is how my mom always made it) rather than dropping it off a spoon (which is what the Settlement Cook Book advised). Spaetzle is quite rich and heavy (it's an egg plus milk plus flour, pretty much) and it kind of falls into that tradition of eggy-flour dishes that can stretch out a meal with less meat. (I suspect Yorkshire pudding developed for similar reasons).

I have one of the three chops left. Part of it was I was getting full after finishing the second one, but part of it was also I couldn't quite justify consuming $12 worth of main-dish at a single meal. (Then again, with the exception of the head of red cabbage - which was a couple of bucks - everything else in the meal was made from staples I already had on hand).

(* I once tried the lamb that the local Mart of Wal carries. It was actually mutton labeled as lamb, I think. It would be fine if I'd grown up eating mutton, but I hadn't, so it wasn't.)

(**I wonder if Luchow's still exists. Reading the cookbook - which has drawings by Ludwig Bemelmans - makes it seem like something out of the long-gone era of Delmonico's. The time when Archie Goodwin roamed the streets of New York and before things like restrictions on salt and trans fats. (I can just imagine Nero Wolfe's reaction, on one of his rare trips out to a restaurant, to be handed a menu containing caloric and fat labeling of the dishes).