Coffee Bean Goddess

Happy New Year, Coffee Mates!

2009-12-31T17:26:00.000-08:00

Well, here we are. Another year, all wound down and coasting to a stop. Time to snip off the loose ends and tuck everything in and put it away. It was certainly a year full of highs and lows for this sturdy band of Coffee Mates. Some of us welcomed brand new loved ones into the world, some of us suffered grievous losses when loved ones left this world. And everything in between.

So here we gather at this end of the cycle, all ready to open the door and let in the next year. Before 2010 toddles in, though, I just wanted to let you all know I've loved hanging with you this past year and will be very grateful to be able to extend the privilege through the next one. Whether you've spent 2009 up, down or sideways, I have a hug for each of you -- some for celebration, some for consolation, all for friendship. Hugs are healthy. It says so right here.

Oh . . . no matter how late you stay up tonight, I'll have the coffee on for you. (See above.) Special coffee. Magic coffee. Enhanced coffee. (wink, nudge) See you next year!

The Art of Twisting

2009-12-27T17:43:00.000-08:00

Still munching on leftovers, are you? Me too. Good thang I love leftovers, that's what. It's so much fun to figure out a new twist on a regular dish and what didn't get eaten the day before just sort of sits there and asks to be reinvented, don't you think?

Like the mashed potatoes. Lots of things you can do with mashed 'taters. Topping on a nice cottage pie. Shaped into patties and fried -- or baked. Added to bread dough. Made into gnocchi. But today I got hungry for a quiche and thought, hey, how about a quiche with a mashed potato bottom crust? So I Googled the idea and, sure enough -- all kinds of examples of mashed potato crusts, most of them being more or less of the twice-baked variety. That is, one bakes the crust while it's still empty, then fills it, then bakes the whole thing again.

For the most part, I'm not giving you specific measurements. This is the sort of thing you play by ear, according to what ingredients you have on hand. Also, you have to build according to however many you plan to feed. I put this quiche in a 9 inch pie pan but it really isn't enough to feed a hungry family. Nice for one or two people but you put any more at the table and somebody is going to get stabbed with a fork. I'm just sayin' . . .

Anyhoo, I slapped about 2 cups (guesstimate) of mashed 'taters in an oiled graniteware pie pan and patted it fairly even across the bottom and up the sides. Baked it for 40 minutes at 375 degrees but I think next time I'll do it for half an hour at 350 degrees because the edge will brown more on the second bake period.

While the crust was baking, I rummaged through the fridge, deciding what vegetables might work well in the quiche. Some leftover roasted carrots, cut into coins. Some minced green bell pepper and minced onion, sauteed lightly, just to get the raw edge off. When the crust came out of the oven, I sprinkled the veggies around, then scattered about a cup of grated mozzarella cheese over everything. Whisked 3 eggs and 1 cup of buttermilk together, seasoned it liberally with salt and pepper and poured it over the veggies and cheese. Poifect! (I could have added chopped up meat of any variety but wasn't in the mood. Your mileage may vary.)

Back in the oven, 350 degrees, 30 minutes. As you can see, the top edge of the crust got very brown but it was still tender-crunchy and delicious. The filling will be all poofy when you take it out. You're supposed to let it set for 10 minutes before cutting into it. The poofy will go down as it rests and you will go nuts trying to keep yourself from tearing into it too soon. It smells incredibobbly good.

I could have taken a picture of the first slice I pulled from the pie. And I would have -- except I messed it up. My fault entirely. Cut the piece way too big (well, I thought I was starving) and it is, after all, merely a mashed potato crust. Needs some support as it's lifted out of the pan and my piece was so wide, some of it fell off. Didn't look pretty at all. Smelled pretty. Tasted gorgeous. Yes. I ate the evidence and there's nothing you can do about it. Unless you want to make your own twisted leftover quiche. Might want to double the egg/milk mixture if you make a larger pie. You'll know. Have fun!

Meet Marvin

2009-12-26T17:56:00.000-08:00

Please meet Marvin the Musical Moose. He has been such a good little buddy the last few years. Here he sits on the window sill, guarding the Christmas card crop and looking adorable. You may also notice he is sporting a bright red tree ornament, dangling from his antler.

Yep. The very same red tree ornament I got from daughter Patti when I was hellbent on putting up a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. The way I had it figured was, I'd trot around outside, scouting through all the trees, looking for just the right blowdown branch to emulate a pathetic little tree. Given that there has been plenty of boisterous wind over the last month or two, I thought there would be a reasonable assortment of branches from which to choose. Well, there was. The problem was, there was not a single branch that came even close to being The One.

I could have grabbed the hatchet and chopped off a suitable limb from a suitable tree but that seemed, somehow, uhmmm -- unsuitable. And mean. Mutilating a perfectly good tree to score a single branch is just not descriptive of the spirit of the season. What to do? What to do?

Then I thought about Marvin. Hey! There ya go! Marvin is a good sport and I knew he'd be delighted to dandle the dangly for me. It adds a bit of color while he sings his Christmas song, don'cha know?

What song? Oh. Well, Marvin takes great delight in telling folks how Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer. I can tell he's having fun because he wiggles and jiggles while he's singing. I don't want you to think he's being a tattle tale, either. Actually, he's providing an early warning system, sort of. Kind of. The song clearly illustrates what happens when a team of reindeer have to travel so many places so very fast that they don't have time to brake for liddle ol' leddies who step out in front of them. Especially liddle ol' leddies who have been nipping at the brandy that was supposed to go in their fruitcake.

But I guess we don't have to worry about that now. The reindeer are all back at the North Pole and Grannie is recovering nicely. I think she'll probably be in fine shape by the time New Year's Eve gets here.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, EVERYONE!

Making God Laugh

2009-12-18T20:26:00.000-08:00

If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.

And only God knows who came up with that line originally. I've seen it attributed to everything from "Old Folk Proverb" to Woody Allen and assorted cultures and folk in between. Doesn't matter. It falls into the "best laid plans of mice and men" category and I do believe I heard a fairly subtle heavenly chuckle somewhere in the background today.

Which is why you're getting the LOLcat photo of those cutie-pie fur kids instead of a CBG photo of the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. (Sorry about that, Kate.) When the weather was decent earlier today, I was busy with company and "stuff" and couldn't go out to gather the perfect CB tree. When I was free to do the deed, it was raining. Of course. I'm not feeling particularly desperate about it. There's still a week to go. No pressure. No need to deliberately get wet when I can be reasonably sure of helpful periods of relative dryness.

Oh wait. Do I hear a distant chuckle again? I was not making plans, God. I was merely speculating, okay?

I did get one element of the project safely in hand. Patti brought me the perfect little red ball ornament. Yay! That's got to count for something.

I was also quite pleased with the results of a new (to me) experiment in the culinary department. Do all y'all know about creme fraiche? There are accent marks in there somewhere but we aren't going to worry about it. I'm informed it's pronounced "krem fresh" and it's like the French version of our sour cream. Only more decadent and silky. And it doesn't separate in sauces and soups like sour cream can. You can get details by clicking on this Epicurious link and those folks, unlike moi, know of what they speak.

I've never seen it in the store myself but apparently the creme fraiche in this country is ridiculously expensive. I don't see why that should be when it's so easy to make it yourself. After skimming at least a dozen different sites for recipes, the consensual formula seems to be as follows: for every cup of heavy cream (whipping cream), add 2 tablespoons of either cultured buttermilk, cultured plain yogurt or sour cream. Mix together in a non-reactive container (canning jar, plastic food keeper, etc.) and leave out, covered, at room temperature for one to two days, until it thickens. Shake or stir from time to time. The warmer the room, the faster it will set up. Then you can give it another stir and put it in the refrigerator where it will keep for a week or two, getting thicker and developing flavor as it goes.

I did up a pint of whipping cream with 4 tablespoons of buttermilk and it took two days to thicken to almost sour cream consistency. At that point (yesterday) I put it in the refrigerator. When I took it out today, parts of it were very thick, parts were more custardy -- which evened out when I gave it a good stir. At any rate, the flavor is getting wonderful and it certainly tasted great in the potato soup I made this afternoon.

By the way, it is safe to leave it out at room temperature while it's "making." The good bacteria keep out the bad bacteria. As long as your cream and buttermilk are okay, the combo will be fine.

Prices vary, of course, but going by what I pay at the little market here in town, it costs me all of 15 cents more to make the creme fraiche than to buy a tub of sour cream. The only downside is that one needs to get it started a couple of days before one will need it.

Just remember, if you plan ahead, you might be making God laugh.

PLEASE NOTE: I apologize to any of you who were messed with when you clicked the link to the YouTube video last night. Somehow I messed up the original link but didn't catch it because I didn't do my usual check. Fortunately, Becky and Wendy were on the ball and gave me a heads up. Thanks, gurlfriends! Just for the record, I did check the Epicurious link in this post. (big goofy grin)

Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum . . .

2009-12-17T18:18:00.000-08:00

It's the darndest thing . . . I got all caught up in a Charlie Brown fever and messed around until too late to trot outside and DO something about it. If you will forgive a bit of a mild rant, hang in here with me and I'll explain.

It sort of started with this YouTube video. Go ahead and watch it. [Idiot Alert! Sorry, Coffee Mates. I did not double check that link. Fortunately, Becky let me know what I had put in wasn't working and she even sent me the correct one! Thank you, Becky. So, okay -- now the link works. ] I'll keep the coffee warm until you're done. Really. Might even have some more of that cranberry shortbread laid out for you. (I know. I could have done the embed thing but, for some reason, it wasn't working tonight. Thus, I'm letting you click over to YouTube for the viewing -- and bribing you with coffee and cranberry bars so you'll click back.)

Okay. Now you have the idea.That's what got me going. Before you could say, "Sic 'em, Snoopy!" I was Google-gallivanting through assorted trivia about Charlie Brown and his famous Christmas tree. Now, if you've never seen the special, Wikipedia has an excellent synopsis. And you've just got to cheer the little guy for seeing the beauty in that pathetic, scraggly tree and, in effect, striking a solid blow against the commercialization of a holiday.

