summer in a jar

A breakfast of peaches canned from D's father's trees, with raspberries picked at Rosby's Farm and frozen: this bowl is the reason we'll be canning again this year, even though it was hot and sweaty and sticky work.

supernaturally good granola

I've gotten a nice haul of cookbooks in the last few weeks--some for my birthday, and some as presents from me to me--so I'm planning to try a few new things out here over the next weeks.

Last week I got Heidi Swanson's new cookbook, Super Natural Cooking. I've been following her blog, 101 Cookbooks, almost since I started reading blogs (how did I live in that pre-blog darkness?) and I bought this as soon as I could. It's a beautiful book, wonderful colors, great photographs (Heidi is her own photographer), and the recipes are the kind I like best, that is, they are recipes that quest and explore.

So far I've mostly been reading it, dipping in here and there, making note of things I want to try (Raspberry Curd Swirl Cake! hibiscus-flavored Agua de Jamaica! a healthy version of Thin Mints!). But yesterday I wanted to get my hands into one of those recipes, and I chose something simple to start: Heidi's Grain-ola. I changed her recipe a little, partly to downsize it by half, partly to suit my cupboards.

Grain-ola, mostly from Super Natural Foods

2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup hulled pumpkin seeds (a sub for sunflower seeds)
1/2 cup roughly chopped walnuts
grated zest of 1 orange
1/3 cup of maple syrup, plus 3 tbs of honey (Heidi used all honey, but I was almost out)
1/8 cup peanut oil (sub for coconut which I didn't have)
about a cup of assorted dried fruits (I used raisins, cranberries, and chopped apricots)
(I also left out coconut, again because I was without, and I have promised to try it with the coconut and the coconut oil.)

Heat sweeteners and oil until warm, and pour over the other ingredients, combined in a big bowl. Spread out on a cookie sheet (I lined mine with foil to save clean-up) and bake at 300 degrees for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Mine came out a little darker than Heidi's, because I couldn't decide if it was done and left it in about 10 minutes longer--not a terrible mistake, because it has a nice darkly caramelized flavor. Altogether, as fine a granola as I've had, right up to my former high watermark of granolas, the kind they make for Vermont College's cafeteria (which is catered by a culinary institute): crispy, chewy, with the nice toothy softness of the dried fruits--good as a dry snack, and ambrosial in a bowl of milk.


One of the appeals of Super Natural Foods, for me, is its focus on unprocessed or minimally processed food, and on unfamiliar grains. Under Heidi's tutelage, I'm hoping to get to know teff and wheat berries in the most intimate and delicious ways.
For Amy Sherman's (of Cooking with Amy) interview with Heidi, check here.

some links, and kitchen news

Here's the best thing I read about the Oscars (1st saw it at Foodgoat); I was also thrilled that Helen Mirren won.
Some people are gardening already--I have seedling envy. My garden still looks pretty much like this, although some of the snow has melted.
Some other people (well, only one) have lost 1/2 their weight, which makes feel like a slacker for not being able to lose 10.
March 1 was National Pig Day, which I didn't know--but I'm planning on eating bacon this week anyway, in belated remembrance, perhaps in this tempting recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini, which is basically mac and cheese with hazelnuts and bacon: mmmm. (Clothilde's cookbook is coming out in May!)
I was looking for something quite different the other day (can't remember what it was), and found a site with Czech and Slovak recipes, which reminded me that I want to explore my native cuisine (one of them: I'm a mongrel). The only ones I recognized were klobasa (which we knew as kielbasi)--the beloved smoked sausage of many Eastern European countries; and palacinky, which the site described as "sweet stuffed crepes." I felt almost offended by the name--I could feel my dormant Slovakness rising up: a French name for one of the only Slovak dishes my mother made for us? Quel horreur!
But I guess they are crepes, we just didn't know it. To us they were a seldom, special treat, and everything about them was lit with magic: the way the batter gaily spread in the pan to make the thinnest of (pancakes) (crepes) palacinky, the red gleam of the jelly spread on the finished product, the powdered sugar dusted on the rolled palacinky, the squidginess of the roll under the fork, the separate tastes of egginess, jelly, sugar in the mouth.
Sometimes Mom would say, "my mother used to make these for us," for her and her 10 brothers and sisters, and that would make them taste even better, imagining my grandmother making them on the farm, and maybe even back in what we then called "the old country." Food from the past, from Europe, from where our grandfather worked as a forester, like something in a fairy tale.
Here's the best picture I could find of palacinky--it appears to be a mix for palacinky. Ours were never served with whipped cream or berries, although I wouldn't say no.

