Pre-Thanksgiving?

Making a mess!

I love autumn. I love the transitional phase into winter as our days get shorter and our nights longer. I love the comfort foods (and so do my braces!), hot chocolate, rum apple cider, spiced wine, a fire in our fire place, holidays, fall colors. To me autumn feels warmer than summer. Emotionally, physically, spiritually. No, really, I'm actually being serious. The warm colors, hot beverages, blanket snuggling and well-wishes warm me from the inside out. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and finally the big-bang of New Years. A lot of introspection goes on in this time and it culminates in this fiery burst of energy on New Years where you get drunk enough to forget all of your resolutions, or you remember but are too hung over to get your ass to the gym. (I say this because resolutions should be made anytime...now!)

Summer in Seattle is so fleeting. I enjoy it while it is here but it's so...short. The food in summertime tends to be the same. You get a bag of blueberries and you have to hurry up to eat it before it goes bad. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the bumber crop that summer brings. I love the fruit, the salads, the fresh fruity bursting flavors of summer, but it just so happens that the heartiness of fall/winter foods is really what appeals to me. I love making huge batches of chili to eat during the week, I love the butter and the cream and the fat, the kale and the squashes, and don't even get me started on pumpkin. When autumn comes around I feel more connected to the...oh...I'm going to say it...EARTH. It's true. Autumn is just so damn seasonal to me. I can't wait to post pictures of my homemade apple cider!

If there is one thing I would like to improve with my cooking it would be to cook more seasonally. I know I feel out-of-touch with shopping at grocery stores. I never know what is in season and what isn't. I have a pretty good clue, but for a lot of things I don't know. (Is there a season for mushrooms?) So, I picked up a seasonal cooking book from our awesome library. Let's hope it's worth a damn. :)

In other news I will be picking up a brand-new Nikon D3100 this Friday, provided they are still in stock! I am hoping to improve my photography skills (though I realize the camera won't help). It's painfully embarrassing to see a lot of my earlier pictures. I thought I was hot shit with my arrogantly named 'study in mushrooms' (I'm not even linking it). Blarg. But with recent research I am seeing things in a much different light (haha). It's a slow process, but a lot of fun getting to where I want to be.

As for this meal, I had some leftover buttermilk from the apple cake, so I marinated a chicken breast in buttermilk, garlic powder, parsley, cayenne, thyme. Dredged it flour, egg and panko and pan fried it. I am sure it would have turned out fine but I don't have any patience so I started messing with the chicken instead of just letting sit and the bread crumb-crust started falling off. Oops. But it was tasty anyways. Some of it just fell off into the mashed potatoes and added some texture.