It doesn't much matter whether you're celebrating the season from a religious perspective, a secular one, or both. The point is that all our celebrations have mutated into some weird kind of pressure cooker roller derby, driven by a frenzied cash register drum beat.We've lost sight of the simple, warm, GOOD things we need to reaffirm so we can balance and restore our poor, harried selves. Thus Charlie Brown's Christmas tree has become a symbol of rejecting the glitter and gloss for the humble and real.

Well, sort of. Because -- here's the dose of irony -- a second glance at some (many) of those Google links were for (gasp) store after store selling (not cheaply) fake Charlie Brown Christmas trees! Remember, in the video clip how Linus wrapped his precious blanket around the bottom of the tree to give it a little love? Well, folks, if you pay a bit extra, you can have your fake Charlie Brown tree with its own blue blanky.

I applaud the folks in Concord who opted for their version of the CB tree. Good ON them! And, by golly, as a show of support, I'm putting up my own Charlie Brown tree this year. Yuppers. I'd have hauled in what I needed earlier this evening but it got dark before I realized it was so late. (sigh) So -- tomorrow, tomorrow. Yes. Daughter Patti will be down tomorrow and she's giving me one of the red balls from her own tree -- because the CB tree has to have a red ball, don'cha know?

All together now, Coffee Mates: "O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, your branches green delight us."

Stuffing Gallons Into Quarts

2009-12-16T19:44:00.000-08:00

I don't know how we do it. I don't know how we can keep squeezing gallons of activity into pint jars of Time when the holiday season rolls around. Okay, maybe they're quart jars. But we still have more "stuff" than jar. There is probably an obscure scientific law that explains how that can be but it's so obscure, nobody knows what it is.

One of the things that has been taking a lot of my time has been the yearly -- obsessive -- search for new and different recipes for holiday occasions and gift giving. I might compare a dozen or two recipes for a single dish, trying to decide which one sounds like The One. And that's just for one item. You would not believe the number of various and assorted cranberry recipes I've been scanning, drooling and slobbering as I go.

Like, for instance, the one I found at the Joy of Baking web site. It turns out to be easy to put together and utterly delicious when done. This one's a keeper, Coffee Mates.

You can copy the recipe from the above link if you want, or grab it from here, whichever is easiest. It goes pretty much like this:

CRANBERRY SHORTBREAD BARS
9" X 9" baking pan, buttered -- preheat oven to 375 degrees fairy height

For the filling: In medium-sized sauce pan, put:
2 1/4 cups (8 ounces or 225 grams) fresh or frozen cranberries
2/3 cup (130 grams) sugar
3 tablespoons water
On medium-high heat, bring to a boil and continue boiling until mixture is thick and syrupy. This will take about 5 or 6 minutes. She didn't say, but I stirred the mixture the whole time, just in case. It's amazing to watch all the resulting liquid cook down and thicken. Once it's thick, remove from heat and set aside to cool.

For the crust: In a mixing bowl, whisk together:
2 cups (270 grams) all purpose flour
2 tablespoons corn starch
1/4 teaspoon salt (I used a teaspoon of salt.)
In the bowl of your stand mixer, cream 1 cup (2 sticks) butter until smooth.
Add 1/3 cup (70 grams) sugar, beat 2 minutes, add 1 teaspoon vanilla, blend in.
Gently stir in the flour mixture just until incorporated.

The dough will still look very crumbly. That's okay. With all that butter, it'll come together just fine in the pan. Dump two thirds of the dough into the buttered pan and pat it into a reasonably level layer with your fingers. See? It holds together just like it knew what it was doing.

Now you take the cooled filling and spread it over the layer of crust, leaving a quarter-inch margin all around the edges. Then take the remaining third of the dough and crumble it over the filling. It's okay if there are little gaps that show bits of the filling. Gently press the crumbs into the filling, put it in the oven and bake for 30 minutes, or until crust is golden brown.

When you take it out of the oven, set the pan on a cooling rack and cut the squares/bars while it's still hot. Then let it cool completely in the pan. Cutting it while hot enables you to wiggle out each gorgeous little bar without excessive crumbling and unseemly deterioration of your culinary artistry.

Just in case you didn't get a good enough look up top, here's a closer view of these tasty morsels.

Mmmmm! Look at that tender crumb. Gaze with delight on that lush, tart-sweet filling. Wipe the drool off your chin and head right into the kitchen to whip up a batch for yourself.

Listen, I would love to share this batch with you, really. Oh, WHEN will they invent email that allows you to send real live food attachments? Geez, if the hackers would just consider the benefits to themselves, I'll bet they could come up with such a program -- I'd be happy to keep sending attached Cheetos to such genius persons.Wouldn't you?

My Obligatory Football Whinge

2009-11-29T21:04:00.000-08:00

Hah! I'll bet you thought I wasn't paying any attention to football this year, just because I haven't mentioned it so far. At least I don't think I've mentioned it this season. But, no, I'm still hanging in there, taking perverse pleasure in the agony of Being Loyal To My Team No Matter How Terribly They Play. (Some concepts simply demand capital letters.) Thus the LOLcat picture featured above.

The family was kind enough to let me watch the Raiders play Thanksgiving day. I don't have a television hookup myself so it was a treat. Sort of. The problem was, they won their game last week, when I couldn't watch them. It would have been nice if they'd repeated that feat while I was able to witness the miracle. But nooooo. They not only didn't win Thanksgiving, they looked really pathetic in the process of losing.

See, there is losing and there is losing. Losing can be heroic when the play is up to snuff and from the heart. You might shed a tear but you'll also be proud in a bittersweet way because, by golly, they gave it all they had and that's all anybody can do. On the other hand, losing is when the play is so bad you can't decide if it's comedy or simple stupidity. That's when you realize you're actually lucky not to be able to watch the train wreck every week.

Because I would. Oh yes. You couldn't stop me from watching if you turned the whole defensive line of the Green Bay Packers loose on me. Because you never know when my erratic Pigskin Paladins will storm the field with inspired play and cunning strategy, reaping victory as their just reward. Hey, don't smirk. It doesn't happen often anymore, I'll admit. But it does happen and is all the sweeter for the rarity.

Meanwhile, I do try to keep a stash of therapeutic chocolate available at all times. And celebratory chocolate for other times. It gets me through.

Rainbows and Remnants

2009-11-28T19:18:00.000-08:00

As an apology for being awol for most of the month, I give you a rainbow. Oh. Wait. I'm not the one giving the rainbow. (Sorry, God. You know what I meant, right?) What I'm saying is, I'm happy to share my good fortune in being able to capture this rainbow amidst all the November rain we've been having. There has been sunshine, to be sure, but the appearance of vertical liquid approaches something like eighty-eleven percent of the monthly weather. Give or take a gallon or three. The rainbows are to cheer you up -- sort of like the lollipop the doctor gives after the shot.

I could have laid some food photos on you but since food has been a major component of our lives this past week, maybe a short vacation from the subject will be in order. Not that I'm taking a vacation from the consumption of food. Nay! I finished my share of the Nantucket Cranberry Pie and Albert's sweet potato pie but there's still a little of Patti's pumpkin pie left. Yay! And I can get one more meal out of the Casserole a la Leftover that I cobbled together. It went like this . . .

Took a couple of cups of Roger's turkey stuffing and dumped it in a big bowl. Added a couple of cups of chopped up leftover turkey, both white meat and dark. Whisked one egg into two cups of chicken broth and stirred it into the stuffing mixture. Let it sit so the bread cubes had time to absorb more liquid. In the meantime, I grated a chunk of cheddar cheese (half a cup?) and mixed it into what was probably a cup of mashed potatoes. Lightly greased a casserole dish and packed the stuffing mixture into it. Spread the tater and cheese mixture over the top and leveled it off, like a mashed potato crust. Sprinkled it with paprika and baked in a 350 degree oven for half an hour.

Nothing particularly original about it but it efficiently used up the leftovers and gave me, all together, 5 meals. Not too shabby. That last meal (mentioned above) will be teamed up with the last of Patti's fruit salad. I don't think I'll be able to handle the rest of the pumpkin pie until tomorrow. That works. It'll make an excellent breakfast.

And just in case it's raining where you are, here's another shot of God's nice rainbow.

Shaking Out Perfectly

2009-11-02T21:05:00.000-08:00

Boy, did I score big today! My grandson Albert-the-chef and his Holly and my favorite short person, great-grandson Archimedes, all came over for a visit this afternoon. They even brought me a big bowl of a wonderful soup Albert had just fixed -- sort of a Mexican Minestrone, with black beans and corn and about a kajillion other ingredients, perfectly seasoned. Oy vey, aiiii caramba, wowsers!

Archimedes was, of course, the main attraction. Such a child. I haven't managed to teach him how to say, "Yay, Raiders!" yet but we'll get there. He is showing signs of understanding the concept of the high five, however. At this point, he seems to prefer the horizontal version but the vertical can't be far behind.

Eight months old and he's built like a line backer. Solid. And he's not that far from the toddling around stage. That's going to keep 'em on their toes. Because, of course, everything is interesting at that age and simply must be explored and examined and tasted. Oh yes. I wonder if they'll learn to do what I did when the kids were little. The cupboards they were allowed to explore were stocked with beat-up pots and pans and plastic bowls they couldn't hurt. They always liked that sort of thing over any regular toys.

And the sun was shining all day. Isn't it great how some days just shake out so perfectly?

My New Favorite Cookbook

2009-10-30T22:23:00.000-07:00

[EXPLETIVES DELETED]

Oh verily I say unto you (quietly so I don't corrupt the children) various vile and vexatious vociferations. That's uptown wiffling for downtown cussing. Yea though I walk through the valley of wild cyber children (who refuse to play well together no matter how I beggeth them), I shall fear not for my sanity for my sanity did deserteth me the day I signed on to the World Wide Web.

