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.

Menus May 28, 2013

"Here's rosemary, that's for remembrance;

pray, love, remember"
Ophelia, in Hamlet, Act 4

William Shakespeare

I missed an opportunity last Tuesday. I overlooked a calendar event that makes a late May dinner fall naturally onto the plate. I must have curled up with a book in a sunny time warp or something, because it wasn't until late Wednesday, as the internet began to scroll out dozens of tender reminders, that I realized...

What!? Memorial Day this weekend?!?
But it was only just Mother's Day!
 I have planned zero barbecue things!

Alas, the week's menus were already set in cyber-stone and I'd already shopped for groceries. But in an odd way, forgetting made me think about remembering, and as we drove past lawn flags and concert posters, I thought of poor mad Ophelia, sending messages in secret flower code when she could no longer speak a sane sentence. 

Don't be misled- the fact that this line about remembrance stuck in my brain does not mean that I am either high-class or high-brow.

It just means I know a thing or two about women and crazy.
From, you know, watching movies.

And yes, rosemary really was for remembrance. The Victorians  confirmed it when they formalized the flower code in a "language of flowers" dictionary , which  made it possible for repressed Victorian rascals to assemble cute little bouquets to send to each other instead of actually talking. I'm sure this went a long way toward making communication between the sexes less confusing. 

See, If only she'd said
"Sweet pea, white clover, arbutus, gardenia. Jonquil? Celadine!"
Instead of "Pass the grapefruit."
Breakfast would not have ended so badly.

 So, rosemary and remembering have been twining together in my mind ever since last week;  since there seems to be no untangling the two, I think I'll take them to dinner. Rosemary gives a few of this week's meals a little flavor kick, and as far as cooking with memory, well that's for Friday.

There are a few tenacious sprigs of rosemary growing in our backyard, which I planted  years ago after reaching for that little plastic folder of fresh rosemary at the grocery store, hesitating, doing a little math...

"Holy herbaceous border, Batman!
That's $13 a pound!"

If you don't have such easy access to rosemary  and you want to play with these recipes, use it dried or live dangerously and pinch a stem from almost any landscaped shopping center or housing development. (Once you look for it, you'll see it everywhere.)

But in case you, like I, am botanically challenged, or in case the rosemary in your neighborhood park is trying to blend in with real roses, I offer this "recognizing rosemary" tutorial from my own....er...garden, where I have planted both roses and rosemary. With unequal success:                                                   

Rose. Tallish. Thorny.                                                                  Rosemary. Shorter. Spikey.
Dies.                                                                                           Does not die.
Requires pruning, often with a shovel.                                          Does not require pruning.

And now that we've taken a stroll down the garden path, let's make our way to dinner, shall we?

Wednesday: Roasted rosemary chicken, Rosemary mashed potatoes and salad.

I'll be cooking two chickens tonight, because I've a use for cooked chicken two nights from now, and if I get started in time, I'll brine them in salt and honey. The salad will be any simple something that lets me feel like we ate a green veg.

Thursday: Pizza and salad.

Ok! excitement is rising, because I've found a recipe for a no-knead bread  that looks easy and fun. It takes time though. Little effort, but lots of time. It needs about 18 to 24 hours to rise, so I'll  need to stir it together after dinner on Wednesday. In case I forget, I'll make this more standard but still easy foccacia dough. A homemade crust costs pennies, and makes the house smell like little warm carbohydrate angels did a happy dance in the kitchen, but a premade crust (or a premade pizza) is a good time-saving option. The salad will be tomatoes, olives, and chunks of mozarella on lettuce. 

Friday:Retro chicken casserole and Morton's wedge salad

Thinking of wars and remembrance took me on a brief cruise around some fantastic websites that list hundreds of retro recipes. Wanna know how to make a dessert with your sugar ration? How to use the veggies in your victory garden?  try here. Or, move up to the 50's here, and you'll see things like this "hey my mother used to make that"  chicken casserole, and this salad that became famous when iceberg lettuce was a luxury that only the wealthy could afford. And jello. Lots of jello.

