Dang. If I roasted up some diced rutabaga and got some charred edges, and sauteed the shallots, minced, and wilted the arugula, I could make a batter for a risen pancake, somewhere in the neighborhood between Dutch baby and clafoutis, but savory. Maybe with herbes de Provence and some black pepper. Maybe save out the yolks to make a sauce and whip the whites.

By the time I finished it would be tomorrow.

And the Chinese food guy is coming...

Yeah, but what are you going to do with the pickles?

I'd wait for the Chinese food guy, and then tomorrow make a pasty with the rutabaga!

Annie

Oooh! I could use pickle juice for liquid in the pancake with some baking soda and make it even fluffier! But I fear me it would be weird....

The Chinese food was good. And really hot, like blow on the soup hot, which is a trick when packed in a plain paper bag on a cold night.

Nothing nearly remotely near me has decent Chinese take out. Not remotely. (Alas.)

Yes, some days you order in Chinese--I'm a fan!

Our little, newish hole-in-the-wall Chinese place is awesome--we ordered Kung Pao Chicken ($8.99 incl rice) and requested 'not too much' sauce. When we arrived home, I weighed the entree in it's styrofoam container (which we know doesn't weigh all that much) and we had 2.2 lbs of food. Yum!

Edited to add: No MSG!

This is what post holiday cooking looks like! Tired people, random leftover ingredients, takeout temptation battling reflexive foodie instinct.

We've been eating really random stuff for a few days. Trying to use up things we bought but didn't cook and threw in the freezer. Tonight I have to make something from two packages of fresh then frozen raviolis, two pounds of frozen shrimp, a bunch of unused veg, and assorted cheese ends.

First world problems, I know. Wish DD were here - as a college kid she's good at imagining dishes from whatever is on hand.

Digression - I got to be the house videographer for a press conference/rally today. Our local NAACP, independent music association, Portland Tenant's Union, small business groups, small landlords, historic preservation groups, and others are all uniting to fight city hall on a land use issue. Interesting coalition.

Like artemis, there is no edible take-out Chinese food anywhere near me! It requires a 30 minute ferry ride and atrocious traffic to get anything decent. Not at all sure why as other ethnic restaurants proliferate in my locale.

Sooz, good news on the winner!

Gardengal, I lived for the better part of a year in a tiny hamlet nestled between a rock and a hard place in a remote part of a remote country. There was a highway, so enough travelling through to support a few restaurants. One was a really good Chinese place. There was really good Chinese food because the guy who owned the restaurant went to China and hired four really good Chinese cooks to come to the tiny hamlet far from their home to cook it. :) To get good Chinese food, you have to entice some good Chinese cooks!

Artemis, you did want to go rural.... Maybe in the near future we'll have fast delivery drones that can bring it to you hot from an hour's drive away. (Though in the large town nearest my tiny hamlet the really good Chinese food was made by Vietnamese cooks...)

Though, come to think of it, I used to go to conferences in another small town on a different highway, only a about 1200 miles from home, where there was a fine dining restaurant (city trained chef) and amazing homestyle Thai (from Thai homemaker with a side job cooking--one order at a time) in addition to your basic small town grub.

The really good szechuan place nearish to me stopped delivering, though I suppose I should check to see if one of the delivery apps has them. The place we like best, though, is more generic but focuses on healthy so there's not too much salt, no MSG, and light on the grease. It was really good. I treated myself to honey glazed walnut prawns, and they were perfect pillows of deliciousness.

John, you had me up to the cheese ends. I think you need to break that into two things. Like make a shrimp and veg stir fry with a nice sauce to marry them. Does the ravioli need transforming? If so, you could roll them in bread crumbs and toast them, or deep fry them, and make a lovely drizzle or dipping sauce out of the cheese ends.

OH! Together you could make a ravioli and shrimp casserole, like "ravioli lasagna" meets lobster (shrimp) mac and cheese. Make a thick cheese sauce and layer the ravioli and chopped and browned veg with it, top with bread crumbs or grated cheese and bake. Cook the shrimp halfway, and just before serving tuck them into the casserole and bake another minute or two. Or bake the casserole naked and make a shrimp crumble topping which gets added at the last minute, not even baked if it's already fully cooked (trying to avoid rubber). Or you could make a shrimp salad with chopped ravioli croutons.... I think I've seen too much Chopped over the holidays. This is sounding weirder and worse and less like food...

I made it to the store today before the rain and did come home with some sirloin tips and ground beef. But we have leftover Chinese... Well, none of the prawns...

Plllog, you need an espresso!

I was too brain dead to do anything other than simple. There was a monster beet, a The Beet That Ate Philadephia sized beet, so it was roasted, vinegared, and combined with arugula and goat cheese for a salad. The two pounds of shrimp were simply sauteed with garlic, shiitake mushrooms, and various hot and spicy things including Santa's thoughtful gift of Trader Joe's Mushroom Umami powder. Then some renegade brussel sprouts were sprinkled with oil, salt and sugar, roasted, and served - upside down, it appears - with leek, shallot, and blueberries. It's not even 7 and I'm in bed. I think the last month has just been a lot more tiring than I'd realized.

