Bear made sugar cookies and I can’t stop eating them. Having a husband who bakes is the best thing and the worst thing ever.
2009 Year of Pleasure #46
November 25, 2009
Meet Pearl.
Isn’t she a beauty?
I had a great little cobalt blue kitchenaid for about eight years, and it finally gave up the ghost a bunch of months ago after one too many batches of bread dough. It served faithfully like a good little soldier. She is missed.
We went a couple months without a mixer, because who has $300 just lying around for mixer emergencies, and finally we just said That’s It! We Need A Mixer!
Bear and I made each other a promise. If we stopped eating out and buying processed foods, then we could get the mixer now and then it would pay for itself by the end of the year. For the first month we were absolutely religious. I made homemade crackers, Bear brownbagged it for lunch everyday, and then the whole family got sick and picking something up on the way home was all any of us could manage.
But we still look for excuses to use Ol’ Pearl. She runs like a dream.
Sweet and Savory Cranberry Sauce
November 24, 2009
This is a love note to my friend Crysta
Last year I canceled all our usual Thanksgiving plans when I heard that my friend Crysta and her family were going to be in my general vicinity, and I jumped on the chance to claim her undivided attention and cook an enormous meal all by myself.
Every year I get the itch to add something new to the tradition, and last year I just *had* to make my own cranberry sauce. I don’t know why homemade cranberry sauce has this reputation as the pinnacle of do it yourself extravagance because it couldn’t be any easier. It’s literally not much more than boiled cranberries.
I thought that red onions would be a great paring for the cranberries, so I started throwing things together, and I got a little, shall we say, carried away. Poor Crysta took a bite and actually managed to say, “Um, this is great. Maybe the onion taste is a little….prominent?” without spitting anything into her napkin. We threw that batch out and started over, and the second try was far more successful.
I finally got around to writing out what I did, so in time for her Thanksgiving and yours, here’s my great second times the charm cranberry recipe.
Tresa’s Sweet and Savory Cranberry Sauce
1/4 C red onion, diced
2 Tbs butter
2 C water
1 12 oz bag fresh cranberries
2 C sugar
1/3 C apple juice
1 C brown sugar
4 Tbs red wine vinegar
zest from one orange
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp ginger
Dice the red onion and sweat in the butter. Don’t let the onion brown, keep the heat down until the onion gets all lovely and translucent. When the onions are soft, add the rest of the ingredients and let simmer. After a little while the cranberries will pop open. Give it a few stirs, mash some of those cranberries up against the side of the pan, and continue to let simmer and reduce. You can let this go as long as you want for the desired thickness, but I call it good enough once it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon well. Pour into a jar and stick in the fridge until it cools.
The Canon
July 29, 2009
I’m finally finished organizing my recipes. Well, as finished as I’m ever going to be. I like experimenting with new dishes too much to ever just cut myself off completely and say, “Nope. I’ve got the 30 recipes we like to eat. That’s enough for me.”
Since it’s been a while, let me catch us up in a nutshell.
Bear’s Aunt Liz wrote a cookbook, and the real genius of it is in the meal planning. She has a theme night for every night of the week to narrow down the options and make it easier to decide what to cook from every single recipe in your repertoire.
I decided on the theme nights I wanted for us, and then I made notebooks to help me organize everything. Then I set about on a mission to fine tune all my recipes and get them just the way I wanted them, then I would add them to their proper categories and the recipe would enter “The Canon.”
I created a whole bunch of word documents, and every time I got a recipe just right I’d type it up and copy paste into whatever categories applied. Once I got all the recipes I make on a regular basis all typed up, then I printed them all out, put them in page protectors so that I can clean up any spills, and sorted them into their little categories.
I even did this with my side dishes and it saves me so much time. Now I can turn to one section for veggie sides, and another for starchy sides.
Some meals are so simple that a full-on recipe is overkill, so I have an “Ideas” page at the beginning of each book for things like Fried Chicken (that I could make in my sleep) or Grilled Cheese Sandwiches (that anyone could make, but often doesn’t get considered as meal-worthy).
