February 20 - French food, processed food

So beautiful.

Happy! I've taken another step towards becoming a decent home cook - I've gotten myself a shiny new food processor. It's a thing of beauty, to be sure. It came with 2 work bowls and a ton of attachments. It's my new favorite toy. Thank you, Macy's, for putting it on sale at a questionably low price.

You can imagine how difficult it was for me to make it through my work day while dreaming of my new food processor. I was counting down the hours until I could go home and play with it. Lucky for me, Ron and I had plans to head to Belle Epicurean for lunch.

I should have had one of each.

I'd been hearing about this little French patisserie/cafe for a while, and was pretty excited to try it out. Fighting my urge to just order a bunch of pastries and gorge, I perused the lunch menu and decided on something sensible. Well, sensible for French food.

I went with the ham feuillette, which is basically a brioche cup filled with ham and gruyere cheese, mingling with an herbed bechamel sauce. Translation: butter butter ham butter cheese butter and butter. It was delicious.

Don't let the salad fool you.
This is not a healthy lunch.

Ron went with something ever so slightly less buttercentric. The fool. I guess it still looked good: a deviled egg salad on a croissant with a side of the house mushroom soup. I was kind of bummed that it's the only soup they offer, since mushrooms taste like dirt to me, but I got over it. The salad was fresh and tasty, and I pretended not to notice the pleasure with which Ron slurped his soup.

Better than the egg salad in your lunchbox.

Feeling that I had not quite tripled my suggested butter intake for the day, I got a berry. . . pastry. . . thing. I don't remember what it's called. I just know that it was delicious when I got to eat it at work later. My cubicle buddy was, undoubtedly, green with envy. And I didn't share even a little bit.

Making the office just a bit more bearable.

At long last - food processing time! I decided to take full advantage and process some onions - which usually make me cry like a neglected child of divorce. It worked like a dream.

You'll best me no longer, onion fumes!

I decided to make ground pork patties - something my parents used to make with rice noodles and lettuce for family lunches. I took about a pound and a half of boneless pork ribs and sliced em up good.

Pork: food of the gods.

Then the cool part: I dropped them into my shiny new food processor and the came out lookin like this:

Minced meat!

I then put my freshly savaged pork in a bowl with my processed red onion, some salt, pepper, msg, and fish sauce, and squished it all around. I shaped this squish into patties and tossed them into a pan on medium heat.

Mmmm. Char.

Ideally, I would have had rice noodles and lettuce to eat these little guys with, but I didn't plan this very well. I opted instead to serve them up with rice and cucumber, as well as the secret sauce. You want secret sauce? Fine

1/2 cup plus a bit more fish sauce
1/2 cup white distilled vinegar
1/2 cup water
3/4 cup sugar
squeeze lemon juice
chiles to taste

Mix it all up. It's delicious with lots of stuff. Like this for instance.

Ignore the magnetic ribbons.

Focus on the food.

It was equally tasty in my bento box the next day.