What brought on this tantrum, you ask? You will have noticed, of course, the decor has changed again. I really liked the looks of the last design but it simply would not do some of the things I wanted it to do and so I had to show it the door. Don't get too used to this look, either. It's strictly a temporary marriage of convenience, just until I find my own true love, the one who will agree to play nicely and not stimulate my potty mouth. (sigh)

But never mind all that silliness. What I really wanted to tell you about was a fabulous book that fell into my hot little hands today. It's a cookbook. But it's more than a cookbook. Way more. Right off the top, though, it's got to be one of the prettiest cookbooks I've ever owned. Front cover to back and every single page between is a loving work of art and almost every page showcases gorgeous photos taken by the author.

I'll have to apologize for the quality of my photos. I'm afraid I dillydallied too long and the lighting was lousy. It's no biggie but I'd rather do the lady the justice she deserves. Anyhoo, you may be familiar with Ree Drummond from her amazing web site, Pioneer Woman Cooks. (See link in sidebar.) For the food porn alone I would enjoy this woman but she's a whole lot more than just a pretty cook. In fact, I just took the trouble to look up the spelling for renaissance because that's what she is; a renaissance woman. Well, gee. She home schools her kids, feeds a bunch of hard-working cowboys and regularly updates a website with so many features it's practically a full-time job all by itself. She's a genuinely good photographer (and gives tips on her web site), a gifted writer and is smarter than the average bear. Besides which, she has a terrific sense of humor and absolutely refuses to take herself seriously. I like her so much, I don't have the heart to slap the gravy out of her.

I don't know how many recipes there are (except there are lots) but there are 248 pages in the book. Above is a sample of her photo tutorial style of presenting a recipe. Fans of her web site will recognize some of the offerings but there are plenty of new ones, just for the book. I would rate this as the best cookbook in a coon's age if the recipes were all there was to it. But, as I said, it's much more.

Interspersed between all the glorious food pages are photos of people and cattle and horses and dogs -- oh, wait until you meet Charlie! He's just the handsomest Basset hound you ever did see. There are funny stories and poignant vignettes. It's not exactly like reading a novel. It's more like a rollicking visit with a best friend. You can't help but feel good for having the visit. And wait until you see how good you feel when you follow some of her recipes. Listen, this woman is armed with butter and she's not afraid to use it!

I put a link at the top of the sidebar if you'd like to whip over to Amazon and read more about the book. Or scroll down to the link for her web site and browse around at her place. Get a feel for what she does. If you like what you see there, I can pretty much guarantee you'll like the book as well. Heck, even if you don't cook, you'll like the book. But I'm warning you -- it'll make you hungry.

Pull & Pray

2009-10-25T22:25:00.000-07:00

"Okay, if I pull this handle, I go right. If I pull that handle I go left. No wait . . . I'm below the equator so it works the other way around. If I pull this handle, I go left, the other one goes right. Right? RIGHT?"

There are some who think the chubby koala shown above is actually asleep at the switch, so to speak. Not so. The poor thing is so confused about which switch to pull, he's earnestly asking for divine guidance. Instead of Plug & Play, it's Pull & Pray.

Some days are like that, aren't they? You go along thinking you at least have the basics of life well in hand and then some little thing sets you back on your heels and you don't know if you should turn clockwise or widdershins. It can be something as simple as a word not looking right. You've been spelling that word the same way for practically all your life but suddenly it just looks alien. So alien, in fact, you're compelled to look it up in the dictionary. Even then, instead of feeling vindicated, you've been so unsettled, you're not sure you can trust Merriam-Webster anymore.

When one finds oneself in that slightly askew moment, I believe the only sensible thing to do is to pretend you've accidentally slipped into a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel. You will immediately realize askew is actually normal and you can relax. I know this is true because I just looked at the word askew. Now, I ask you, does that look right to you? No it does not. Shouldn't it be something like ascue or asskew or . . . no, I can see those are not correct either. See what I mean?

So, okay. It's obviously Discworld time. Aha! Now that word looks correct and I can't imagine why I thought otherwise. Do not doubt me. You'll find that sort of thing just makes more sense once you realize your world is serenely gliding through space supported on the backs of four giant elephants who are, in turn, standing on the back of a mighty turtle, the Great A'Tuin.

For those of you who have never read a Discworld novel, the above references must sound a bit like inside jokes, which can be very rude. I certainly didn't mean to be rude. What I hope is that your curiosity is aroused enough that you'll check out one of the series -- there are something like 32 books so far and you don't have to read them in order. Just jump in anywhere. Terry Pratchett is simply one of the most brilliant writers on the planet right now. Seriously.

Banana Bigot

2009-10-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

Look, I admit it . . . I am a banana bigot. A blatant banana bigot. My upper lip curls spontaneously when I pass the banana display at the market. It isn't that I hate bananas. It's that the ubiquitous Cavendish that is about the only choice offered to most of us here in the good old U.S. is, in my not-so-humble opinion, a really blah, boring banana. Depending on your source of information, there are somewhere between 500 and 1200 varieties of bananas. You would think, out of all that, the powers-that-be could have found a tastier version that still shipped well. Wouldn't you?

I have tasted bananas that were absolutely wonderful. Little fellers with big flavor. Don't know what the variety is called but it's common in Thailand. I'm glad I got to experience them but, gee, it sure makes it harder to put up with those damned Cavendish critters. I don't mind them so terribly much when they're practically green and I slice them into a nice Caribbean stir fry, along with sweet potato and pineapple and good stuff like that. And I can tolerate them if they've been tossed with lemon juice before being added to a fruit salad. I can even deal with them in quick breads -- but I'd really rather have bread made with apples. But I've been reading about this magical one-ingredient "ice cream" that you whup up in your blender or food processor and -- brace yourself -- that ingredient is frozen banana.

Okay, we know it isn't really ice cream. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But it's creamy and cold and should hit the spot on a hot day or as topping on dessert, should it not? That's what I figured, anyway. Of course I also figured I simply wasn't gonna like it if it was just banana. Which led me to freezing up both sliced bananas and sliced peaches. I just did the flash freeze thing and then dropped the results into pint freezer bags.

I plopped roughly equal parts banana and peach into the mini-bowl of the Silver Streak. Hmmm . . . and I see I should have tossed those banana slices with lemon juice or Fruit Fresh or something to keep them from getting dark. But I didn't. (Insert sigh.) Well, next time.

I'm glad I did a lot of reading about this before I actually tried it myself. That's how I knew not to worry when this turned out to be one of those things that doesn't get done lickety-split with the food processor. At first you have to keep scraping down the sides of the bowl and then, finally, some of the chunky frozen bits begin to cream up. Gradually, oh so gradually, more and more of the frozen bits are engulfed by the creamy part until, shazaam! You pretty much have it all smooshed up. And, you know what? I think it would have gone a lot faster it I'd begun with just a little of either fruit, then added one or two chunks at a time as the processing went on. Live and learn, I reckon.

I'll say this for the concoction . . . it does clean up purty. The consistency is pretty much like soft serve ice cream and doesn't taste bad. Still too much banana flavor for my pleasure but if you are one of those who love bananas, you'll definitely love this. And I suspect, if you like the idea of mixing different frozen fruits with the frozen banana slices, you will have a ball experimenting. Me? I'm going to make some more frozen yogurt and I won't allow a banana slice anywhere near it. Because I'm a bigot.

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Just wanted to update y'all on those snazzy little pecan pie muffins we did the other day. (I say "we" because I'm sure you rushed right into the kitchen and whupped up your own batch.) I added an edit to the recipe that you may have missed. Be sure to grease the muffin cups, okay? Also, I've discovered they freeze very well indeed and heat up nicely in the microwave.

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The most perplexing thing has happened and I'm still shaking my head over it. For whatever reason, my otherwise splendid ISP decided to separate my e-mail into two different locations and, as near as I can figure out, they neglected to explain what they were doing. So there I was, tending to my e-mail as usual, but feeling more and more uneasy and puzzled because I wasn't getting some of the newsletters and notify mails I was used to seeing. My mail settings seemed to be okay and there didn't seem to be any horrid bugs or slugs embedded in the hard drive innards. But I knew there was something seriously wrong yesterday when an important verification message failed to appear. That sent me to seriously checking out possibilities which, finally, included clicking on the start page mail icon I'd ignored up until then.

OMG!!! I found myself gasping at the sight of 590 messages that had been collecting since September 8th. Which is why I didn't do the banana post yesterday, Coffee Mates. I ended up working through all those messages well into the wee hours, finally saving a couple of responses until this morning because I was, for all practical purposes, comatose. (Some say that is a normal condition for me but I call it "laid back.") In any case, I just wanted you to know that is why I didn't respond from time to time when I could legitimately be expected to do so. I think I've caught up with everyone but if I've missed you, for heaven's sake, holler at me.

How to Do Clark Gable

2009-10-21T21:38:00.000-07:00

I don't know what it is. I think you have to have been born somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line to eat pecan pie with impunity. I do love it, you understand. Really. It's just that it's so utterly, irredeemably, impossibly rich. I can't think of another thing, right off the top of my pointy head, that contains such intense, concentrated sweetness. And I don't handle that degree of sweetness well.

My tummy is such a wuss. This is the same tummy that thrives on any chili pepper that makes it past my taste buds and begs for more. But offer it something really, really sweet and it throws up its little hands and whimpers, "Don't hurt me." It's just pitiful. That's why, much to my dismay, I have to limit myself to a small portion of pecan pie once in a very great while.

Until today. Today I may have stumbled on the perfect solution, allowing me to have my pecan pie and eat it , too, just as if I owned real estate on Bourbon Street and had a season pass to Dollywood. There I was, browsing around the Tasty Kitchen section at the Pioneer Woman site and I found this deceptively simple recipe for Pecan Pie muffins. Muffins! Who'd a thunk it?

I urge you to click over there and look around but, for future reference, here's a quick take on the recipe. First, you set your oven at 350 degrees fairy height. Then you whisk together 1 cup of chopped pecans, 1 cup packed brown sugar and 1/2 cup of all purpose flour. Melt 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter. Lightly beat two eggs and add them to the butter. Stir the liquid mixture into the dry mixture. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring. Fill six muffin cups and bake 20 to 25 minutes. (I did the full 25.) Remove from pan immediately.