The Pizza Night notebook has the occasional recipe in there – crust, sauces, etc. – but it’s almost more a selection of shopping lists, or reminders that when I get sick of BBQ chicken pizza, I can throw bacon on the top and all of a sudden it’s a whole new thing.
I also keep a notebook full of magazine clippings and internet printouts – recipes I want to try. The mistake I made last time was including in my cookbook every recipe that looked interesting and that led to a lot of wasted flipping through and some very unpleasant discoveries when those recipes didn’t work out.
Eggs Benedict Pizza
June 17, 2009
As part of my meal planning/recipe organization project, I’ve been going through all of my collected recipes and seeing which ones work for me. I have a binder full of recipes I want to try, and a journal full of notes on recipes in progress, and once I’ve got something down pat, I add it to the notebooks. I’ve started calling these “the canon.” So once I finish fine tuning a recipe just so, it goes into the notebooks were it becomes canonized.
My meal planning schedule makes Friday night pizza night. I have to admit, I really don’t enjoy pizza all that much. I don’t know why, I used to like it fine, I just developed a weird aversion to it. Even so, I had to keep this night on the schedule for Bear, and for Atti as he gets older and starts bringing friends around – I think pizza night will be a big hit. But I had to do something to keep myself interested, so I put on the ol’ thinking cap and started coming up with the most gourmet pizzas I could. This is my new favorite one.
Eggs Benedict Pizza
Pizza crust – your favorite recipe
Monterey Jack cheese
Canadian Bacon
6 eggs
Hollandaise sauce
Hollandaise sauce
1 lb butter, clarified (melt the butter and only use the clear yellow part, not the milky solids)
Dash of salt
Dash of peppercorns
½ C white vinegar
1/3 C water
6 egg yolks
1 – 2 T lemon juice
Salt and cayenne pepper to taste
Combine the vinegar, salt and peppercorns in a saucepan and cook until nearly dry. Add the water and stir thoroughly to pick up all those vinegar crystals, then strain out the peppercorns. Allow to cool. Add the egg yolks to the vinegar mixture in a non-reactive bowl and beat well. Hold the bowl over a pot of boiling water and beat until the yolks are thick and creamy and reach the ribbon stage. This is when the eggs are thick enough that they start to hold some shape and look like ribbons trailing off the whisk. This will give you quite a work out if you do it by hand, but it’s a whole lot easier to use a hand or stick blender. Remove the bowl from the heat. Ladle in the butter slowly while beating the eggs, only a few drops at a time at first and waiting until all the butter is fully incorporated. If the sauce becomes too thick to beat, add the lemon juice and continue to add the butter. Add lemon juice, salt, and cayenne as needed to taste. Strain if necessary to remove any egg clumps.
Mix up crust, brush with olive oil. Distribute Canadian Bacon and top with grated cheese. Bake. When the crust is done, crack six eggs around the top of the pizza. Leave in the oven for 1 minute and then take out. Carry over cooking will take the eggs the rest of the way. Serve with Hollandaise sauce for dipping.
When we made Hollandaise sauce in class, it didn’t really thrill me. It’s creamy and buttery, but tasted on it’s own you don’t really get what all the fuss is about. I’ve had Eggs Benedict plenty of times, even a particularly fantastic Crabcakes Eggs Benedict, and absolutely loved them, but I never walked away craving the sauce. That’s the particular gift of Hollandaise sauce. It doesn’t overpower, it spotlights. The flavor blends in and makes everything else just shine. It’s totally worth the trouble.
Summer Corn Chowder
June 12, 2009
I’ve been attempting to go through all of my recipes and cull out the ones I never make, test out some new ones, perfect the old standbys, all so I can use my new notebooks and make my meal planning go from my most hated chore to my most favorite.
I’ve always loved a good soup, and I realized that I had about four different, but essentially the same, recipes for a simple corn chowder. It’s one of Bear’s favorite things in the world, it’s super easy to make, and it’s a great summer recipe with all those fresh garden veggies in there. After sorting through all the variations, here’s my version of it.
