Ain't no party like a teacher party because a teacher party don't stop. Well, until about 10. Then it stops.

I'm sorry.

I've been totally remiss at getting these posts up in any semblance of timeliness. In case you're confused — I've been pulling the wool over your eyes and setting the date to the post to the day when the meal was cooked, but, in case you haven't noticed, I've been updating in fits and spurts.

The problem with this is that they tend to start getting boring by the third post I've made in a row. (I know, I know, even I can get boring.) I'm not promising you anything though. To be completely honest I'm usually loaded by the time we finish dinner so it's better than just seeing me non-coherently swear for about three paragraphs about how much rice rules.

Like right now. It's not August 29th or even August 30th. It's September 7th and I'm at home watching the MTV Video Music Awards pre-show (don't ask — it's for work) and trying to write about that delicious spread you see up there and then get through what I made for dinner tonight.

Why, may you ask, was there that much food set up in such an attractive manner? Well, Julie had a party for her staff on their first Friday back at school. Since it was my last summer Friday, I knocked off around noon and then spent the entire afternoon cooking ad cleaning for her teachers. Well, that's a lie. I also had to go shopping to buy most of these things at the farmers market. And honestly I didn't cook much — aside from wrapping the peaches with prosciutto I had to make that delicious tart.

This tart is a little bit like that girl that your friends want you to hook up with sight unseen but instead of describing what she looks like they keep saying "she's got a great personality;" a little unsightly but awesome once you put it in your mouth. Wait. No. Nothing like that girl.

The tart was pretty easy to make; it appeared in an issue of Gourmet a while back, consisting of a very light and tender dough made with eggs and olive oil and then covered with mustard, caramelized onions, toasted fennel seed and Parmesan. Since it's the height of tomato season I also put some tomatoes on top (salted, rinsed and patted with towels to reduce the moisture). The only real pain in the ass step was the caramelizing the onions -- it's about 3 lbs of onions cooked over a very low flame for almost an hour to get them totally sweet and reduced. It's worth the effort, but you gotta watch it like a hawk to keep them from sticking to the bottom.

Amazingly enough, by the way, the entire spread was consumed in about an hour all whilst watching her coworkers thrash about on Rock Band like a man covered in baby oil trying to get out of a deep tub.

These pillows were so soft you could sleep on them. I guess if you were a little person. And not like a midget.

After the dismal Rellenosgate of 2008 was over, I figured I needed something that would restore Julie's culinary faith in me, and possibly, just possibly, not be a bunch of back-breaking labor.

So, naturally, the sadist in me said "Oh! Julie mentioned that she wanted Gnocci a while ago." So self, I said, "Self, why don't you just make some? You know, from, like, scratch. They can't be that hard — I seen't Mario Batali make them. I seen't it with my own eyes." To the kitchen!

I boiled five large russet potatoes in some salted water, uncut, peel still on, until they were tender. I let them cool a little and then peeled them and riced them. (Man that ricer has already gotten more use than the apple corer or olive platter we got for the wedding.) Once they were riced I made a well and added the left over cheeses from the ravioli fiesta on Saturday along with two eggs. (And no, for the link phobic, I did not make a dish called ravioli fiesta. I can only image the casserole that name would invoke with store-bought frozen ravioli swimming in a sea of cheese wizz and cream cheese.) I added a 1/4 cup of flour on top and started stirring in, adding more flour 1/4 at a time until the dough was smooth but not dry. I then wrapped it very well in plastic and stuck it in the fridge and went to work.

When I got home, I took out the dough and on a lightly floured board, rolled snakes about 1/2" thick and cut them into pieces about 3/4" wide. I then rolled each one off the end of a fork to give them those "ridges" that make gnocci hold on to just enough sauce. Ruffles, FTW. Cooked in boiling salted water until they float with a simple tomato sauce — faith restored.

Shit, I mean, I can barely spell rellenos, much less make one that isn't just janky. Also, like that presentation? That's called "giving up." I learned it by watching using Windows.

I'm gonna admit. Most of the time this blog serves nearly no purpose other than to blow smoke up my ass. I mean, really, this shit reads like an "I'm a genius because I made this taste better then a pile of puke" self-righteous list of things I can do better than some other people. But, yes, even I, as amazing as it may be, have my failures.

Not-fully cooked chicken due to massive thawing issues? Yeah, that first cut had a nice cross section of pink jelly-like sashimi deep down inside. And nothing, I mean nothing, is more appetizing than raw chicken which bleeds all over your mashed potatoes.

Like "jerk" chicken which was just greasy and green? Yeah, who's the jerk? Me! But, boy, did that pineapple ever make it look even more appetizing.

The most recent fuck up was definitely these rellenos. I decided that since, you know, I can follow instructions on how to make enchilladas verde, I must be the best Mexican chef ever. Apparently, I am not. The peppers roasted OK over the gas burners, and the skin peeled off. What was wrong though was the filling. Toasted pumpkin seeds + corn + jack cheese != a cohesive filling make. I probably should have ground the seeds or boiled them to make them soft or something. And added some cilantro. Anyway, these were dismal. Julie humors me well though and even finished her portion.

I mean, shit, I've probably even spelled rellenos wrong throughout this post.

Thank god for rice and beans.

No, Julie didn't have a whirlwind romance with Barak Obama. Although I hope Google now returns this blog as a result for "Obama cheating." That would be hilarious. Since, well, you know, Republicans HATE good food.

No, it was just my Dad. Conveniently he lives in the city so we have dinner on the occasion, but usually it's Julie and myself going over to his house for dinner, rather than the opposite. You know, the whole father/son relationship.

