Weekend Update, July 28, 2013

 it's in a man's mouth,

whether he's eating or singing,

that sweetness has it's place.

Pablo Neruda, Sweetness Always

Our daughter Liz, after accompanying me through nearly two weeks of excellent adventure in Seattle and Dallas, boarded a plane on Friday and flew off toward the last leg of her holiday. I shuffled out toward the coffee pot on Saturday morning and found that the kitchen had left me a message:

Creeped me out, I can tell you.

Creepiness and dismay at the kitchen's poor penmanship aside, I had to agree. It had been a ten day funfest, and in no room of the house was her absence felt more than in the kitchen. While I played at translating our Seattle memories into dinner, Liz baked as if each night's sleep turned her fingers into 10 dancing sugar plum fairies. It's easy to see why the kitchen prefers her helmsmanship to mine:

With all of these sugar beauties leaving the kitchen, trying for pics of the random multiethnic mashups that made their way onto the dinner plates became pretty amusing.

That's key lime bars, whiskey maple bacon cupcakes, coconut sugar cookies, Brazilian truffles, cream puffs, and chocolate macarons with fudge filling. Wow. 

Liz caramelized chopped pecans in maple syrup and added them to the bacon that topped the spectacular maple cupcakes, and those pecans prompted a question whose answer I learned today.

Question: is it right to call these maple whiskey cupcakes with bacon and pecan praline?

Answer: No

The answer was given to me by Marvin, who with great knowledge and enthusiasm was was manning his mother's boothful of lovely pralines at the Dallas Farmer's market. Pralines, according to this generous pro, contain milk- and these other things:

Marvin  suggests calling last week's invention Maple Whiskey
cupcakes with bacon and glazed pecans.
He also suggests making another batch topped with a few chopped Jazzy Fat's
pecan pralines and bacon.
This suggestion made my knees go a little weak.

And, in case you're wondering, we tasted most of these sugary wonders, but ate few of them and asked the home audience to take them to the office, where he shared with his (appreciative) coworkers. The thing is that although I'm twice Liz's age, my aging metabolism works half as efficiently.

It's one of life's nastiest little tricks. 

Just about the time that you discover that chocolate loves you and may provide you with the most consistently supportive relationship of your life, you realize that if you pick up the phone every time chocolate calls, you will soon be the shape of a very large round fudge truffle yourself. 

So, in between the sweets, we made a few great discoveries:

First, the grilled lamb gyros. The herb marinade here is fantastic- the lamb was sliced thin and pan fried for gyros then cubed for use in a curry, and the remaining cubes grilled as kabobs.

That's a thrown together vegetable curry with the kabobs.
It wasn't a curry I'd serve to anyone who knew what a proper curry
should taste like, but it was still an okay dinner.

Next, the sausage filling of these sausage rolls. It was a fortunate inconvenience that all the grocery shops nearby were out of ground pork- fortunate because otherwise, I'd have followed the recipe. As it was, I heaved a heavy sigh and brought home a few lean pork chops, and threw them in the food processor along with the other ingredients. A little more sagey than the sausage we were hoping for, but still!!! Lean, tasty sausage that doesn't start on a poultry farm! Look!

freezes wonderfully too!!!

And then there's poutine. 

I decided to try it the hard way first: homemade oven fries and homemade gravy topped with bacon and cheddar. We dug in with a respectful silence punctuated with little happy noises. And do you know what? I think that if you tried these with frozen fries and a jar of a good beef gravy, they'd be really good too, and would please any crowd that you put them in front of.

Unless you cater to a crowd of sophisticates who are too cosmopolitan to admit loving food as common and comforting as fries, and gravy, and cheese curds.

That's okay.

just call them "pomme frite com au jus et fromage"
and even your highest class friends will love em.
And next time, I'm finding real cheese curds.

What eons since our kitchen worked on so many desserts in a single week!

 And as Liz spooned and piped and whipped and experimented and invented, I thought about the word sweet.

How it's come to mean not only sugar laden foodstuff, but all sorts of things that bring us a tender pleasure.

A sweet ride, a sweet job, a sweet disposition, a sweetheart.

I thought about Neruda's sideways observation in the poem sweetness, always that sometimes we fear sweetness.

And I began to hope

 that the week ahead brings you more sweet, necessary nothings than you can count.

That you will know the importance of insubstantial things-

those things that melt away like cream and sugar in your mouth.

That you will recognize those sweet moments as they come to you 

through the salt and bitterness of the week,

Hold them near,

and drink them in.