EDIT: I forgot to say (because this particular recipe source didn't mention it) but be sure to grease your muffin cups! Your mileage may vary but, personally, if I suspect a potential for serious "sticky," I use solid shortening instead of nonstick spray. If you wait too long to decant the muffins, just pop them back in the oven for a couple of minutes and they should drop out easily. As for using paper liners, I'd suggest not. From what I've read, most folks feel too much of that nice, crunchy crust gets lost when you peel the liners away.

Well, folks, I had a batch of those bad boys whupped up almost before you could shout, "Memphis, Mobile and Baton Rouge!" That's assuming, of course, that you'd even want to wander around your kitchen shouting the names of southern towns like you were practicing to be a train conductor. It's just that they have such a great magnolia-scented sound to them, don't they?

As you can see, the recipe makes a tidy half-dozen muffins, which is just fine for me. Just the perfect size for one to give me a great pecan pie hit without making my tummy snivel and whine. In fact, my tummy insisted I give it a second muffin before it very politely said, "Thank you, that will be sufficient."

Just look at that tender, moist interior, will you? (If you left-click on the photo, you'll get a larger version to view.) I promise you, there is absolutely nothing you need to put on these muffins to enhance them. Nothing. The crispy-crunchie outside and the soft, caramel-like inside are perfect just as they are. Perfect, I tell you. And if anyone around you complains that you're getting the lion's share of the muffins, you'll feel southern enough by then to do a Clark Gable and say, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Coffee-sippin' Weather

2009-10-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

With all the messin' about yesterday, trying on the new outfit and all, I plumb forgot to take pictures of the maple leaves that had started the whole thang. By the time I remembered, it was as dark outside as day-old camp coffee. It's been mostly overcast today but the light was just fine for catching the color from the dining room window.

Some of the leaves have just begun to lose their green -- see the one on the far left -- but most, I think, are in the buttery-to-pumpkin stage.

Every now and then you can spot a leaf that's trying its darndest to develop a bit of dusty rose. Just a bit. Maybe I'm stretching for that but, gee, dusty rose is such a nice color.

Some of them didn't even get a chance to finish turning before the wind shredded them up the other day. At least I think it was the wind that took the leaf surface down to a cellophane-like remnant. Maybe it was just a bug attack. Some bugs don't clean up their plates.

Most of the tree is still green but, oh my, that's really quite a lot of turning in just a week's time. Well, compared to most of the other trees in view from my window. It really hasn't been all that cold yet so green is still the predominant color hereabouts. Not that I'm complaining. Nossir, nope, no way. It's not even officially winter yet so I'm certainly not trying to hurry things along.

Relax, little maple tree. Have another cuppa. Flaunt your finery some more. Trust me when I tell you -- naked is not your best presentation. Which is all too true for some others of us, as well. (Insert long, resigned sigh.) So here's to a languid, lazy fall and plenty of brightly colored clothes. Coffee-sippin' weather. Yeah, I know. For me, it's all coffee-sippin' weather. And your point was?

Changing Outfits

2009-10-17T18:53:00.000-07:00

Uhmmm . . . does this outfit make my butt look fat?

Okay, tell me the truth. When you clicked in here today, did you -- for just one crazy moment -- feel like you'd stepped into a stranger's house? Sorry about that. If it's okay with you, we'll just blame Mom Nature for the confusion. See, I was looking out the window and thinking, with a certain amount of awe, about how quickly the maple tree is changing color. Last week almost every single leaf was green. Then, on the thirteenth, appropriately enough, we got our first storm of the season and, ever since, the leaves have been turning gold so fast I have to wonder if the tree has been sneaking into a tanning salon when I'm not watching. Anyway, I figure if the maple tree can change outfits, so can I.

Note to Self: Next time you decide to change the look of the blog page, let me slap you 12 or 17 times.

It's been quite an experience and, unfortunately, I ain't seen nuthin' yet. There are still some aspects of the appearance of this template that I need to tweak -- just as soon as I figure out how. Or maybe I won't even bother. (Cue hysterical laughter.) Maybe I'll just enjoy all the pretty colors that attracted me in the first place and then, when I get tired of that, I'll go hunt down a different template to make me nuts.

Just so it doesn't make my butt look fat.

Ohboyohboyohwowie!

2009-10-16T18:57:00.000-07:00

Are you smelling the incredibobble fragrance of that gorgeous bread? Is your mouth watering copiously? Are your taste buds quivering with excited anticipation? Yeah. Me, too. I can't take credit for this lusty loaf of leavened heaven. Should you happen to wander over to the "Tasty Kitchen" section of Ree Drummond's "Pioneer Woman Cooks" website (see Ree's link in sidebar) and should you happen to cruise through the section on breads, you would soon come to this outrageously good recipe for Fast Bread. That is not the same thing as "quick bread," you understand. We're talking about a fast and easy yeast bread that comes out totally tender-tasty and loaded with the prized Wowie! factor.

While I was waiting for the bread to rise and bake (not very long), I whupped up my own version of a basic cheese spread. I say "basic" because you can go just about anywhere you want from the bare bones, adding or subtracting seasonings of choice, perhaps adding different cheeses like Parmesan and/or crumbled feta and/or bleu cheese and maybe even a generous helping of tiny canned salad shrimp or whatever lights your candle. But the first thing you want to start with is the roasted garlic.

Now, Lord knows, you don't want to fire up the big oven for one little head of garlic. Or even one big head of garlic. This is the kind of thing your microwave does very well. This is sorta-kinda the way Barbara Kafka suggests doing it in her excellent Microwave Gourmet cookbook. Whack the tips off of a head of garlic, exposing the cloves. Set it on its little bottom in a 4-cup measuring cup and drizzle with about a tablespoon of olive oil. (She suggests 2 tablespoons if you're roasting 4 heads.) Then you add about 2 ounces of chicken broth (I mixed a bit of chicken bouillon with hot water), cover with plastic wrap and nuke for 5 minutes. Let stand for about 10 minutes still covered, then cool and pop the tender, nutty-sweet cloves out of their skins. You will not believe how great your kitchen will smell while this is going on but you will probably find yourself suddenly doing a lot of deep inhaling.

Okay, that's the first part. Now comes the fun stuff -- and I apologize for forgetting to take a picture of this bit but I was undergoing creative chaos and the thought of clicking a shutter couldn't squeeze its way though the crowd.

Drop those cloves into your blender or the mini-bowl of the food processor and add about a cup of finely grated cheddar cheese, a scant tablespoon of softened butter, a bulging tablespoon of stone ground mustard (mine is blended with stout) and maybe a couple tablespoons of white wine. I have some lovely Gewurztraminer that was perfect for the job. At the last minute I tossed in about 2 tablespoons of canned, sliced jalapenos (you can use pickled or plain) and processed it until I had a creamy spread and the peppers were minced up tiny.

You'll end up with about cup of spreadable goodness that you can smear on bread or crackers. Or you can plop a glob onto the top of a hot baked potato or steamed veggies. It'll taste better the next day, after the flavors have melded a bit in the refrigerator but you don't need to wait that long for the first taste. As you can see from the above photo, I didn't. And while I was savoring that, I slathered some more on the other two slices of bread and slid them under the broiler.

This is how they looked in the time between the depths of the oven and the depths of my mouth. I wish you could smell the aroma arising therefrom. Heaven.

Okay. This needs a closeup. Just feast your eyes on those teensy bits of garlic and jalapeno and whatever those flecks from the mustard might be. Yes, I know. It's a thing of grace and beauty, is it not? Ohboyohboyohwowie! I'm just sayin'. . .

Heaven On Toast

2009-10-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

I'm baaaaaaaack -- ready or not! Although I've been absent from this particular cyber real estate for a bit, I have certainly not been idle. There was a good visit with out-of-state families and, between then and now, lots of experimentation with the Silver Streak.

That would be the new KitchenAid food processor, of course. The KitchenAid stand mixer is otherwise known as the Blue Beast. Together they make a fantastic kitchen team, I kid you not. Happily, I can report the Silver Streak has handled everything I've thrown at it and handled it well. Even when I screw up, the Streak doesn't. Can't ask for more than that, can you?

Today isn't about kitchen tools, however. Today is about an absolutely fantastic way to enjoy the season's bounty of freshly ripe tomatoes. REAL tomatoes, thank you very much, not the cardboard imitations picked too early for flavor. Last week Patti and Roger gifted me with some from their garden. They couldn't remember what kind these were but they are a very meaty tomato and intensely flavorful.

And I know a way to make even more flavor pop out.

Tip: I can't scientifically vouch for this but, while Google-cruising for 'mater recipes, I found several references that swear tomatoes keep longer if you store them with the stem end down. Well, it can't hurt.

Have you ever roasted fresh tomatoes? I hadn't. Not until today, anyway. I'm here to tell you, there is absolutely nothing like the flavor of roasted 'maters. Nothing. The beauty of it is, this is a really easy way to fix them. Plus, once they've been roasted, there are a kajillion ways you can go with them for future use. That's assuming you haven't lost your head and gobbled them up right from the oven. All too easy to do, I assure you. If you feel shaky about your self control, get lots of 'maters for roasting. (By the way, I'm told smaller batches can be roasted in toaster ovens. I imagine the same would hold true of countertop roaster ovens.)

I only had three left from the ones the kids gave me so I used the enamel-clad cast iron baking dish for the job. You can use larger pans or cookie sheets if you have more 'maters. I sprayed the bottom of the dish with a light coating of olive oil, then laid out the sliced tomatoes. The small one was simply cut in half, the larger ones were sliced into four sections. Then I drizzled a bit of olive oil over all the slices, lightly salted them with coarse kosher salt and ground a combo-pepper mixture over them. I could have sprinkled them with minced garlic but decided to do that next time. You can sprinkle any sort of herb or seasoning over them that suits your fancy, by the way. This simple treatment was all I wanted to do for the maiden voyage.