Summer Corn Chowder
½ lb bacon
½ C chopped onion
½ C chopped celery
¼ C chopped green pepper
½ C roasted red pepper
2 C diced potatoes
5 C chicken broth
2 C water
1 tsp salt
1 bay leaf
4 sprigs thyme
3 sprigs oregano
3 C corn
1 pint whipping cream
2 Tbs flour
2 Tbs butter
Chop bacon and fry in a stockpot. Remove bacon from the pan and drain grease until about 2 Tbs remains. Add the onion, celery, and pepper and sweat until translucent. Add potatoes, broth, water, salt, corn, and then add the herbs tied up in a bundle. Simmer until the potatoes are tender. In a separate saucepan, melt the butter and then stir in the flour to form a roux. Add the whipping cream and allow it to thicken at medium heat. Incorporate the milk mixture into the rest of the soup and heat through.
You can use fresh or frozen corn, either one will work just fine. Add them at the same point in the recipe, but don’t defrost the frozen corn first. Roasting the red pepper was a really important point to me. The roasting makes such a difference, it’s like a whole different vegetable. You can buy a jar of roasted peppers and just chop those up, but I save myself the money and just get a regular red pepper, chop it in half and clean out the seeds and veins, toss it on a cookie sheet skin side up, and through it under the broiler for five minutes or until the skin is charred. The skin peels right off and you’re left with this wonderful spicy smoky new thing altogether. I’ve also been known to toss bits of roasted red pepper into my corn bread. Good golly it’s delicious.
The Big Day
May 21, 2009
For nearly a year now I’ve been going to a community college culinary school, and tonight is my very last class. Every Thursday since last August I’ve been dropping Atti off at Bear’s office, donning my chef’s whites, and going off to chop and boil to my hearts content. I have a fantastic team of students I work with, and tonight we face our big exam – an iron chef style make something up on the spot challenge.
The biggest thing I learned in culinary school was just how much I already knew. There were definitely lots of “better ways” I learned, but on the whole nothing was new to me. I’ve been making veloute for years, I just always called it gravy.
This experience has really taught me a lot about how I approach life. I worked so hard for my education, and I have such a respect for it, that when I think about something I want to get really good at, I often think about going back to school for some intense study. Especially in art and writing. Those are two fields that I love, and two areas I feel intensely self conscious about because I so badly want to be good at them. For years and years I’ve thought about getting a MFA in creative writing, but the time was never right so I waited and waited, and never picked up the pen. But maybe I know more than I think I know. Maybe I can’t diagram a three act structure for you, but maybe I can still get my point across, just using a different name.
If the opportunity comes along that I can take some art classes, I’ll jump on it, because I can certainly learn the better way to do things. But maybe I need to stop waiting for that opportunity and just experiment my way along just like I’ve done with cooking. Because I’ve been making spaghetti space just fine for years without ever realizing that it was a tomato coulis.
Now, I have to go memorize some sauce recipes, just in case I’m called upon to bust out a Hollandaise at a moments notice.
2009 Year of Pleasures #19
May 12, 2009
As part of my Mother’s Day celebration, Bear attempted to make my very favorite dessert of Chocolate eclairs. He cooked up the special Pate Choux dough, then we piped it into these squashed up figure 8’s per Alton Brown’s instructions.
Straight out of the oven they were absolutely incredible. But before too long they deflated and got a little soggy. We think we know where we went wrong so we can try again with more success.
Even though we couldn’t fill them, they still tasted great, so we mixed up some fresh whipped cream and ate them with strawberries. And called it part of a nutritious breakfast.
Busy weekend
April 20, 2009
Four wiggly kids tempted by cake + low light = one very blurry picture
Bear’s family all got together this weekend to celebrate Sally’s birthday. They only live about an hour away, but with the baby and his schedule, we don’t get to see them as often as we should. An hour away seems to be just far enough to make it too hard to do midweek.
