I've done virtually nothing productive over the past 4 days. Well, okay, I paid the bills. And went grocery shopping. Twice. But other than that, I did not so much as scratch the surface of a large and multifaceted to do list.

My parents are coming to visit next weekend, and I have no idea if I'll be able to catch up on all the housecleaning that I meant to do this weekend in anticipation of their arrival. It's not that big a deal, though - while we're a bit heavy on the clutter, we're pretty good these days at keeping the house clean, if not necessarily tidy.

Listening to Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential has been inspiring me to do a lot of cooking. Bourdain writes very evocatively about cooking, of course, but he also tells some tales about what goes on in restaurant kitchens that make on a little leery of restaurant food. I'll certainly never look at a brunch buffet the same way again.

Bourdain has a little riff on "what have professional chefs got in their kitchens that the average home cook doesn't have that makes their food taste different?" According to Bourdain, surprisingly little. If you've got a good chef's knife, a nice heavy non-stick skillet, and a few other gizmos, you've pretty much got all the equipment you need. He talks for a bit about the little squeeze bottles of sauces and metal rings for arranging food into tall stacks and other doohickeys that chefs use to make the food look pretty.

And then, he says, there are basically three ingredients that chefs have got that home cooks often don't use: shallots, really good stock, and tons of butter.

Well, dietetically, I'm kind of dubious about the tons of butter. (Though, I am starting to reintroduce small quantities of butter here and there to my cooking, after a couple of years of basically being an olive oil only kind of gal. Olive oil is lovely, but sometimes you need butter.) And while I've been meaning to make up a big pot of homemade chicken stock, it's a project that I wasn't up for on a lazy holiday weekend. But yesterday evening, I was wandering the produce aisle at 99 Ranch, looking for some inspiration for dinner, and I spied some shallots. Into my basket they went, along with some spinach, shiitake mushrooms ($3.89 a pound! Can you beat that?), and a nice little hunk of Vietnamese wild caught tuna.

When I started making dinner, I realized something else that Anthony Bourdain has that I don't have: a prep cook to peel and mince all his damn shallots. Okay, not that the things are that bad, but they're kinda fiddly. Like garlic, shallots come in little "cloves" that need to be separated from each other, and are covered with a slippery, papery skin that needs to be removed. (And unlike garlic, I don't think you can do the trick of mashing them a bit with the side of a chef's knife to help get the skin off. Maybe I'm wrong, though.) Like onions, they make you cry. These may have been a particularly sulfrous batch, because they made me cry a lot. Mmmm - razor sharp knife, tiny slippery shallot clutched in chubby clumsy fingers, blurred vision - my favorite combo. Luckily, no fingers were harmed in the making of this meal.

And then someone wanders into the kitchen and quips about "the Lady of Shallots".

So, I made sauteed shiitake mushrooms and spinach with garlic and shallots. It was actually pretty yummy, though I think it needed something to really bring it together, to mellow the bitterness of the spinach slightly and bring up the meatiness of the mushrooms. Like maybe some butter or a splash of really good chicken stock. Hmmm - maybe Bourdain is onto something.

I rubbed Cajun spice mix onto the tuna and seared it in a really hot pan. It looked gorgeous - nice crispy crust on the outside, bright pink on the inside. It tasted just okay - the Cajun spice mix was less potent than I'd imagined, and I probably should have used more of it, and the tuna, despite being essentially raw in the middle, tasted slightly dry. I've been served worse seared tuna in restaurants, and often paid twice as much as the raw ingredients from 99 Ranch cost me, but still, it was kind of disappointing. I don't think that butter or chicken stock would have helped either. It's possible that I started with a not particularly flavorful chunk of tuna.

Ah, well, on the whole, not bad for a meal that was conceived and planned while I was walking home from the market with the raw ingredients.