News: the kitchen is almost, almost finished. See D, left, putting a coat of primer on the ugly redness. There is a stage and a half left: the half is the refinishing of the cupboard doors, which we decided to do separately from the cupboards themselves, since it's going to involve paint remover which we'd rather do outside. The whole stage is the floor, which will be no doubt involved and awful in ways we can't even imagine, but which we won't think about before we have to.
So this weekend, my daughters and their families will come to visit and we'll be able to cook something for them in an attractive kitchen (if you don't look at the floor), free of its plastic veil--I am elated. And I can make palacinky--possibly on Saturday I'll be pouring batter, spreading jelly, dusting sugar. Can't wait.

February is a cold month

We are still in the kitchen, meaning still working on it. Currently, it's the inside of the cupboards, which are painted a hideous shade of drying-blood red, robustly chipped (we always check for paint chips if we get out a little-used dish or bowl), which is not only unattractive but probably lead-based and therefore toxic.
Even so, we haven't mostly relied on frozen dinners, because we got so sick of them during the plastering part of the work. Some things are more easily prepared in a partially functional kitchen. Anthing that uses too many spices will cause grief, because the spices and dried herbs are dispersed far and wide, some in a blue basket, some in a giant dough-rising bowl, some in a box along with the deer's skull that used to hang between the windows (found, not shot).
Also it's not wise to embark on anything that uses too many pans, because there's sure to be cursing and banging of the available pots when you can't find the top of the double boiler, or the springform pan, or the top of the glass casserole dish. (Actually, I don't have a springform pan. I did have one, but I decided I wasn't using it and gave it away, and then became convinced that my life wasn't worth living unless I made cheesecake. So I'll probably buy another.)

Some things that have worked well:
Macaroni and cheese--of course--so simple: macaroni, milk, flour, oil or butter, cheese. The flour canister is easy to find because it's big enough to hold a five-pound bag.
Omelets: everything's in the fridge, which has not so far been renovated.
Chili: this was one of the 1st things we made after the kitchen became functional, and because we like it so much, I grouped the necessary spices/herbs on the window sill for easy access. If I want to use dried beans there's a minor problem, since there are several kinds and they're widely distributed: a giant bag of kidney beans in the cooler, along with the giant bag of rice; pinto beans in an attractive glass jar I got at a house sale; lentils in a plastic container on the dining room window seat next to our record collection; black beans in their original bag in a box on top of the fridge.
Soup: because it is so forgiving. As long as you have stock, bought or homemade and frozen, some vegetables, onions and garlic (almost always essential), meat (optional)--you're in business. One of our recent successful soups was a black bean soup with rice and corn, sensibly spicy--so simple as not to need a recipe: black beans, chicken broth, onion and garlic chopped, corn, extra veg (diced carrots this time), one potato cut up, a cup of leftover rice, a dash of hot sauce, a pinch of ancho pepper (one of the gathered chili spices), another of kosher salt. Serve with grated cheese on top (in this case, smoked cheddar).
Thank heaven for canned crushed tomatoes--a convenience food worth standing up for. And speaking of convenience foods, if you need a reason not to buy Hamburger Helper, check out Erin O'Brien's hilarious post on her HH experiment.

a winter meal

Winter calls, of course, for comfort food. For a dish baked in the oven, the warmth and smell of it permating the house. For blankets of creamy cheese sauce. For turkey and broccoli, which is the family name for this heavenly dish, sometimes known elsewhere as Something or another Divan. Why divan? isn't this anothe name for sofa/couch? Why does divan equal cheese sauce? I don't know. I could Google it right now, but it's winter, and I'm conserving body heat and energy, so I'm going to rest in my ignorance.

We only had this when there was leftover turkey, which meant after Thanksgiving or after Christmas, which were the only times we had turkey. My mother would never have dreamed of making turkey just so there would be leftovers (as we have sometimes done), so it was a rare treat, remembered fondly and yearned for.

There were dozens of recipes for this or dishes like it floating around in the '50s, I think, but my mother got hers from a restaurant, now forgotten. She liked what she'd ordered so much (and probably it was called Turkey Divan), that she asked the waiter if the chef might give her the recipe. He told her that the chef was stingy with his recipes, but that it was really easy, and he described what went into it, my mother scribbling it down on the back of an envelope: sliced turkey, broccoli spears, a white sauce enriched with cheese.

My version is only a little different from hers--I don't use frozen broccoli, and I don't used Kraft's Olde English Cheese. But otherwise, it's the same, and it produces a dish where the whole is immeasurably more than the parts.

