no boys allowed in the room!!!!

That recipe sounds delicious and do-able (except for the lardons but I'm veg so). Also what is cream fraiche? I'll google it.

Cooking is easier for me when there is a plan of action and instructions. My step mom is one of those McGyver kitchen people who can make something amazing out of anything and my mom was until recently a fast food, microwave dinner or ground beef meely muck mo type person so maybe some of the pressure comes from seeing my mom stress when hearing what I ate over the weekend at my dad's.

Creme fraiche is like sour cream, but lighter. If you're in America, go for sour cream because for some reason creme fraiche is $$$$$ there.

Original recipe and its variants are so easy - the hardest thing is a walk to the Italian market for the orzo. I may have to splurge and buy truffle oil since the restaurant dish I'm replicating was pure bliss because of this ingredient.

i've done that! (splurged on truffle oil to replicate a restaurant dish) when i make something like this, sometimes after toasting the starch (orzo/rice) i add a little sherry to the mixture before the stock. it adds a lot of flavor and makes it taste fancy.

also peacocks you should stop listening to the pressure and spend more time cooking with the stepmom, provided that you enjoy her company.

Yeah if yr partner nixed pasta completely, I see how that would make cooking much more difficult! My partner has nixed all Mexican foods, because apparently he "hates" it (you can hate meat and vegetables and cheese on a corn-meal plate? Who knew??). So that's a pain.

I bought orzo last weekend to make a cold salad with chickpeas, lemon juice, and something else, but maybe I'll use suzy's plan instead!

I very often make one thing for my partner and something completely different for myself. Last night he had a small steak, a spinach salad, and couscous. I had fish on a bed of greens with some couscous on the side. Sometimes I make soup for me and then different stuff for him. I used to make the same thing for both of us, but I got tired of always eating what he wanted. Now I still cook it all, but I get to eat what I want. We've lived together for ~10 yrs, so these things happen.

I actually have a tinytiny bottle of truffle oil! At which point would the truffle oil be applied, suzy? Thinking I might do this this evening as other half is out and I'll be going past a deli which may have orzo. Depends on if deli is open when I get there.

(Yes, most of my lazy cook-for-self recipes were pasta-based, or at least the ones which could actually came out OK fairly consistently. Have considered redoing them with e.g. couscous but he's not mad on tomato-based or carbonara-ish sauces either so may as well give up on them completely.)

i drizzle a (very!) little bit over the whole thing at the end, but i am not suzy

Plenty of pasta sauces could transition to being soups and be eaten with crusty buttered bread instead of pasta. Just thin them out with whatever base seems like the most logical for that sauce: some things would become soups with veg or chicken broth, some things you could thin ("thin") with cream. Then after you've made it that way once or twice, if you want it thicker in the future try adding some diced potatoes, or cook & blend some cauliflower to give it more body. Maybe it could use a can of white beans to make it more hearty (tip: white beans go awesome with the whole cannon of Italian sauces).

The trick may be to trick yourself into cooking while making your lizard-brain think you're just doing what you usually do.

Yep, right at the end. The place where I had ham/mushroom orzo in creamy sauce mixed parmesan and breadcrumbs infused with truffle oil and sprinkled it on top of the orzo, in a little ramekin, and then put this under a grill for a minute. Smelled amazing. You can also just put a few drops in at the end, less complicated.

Is there any food that when rejected by a partner, becomes a deal-breaker? I would be really annoyed if I had to make different meals (and the corresponding extra dishes) for two people and probably wouldn't weather someone who hated a major cuisine that I loved.