I'll be using the leftover chicken from Wednesday.

Saturday: Burgers and  Oven fries and tomato salad

The smoke of neighborhood grills scented the air here all weekend, and I've been jonesing for a burger ever since. We're currently between grills though, so I'll be trying this method of getting a crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside burger from the stovetop.  This is my all time favorite oven fry recipe and this week, I'm going to try it with uber nutritious sweet potatoes. 

Sunday: Tacos and salsa

For some reason, after a burger feast, we always patties leftover. I'll make taco filling by chopping them fine and mixing with taco seasoning.  Since the tacos are going to be so easy, and since I've yet to find salsa in a jar that we're crazy about, I'm thinking about making this salsa. And, since avocados are hovering around 40 cents apiece at Aldi, we'll have some guacamole too.

Roast chicken, casserole, pizza, burgers, tacos- you know it's a quintessentially American meal plan when it has it's roots in 4 different countries.

and of course, the rosemary- because

It's so easy to forget, isn't it? 

So easy to forget how connected we all are-

how kindness or cruelty or courage ripple over and through our lives

like the circles from the splash of a stone.

I hope this week you can remember.

I hope you can remember a time (maybe even now) 

when you were surrounded by love.

When you were embraced with a fierce kindness that would fight tigers for you

or feed tigers for you.

When you were protected by a fearless wisdom that knew which tigers to combat, and which tigers to cuddle. 

even when all those tigers were you.

Menus, December 19, 2012

Not all of us can do great things. But all of us can do small things with great love.

Mother Teresa

And if you wonder whether or not that's true, I offer exhibit Zach.

Zach cooks up lunches at Sweet Marley's, a Hill Country cafe so welcoming that it seems a cosmically deliberate thing that 'Fredricksburg' and 'Friendly' have (1...2...3... oh, alot) of letters in common. He explained the deliciousness of my bowl of potato-broccoli-cheese-bacon soup by telling me that he had made it himself.  With Love. And bacon for goodness. And broccoli for nutrition. A winning combo that I'll be attempting to duplicate on Friday.

disclosure: that's an empty soup bowl.
because, you know, I ate all my soup.

And next, evidence from Lampasas, where I was drawn by row upon sunlit row of these:

which were hanging outside a shop where I  bought these:

and wished to buy a whole lot more- because the owner of the Red Bell plant stand, like the guys at Sweet Marley's, besides being super interesting to talk with, is happily passionate about the power that can be contained in something as simple as a bowl of soup and as small as a jar of jam.  

The power to create something that can nourish and nuture yourself and those around you.

Here's the difference love makes:

red bell preserves on the right, and a nice grocery
store brand on the left.

ok. so my phone cam doesn't do a great job of showing you the difference love makes. But I'm tellin' ya. It tastes like all the best bits of summer on a spoon.

So, I'm hittin' the home kitchen with some fresh inspiration. Inspiration that will put some extra love into some favorite old recipes for some old friends, and some extra excitement into the great holy grail chili quest.

Wednesday: Roast Chicken and oven fries

I've made this roast chicken enough to want to play around with it a little, and here's how I'm going to do it. The recipe calls for potato slices under the baking chicken so that any dripping fat or oil will be absorbed by the potatoes. Because if it's not absorbed, the high cooking temperature will cause that dripping stuff to smoke. (dangerous habit, smoking. Especially before dinner) I'm going to see what happens if I try carrots or butternut squash or cauliflower instead of potatoes. It may be great, or I may have a pic of a very smokey kitchen to show you on Monday. Any one willing to hazard a guess or place a wager? 

Assuming the fire department does not pay us a visit that changes my plans, I'll be freezing any leftover chicken for chili on Saturday night

Thursday: Lasagna and green beans

Dilemma- what do you do if you've become allergic to garlic and love lasagna? You come stay with a friend who has a great lasagna recipe and knows how to leave out the garlic, that's what. I'll  be tossing some green beans in olive oil and salt and roasting them alongside the lasagna.