Bear made another one of his cakes, but Sally wasn’t really into all the fanciness we’ve been messing around with lately. She is a function over form kind of gal, and didn’t want any of the pretty to interfere with a good tasting cake. So we made a quadruple layer white cake with chocolate ganache filling, and then I layered on about an inch of real buttercream frosting. Fondant sure looks nice, but when you are as big a fan of real buttercream frosting as Sally is, it just gets in the way.
I’m kind of the “get it done” girl in the family, so our birthday present to Sally consisted of a pile of things she needed doing. Skirts fixed, old projects finished, technological help. The big present was unveiled late Saturday afternoon. Everyone took the kids and bustled off to a nearby swap meet (which is really a deceptive name because the Orange County swap meet is more like a temporary outdoor mall than any other swap meet I’ve ever seen) while I stayed behind claiming my bum knee, and then spent the next five hours stripping wallpaper out of one of the bathrooms.
When I finished removing all the wallpaper in our house, months and months and months of removing wallpaper, I swore that I would never do it again. That it would be a deal breaker in any future house we might buy. But their wallpaper really needed help, and if you don’t have to live in the mess, it’s oddly satisfying. It’s like peeling sunburned skin or popping a really big zit.
No? Just me? Oh. Sorry.
We came back late Saturday night so we could make it to church Sunday morning. For Atti’s whole life we’ve been taking turns going just long enough to teach our classes and then coming home. He’s been getting monthly RSV vaccinations and we were warned with the fear of death to keep him away from crowds. He just got the all clear, so we were so excited to bring him to church with us and sit in the pew like a real family, only to wake up that morning and realize that he had absolutely nothing to wear. I just couldn’t bring myself to bring him to church for the first time in nearly a year in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that said “Mr. Grumpy” on it. I’ll at least save that for the second week back.
Then I heard that the teenage girls I work with are having a fundraiser this Saturday for a summer camp. Only showing up to teach my class leaves me pretty far out of the loop for most stuff, so while they’ve all been working on this for awhile, I was totally oblivious. I have until Saturday night to make a quilt to contribute. After finishing my healer quilt by Thursday when I’ll see Atti’s therapist Miss Jan for the last time. I think I can do it. But I may not sleep much in between now and then.
Spring has Sprung!
March 16, 2009
The weather here today is absolutely glorious. This is the best time of year to live in San Diego. It hasn’t entered the part where it’s so hot that I have to shut the house up and away from any blistering sunlight, but the relative gloom of the winter has blown away. Now we get bright sunny days with a sweet crisp breeze blowing through. It’s still just a touch chilly for it, but we are days away from leaving all the doors open all day and letting that breeze play through the house.
In celebration we spent as much time as possible outdoors this weekend, playing in the garden, letting the kitties pretend they were outdoor cats, and firing up the old grill.
When we lived in Orange County, I used to love to go to this Aztec restaurant where they served simple grilled or panfried meats with rice and fresh sauces. This weekend we tried a version of that here at home. I found this recipe from Martha that was pretty close. It’s basically a pesto made from parsley, and since my parsley and cilantro are growing so abundantly they’re threatening to choke out anything else, I used a whole mess of herbs from the backyard. The sauce I remembered was a little creamier, so I think next time I might toss in an egg to make it a little more mayonnaise-y.
Then Bear, bouncing back from his KIDNEY STONES of last weekend (I threatened to take a picture of the offending stone to share on the blog, but he vetoed that idea. It was a horrible ordeal, but he’s feeling much better now.), decided to have a little fun with his baking book and whip up a little dessert.
His crust was perfection, and so was the lemon filling. The meringue was a little on the weepy side, but it’s not considered one of the hardest desserts to make for nothing. I think we need to spend a little more time whipping it next time.
The flowers I’ve planted so far are springing up fabulously, I’ll be sure and share pictures of that soon. I still have quite a lot of work to do out there, but now it’s just the fun stuff, the planning and shopping and planting, the dreaming of new possibilities that spring brings.