Jo's Turkey and Broccoli

2 tbs butter or olive oil

2 tbs flour

1.5 cups milk

1.5 cups grated cheese of your choice

pinch of salt

1/4 tsp nutmeg

2-3 broccoli crowns

a cup or cup and a half of leftover turkey

paprika

Melt butter in a saucepan, and add the flour to it (or to the oil), stirring over the heat until it's absorbed. Stir in the milk and continue stirring until it thickens into its white-sauceness. (This time, I was doing 2 other things at the same time, and I let it start to boil, which you are never supposed to do to white sauce, but you know--it turned out fine.) When it's thickened, add salt and nutmeg and grated cheese, stirring until it melts in. (I mostly use cheddar, but I add other cheese to it, depending on what's in the fridge.)

Cook broccoli until just starting to become tender, and slice or separate the florets--you don't want anything to be so big that it will stick up and mar the cheese-sauce blanket. Slice or chop the turkey. Put the broccoli in one layer in an 8-inch baking pan, and the turkey over it. Pour cheese sauce--it will probably be thick, so spread it to the edges and corners. Sprinkle lightly with paprika.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes, or until the sauce is bubbling around the edges and the top browns slightly. Eat with moans of pleasure.

I always think of my mother when we have this, of her wonderful cooking, her curiosity. I can see her talking to the waiter, her eager friendliness, maybe almost flirting a little (she was a very attractive woman), my father looking on benevolently--because for him, everything she did was right.

snowed-in valentines

Big storm, as you probably know if you're a midwesterner. We're not really truly snowed in--we could get out if we had to. But there's enough snow that we're happy we don't have to--about a foot, I'm guessing, although there are drifts that are much bigger.

We're having a make-do Valentine's day, since both of us were planning last-minute heart-shaped shopping. D gave me a chocolate heart made from a Cadbury bar melted down and poured into an ancient high-sided, heart-shaped cookie cutter.

I'm making him a bread pudding in heart-shaped ramekins with what's around the house: I'm thinking chestnuts, apricots, caramel--I'll let you know how it turns out.

this + this, but not that + that

I do have a kitchen again, although there are still 2 more stages to the renovating: the upper cupboards and the floor (see left, the paint job). And D and I have been cooking--how I missed those beloved ordinary meals that were so unattainable when the kitchen was full of ladders and plastic tarps: shrimp stir fry, meatloaf, baked potatoes with various toppings, etc. etc.
I'm not quite ready to post about the actual cooking yet though--I'm easing my way in by food contemplation: imagine me with chin leaning on one hand, a cartoon balloon over my head that has a picture of a cake in it, or maybe a steaming pot of stock, or some handmade pasta (one of my food resolutions).
Today I was thinking about things going with other things: sometimes they do and sometimes not. So I've started a small meme, a version of the fives: list 5 food pairings that you've discovered go very well together (maybe against expectations); and 5 that you really don't like at all.

Here are mine:
5 delicious partners
1. Ginger snaps and cheddar cheese--the snaps should be very gingery, the cheddar sharpish. This is an idea I got from a good friend, Susan of Bluffton, a late-night snack invention when she was getting her Ph.D. in creative writing. When I was visiting her several years ago, she brought out the gingersnaps and cheddar for one of our food and talk fests. "You'll love this," she said, and I was an immediate convert.
2. Potato chips and ice cream. Unflavored chips, of an unsurpassed crispiness and saltiness, and any kind of ice cream, although I like them best with chocolate. Salty and sweet--very classic; also crunchy and creamy. There's so much going on you won't be able to hold a sensible conversation. The first time I ate chips and ice cream together it was to gross out one of my squeamish cousins. I scooped the ice cream up like dip while she squealed in horror. Now I just eat them sedately from side-by-side bowls, which is just as good.
3. Cherry tomatoes and kalamata olives. They can be eaten together casually and promiscuously out of a bowl for lunch, or skewered jauntily on decorative toothpicks. Each makes the other taste more so--more sweetly tomatoish, more bitingly, piquantly olivish.
4. Saltine crackers with butter. This takes your snack life up a notch without noticeably increasing prep time. Open box of crackers, spread butter thinly. Make a stack so you don't have to go back to make more when you've gotten to a good place in the book you're reading and you don't want to stop and go back to the kitchen. I prefer unsalted butter, but if you're a saltlover go for the double dose.
5. Hardboiled eggs and French dressing. I usually make my own salad dressing now, but if it's going to be on a halved hardboiled egg, it has to be Kraft French Deluxe. The taste is important, but also the brilliant (some say lurid) color.