Friday:Roast beef and Broccoli Potato Soup 

This is the recipe that comes closest to the soup we had at Sweet Marley's-I'll be topping it with crumbled bacon. Hope I do you proud, Zach.

Any leftover beef will get to show off it's versatility in Sunday's chili.

Saturday: chicken chili

a trip to the airport and then some last minute shopping today, and then back to the chili quest! By the look of the recipe,this will stir up faster than deciding where to go for take out.

Sunday: Hot stuff chili

The first beef chili of the quest, and it looks like a contender!

It seems that there are more little tasks in these last few days before Christmas than anyone can count, let alone accomplish, doesn't it? A million small things to be done- but if you look closely, I'll bet you'll see that each one is somehow evidence of the deep love you carry for the people around you.

I hope that even if you've reached the edge of exhaustion, you recognize in yourself that resilient, determined love, and find yourself pouring that great love on all kinds of small things that need loving.

Even dinner.

Stay sane, my friends, stay sane.

Menus, October 31, 2012



We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

That's T.S. Eliot, one of the swooniest, brilliantiest poetry gods in my personal pantheon. My fingers could type, delete, type, delete, type for days about the overlooked magic of the familiar and what home is or might be, and still not catch the truth he did in those four velvety lines.
You go ahead and apply those golden words to your own explorations and homecomings; I'm going to turn them into dinner.

Because while outside, nature is spending immoderate amounts of energy throwing one last spectacular orange and yellow party, inside, I'm planning a week of cozy, familiar meals to share with cozy, familiar people around a cozy, familiar table.

Because for me, in autumn,

this

  

becomes a destination as exciting as

any of these

and this

is an adventure

 as heart stopping

as this

In autumn, familiarity no longer breeds contempt; it pulls you to the chair you like best, passes you that novel you're in the middle of, puts your favorite mug in your hand, and remembers that you absolutely LOVE those teeny marshmallows in your cocoa.

*sigh* It seems that maple trees aren't the only things that go all sappy in October.
Anyway, here are the meal discoveries that we'll be rediscovering this week:

Wednesday: Halloweeeen!!!!! PUMPKINFEST!!!!!
We'll be having pumpkin, followed by pumpkin, with pumpkin for dessert.
No, for reals.We will.
shrimp stuffed pumpkin,  salad with butternut squash and walnuts  andpumpkin chocolate chip bread!
Now that the pesky what's-for-dinner-decision is made, we can focus our energies on today's genuinely crucial dilemma:

will it be Cinderella........................or Ariel?

 Thursday: mushroom soup,  easy chicken parmesan and green beans.
There's a tiny bit of red sauce left in the freezer- we'll be using that on the chicken instead of the jar of pasta sauce.  If the mushroom soup recipe looks too fiddly, follow the advice of the farmer who grew these beauties-

saute them in butter, and cover them with cream.
(might be worth a try- he looked like a man
 deeply at peace with himself and the world.)

Friday: Flank steak and stuffed squash.
We'll be broiling, not grilling the steak, and adding some rice and cranberries to the squash filling.
Wait. If the oven's busy with the squash, how are we going to broil the steak? hmmm. well, we've got 3 days to work that out. We may have to wake up the grill.

Saturday: Back by popular request,Spiced Chicken with apples and pumpkin I know, we had it just last week, but we were dishing thirds- THIRDS I tell you, onto our plates! We'll have this over rice- we'll be making some on friday for stuffed squash, and we'll just make extra.

Sunday: Salmon, Greek salad and oven fries
We'll be either poaching the salmon in white wine and a squeeze of lemon juice, or popping it the oven for the last 15 minutes or so of the ovenfry baking time.
The salad? lettuce, tomatoes, olives and feta. easy peasy.

Happy eating and happy cooking everyone- I hope that this week holds for you lots of space for explorations- whether large or small, whether interior or exterior, whether charming or terrifying.
 And I hope that this week when you return, changed by your exploring, to a familiar place, you'll know it as a place of peace and grace.