Orzo is better hot. Oddly, I used to stay away from pasta in college because I did not want to eat Poor Student Food. I don't think I've eaten cold pasta salad since 1989 - too dressingish - unless it's the 5-gallon batch of shrimp/egg/grape/macaroni salad my mother is liable to make for picnics and potlucks, which casual readers are right to be scared by. She would want to chop my arm off for shrimp-raiding this delicacy when I was little, but hey.

i could never live with a vegan
(sorry vegans)

It's pretty Midwestern but White Chicken Chili is a total no-brainer, if you're interested in the recp.

xp Haha I am suspicious of all mayo-based salads or the slimy pasta-with-oil things I see at New Jersey cook-outs, except that my mom has always made a tuna & pasta salad that's probably grosser than all of the above combined but in fact I love it.

I LOVED eating Ramen or instant rice things in college b/c I'd never had them before/they were not allowed at home.

Honestly, if someone gave me vinaigrette-soaked pasta and pepper salad in the 21st Century it would be deeply embarrassing. Midwestern Mom salad does imprint though I'm tempted to call it 'summer hotdish' because there's still tuna/chicken/beans in it and Durkee onions on top.

It's sad but my reaction to vegans being awkward* is BRING ME BACON or similar.

*awkward = not letting you know they're a vegan until they land in the middle of your dinner party, or in any way doing a PSA for veganism in the middle of something else.

yeah, i don't even like meat that much, but tell me i can't have it and i want a burger

Our version is a cold tuna-and-pasta salad using large shell pasta with small amnt mayo as a binder, extra lemon juice, shredded carrot, shredded cheddar, halved grapes, diced celery, sometimes halved pimiento olives (which I pick out). I think it must have evolved from "how can I feed 6 people with what's in the pantry, and sneak in two or three vegetables?"

i think my mom's pasta salad is good. no mayo or grapes (?) though. usually pieces of fresh mozzarella, olives, roasted red peppers, some other stuff i can't remember.

Oh yeah, where it detours to cheddar and grapes, we're not even pretending that this is related to Italian food in any way. Fresh mozz sounds nice.

i am a fan of cold pasta in general

OH well see that was more when I was a kid. My mom is retired now and makes all kinds of things so we have been cooking together more. My step dad is usually the main cook but they mostly work as a team which is what I would like in a relationship re. cooking.

Last week's egg fiasco had me unnecessarily nervous and quite overly apologetic. I'm over it now since I was able to prove to myself that I am not a complete kitchen ignoramus by making excellent blueberry pancakes from scratch for mother's day and spent more time in the kitchen making lunch and helping with dinner.

I'm vegetarian and am seeing a meat eater. He hasn't expressed any desire to make things with meat when we're eating together which is nice but eventually I'm sure he'll want to. I don't think I would object to preparing meat as long as I don't have to buy it and of course not eat it. Although, over the years I have become increasingly more squeamish when it comes to bloody looking meat. I guess I'll just have to find out when the time comes.

i don't really enjoy cooking meat and would have trouble being with someone who needs it every day. i've been eating more chicken lately but without a dishwasher i'm afraid to let it touch too many surfaces.

ps. my mom always makes tuna salad with apples, chopped almonds, celery, olive oil mayo and curry powder. It is sooo good and one of the only times I will ever eat fish.

My mom's evil salad is small/large shrimps, white grape halves, macaroni shells, boiled eggs, finely chopped scallions, mayo. If I'm not around I'm sure she makes it with tuna. Things I didn't eat as a child: mayo-based salads, Boston baked beans, canned tuna (still will hurl at smell), jello salad, fucking horrible five-bean salad and anything made with Miracle Whip. At summer potlucks I had very little choice apart from grill stuff and fruit.

hb: Plant mister full of water with a capful of bleach, recommended. Best not to accidentally get any on your clothes, though.

Or if your sink has a drain-stopper, dump all the things that touched the chicken in there, cover them w hot water, add couple of caps of bleach, wait 5 mins or so. Drain hot water, wash items normally.

It's not perfect but it's more than adequate for at-home use.

XP now see, that's a mongrel salad too, some let's-add-canned-fish version of the Walforf. I feel better now.