5 food hostilities
1. Prunes and chocolate. I like prunes, I like chocolate, but they just don't go together for me. Hopeful, I try them out again every once in a while, but--nope. Even as I'm typing this though, I had a vision of prune chocolate chunk muffins, so who knows? (Chocolate and apricots are fast friends though.)
2. Champagne and beer. Probably no one needs to be told this, but champagne and beer do not go well together. Especially not when they're mixed because you don't have a lot of champagne, and you think that beer (which you have a lot more of) will make it go farther when you're celebrating New Year's Eve at the home of one of your friends whose parents are spending the weekend in Las Vegas. I don't like to admit whose idea it was.
3. Coconut milk and pumpkin. One of the worst soups I ever made was a pumpkin soup made with coconut milk. It's true that I was not following the recipe, so it was my my own fault, but it was awful. The only time I've ever thrown something away (usually if things go bad, I put it in the fridge and pretend that I'm going to eat it later, until it grows a coat of mold and then I throw it away).
4. Sausage and gravy, as in sausage gravy. I've given sausage gravy many chances, because I ought to like it--I like them when they're decorously apart, but when they come together I draw back in horror. Maybe it's because I don't think gravy should be white? I know it's not because it's high in fat.

5. Celery stuffed with peanut butter. Who is responsible for this? I don't like the way it tastes, I don't like the way the peanut butter stickies up the crispness of the celery, and I don't like the way it looks--green and brown, not attractive. The only thing celery should be stuffed with is cream cheese mixed with a dollop of horseradish and a squeeze of lemon juice--a sanctified and beloved hors d'ouevre in our family.

I'm tagging Plan B, Madame X, Pen in Hand, Book of Marvels, No Feeling of Falling, and I'm hoping that Alternate Side Parking will take some time from the pressing business of moving her car from one side of the street to the other as well.

wishful cooking

The kitchen is coming along. It has gone from its mutilated state (left) ; then the stove served up an assortment of strange chemical dishes, right; and now it's assuming a bridal-white coat of primer below right).

But cooking is once again suspended, and we've eaten more TV dinner type food than I like. The Boston Market chicken pot pie is not that great, in case you're interested; Marie Callendar's is far superior (although a little too salty).

In the meantime, I'm reading cookbooks and blogs and marking recipes I want to try when my stove has lost its plastic drapery, and the cupboards are full of food and dishes instead of paint thinner and sandpaper.




There have been a lot of winter vegetable posts lately, enough to make a menu. Here is my dream wintery menu:

Appetizers:
Puree of Celery Root Soup, from Orangette
Winter Salad with Fennel, Pear, Orange, and Pecan, from the passionate cook
Entree:
Simple Butternut Squash Tart, from Heidi at 101 Cookbooks

with side vegetable:
Roasted Parsnips, from Maureen at No Feeling of Falling
and for dessert,
Dark Chocolate and Beet Brownies, from La Tartine Gourmand

In the meantime, the contents of my kitchen cupboards are all over the place. Is the oatmeal on the dining table or in the corner of the living room? Where is the cinnamon? Did we eat all the walnuts, or are they in a box next to the couch?

Our tentative date of cook-ability is January 25: here's hoping.

culinary resolutions

It's still January, still fair to be making resolutions. So here are mine:
1. Make pasta from scratch. I'll have 2 good step-by-step blog posts to guide me, here and here.
2. Finally finish renovating the kitchen. I want to have all my spices in one place again!
3. Try making dishes from a new-to-me ethnic cuisine. Thai? Moroccan? or maybe explore my own culinary roots--Slovak/Eastern European. (I also have Scottish roots, but I'm not sure I want to make a haggis.)
4. Make pierogies from scratch (my ethnic roots!).
5. Utilize my cookbook collection more. I have a tendency to covet and collect and then just hoard things--so maybe I ought to make a recipe a week from one or another of them.
6. Make an effort to shop, cook, and eat more adventurously. Find out what galangal is. Buy a quince or some kumquats. Make some pickled turnips!
7. Collect the family recipes, which is something I've been meaning to do for a long time and haven't.
8. Make a kitchen inventory: do I really want to do this? or is it just a fantasy, like the one where all my books are alphabetized and ordered by genre and subject?
9. Stop eating things I don't like, or don't like much, and eat only things I love. No more of those muffins from Starbucks. No more processed cheese or stale doughnuts at work functions. (Make my own doughnuts! if I make pompkushki, it will be more of the ethnic roots thing.)
For some other posts on food-related resolutions and plans, see Food and Thoughts and Hooked on Heat; and for a great retrospective list of her favorite 2006 recipes, see La Tartine Gourmande.