I slid the pan into a 275 degree fairy height oven. That was a compromise temp, as I've seen suggestions for anything from 200 degrees to 450 degrees. I can't vouch for the accuracy of my particular oven but the temp I chose seemed to work just fine. The photo above shows what the tomatoes looked like after one hour. They're starting to shrink and the glorious process of caramelization is just beginning. Oh frabjous joy, if I may slightly paraphrase the Jabberwocky.

After two hours, the above looked to me to be exactly right. I didn't want them dried out but I did want them imbued with that rich smokey flavor you get from the caramelized bits. I popped one of the smaller pieces in my eager mouth just as soon as it was barely cooled enough to avoid pain. Oh my stars and garters! The extra depth of flavor will just knock you out, I'm not kidding.

Now, there are any number of things one can do with the 'maters at this point. For one thing, you can flash freeze them so they'll be available all winter and you can sneer at the cardboard tomatoes.

Tip: I always thought "flash freezing" meant food was frozen really fast. As the term is used in this sense, however, it means you lay out the food on a cookie sheet or platter, each piece separate from the next, and put them in the freezer for a couple or three hours. Now you take the frozen bits and throw them in freezer bags or containers and put back in the freezer. That way, you can always remove just the amount you need without having to thaw the whole package.

The roasted tomatoes can be used "as is" in pretty much anything to which you'd add regular tomatoes -- except now you have the flavor bonus. Soups, stews, breads, pureed with broth or juice for various tomato sauces (marinara, spaghetti, pizza, etc.) -- whatever lights your candle. What I did this time was one of those experiments that actually worked out like I knew what I was doing. Believe me, nobody could have been more surprised than me.

What I did, was, I scooped up the roasted tomatoes and plopped them in the mini-bowl for the Silver Streak. (Small food choppers or blenders will work just fine, too.) Then I poured a bit of decent Australian Shiraz into the baking dish to deglaze the pan -- which I set on medium heat on top of the stove. Using a silicone spatula, I carefully loosened all those caramelized bits and kept stirring them into the wine as it cooked down to about half. I think I ended up with about a quarter cup of liquid. (You can use fruit juice or chicken broth or even plain water to deglaze if you want.)

Then I poured the slightly thickened liquid into the bowl with the tomatoes and processed everything until I had a thick puree. Maybe 30 seconds? Now comes the reward part -- I toasted a slice of oatmeal bread (because that's what I had but any kind of bread will work) and spread it with some of the yogurt cheese I had made up. (Also known as Greek yogurt. Or you can use cream cheese.) On top of the cheese, I spread a layer of the roasted 'mater "jam."

This is what it looked like, just before I took the first dainty bite. And then the second, larger bite. And then the rapid wolf-down, complete with snarling and yipping. I didn't take any pictures of that latter. It wouldn't have been seemly.

So now you can raid your garden -- or hit the local Farmer's Market or roadside stand or just beg and snivel to a gardening neighbor -- and roast up your own Heaven On Toast. I'm just saying . . .

Don't Forget To Write

2009-09-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

I don't know where to start with this. Everything feels out of balance. Having been busy of late with off-line life and family doings, I've pretty much neglected giving more than cursory attention to on-line "families of the heart." Upon finally checking back in yesterday, there was a notify e-mail that took me to Jo's Journal. What I read there was not unexpected but, as we all know, we are never really ready to see a loved one slip out of here ahead of us. Jo, I miss you already.

A lot of folks are saying that very thing right now, those of us who were given the gift of her warmth and humor and sheer love of life. When Jo extended her friendship, she was nothing if not generous. Jo had many good qualities but I'm in awe of her courage. In spite of all too much physical misery, she never stopped living her life as fully as she could for as long as she could. Part of the reason she could do that, I know, was because of the devotion of her husband and best friend, Bill, who signs his comments here as "The Old Guy." If you click over to his "Cud Chewing" blog, you can read more about Jo.

This muddle we call Life being what it is, it seems there is always something you find yourself wishing you'd done or said while your friend was still alive. I had written to Jo because a long silence from her was beginning to worry me. And she responded with a nice long letter. And I didn't write back. Lord knows, I meant to. It was never far from my mind. I can list a hundred reasons for that neglect but not one single damned excuse. Well, there simply isn't any, is there. A huge regret, to be sure, but no excuse. So I'm just saying, if you have someone in your life who might need a line or two from you, try not to put it off. We just never know how much time is left so don't forget to write.

FOR WILMA

2009-09-10T09:16:00.000-07:00

Some of you who drop in here for virtual coffee have also shared that beverage with our Canadian friend Wilma, also known as Jade Angel. (See "Wilma's Word" in my blog list in the sidebar.) I was shocked and saddened to learn her dearly loved husband Tim passed away suddenly this last Thursday. She asked me to let you know, just in case you hadn't stopped in there lately. Here is the link for Wilma's beautiful tribute post. There is also a link there to Tim's obituary.

Wilma, words are so inadequate but please know there are a lot of folks who care deeply about you. There are chains of light and love directed at you from points all around this globe. May that help give you strength.

My Cup Runneth Over

2009-09-09T21:19:00.000-07:00

I am SO in love with Amazon. Really. Remember how I was whining and sniveling a couple of days ago because my amazing food processor wasn't due to arrive until this coming Monday? That's because, as always, I selected the free shipping option. Which takes longer, of course. Except when Amazon does something totally cool -- like upgrading my shipping to Priority Mail. The food processor arrived at the post office YESTERDAY and I didn't even know it!

Fortunately, grandson Albert came over with great-grandson Archimedes and they went to the post office to pick up my mail. I knew the TimTams I'd ordered were in but that's the only package I was expecting. Albert and Archimedes came back with the TimTams and assorted mail and then Albert dumped my favorite short person in my lap and said, "You have to watch him while I go back for your KitchenAid."

"You're expletive deleting me!" I said (without deleting the expletive).

"Nope," he grinned. He was as tickled as I am. So I got a brief-but-delightful play date with Archimedes as an extra bonus to the wonders this day has produced and then Albert helped me unpack the Beast. (That dude is heavy, Coffee Mates!)

Didn't take me long to read through the User's Manual and it certainly didn't take much time to wash and dry all the components and set the Beast up in his place of honor by the sink. In fact, that's why the food pusher is not in the feed tube in the photo above. It's in the drainer in the sink. Don't worry. If you've seen one food pusher, you've seen 'em all.

It has long been my firm belief that when one has a new toy, one should play with it. For my first act, I shredded some cheddar cheese. Zap-whiz! Zap-whiz! Oh! What a blast this iz! And just like that, I had a bowl full of shredded cheese. Dumped it in another bowl, rinsed out the processor work bowl and whupped up a batch of bread dough. (Which included that shredded cheddar and some jalapenos.) Amazingly enough, the dough was ready in something like two minutes. It took longer than that to gather all the ingredients!

Now, the bread machine kneaded the dough for a good long time and the results were always excellent. Then I tried mixing bread dough in the stand mixer. That took -- I dunno -- 5 to 7 minutes, I guess. And the bread came out just as good as that mixed in the bread machine. I thought that was fairly amazing and was afraid it would be asking way too much to expect anything that good with only 2 minutes in the processor.

Well. I'm here to tell you, out of that batch of dough, I made two Epis for Albert and Holly and I made myself two small round loaves. The above photo shows one of the latter after slicing. Folks, that bread is as good as any I've ever made and, by darn, I've made some excellent bread. (With the machines doing all the hard work, of course.) I had to go over and fondle the Beast just a little bit to let him know I appreciated the fact that quality did not suffer from the application of speed.

But my adventures were not over for the day. No, indeedy. See above? That is NOT peanut butter. That is freshly made cashew butter. I just happened to have 2 cups of salted cashews and that seemed like an excellent way to break in the mini bowl that sits inside the big bowl with its own little multi-purpose blade. I had never tasted cashew butter before but I'm definitely a fan now. All I added to it was some olive oil and then turned the Beast loose and let him run until the consistency was right.

What can I say? I got to play with The Short Person, Amazon treated me extra nice, KitchenAid puts out superb toys for goddesses and, oh yeah . . . my brother called and they'll arrive here sometime tomorrow. My cup runneth over and I will moppeth not because I want to wade-eth through it.

In Transit

2009-09-07T21:12:00.000-07:00

IN TRANSIT.

Those are such small, innocent-looking words, aren't they? In transit. Who would have thunk they could engender such roiling, boiling impatience in a person. But here I am, roiling and boiling, trying to keep the lid on my fidgets and fiddles, all because there are a couple of In transit situations on my calendar as we speak.

Like, fer instance, my brother and his wife are driving out from Illinois this year. Talked to them on the phone today and they were somewhere in Wyoming. They figured to spend the night near the Utah border and keep on keepin' on tomorrow. The ETA is Thursday.

They are IN TRANSIT.

Then there is the other item. I have been waiting -- quite patiently, in fact -- and saving so I could treat myself to a handy-dandy food processor. It's not something I need but it is definitely something I want. Did all kinds of research and then kept track of fluctuating prices and "best deals" and, finally -- when I least expected it, of course -- my targeted KitchenAid 750 went on sale. Woohoo! I had to make a temporary loan with daughter Patti and SIL Roger because the sale was going to be over before my monthly SS came in. Then, when we had that all arranged, the particular color I was going for was already sold out. Well, shucky-darn. The next best price up was only $13.00 more so I said, "Hah! I can do this," and I did. They shipped my baby out at 7:10 pm from Goodyear, Arizona Saturday.

From the moment I got that notice, my patience disappeared and I've been agitating ever since. Every day -- even though by now I know better -- I go to the page where you're supposed to be able to track your package, courtesy of the United States Postal Service. And it's true. I can do that. Sort of. Their idea of tracking and my idea of tracking do not make a perfect match.

Do they give me a blow-by-blow as the little guy wends his way to me? No, they do not. They tell me the estimated delivery date is Monday, September 14th. They tell me "Status: In transit." That's all the tracking I'm going to get. Now where's the fun in that?