XXP. And WalDorf, obv.

but no one NEEDS meat every day -- maybe my earlier example misrepresented my partner's eating habits. usually we're pretty much vegetarian about 75% of the time; i do like to use meat to flavor things, though, and am not interested in forsaking cheese or butter or honey.

anyway, i just can't deal with the overwhelming (to me) severity of veganism.

"salads" with mayo have disgusted me since the day i was born. i have never eaten one and i never plan to. <-- this is the kind of severity i can get behind!

nah i don't like playing around with bleach, i'd rather just not eat it or throw it into a skillet without letting it touch anything else
i like three-bean salad (green beans, kidney beans, garbanzos w/ balsamic/olive oil dressing + herbs)

There's probably a vinegar rinse that would kill salmonella et al too. I'm sure there are eco-/pet-friendly alternatives to bleach.

i could figure it out if i wanted to, i just don't want to that bad

I've been vigorously anti-potato salad my whole life but I made it 100x last summer per the Cook's Illus recp and I can't get enough. More vinegar-y than mayo, for sure.

Re chicken: it's so much cheaper to buy a whole one or buy more parts and section them out yourself, that I try to do that instead of getting the more processed skinless/boneless/tasteless breasts. But working with it more means it touches more things: knife, kitchen scissors, cutting board, my hands. I try to be sanitary about that stuff.

vinegar solves every problem.

http://www.versatilevinegar.org/usesandtips.html

yeah i clean everything with vinegar

Whenever I've worked with chicken recently I've washed the pieces in lemon or lime juice depending on the recipe, but otherwise I just clean up with thick bleach at the end.

I love nice mayo (it was like a golden door opened when I discovered it went with fries) but anything with raw yolk or obvious yolk used to make me heave when I was a kid.

New question. Not intending flame war or anything, but can I get a sampling of people's feelings about gettin hitched & changing your name?

I have always thought it was so obvious as to be a non-issue that I'd keep my own, and now that appears not to be an option under the circs. Got kinda weird at my house last night.

don't see a reason to change names anymore & would get really mad/uncomfortable @ someone for thinking it's mandatory because it kinda shows their whole philosophy on that kind of stuff

It depends on the name and how it matches the other names.

It's up to you to do what you want for your own reasons. It's not something that should be discussed in the hypothetical because every situation is different. Every decision to keep or change one's name could change acc. to the circumstances. That's my philosophy.

I did what I wanted (changed my name, shifted former surname to middle name) because it's what I wanted to do under my individual set of circumstances. Not going into any reasons on the internet.

Sounds stressful, though. Sorry L.

...but if partner is asking for negation of your name then :/

YES harbl which since I know his philosph, I thought it would never come up and therefore I never BROUGHT it up. I "forgot" his family is Roman Catholic & I appear to have misunderestimated how strong the tradition/history is there.

Also he says that it's "normal" and possibly even legally required for womenz to change their names at marriage in (most of?) Europe, which I would never have guessed. Maybe sexism is a thing like "racism" that Europe thinks it's so "over" that no one talks about it.

i have heard that about europe

It's just not true. Has he been to Europe?

He's from there.

i'm unsure of what's actually going on here:

1) are you trying to change his mind?
2) are you trying to convince yourself to agree with him?
3) are you genuinely trying to make this decision because he has proposed?
4) is this conversation about a decision that is, at this time, purely/almost entirely hypothetical?

The third one, but it turns out it is contingent on my not keeping only my own name. Which we had simply never talked about before, so we both feel blind-sided by the other.

I of course think he's being 100% retarded.

aha. well, at least it's not hypothetical -- those conversations are like precedent-setting provocations to argue.
on the other hand, congratulations?!

that's kind of a weird condition? like forgetting the point of getting married?

well i guess it depends what you think the point is

My understanding of the point last night was mostly "What fucking year is it again?!? Oh wait Southern Europe plus RC, you can't tell your family, can you, yeah now we're getting somewhere...."