good luck food

This probably should have gone in the end-of-2006 post--our New Year's Eve dinner, but I didn't get around to it, and then there was the mac & cheese thing, and so on. But I had to give it a post for 2 reasons--one is that my kielbasi photo looked so good, I didn't want to waste it. And two, I wondered about the good-luckness of pork and sauerkraut, which is the Slovak good-luck new-year's dinner of choice. I'm very fond of both, but why is it good luck to eat them at the end/beginning of the year? Living off the fat of the land? (pork) eating up the bitter/sour parts of life? (sauerkraut)
I'm passionately fond of sauerkraut, and would make it more often except that D is not as fond. I make it from my mother's recipe in a no-recipe way, but this year I made it with chicken broth because I forgot to buy beer and didn't want to go out again. And since I was changing the one thing I made another addition or two, which I hope my mother wouldn't hate (although she might find it faddish).
Sauerkraut for New Year's (or anytime)
1 bag sauerkraut, drained
a pork chop or a chunk of kielbasi
a good pinch of caraway seeds (about 1 tsp)
a smaller pinch of cumin seeds
a cup of beer or chicken broth
(if broth, also add a splash of vinegar)
1 small potato, grated
1 tsp diced lemon peel
Put sauerkraut in a saucepan with everything else but the lemon peel and bring to a boil. Simmer for about 30 minutes (while you're frying up the rest of the kielbasi in a skillet). In the last few minutes put in the lemon peel. Serve with kielbasi and plenty of horseradish, and follow (somewhat later) with champagne.
We added brownies with vanilla ice cream for dessert, and thought ourselves lucky to have found the brownies leftover in the freezer.

macaroni and cheese

This post is dedicated to my daughter S, who loves macaroni and cheese with a passion--I always try to make it for her if she visits (and once made it for her at her house; a small disaster because of the difference in our ovens). I must say it's a pleasure to know of something that will always delight her; if only my older daughter V had a favorite dish so I could do the same for her--if she has, she's not telling.
Kevin at Seriously Good has come up with a Mac-and-Cheese Off, and I had to post on mine, even though it is extremely ungourmet, not in any way tarted up, perhaps boring. We like it that way (although we don't agree that it's boring). I haven't used a recipe for years, although long ago I had it written out on an index card, one of the few dishes of my mother's that I carried into my first marriage. It's her recipe, possibly originally from the Joy of Cooking (although it's not quite the same) and all I've changed is the type of cheese (Mom was a fan of Kraft American).
Here it is--basic, homey, and delicious.
Sue Bee's Macaroni and Cheese
2 tbs butter (you can use oil if you want, although the taste will change)
2 tbs flour
2 cups milk (I've used skim, 2%, and whole--all work fine)
about 2 cups grated cheese
2 cups macaroni
Paprika
Melt the butter in a sauce pan, add flour and stir into a roux, cooking it gently for a half minute or so. 1 Add milk and stir constantly over low heat until the lumps dissolve (smash at them with your spoon if necessary). Continue cooking over lowish heat, 2 until the sauce thickens enough to coat the spoon a little. 3 Add the grated cheese 4 and stir until melted (you shouldn't need the stove here--the heat of the sauce should melt it).
In the meantime, if you're efficient, you'll have had water boiling for the macaroni. Sling it in and simmer it until it just starts to soften (I take one or two out and eat them to see how they're coming along). When they get there, drain and put in your preferred dish (I use a 9x13 pan), then pour the sauce over, mixing everything around until the cheesiness is nicely distributed.
As a last touch, sprinkle with paprika (this is more for aesthetics than flavor, but we can't do without it). Bake at 350 degrees for a while. I don't really time it any more, but I think it's supposed to go for about 25 minutes, or until the sauce is bubbling a little around the edges.
Serve right from the pan, because no one is interested in waiting any longer. It's good with vegetables like broccoli or green beans (also a nice color contrast), but we never put the vegetables into the mac and cheese in the interests of innovation or saving time as I've seen some recipes suggest.
mac and cheese footnotes:
1 When I first made this I had no idea what a roux was, but now I take pleasure in using the right word.
2 You're supposed to cook it over low heat, but I confess that I often turn up the heat after the lumps are gone, which works OK if you stir madly.
3 Knowing when this is partly a matter of experience, but I find that the feel of the spoon (I always use a wooden one) against the pan changes when the sauce starts to thicken--it moves against the pan bottom in a more silky way.
4 This particular mac and cheese had a mixture of two kinds of cheddar (an Irish cheese, I think, and Helluva Good Cheese Extra Sharp Cheddar), plus the end of a piece of Swiss. If I'm making it for S, it has to have a high proportion of yellow cheddar, since she disdains the white version. Confession: I once used a judicious mixture of yellow and red food coloring when I had only white cheese: no one guessed.

end-of-2006

A wrap-up of my first food-blogging year that is a day late. This has also been the year of my kitchen disruption, which is leaking into 2007 (but surely not farther?).
Here are some dishes and meals from 2006 that I didn't blog about:
Left--my birthday cake, a yogurt cake based on Clothilde's soaked with an orange-infused simple syrup, and topped with ganache and whipped cream. Excellent!