There is an undeniable thrill one can enjoy when one is able to vicariously make the trip with the expected package. You can measure in your mind's eye each increment that inches tantalizingly closer every day. There is something about that kind of detailed tracking that helps the wait go faster.

It keeps you from raking long, wicked gashes in the walls with your fingernails.

It enables you to curb the incessant muttering and the sporadic howling is almost eliminated.

The twitching is easier to control so folks don't even know you're doing it unless they look close to see why you're slapping yourself.

Does the United States Postal Service care? I guess not. If they did, they'd be willing to inform me of interesting details like, maybe, the mail truck paused briefly at Gila Bend or Burro Butt and is tooling its way through the desert toward, oh, say Palm Springs or even Wendover. They would tell me neither sleet nor snow nor desert sand storm would stay the steady course of my trusty mail carrier truck/train/plane/person. They would include me in the fun, the excitement, the romance.

Oh. Excuse me. (Twitch. Slap!) I didn't mean to start howling again. Sometimes it just comes over me, you know? I'm going to "woman up" now and try to maintain my dignity until this coming Monday. I'm counting on Merle and Linda to distract me when they arrive Thursday. I'm sure they will make the final few days of the Other In Transit go much faster.

In the meantime, I'm going to wander into the kitchen and enhance my sacred coffee with some golden nectar. I might lay in one more casual swipe of gashes if I can find a section of wall I haven't already shredded but I think the worst of it is over now. Except for the snarling -- but I do that very softly.

Epi-logue Epic

2009-09-06T23:48:00.000-07:00

Will you just feast your everlovin' eyeballs on those puppies? Have you ever seen anything prettier in your entire life? Okay. Your kids. And your grandkids. And maybe Sean Connery for those of you of the female persuasion. Well, yes, chocolate is mighty pretty. The list can go on so let me concede the point and just say the above photo is ONE example of pretty. Not only that -- it is also an example of creative engineering and, blessedly, much easier to accomplish than it appears. Therefore, should you choose to make a bouquet of these critters to present as a hostess gift next time you're invited to dinner, you will be almost ashamed to accept the awestruck compliments you're sure to receive.

What are they? The French call them "pain epi" and Wise Geek has this to say about them:

"In French, epi is the word used to describe the flower of a wheat stalk. Since pain, roughly pronounced “pan,” means “bread” in French, epi bread may be listed as pain epi at many bakeries."

What epi bread is, is a clever way of putting all your dinner rolls on a stem, like a little choo choo train with all the cars linked together. You just tear off one of the "seed heads" of the wheat stalk and dip it in whatever is provided and start wolfing down that crispy crunchy crust and the tender fluffy center that laps up your olive oil and balsamic vinegar -- or your melted butter -- or whatever. I've been going to try this for a long time and finally got around to tackling the project earlier this evening.

The recipe I used is adapted from one a charming young man named Pete offers at his web site, where he calls it Cheesy, Savory Monkey Bread. Pete, in turn, adapted his recipe from one offered by Chris Pandel, a popular young chef at The Bristol in Chicago. His version is called Monkey Bread With Dill, Butter and Sea Salt. My variation on their versions was a healthy dose of my Lemon Dill (because I didn't have any fresh dill) and a quarter cup of grated Parmesan (because I didn't have any fresh Parm) but otherwise I kept pretty much to what they said. Except, of course, for turning the dough into epi bread instead of monkey bread. Works for me, she said with an unrepentant smile.

For the magical moment when you actually turn your bread dough into wheat stalks, I have two links for you to enjoy. The first one is a very short but impressive demo on YouTube. The other is a photo shoot of epi making at the Fig Jam and Lime Cordial web site. (You have got to love a name like that!)

So I did my version of the monkey bread recipe and was grinning like a fool when I discovered clipping a branch of epi was actually as easy -- and fun -- as it looked. I didn't indulge in all that butter like the guys did, though. Just brushed the epis with some olive oil and sprinkled a small scatter of coarse kosher salt across the top. Put the pan in the 375 degree oven and set the timer for 20 minutes and then I decided to get artsy fartsy with my spread of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The idea was to put the vinegar in a shot glass, put a dish over it, then turn them both over so the glass would contain the vinegar. Then I was supposed to drizzle the oil around it, quickly whip the glass up and -- tah dah! -- there would be a little pool of vinegar beringed by olive oil.

Heh, heh. As you can see, I fumbled the pass and lost half the vinegar in the flip. Had to mop it off the table. That's why the purple puddle has a Rorschach-like tail. Please don't tell me what you see in that image. I'm laughing too hard at my own vision.

It really didn't matter because very shortly after I sat down with a small glass of some pretty good Australian Shiraz, the Rorschach puddle got thoroughly reshaped anyway. I am here to tell you, Coffee Mates, the next few minutes were pure bliss. I don't mind admitting, I moaned when I ate. It was wonderful. I dipped and munched and sipped and dipped and munched and sipped and -- in a magical confluence of the Forces of Light and Goodness -- all that sipping and dipping and munching came out even. That is to say, I decided I was stuffed at exactly the moment I emptied the wine glass.

And no wonder. I was shocked to discover I'd actually wiped out half of one of the epis! Shocked but not really surprised. When something tastes that good, accidental gluttony should not come as a surprise. As I sit here and gaze upon the final shape of the culinary Rorschach, I've decided it is a fitting epilogue to the epic Epi adventure. No, I will NOT tell you what I'm laughing about now.

Bugs & Windshields

2009-08-29T22:16:00.000-07:00

The weather decided to put on a more amiable face today, which made me feel more amiable. So amiable, in fact, that I decided to try out a new cookie recipe. As I believe I've previously noted, some days you're the windshield, some days you're the bug. This was a bug day.

Mind you, the cookies are delicious. They just seem to have a serious identity problem. They don't know whether they're going to be hard-crunchy or fall-apart softy. Out of the oven, they cool down to the former -- put in an air-tight container, they sag to the latter. I was expecting something along the lines of a cake-like texture because these are apple-cranberry cookies but I suspect the brown sugar measurement is in error. If the recipe had called for half white and half brown, I'll bet there would have been a difference in the result. Not that it matters. I will still eat -- and enjoy -- the cookies. I just won't ever use that recipe again.

There was a happily serendipitous bonus out of the affair, however. Remember how I mentioned we can make our own brown sugar (1 or 2 tablespoons molasses per cup white sugar)? Usually I mix it up with a fork or even my fingers (finger-lickin' good) but I wasn't sure I was really in the mood to mess with it today. Still, the recipe called for 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar. Darn.

And then a big light bulb appeared over my head and lit up in all its glory. "Whoa!" I said. "What's that for?"

And a voice that sounded eerily like Emeril -- or maybe Martha Stewart -- said to me, "Don't you have a perfectly lovely KitchenAid stand mixer?"

"Uh . . . ye-eeees."

"Doesn't it have a perfectly useful wire whisk attachment?"

Blink-blink. "Yes, by golly, it does!"

"I rest my case."

Well. The Voice doesn't have to speak to me twice. I dumped a couple of cups of granulated sugar into the bowl, added 4 tablespoons of molasses (because the recipe called for dark brown sugar) and let the Blue Beast loose at a sedate low speed. I scraped the sides of the bowl twice and BB did its thang and looky what we ended up with.

I don't think it took more than 5 minutes, including measuring time. And I still got to lick the whisk. The Blue Beast did all the work and I was able to use the free time to make a fresh pot of coffee. I don't see how one can ask for fairer than that, even on a bug day.

Rainy Day Fooling Around

2009-08-28T17:59:00.000-07:00

This has not been a lovely summer day. No. This has been a day of mizzle and drizzle and featured the debut of a little baby stormlet, trying to impress Weather and hoping for a contract with the winter show. Baby pranced and performed, whooshing gusty wind rushes and tossing tree branches about. Didn't quite manage the patter of rain on the window pane but succeeded in getting the streets and highway wet enough to cause a satisfactory swish-swish from the cars going by. Don't know if Weather picked up Baby's option or not. Second string would be nice. Baby could learn from there.

In any case, it was a good time to continue with the project I started last night, when I decided to dehydrate a couple of my Granny Smith apples. The first apple went in yesterday evening and the slices were ready 4 hours later. Schweet.

That would be the pile of apple rings in the foreground of the above photo. The ones with the round holes in them. First I hauled out my trusty v-slicer mandoline and zipped the apple through on the thinnest slice setting. Then I got my melon baller out and used it to cut away the core portions of the slices. Worked ever so neatly, as you can see. The holes were not that big before the slices went in the dryer but the apple shrinks as it dries so the holes enlarge.

That was before I went to a web site where a fellow by the name of Steve Gallagher did a terrific photo tutorial on drying apple rings. Steve said you don't have to core those puppies. Well, if Steve said so . . . What's more, he had rather more adventurous ideas about soaking the apple rings, far more interesting than simply dipping them in water treated with fruit fresh. Hah! I'm all over this, Steve!

So the Granny Smith I did today was soaked for 10 minutes in a mixture of cranberry juice and sweet Port wine, hence the faintly red tinge to the slices. I love the little cutouts formed by the seeds. Makes the slices look a bit like ruffly sand dollars.

All the slices, from yesterday's batch and today's, are still soft and pliable, rather like good suede. I don't want them dry crisp, just almost dry and chewy. And tasty. Oh yes, they be tasty!They pass with flying colors. Very toothsome, both batches. I will put them in plastic freezer bags when they've finished that final little bit of air drying. They would last a long time in either the refrigerator or the freezer but they won't have that chance. They make lovely snacking food here at the computer, you see.

Now I have to leave you becuth it ith not polite to talk wif my mouf full becuth it ith harder for you to undershand whudI'mshaying, you shee.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Remember my mention of the split comment sections for the froyo post? And remember Bonnie and I only saw one of those sections the following day? Just on a hunch, I checked back a further page. Aha! The second section was there, right above the post for Shish Kabobbery. I was concerned because Diana asked a question and I wasn't sure if she'd been able to read the answer before it did its disappearing act. So, Diana! Here's what I found out for you:

Diana, what interesting questions those turned out to be! I just did a Google-gig to make sure I didn't lead you astray. (smile) Okay, Kraft Foods is the "culprit" for both items. Dream Whip and Cool Whip are both whipped cream substitutes, with Dream Whip being the powdered form to which you add milk and whip, whereas Cool Whip is already whipped. In the UK, Dream Topping seems to be Dream Whip's equivalent.