On the takeout Chinese - there used to be a little Chinese restaurant near us that was run by the nicest family in the world. The dad cooked, the mom ran the register and served, the son took orders and bused. When we walked in they would light up, greet us like family, ask about the kids' school. We loved the place and went there all the time as well as ordering out. But it wasn't doing well. It was an old fashioned, too familiar "Chinese-American" place in a town where the hipsters craved new and different. Hard to get social media cred posting pictures of boring old Kung Pao Chicken. The online reviews were sneering millennial snark like "this is where your parents ate what they thought was Asian food". Customers were sparse and the place was getting a little sad looking. The kids started to worry that our family was the only thing keeping the place afloat.

One day our Chinese restaurant simply disappeared. Closed. We never saw them again. It was replaced by an awful Rice Junkies chain store. We were suffused with guilt. If only we'd eaten every meal there, maybe our restaurant would still be alive. I don't know what happened to the family. Maybe the parents retired comfortably to the country and the son went to college. But DD, just a young girl then, used to worry that they were living in one of the tarp covered tents along the freeway, and that it was all her fault for not eating enough honey walnut prawns.

Around that time, a French restaurant started by a young chef also failed. He was a superb cook, the dining experience was gracious, the pastries divine. But the restaurant business is so hard. He worked constantly, and was always short-handed. His young wife and parents had to help out in the restaurant, serving and greeting. We got to know them as well. DS, who was about 9 at the time, loved going to the restaurant, picking his favorite pastry, getting special attention from the mom. Finally the restaurant closed - right when it was starting to develop a following, but he just couldn't hang on any longer.

They kept their standards to the end. Our last meal there was the best we'd had. DS cried so hard.

That was during the recession. A lot of businesses around us were closing, you'd walk to a storefront and it would be empty like a hospital bed whose occupant was taken away in the night, leaving only an imprint on the pillow. My neighbor lost his restaurant, my friend lost her boutique, my other neighbor his house. A 30-story skyscraper project by my office stopped dead and sat, a six story block sized pit in the earth with rusting rebar jutting from half poured concrete, for five years. The chill never left the air.

Today those storefronts are all full of customers spending money with abandon. Tower cranes everywhere you look. New buildings leap from the ground. I don't go to restaurants much anymore. I like cooking at home and - there's less emotional risk.

John, you didn't use the ravioli! Your dinner looks delicious, but it's a lot easier if you don't have the albatros!

I don't do caffeine, much as I like espresso, but I'd risk it for your baby. Do you think it's all that buffing that's getting to you?

We had similar ouches during the recession. One of my favorite avant garde places went elevated pub standards trying to stay afloat, offending the avant garde, who stayed away, and not pulling in the ordinary because the reputation was for avant garde. It's some kind of Asian fusion now, IIRC. So sad about the families you knew who lost their livelihoods. But re the mean hipster-wannabe reviews (my personal opinion is that true hipsters wouldn't be so snobby (they love a fossilized old steakhouse which is known to my generation as the Grim Reaper's waiting room (referring to the average age of the clientele)), I think it's a shame. I enjoy good avant garde food (but only if its good), but most people just want to eat good food in a pleasant place.

I live out in the sticks where good food reigns and fashion can take a running jump.......but I think that in big cities, fashion has the upper hand so quality, knowledge and taste often get lost. It's being seen in the right place over knowing what they're eating. Then there the mentality that has no idea whatsoever so they think if its expensive, then I must be good.......lord help us. Then again here, we have some tourist traps.......

Pillog, even back at my non rural previous place, there was and is no decent Chinese food.

Youch! Well, same answer holds. It's the lack of will to get good Chinese cooks to do the good Chinese cooking. :) There is excellent, high class, fancy Chinese around here, and if you drive awhile you can get regional authentic from several (many?) different parts of China. I don't cook Chinese food at all, so I don't have the "I could make it so much better" problem, and for just not having to cook the "healthy" Chinese place makes good food, even though it's not the best actual Chinese food. :) I wish you at least had one of those...

Yes, no tolerable Chinese food here, either, artemis. Every Chinese restaurant in town uses that horrid minute rice version of fried rice now instead of the real thing, for one thing. You can always order white rice, but the entrees are equally appealing. Sigh.

Good Chinese chefs can earn a lot more money in China.

Many have left here.

dcarch

Oh. That's a shame. For us. For them a good thing to get a great wage and be home.

I'm boggled about the rice. The place I order from has proper rice. The only "innovation" is that you can ask for brown rice. It's so good that when I used some leftover rice in a dish for stray company, they were asking each other for days what kind of rice it was, and when I finally saw them again and told them it was from the restaurant they were totally crestfallen. I encouraged them to ask there what kind of rice it was (all I can say is short grain brown). Of course, it probably comes in 100 lb. bags. :) Mind still blown. Unimaginable. Rice is so darned easy to cook! And there must be a food service grade rice cooker for restaurants that don't know how to boil water.