In July, I ate some of the amazing food in Lake Tahoe, most of it bought at the farmers market--perfect local blackberries, tapenade made from local ingredients (not pictured), my friend Kris's mother's famous eggplant dish (left). (Had I ever had a fresh-from-someone's farm eggplant before? I don't think I had.)



Dark, luscious, local cherries (during local-eating August) made part of a picnic on the road to my niece's wedding in upstate New York. And in early fall, there was an amazing dinner at Three Birds restaurant to celebrate finishing the first draft of my novel--see the crowning dessert below, left.





In November, I was amazed to find I still had herbs and greens still growing in my garden (and even more amazed that I'm planning to go out later this afternoon and pick some cilantro to go with the black bean soup I'm planning to make; I'm worried about global warming, but does that mean I can't enjoy a small silver lining?).



In early December, I made a very successful (but unrecorded) chicken curry, dodging the plastic sheets that hung in the half-renovated kitchen.



And finally, right before Christmas some friends and I had our annual holiday lunch at Parker's, a great Cleveland-area restaurant that closed at the end of 2006 (yesterday!), and let our festive martinis serve as a valedictory virtual toast to the end of the year. It was a pretty good one for me, but even so, I'm always happy to see the new one arrive--the promise of something new, new projects, new writing, whatever is coming up.

our kitchen is on hiatus, but--

we are doing a bit of cooking here and there. Actually, the kitchen is stalled, while D figures out what is causing the minor leak in the corner by the cupboards. This was a relief, because takeout palls after a while.
But I was very glad that my sister had volunteered to do Thanksgiving. She did the turkey, gravy, stuffing

--all in our mother's time-tested ways--and the mashed potatoes, also the cranberry sauce (we have to have the canned, complete with molded lines, for tradition's sake). I did the salad and veg (green salad w homemade dressing, roasted carrots, and green beans). Our aunt made the pies: two pumpkin, one pumpkin chiffon, and as she always does, pronounced the dinner a triumph. Here she is, approving the table settings.
The green beans were steamed and unadorned; the salad with a simple vinaigrette: our family believes in some plain food on holidays to go along with the fancy. But the roasted carrots were gussied up a little, and got their modest share of compliments.
Roasted Carrots
16-20 medium to large carrots
2-3 tbs olive oil
a pinch of salt
juice of half a lime
2-3 tbs brown sugar
I cut the carrots in chunks, splitting some of the largest first, then tossed them with the oil and juice and sprinkled them with salt. I roasted them for about 40 minutes in a 375 degree oven (until fork tender), then took them out and tossed them with the brown sugar. I did them a day ahead and heated them up in my sister's microwave, and they were very good, fitting accompaniment to the glamorous turkey.
My surprise of the day was how much I (a fanatical lover of the regular version) liked the pumpkin chiffon pie--my aunt has promised the recipe, so maybe I'll post it later. As with so many great dishes, it was devoured before anyone (me) thought to take a picture.
Here's the youngest and pickiest Thanksgiving diner, left, turning his nose up at something.
And his cousin, right, planning an assault on the mashed potatoes. They haven't learned to like the stuffing yet, but maybe we won't tell them how good it is for a while.

Here's the reason there haven't been so many cooking posts lately--the only things on our stove are a tub of plastering stuff and various implements of renovation, plus an attractive frosting of plaster dust. D is fixing the ancient water damage, that we ignored for as long as we could (some might say it was way too long), and because he's a perfectionist, he's decided that not only will he do his own plastering, but that he'd redo all the ceiling problems, cracks, flaws, dimples, etc. All the books say to leave large plastering jobs to the experts, but D was undeterred. My part is to be encouraging; to call out "What's wrong?" in a calming voice when he starts swearing; and not to complain about the dust.
So there's been some take-out, some McDonald's; I had a Big Mac for the first time since the '80s. We have done a little bit of cooking, but it's short-cut cooking, making extensive use of the microwave. I made scones the other day, but all the prep work had to be done in the dining room, since every kitchen surface is a plaster-staging area.
The idea is to have it done for Thanksgiving, when my daughters' families are coming. I have my fingers crossed.

art and food

D was in a juried art show which had its opening last night, so we went and mingled with other other artists and art lovers. Some good stuff--above is the 1st prize winner, which was called "Emerging."
And here is my favorite painting of D's in the show:

And here is the food--it was solid fare of the cheese-cracker-grape-olive variety, but I particularly liked the signs, which suggested mysterious food and drink misbehavior at past openings that I'd like to hear more about.