As for Miracle Whip, in any given group of people, you can almost guarantee a food fight by bringing it up. (grin) In the UK, I think Heinz Salad Cream is the equivalent. Do you have more than one brand of salad cream? Miracle Whip is like mayo with a tang -- it's like it's got more vinegar and sweet pickle spices in it.

Playing With My Food

2009-08-27T18:20:00.000-07:00

Okay. I've just become a staunch advocate for hot brine, as opposed to cold brine. Look how it's penetrated those eggs, actually starting into the yolks after only a week! The flavor, of course, goes right along with the color, because they are faithful companions.

Speaking of flavor, I was happy with this batch except for one teensy thing -- I wasn't nearly aggressive enough with the hot spices when I mixed the brine. Virtually no heat came through at all. Shucky-darn! Next batch, look out. I'm gonna load the brine with jalapenos and some African Bird and look for smoke to rise from the jar, by golly.

That dark burgundy on the outside is caused, I think, from the addition of the balsamic vinegar. I sort of messed up the yolks when I started hacking away at the eggs. But that's okay. Once I took the pictures, I chopped them all up and tossed them in a quickie 'tater salad for lunch.

Just a simple one . . . a Yukon Gold potato, nuked for 4 minutes and diced, skin on. Some minced onion. A couple of globs of mayo. Salt, pepper and Mrs. Dash chipotle seasoning. I seriously considered a strip of bacon crumbled into the mixture and that would have been lovely but I was too impatient to wait.

To tie up some loose ends, I should let you know that weird stuff was going on yesterday when I was uploading my post. The first attempt just disappeared from the planet, kapuft! Which irked me no end because I had to reload all those photos and redo all those links. Arrrgh! Then, today, I discover there is a comment section for both attempts even though only one of the versions got through. One is above the community service ad, the other is below. So if you're looking for your comment, it's either top or bottom. (sigh)

Update on the froyo -- I had the second half of my froyo effort for dessert today. David Lebovitz, who is THE ice cream guru, cautioned ice cream (or froyo) made this way -- without an ice cream maker -- was best eaten the same day it was made. I believe he's right. My froyo was frozen solid as the Ross Ice Shelf. Had to let it sit out awhile and then started hacking off spoonful after spoonful. It was still delicious but was much easier to eat yesterday. Lesson learned. Make small batches you can eat the same day. I can live with that.

In the meantime, playing with one's food is still fun . . . as long as you can eat it when you're done playing.

Froyo-yo-yo-yo

2009-08-26T18:52:00.000-07:00

These past few days have not been idle. My inner Igor and I have been busily toiling in our kitchen laboratory, experimenting with different methods and recipes for froyo. Or is that fro-yo? I could be wrong but I think that's California-speak for frozen yogurt. Whatever the origin of the term, froyo is surely one of the wonders of civilization as we know it. It is not only lower in calories than its ice cream cousin, it's even healthy. Not to mention, it's heaven on a spoon.

I started with a great recipe from David Lebovitz. Granted, it is for ice cream but I think using yogurt instead of milk is a reasonable substitution. David promises his Easy Chocolate ice cream is ready to wolf down in a mere 4 hours without the need of an ice cream maker or any ice and rock salt rig. He was right. It's fantastic. And it's not his fault that I almost forgot myself and spat out the only mouthful I took. See, the recipe calls for one frozen banana -- and he probably meant a newer banana rather than an overripe beast ready for bread -- and 6 tablespoons of Bailey's Irish Cream. Now, I like bananas if they're not too ripe and Bailey's isn't bad, although I prefer Carolan's. Unfortunately, there is something about the combination that simply, emphatically does not work for me. I couldn't wash that batch down the sink drain fast enough. Gadzooks!

Igor scratched that one off the list (although a future attempt will include a newer 'nanner and either Kahlua or some other coffee/choccy liqueur), noting David also has a recipe for Strawberry Frozen Yogurt that looks yummy. Currently lacking strawberries -- or any other fresh or frozen fruit -- I have to pass on that one for the moment.

Okay. On to Heidi's wonderful 101 Cookbooks web site where she has a fabulous basic froyo recipe. It is so basic that I couldn't resist messing with it a bit. Still smarting from the Bailey's and banana FUBAR, I took her recipe and added 6 tablespoons of good ol' Peach Schnapps. That was yesterday. Today it is very cold and very tasty. It is also very -- uhmm -- loose. Just won't thicken up. Probably because I used all that schnapps and no banana. Alcohol doesn't freeze, you know.

So last night I decided to go ahead and make yogurt cheese which is, I understand, the same thing as Greek-style yogurt. If you can get the Greek yogurt, go for it. Otherwise, if you want the thicker yogurt, you have to drain your supply of regular. I notice everyone else calls that process "straining" the yogurt. I call it "draining" because I say to-may-to and they say to-mah-to. What we're doing is letting all the whey fall out, leaving a nice firm mass similar to cream cheese. And it's easy.

This is what went in my refrigerator at 10 pm last night and came out at 10 pm this morning. I should have taken pictures as I put my personal Rube Goldberg yogurt cheese maker together but by then I was in no mood for playing photographer. We'll just have to deconstruct the process so you can poke around your kitchen and come up with neat stuff to make your own unit.

What you basically need is a bowl and a colander that fits inside of it. You want enough space between the bottom of the colander and the bottom of the bowl that the yogurt isn't swimming it what it's trying to drain. Otherwise, you'll want to check and empty the bowl now and then. Once you have those two pieces, grab yourself a big paper towel -- or two of them if they're small. Get the towel wet, squeeze the excess moisture out, then spread it inside the colander. You can use cheesecloth or even a clean old pillowcase (better) but you'll have to scrape the cheese off the cloth and then you'll have to carefully rinse and wash it so it can be safely used again. With the paper towel, the cheese doesn't stick and you can toss the towel when you're through with it.

Dump your yogurt into the colander. I usually do the whole quart but I was down to roughly 2 cups of yogurt by last night. Neatly fold the paper towel over the yogurt so its surface is covered. Then take a dish or, as I did, the bottom of a coffee can, and lay it over the folded towel. Put the whole thing in the fridge and, very last thing, set two cans of whatever from your pantry on top of the dish/lid. I used one can of diced 'maters and one of salmon. You may file that under Trivia. The point is, that extra weight will squeeze out more whey at a faster rate. You don't have to do that part. In any case, the longer the yogurt sits and drains, the firmer it will get.

When you remove the cans and the lid and unfold the paper towel, you'll see a lovely firm cake of nicely thickened yogurt. Notice how there are practically zero bits of stray yogurt clinging to the towel? So neat and tidy. Just makes you wiggle with joy.

Okay. Carefully grasp the paper towel -- don't worry, it'll hold -- and flip the yogurt into your working bowl. Drained yogurt ends up with about half the mass it originally had. What I had here was about a cup of yogurt and 2/3 cup of whey. Don't throw out the whey. It's good in soups or as liquid in bread dough or all kinds of things. Some folks drink it. Or feed it to their critters.

Okay. Now we're ready for the Big Dance. Using Heidi's basic recipe from the above link, adjusted for the amount of yogurt I had, I added 1/4 cup of powdered sugar and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Heidi used granulated sugar and said to stir until it was dissolved. The powdered sugar practically dissolves itself and its corn starch content helps with the thickening process. At this point you can add all kinds of wonderful things but I can only tell you I'm glad I took Heidi's advice and kept this batch at its simple basic minimum. (You can use artificial sweeteners, too, in whatever amount suits your taste.)

She used her ice cream maker to turn out her froyo from here. I just covered the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the freezer.

That was at 10:30 this morning. At 2:30 this afternoon, I scooped up this serving of froyo and sat down with my trusty spoon. OMG! Listen . . . this incredible delicacy is as smooth as liquid silk. There are only hints of ice crystals that dissolve almost instantly and, after all, provide the brain-freeze quality we want. The sugar softens the yogurt tang but doesn't hide it. What you experience is a very light, citrus-like flavor that makes you smile.

As you can see, all good things come to an end. But, oh my stars and garters, that was wicked good. The only problem is, I'll have to send my inner Igor to the market for more yogurt. And fruit. Because there are lots of froyo recipes with frozen fruit. That don't need an ice cream maker. That make you smile.

By the way, for those of you with food processors (you know who you are), here is what looks to be an excellent source of froyo variations at Cooks.com -- they use regular yogurt and still get almost instant serve. Wow.

2009-08-26T17:24:00.000-07:00

Shish Kabobbery

2009-08-22T21:01:00.000-07:00

Some things are just too good not to share. The above photo shows you one of them. Shish kabobbed chicken that's been marinated in a yogurt mixture, skewered with chunks of zucchini, broiled and served with an apricot-enhanced rice medley. (Cue long, satisfied sigh signifying sybaritic satiation.)

This is all Drew's fault, of course. He had to show off the fantastic barbecued chicken he did with yogurt marinade and, well, one thing led to another and the next thing you know, there I am, puttering around with a similar effort.

First, of course, I fired up my trusty steed, Google, and typed in yogurt marinade. Woooo! There are easily 60-jakillion recipes out there, Coffee Mates. It turns out yogurt has been a gentle and highly effective marinade for practically ever. Who knew? What I ended up with is pretty much like this recipe, except that it's also a lot like a similar recipe, only the similar recipe called for a full 3/4 cup of lime juice, and then there was another recipe that called for cardamom as well as the paprika and cumin and I sort of mixed them all up in a hybrid concoction. Okay?

Will you be shocked to find I didn't add any hot spices? I was. Don't know how I came to forget that. But this is pretty much what I did . . .

Shish Kabob Chicken Stuff

Cut up skinless boneless chicken breast into bite-sized chunks.