Weekend update by Monday morning!

weekend update, October 28, 2012

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes -
The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries

Those lines of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's, long time favorites of mine, drifted through my mind as we spent a glorious Saturday morning at  Matthews Farmer's Market. We'd meant to make a quick stop for squash and apples, but then it looked like this:

so we decided to linger.

Sigh. Autumn. One of North Carolina's four prettiest seasons.
We spent the morning laughing and talking food with people who make their livings by raising produce, farming meat, growing flowers, baking bread and making cheese.
We asked at one stand if the gorgeous deep orange squash at his stall were for cooking or decoration, and were told,quite kindly, yet decisively,
"We grow food".
 And so they do. And they do so with passion and joy.
Ever notice how energizing it is to talk, even for a short time, with people who really love what they do?
It's one of the things to love about a local market.
That, and the fact that you can start a rollicking conversation with the simple question,
"What's your favorite thing to do with this?"
That's how we scored inspiration for lunch and three dinners, and learned two new winter squashes: the deep orange kabocha, and the  pale delicata.



If you're gonna hand a squash
to a toddler, make sure
it's not delicate, but delicata.
(hah! punkin puns!)



What we gained from our errand-turned-adventure? Terrific ideas from at least 4 different food yodas, a great cup of coffee, two hours in the crisp autumn air, some really nice lotion, oh.... and this:



As soon as we got home, we set about getting our tummies on the outside of some of our haul. Lunch was inspired by the creator of that oh-so-fluffy naan bread in the picture, who got us all excited by suggesting that if we had a little hummus or taziki at home, and maybe some chicken....

viola! Saturday lunch!
I may make a habit of seeking advice
from women who bake bread.





AND.....the oven fries recipe from last Wednesday? Wow! They took a little longer than I thought they would to bake, but...well...wow.

As the recipe directs, I poured boiling water over the cut potatoes, waited, drained them, tossed them with olive oil and salt, and was about to cover them with foil for the first blast of baking, when I noticed that we were suffering from an absolute absence of foil.

I figured the point of the foil was to keep all that steamy heat contained for the first stage of cooking, and really, all we needed was some sort of lid kind of thingy, so I rigged this

that's a tray of fries, covered with a tray of fries
covered with a cookie sheet.
Tomorrow I'm inventing cold fusion.



The first point is, don't let yourself be kept from something yummy by an unexpected supply shortage. There's usually room for improvisation

The second point is, potatoes are a very forgiving vegetable.

The  starting the potatoes in boiling water trick worked so well on the fries, that I wondered if the same trick would work on hash browns.

 Have you ever shredded a potato, thinking that you were about to start the day with a plate of crispy carby goodness and wound up with a plate of gluey gray shreds instead?

Me too.

And I was hoping I'd found the cure to that pesky pasty potato problem.

Sadly, all my high hash-browned hopes were for naught. The boiling water washed away so much of the starch that the shreds didn't hold together at all.

and they didn't even taste good.
In fact, they didn't really taste at all.
Even with salt.

And so I note with eager curiosity that further hash brown research and experimentation seem to be necessary. Fortunately, funding for this research has been generously provided by whoever bought that large bag of russets in the pantry. (thanks Andrew- hope you didn't have plans for these)

Guys, I hope that maybe three times this week, good food and good friends act as a balm on the bruises of the day.

 I hope that at least twice this week, you realize that you're listening to someone who passionately loves the work that fills their days.

 And I hope that maybe once this week, as you're listening, you realize that that passionate, loving voice you're hearing is your own.

Back on Wednesday with a new line up of menus- we've gotta use up that produce haul!