one of the 50 best restaurants in America

I went out to dinner with some friends last Friday--a kind of memorial dinner. We did an informal writing retreat in the summer, and want to keep the energy alive; also just to have fun.
We went to Parker's New American Bistro and it was wonderful--above is my entree, a moistly tender piece of pork loin with just the right amount of chewiness. And here's the lamb sausage on a polenta cake appetizer: also extremely good (I snagged the last bite).
One of the nice things about Parker's is that everything is very good, and also as local as it's possible to be when you're running a restaurant. Parker is a local-foods advocate, and is active in various ways around Cleveland and northeast Ohio in the farmers markets, etc. In fact, he's closing the restaurant to give more time to these activities, which is good and bad. Good: more attention to local food, better farmers markets. Bad: no more Parker's.
So this dinner might have been a swan dinner, if I don't make it back before the end of December. It made me think of all the times I'd been there before. It's in the Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland, which is where I went to high school, so the 19th-century building was familiar to me from before it was a restaurant (it's quite close to a boys' school, in the vicinity of which the girls from my girls' school did a certain amount of hanging out).
And then later, when I was working at Cleveland State, my boss would sometimes take me to dinner at Parkers. He liked it because they would bring his plate without any garnish or vegetable. He didn't like to see anything impinging on his meat and potatoes--it ruined his appetite, he said. At other restaurants they would say they'd leave off the carrots or the curly kale, but then they would forget. He also liked the dessert souflees, which had to be ordered at the beginning of the meal (they still do). I had my first souflee there--lemon, very good.
Parker's was featured by Gourmet as one of the 2006 50 best restaurants--one of not so many Cleveland restaurants to be so honored--so it's quite a loss. I'm thinking I ought to go once more at least before it's gone forever.

food news from here and there

Dagoba Organic Chocolate has been purchased by Hershey. Click here for some words about this from Schilling of Dagoba via David Lebovitz's blog. Question: is Hershey planning to gobble up all the organic/artisan chocolatemakers? Is this an evil chocolate plot? Stay tuned.
Elise at Simply Recipes has posted a recipe for Caramel Apples, which look so wonderful I'm thinking of changing my mind about not liking them.
Bridal gown made by future husband, a baker, from cream puffs. See here.
Kitchenhand gives a personal history of the bean, and a recipe.
I had cheese (an unidentified cheddar scrap rescued from the back of the fridge) and crackers (Ritz) for lunch. No photos.

fair food

I went to the Fairfield County Fair in Lancaster last weekend. It's the last county fair in Ohio every year, which gives it an air of nostalgia--last fair, end of summer--quick, eat some funnel cake. Which I did, along with a lot of other stuff.
I also went to look at the food exhibitions, which I love. I've never entered anything (although come to think of it, why not?). I love the gleaming jars of jam and the giant vegetables, and the slices of pie and cake going limp, on display for days after their eat-by dates. This year, I especially liked the weird carrot exhibit, but I'm also always a sucker for outsize tomatoes and giant pumpkins.
I guess some people think of county fairs as outdated, and possibly they are, but I love their connection back to the time when Ohio, and much of the U.S., was mainly agricultural, when farming was one of the major occupations. Making a good jar of jam or canning garden produce wasn't just something you did for fun, but a survival mechanism. Long ago, in the winter, you couldn't go to the store and buy some sundried tomatoes or a jar of capers or spiced peaches. If you didn't have it in the root cellar, you did without.
This was my 1st year canning, and I admit I'm glad I don't have to depend for my winter diet on my food-preserving labor, because it was hard and time-consuming and I was thoroughly tired of it when it was over. But I don't want to lose the connection, even if it's sentimental, even if I'm being food-nostalgic.
The fair is also a wonderful spectacle, full of color and noise and movement. This was the first time I went in the daytime and I felt pleasantly overwhelmed by the sun and the blue sky, the moving crowds, the bright colors of the booths and the rides. A holdover again, right? For those benighted generations w/o electronic diversions. But a day later in front of the tv, I remembered being at the fair, when instead of sitting in front of the flat screen, I had walked in the very midst and moil of the highly-colored, doughnut and gyro scented air, able to put my hands on the giant goose-necked squash or press my face against the chainlink fence to see the sulky race.
And yes, I did have a deep-fried Twinkie.

