last week (10 days ago) I had the honest to goodness verifiable with a swab (gross), infuenza type A.  I woke up Sunday morning with a weird painful cough.  By Monday morning I had a migraine that was like a mallet with every wracking cough and Z sent me to the Dr.  Best Martin Luther King Jr Day ever.  The doctor asked me if I’ve ever had a swab before and then said that I should have one since i had a fever.  I said I thought I had one before.  As it turns out I was wrong. If I had known what was coming I would’ve run.  They practically poke you in the brain.  That junk is intense.  Anyhow, like five minutes later she said I had the flu. So POW.  I was down and out for the week.  I still feel  tired and semi-rotten but definitely better.  All that to say, I didn’t cook anything last week.  One night I ate mango sorbet for dinner.  One night Z reheated some sloppy joe’s I had stashed in the freezer.    My taste buds all broke when I was sick and everything tasted horrible and hurt my tongue anyway.  This week was better.  I actually made dinner and felt like eating it.  So, back to the book.  I cooked two dinners out of this week’s book called Fire In My Belly by Kevin Gillespie.  Kevin was a cheftestant on Top Chef and he cooked lots of Southern type food.  This cookbook is Southern in scope but also a lot of regular old chef-style comfort food.  The two meals we made seem like things a chef would eat at about midnight or 2am after dinner service.  The foods are pretty accessible and the ingredients easy to find for the most part.  Story runs through the book and I think the blurbs by recipes are funny.  ‘Feeds 2 ravenous snackers’ 

The first thing I made were twice hash filled baked potatoes.  A load of sausage and cheese are hashed with the insides of baked potatoes and sprinkled with diced jalapenos.  They were topped off with a really fresh and tasty lime creme fraiche (sour cream because we can’t really get creme fraiche here)  We really liked the dish.  It was easy and comfortable.  The leftovers reheated great the next day at work too.  The second dish was cheddar waffles.  They totally went sideways.  I’m not sure what went wrong with them exactly.  Somehow the egg whites didn’t incorporate and the baking soda didn’t do it’s thing because they didn’t rise at all.  But the cheddar waffle combined with Blis bourbon barrel maple syrup and fried eggs was AMAZING.  I could eat that every day.  A little bit of hickory thick cut bacon didn’t hurt either.  Both dishes were easy.  They both tasted great.  We’ll be back to this cookbook a lot more often.