Menus October 23, 2012

I wonder if Louisa May Alcott was feeling as grateful for her friendships as I do for mine when she said

"Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary"

I'm inhabiting that charming word this week,staying with friends in beautiful Charlotte NC, where I have never met a meal I didn't like. Wait. Let me examine that statement for veracity.....yep. Even the food at the airport is good. Charlotte is a city that tempts you to wander it's busy streets and quiet corners, and order one of everything at every hot dog cart, cafe and restaurant you pass.
I've made a pretty heroic attempt, in visits past, to do just that. And therein lies this week's dilemma.
Do choose the fun behind...
Door A: the fun of cooking with these dear ones all the fun new recipe discoveries of the past months, and repeating the favorites we've shared in the past?
or
Door B: the fun of recreating together some of our favorite Charlotte restaraunt dishes ever? (the eggs benedict at Nolen's! the spinach salad at Flying Biscuit! the collards and fried chicken at King's Kitchen!)
hmm. This week I'm choosing....

A week of sharing new discoveries and old reliables.
We'll start with using up what's on hand, since we're playing too hard to stop for pesky, tedious things like grocery shopping.

Wednesday:Easy Minestrone
well, it's easy minestrone if you start with about 4 cups of leftover red sauce, which we have. Here's a properly written red sauce recipe, the gist of which is

open 3 or 4 large cans of diced, whole or crushed tomatoes
drop in a quartered or roughly chopped onion and
a stick of butter
and if you want to, a cup or two of red wine
let that simmer for about 3 hours, till it's nice and thick.

to the red sauce, we'll be adding some beef broth, green beans, celery, carrots, maybe zucchini...whatever looks yummy.
And, because sometimes the thing that looks like an unnecessary step actually makes a difference, we'll be boiling the pasta separately and adding it to the soup in the bowl, as is my (exasperating?) habit with most pasta bearing soups. 
I know. It's extra work, but ooey-gooey mushy pasta can really ick up a bowl of soup. At least for me.
 (Stop, voice of mom in my head! I do NOT have a picky appetite! Actual mom, stop laughing!)
Bonus: boiling the pasta separately means we can serve it unpolluted by sauce to the other, er...selective appetite at the table, which happens to belong to a 3 year old.


    yukky food        vs        yummy food
It's an understandable reaction
                       

Thursday: spiced chicken with squash and apples
yes, I know I just made this last week, but there are chicken breasts in the freezer and a peeled butternut in the fridge, and this is a recipe I really want to demo to these friends. No way we're going to bother with the complicated prep. We'll cut everything into pieces, coat it in the oil and spices and throw it in the oven 45 minutes before dinner. We'll be baking some of the chicken and veg without seasoning for the high chair contingent, and we'll cook up some rice to go with.


Friday: Lamb Ragu and salad with butternut squash
 Lamb ragu (or ragout) is a new favorite round here, and if it's food (or people, or books or anything) that my friends like, then I'm eager to be introduced to it.
As a bonus to my fellow word vultures, ragout is an old, old dinner tradition, and its name comes from a French phrase that means 'to restore the appetite'. Knowing that makes me wonder what laboratory conditions we'd have to set up to test the truth of this venerable dish's name. Hmm.....How to kill every one's appetite, and then see if a nice ragout will bring it back to life...hmmm...I'll be thinking about that.
 This salad's one I really like, and I'm hoping that it works together with the ragu as nicely as I think it will.

Saturday:  Pita pizzas and veggie sticks and popcorn
MOVIE NIGHT!!!! We're going to spread pita bread with the last of the red sauce, and let the children pick their own toppings. (the 3 year old and I may even top one with sprinkles because that would be SO FUNNY!!!!!)
We'll pop them on a baking sheet in a hot (400) oven for about 5 minutes. If you prefer a crispier pizza base, bake them straight on the oven rack, just put a baking sheet on the rack below to keep any dripping cheesy goodness from smoking up the kitchen.

Sunday: tilapia with garlic and lemon and oven fries
This oven fry recipe gets rapturous reviews all over the interweb, and I figure I can pop the fish in the oven for the last 10 minutes that the fries are cooking. I'll be trying to rustle up a green vegetable to go with this, and I'll bake a little extra fish for fish tacos tomorrow night.

I hope that this week you're treated like a friend by the company you keep, even and especially if you find yourself alone in your own company. I hope your days and your meals are full of fun and love and goodness.
And don't overdose on the sprinkles, okay?