some things I have cooked

One thing is the pumpkin stuffed with a sausage stuffing. I got the idea of a stuffed pumpkin in my head (which sounds uncomfortable), and then I bought a small pumpkin to symbolize fall, and then I felt we should eat it before it went squashy. I think I was influenced by the Sausage-Stuffed Acorn Squash at Chez Megane--that's how the pumpkin got in my head.
I precooked my pumpkin halves in the microwave a bit and also precooked the sausage a little because we were both hungry. The stuffing was very simple: mild Italian sausage, an egg, some torn up bread, a splash of milk, and some herbs from the garden (basil, parsley, and sage). I garnished it with some sauteed sage leaves, and it was very good.
Another thing is the Tomato-Apple Salad, which was the result of having tons of apples from D's father's tree. They were very insect-bitten this year, and most of the apples have to be cut and cut again to find the good parts. We wanted a tomato salad, but there weren't enough tomatoes left in the garden, so in desperation, I added chopped apples--this was an excellent idea. The salad was about equal parts chopped yellow tomato and chopped tart apple, in a vinaigrette of olive oil and lemon juice, with a sprinkling of kosher salt and a grind or 2 of pepper. Who knew that tomatoes and apples went together so well? I'm thinking now of a tomato soup with apples in some form: chopped? juiced? sauteed? We'll see.
Something I've cooked with: my new olive oil, brought back from the food nirvana of California by my friend Kris. It's from Lodestar Farms, a lemon olive oil with a very nice pedigree: extra virgin, cold pressed, late harvest. So far I've only used it twice. I drizzled it on the stuffed pumpkin when it came out of the oven, and I've dressed the pumpkin seeds with it after I roasted them. Both applications heavenly.
This weekend I'm going to Logan, Ohio, home of Pizza Crossing. I expect to try some pepperoni, and pepperoni/sausage/mushroom/hot pepper with my grandsons, who don't mind if I eat the hot peppers off theirslices.

all the things I haven't cooked, plus my favorite herb

I haven't cooked anything at all this week. I'm working on a big project, and D has taken up the spatula (as he did for a lot of the summer). Yesterday, he made a crockpot venison stew that was the ultimate comfort food, with drop biscuits to sop it up, which was so heavenly and nourishing that it may even have increased my IQ a couple of points.
I wasn't cooking over the weekend, and I wasn't blogging either, so I missed contributing to Kalyn's my-favorite-herb event, and didn't get to vote for basil, which came in poor second to cilantro (cilantro 13, basil 7). Check out her round-up, here.
So this is a belated tribute to basil. I have 7 basil plants growing in my garden, 3 of them still looking pretty good although it's been chilly (we haven't had a frost yet). The photo above was taken yesterday, when I was on my way to the library.
I use basil a lot. In summer it goes into 8 out of 10 dinners. I use basil leaves instead of lettuce on my sandwiches. I put a leaf or 2 in my cup of herbal tea in the mornings. I dry part of what I grow and use it as long it lasts (it never lasts long enough). And I make pesto and freeze it.
Pesto is my favorite basil recipe. I got my original pesto recipe from a book on herbs that I've lost. I bought it at an herb shop run by a chirpy old woman, the kind of person from whom you want to buy something, because they're so nice and they answer all your stupid questions about growing this and making vinegar out of that, and in this case, because they're so cute (she was wearing a straw hat with real daisies stuck in the ribbon band around the crown). So I bought the book, and read it through and through, learned how to make herb vinegars, different ways to dry, and most important, how to make pesto.
I changed her recipe somewhat, reducing the oil, for instance--and I see no need to stick to pine nuts; I've used walnuts and almonds, both of which were fine (walnuts give a better texture though). I add a little vinegar because I was nervous then about botulism or something, and I still do because I like the way it tastes. I also like it to be spicy, so I often add part of a hot pepper.
Here's my recipe, which is always amendable--I don't really measure anything anymore, so these are estimated measurements.
Basil Pesto
2 cups of basil (I put it in a pyrex 2-cup measuring cup and really squash it down tight)
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese (it's best if you use fresh-grated, but in a pinch, I've used the stuff in the green can and it's pretty good that way)
a handful of some kind of nuts: pine, walnut, almond; I used pecan once, and I'm thinking of trying pistachio this year, since I have half a bag in the freezer)
a splash of vinegar: probably this splash is in the nature of a scant tablespoon; I use whatever I have in the cupboard.
a whole or half hot pepper: I've used both dried and fresh; jalapenos or cayenne, usually.
a clove or 2 of garlic
I put everything in the food processor except the olive oil and let it go for a minute; then I add the olive oil a little at a time through the feed tube. Sometimes I use more than a quarter cup--I like it to be moving toward smooth, but still a little textured--more olive oil would make it more sauce-like. Mine mounds up in the spoon.
I sometimes add other things on a whim--some green or red pepper; half an onion; some parsley. And I mix basils, except for purple, which I segregate.
I freeze it in small containers, and we eat it in all the usual ways--pasta, mainly. But it's also good on a sandwich, either by itself or mixed into a little mayonnaise. Even frozen it has a strong aroma--when I open one of the little containers I can smell the basil and it's like opening my back door to summer.