Anyway, my Dad is a fan/reader of my blog and wanted to come over and taste some of my delicious (at least Julie says they are) concoctions. Now, he's no slouch in the kitchen so I felt like I needed to really pull out all the stops and make something totally fucking on. Something that would be talked about for years upon years. Something to go down in the history books; if not his, at least mine.

So what's the easiest way to accomplish that? Spend about eight hours in the kitchen over two days to create a meal. That's about right.

Seriously. The tomatoes this year? Fucking amazing. We eat about eight to ten pounds of them a week. I'm not shitting you. And neither are we.

So, you say, how can you spent eight hours in the kitchen? Easy I say.

• Roast beets
• Make tomato jam
• Make pasta dough
• Rice said beets and mix with various ingredients
• Fill pasta
• Blanch corn, chop vegetables
• Disassemble chicken, grind tenders, butterfly and pound breasts
• Make sausage filling and fill chicken
• Blanch sausages, cool and then sear sausages

That's only a partial list of tasks that I accomplished this past weekend. But like. Um. Did you eat this shit? No. So, while, that may look like a lot of stuff to do, holy effin' christ it was worth it like a hang over the morning after a good friend from high school says "meet me at the whiskey ward at 11pm on a Wednesday night." Worth it like spending eight hours cooking for one meal that turns out nearly exactly as you envisioned it. Worth it like re-confirming your wife's decision to marry you based solely on your cooking prowess.

But this is where my over-estimating comes into play. As I was making the pasta I was all "oh, I'm gonna need at least 10 ravioli for each person since they're not going to be that big." Alas, I was greatly wrong. I ended up making enough dough for 40 ravioli for three people, but came to the terms, that for the most part, pasta dough can be made easily by going around 2/3 of a cup of flour for each egg, with each flour/egg portion being enough for one good sized serving. A pinch of salt never hurts either.

Also, this is when ice cube trays would have made a lot more sense. Instead I decided to cut out each round before filling. So, with a bunch of rolled sheets of pasta (thank you very much pasta roller attachment for my Kitchenaid birthday present Kris!), I cut out 80 round of dough, laying them in sheets with parchment paper to prevent sticking. Then I took said roasted beets and passed them through my ricer, adding fresh ricotta and Consider Bardwell farm's amazing goat cheese. Adding a good teaspoonful of this to the middle of a round, then tracing the edge with water and putting on a top. Believe it or not, from the start of the dough to the end of filling this was a good two hours.

I think the French call this a gallentine or a ballentine or some shit. Wait. Ballentine is a delicious whiskey. Scratch that. Anyway, this technically isn't a sausage because it involves no innards. And for that, well, for that I apologize.

So that was just the ravioli. For some reason I got in my mind that I would take some chicken breasts, butterfly and trim them and then pound them out. Then I would take the trimmings and the tenders and make a filling with a little garlic, fennel seed and sage, and then fill the butterflied breasts with the filling, poach and sear them. This too turned out to be a good time sink. After separating the breast meat from the bone of the breasts and butterflying them I trimmed them down to a more "square" type shape. (You only buy whole chickens right? And then freeze what you didn't use for later? And then keep all the backs and wing tips for stock making? Right? Right. We don't have to talk about that.) Then taking the trimmings and the tenders (which really separate when you're pulling off the bone) I toasted some fennel and got some sage leaves, garlic, salt, pepper and hot pepper and ran it through the food processor for a second. I then put the mixture in a zip top bag and trimmed off a corner so I could pipe it onto the lower 1/3 of each breast. Then I rolled them up, and then rolled them in parchment and tied them off with butchers twine so I could keep the shape. A quick 20 minute poach in some shallow water brought them to about 150°F. After letting them cool down I reheated them in a frying pan in some olive oil to get a good sear. Lessons? Use thighs. Breasts dry out way too quick. (Some of these were very tough.)

• Basic pasta dough
• Chicken sausage
• Bruchetta
• Beet Ravioli with a corn, pepper and beet green succotash

Filet-o-Fish? Yeah. And Twinkee the Kid is my Son with Mrs. Butterworth. Although, for a syrup bottle, you gotta admit, she's pretty stacked.

Somehow I just made more dishes in the past five hours making only seven things (and really only finishing three of them) than I think I made the past two Thanksgivings put together. My hands are still wrinkled (OMG dishpan hands? DAWN FTW) and I actually ran out of mixing bowls. But what you're looking at up there (for the Flickr title-challenged) is a cornmeal crusted piece of sole on top of some fresh ricotta cheese, homemade tomato jam all stacked on toasted peasant bread.

Tomato jam is something I see on menus all the time, but never really made — it always sounded like it might be a pain in the ass. As usual, it seems, I was right. Oh holy fuck though it is amazing. I'll even write out the recipe in a normal fashion here for you it was that good. But let this be a warning to you -- it takes about two to three hours and gotta watch it a little so it doesn't scorch. Just imagine a more intensely tomato, less acidic/pickle-flavored ketchup. This will go on sandwiches until the last bit has been scraped out with my finger one morning.

Really, the band just gave the vegetable a really bad name.

The corn succotash/relish/whatever was a last minute decision since I'm sort of sick of just plain corn on the cob. I roasted three jalapeños and then cooked them with some red onion and garlic, then added the corn and a little butter. Those chilis were straight up punch you in the crotch hot though. This has been the first time a jalapeño has bested me in a long time. I should have thrown a little sugar in there to balance it out and hit it lime juice at the end, but, eh. It was still fucking awesome.

Which brings us to the fish. A nice fillet of sole fresh from the farmers market this morning, simply dredged in seasoned corn meal and pan fried in a little olive oil.