Marinade:
3/4 cup lime juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/4 cup yogurt
2 teaspoons grated garlic
salt, pepper, cardamom, cumin, paprika -- about 1/2 teaspoon each

Mix together well, immerse chicken chunks, cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour or as long as overnight. (I did 4 hours.) Soak wooden skewers so they don't flare up in a blaze of glory and ruin your kabobs.

I didn't have any pineapple to skewer with the chicken but I had a zucchini that needed to be used. Chunked it up, drizzled olive oil over it, seasoned it with salt and some dry ranch dressing mix, tossed everything good so each chunk was well coated.

About half an hour before committing kabobbery, I started the rice. You can use any rice. I had some Trader Joe's Rice Medley, which is a combo of long grain brown rice, black barley and daikon radish seeds. I took 4 or 5 dried apricots and ran them through the chopper, pulsing until they were little bitty crumbs, then dropped them in the boiling water with the rice. Please trust me when I tell you that makes an excellent accent.

Okay. I started threading chicken chunks and zuke chunks alternately on the skewers, managing to avoid stabbing myself and actually coming out even on the number of skewers (six) that I had soaked. I couldn't pat myself on the back because I had marinade all over my hands but that's okay. By the way, that was from one chicken breast. Just so you know. There was plenty enough marinade for more than that.

Broiled those bad boys for 7 minutes on the first side and 5 minutes on the second side. If you do bigger chunks, your mileage may vary. And I don't have a clue about barbecue timing because I don't have a barbecue. How un-American of me.

The result? The word ecstasy comes to mind. Amazed delight is an accurate phrase. "Why didn't I know about this before now?" is an apt question. Because this chicken was so tender and SO juicy it was incredible. Remember, we're talking about breast meat, the cut folks most often complain is dry and bland. No blandness here, folks. The flavor was sublime, with just a whisper of the lime caressing my quivering taste buds. Not to put too pornographic a point on it.

Oh! Almost forgot to mention -- the zucchini was tasty and juicy, too. It turned out to be an excellent member of the team. Zukes can shish on my kabobs any old time.

I Like "Tough"

2009-08-21T18:32:00.000-07:00

What you're looking at up there is one of my two spearmint plants. Fortunately for me, mint is an extremely hardy critter, tough to kill. This little guy and the one beside him, out of the frame, were very tall and bushy and full of dark green leaves that perfumed the air when you just brushed them gently. Gorgeous. And then they came to live with me -- and then I set them in the hallway, thinking the skylight would be great for them. I was wrong. They rapidly grew spindly and pale and began losing their leaves and I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't even notice for all too long. Bipped right past them, day after day, and never even looked. (sigh)

Well, when I realized I was in the process of committing involuntary mint slaughter, I whipped them back into the kitchen, pinched off all the spindly and dying stuff, watered them well and humbly begged them for forgiveness. I guess they're okay with that because they have begun to thrive again on the windowsill by the table. They're still not as dark green as they used to be but they've certainly improved over the sad state to which I'd reduced them. Provided I don't lapse into black thumb mode again, they'll progress beautifully.

I so admire their toughness that I decided they were an apt illustration for the batteries in my camera. I know -- that seems like a ludicrous leap of logic but stick with me here. I'll explain.

Back when I got my first digicam, the little refurbished Kodak, I was going through double AA batteries like they were popcorn. I think digicams were greedier then but maybe I'm wrong. I hate to think how many batteries I tossed before I found out they would still operate things like clocks and tape recorders even after the camera had sucked them down. By the time I got my beloved Nikon CoolPix, I'd graduated to rechargeable batteries and I ran two sets of Rayovacs for a couple of years without any problems. Along toward the last, I felt as though the batteries were not holding their charge as long but, by golly, they worked hard for the duration.

Then, when I got my current Canon Powershot (thank you, Cecil), I did a lot of research and ended up ordering a double set of Sanyo's Eneloops, along with the charger. That was in February of last year. The first set didn't run out until yesterday, a good year and a half after they were first popped into the camera! Mind you, that's with almost daily use for over a year. This past six months I haven't shot as many pictures but, still, I think the time span is pretty impressive.

Besides the fact that they're sturdy and long-lived (hence my mint analogy), these are what are called "precharged" batteries. They're ready to go right out of their bubble pack. So I've just recharged the first set and stored them away in their little container and fully expect them to be still amply charged when this second set runs down next year -- or whenever.

Wolfie, if I remember correctly, you were investing in -- I think -- Rayovac Hybrids at the same time. I think the hybrids are virtually the same as the Eneloops. What has been your experience with them? Just so folks know there are choices. Heck, by now there are probably even more precharged battery brands out there.

Just for the record, I'm not being paid by Sanyo to brag on their Eneloops -- but they wouldn't hurt my feelings if they sent me chocolate. Dark chocolate, please. Sanyo? Can you hear me now? Tap, tap. Darn. I don't think this thing is on.

Egg-ception to the Freshness Rule

2009-08-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

Okay, Coffee Mates, I want you to take a good look at the above photo. See that smooth and silky perfectly peeled egg? See the shell, lifted from said egg in almost one piece? It would have been one piece but I was so startled, I twitched a bit and tore the little section off.

There is nothing particularly earth-shaking about a smoothly peeled egg -- unless it happens to be a FRESH egg. Remember in yesterday's post how I mentioned a factoid I've always found to be true -- the shells of fresh eggs cling so tenaciously to the white that your hard boiled eggs end up looking like they've been chewed by starving hamsters. You always, always choose not-so-fresh eggs for hard boiling.

I think I may have been suffering under a misapprehension, at least in part. I still believe it to be true that fresh eggs, when boiled, are nearly impossible to peel neatly. But eggs that have been steamed to the hard cooked stage -- ahhhhh. That's a different yolk entirely.

Frankly, I had never heard of steaming eggs until I did some general research this morning, inspired by Drew after his comment on the last post. Thank you, Drew! It was while reading the comments of others who had faced the peeling problem that I came across the steaming tip. Further research showed it to be a not uncommon method for achieving hard "boiled" eggs and almost all the tipsters insisted it made peeling slick and easy even for fresh eggs!

Just for contrast, here's my tried and true method for boiling the (not so fresh) eggs. Put them all in a pan, single layer, and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil, turn off the heat, slap on a lid, and let the eggs sit for 20 minutes. Put the pan in the sink and run cold water in until all the hot water is gone and the eggs are cooling their round heels. (Note: some folks suggest putting salt or vinegar in the cooking water to prevent cracked shells. Salt makes the whites come out a bit rubbery. Don't know about the vinegar. I don't bother with either and rarely have a cracked shell.) Crack each egg against the side of the sink and, starting at the big end (where the air pocket is), peel the egg under running water.

Now here's what I did with the steam method: not willing to experiment with the whole dozen, I slipped one egg out of the carton and carefully slid it into a measuring cup full of water. Yup. Very fresh. The egg insisted on laying flat on its side, absolutely refusing to attempt any effort at rising. It languished. I suppose I should have taken a picture of it in that state but I'm sure you will believe me when I tell you it was definitely a fresh specimen.

Okay. As it happens, the shallow steamer pan for my pressure cooker fits quite nicely in my biggest saucepan. I put plenty of water in the pan (but not up to the bottom of the steam tray), brought it to a boil, turned the heat down to medium, put the egg in the steam tray and plopped the lid on. Set the timer for 20 minutes. (I read instructions for steaming anywhere from 12 minutes to 30 minutes. Since the egg came right from the refrigerator, I figured 20 was about right.) While the egg was steaming, I put the measuring cup of water in the freezer to chill. Some folks insist on bathing cooked eggs in ice water. I didn't have any ice handy. It didn't matter.

Once the 20 minutes was up, I transferred the egg, via tongs, to the cold water and let it sit for a couple of minutes. Had some sips of coffee. Crossed my fingers. Pulled the now-cool egg out of the water, cracked the shell good on the sink and held it under running water. Started the peeling process, expecting to work as delicately as I had to do yesterday with the slightly older eggs.

OMG!!!! The shell practically leaped off the egg! I could not believe it. And, yes, 20 minutes was quite sufficient to cook the yolk just right. (See photo below.) I'm lovin' me this steamer method, I'm tellin' ya! Now, I realize one measly little egg is not statistically significant so I can't really say steam cooking the eggs will always allow even fresh ones to peel smoothly. But, you know what? I'm certainly willing to do it again, just in the interests of scientific research. (Trying to assume a serious, Einsteinian expression.)

Oh! For what it's worth, here's another tip I ran across: To center the yolks for deviled eggs, sit the carton of eggs on its side in the refrigerator for 24 hours. I have no idea if this works or not but there is a vision in my mind's eye of the yolk lining up smartly like the bubble in a carpenter's level.

For information on the freshness test, you might enjoy the photos at the Recipe Hut. Also, the What's Cooking America site has lots of egg info. If you check in the left-hand side bar, clicking on the link for "Why do some eggs float?" will give you even more fresh-test info.

Well! I don't know about y'all but I've had an egg-ceptionally informative morning. And there's still time to look around for new worlds to conquer. Either that or imitate my fresh eggs and spend the afternoon languishing.

Pickled Plumb Pink

2009-08-19T20:35:00.000-07:00

Oh, that's gorgeous, that is. And fast. And easy. And, if I have sufficiently sacrificed to the pickle gods, in about a week I will be enjoying the taste of those pickled eggs. And the beets. Just for the record, there are sliced beets in there, too.

Got this recipe from a fun web site owned by a nice fella named Drew Kime. He calls his place How to Cook Like Your Grandmother. This assumes one had (or has) grandmothers who were excellent cooks. (I'm raising my hand in the affirmative.) If you click on that link, you'll see photos of his pickled eggs after a mere week in the magic brine. There is also a link between the photos that will take you to the post with the recipe and several photos of the step-by-step he did last week.

His recipe is very simple: 1 cup each of vinegar, sugar and beet juice, heated until the sugar is dissolved and poured over 1 dozen hard boiled eggs, then stored in the refrigerator. Needless to say, I've tinkered with it just a teensy bit. I'll explain . . .

For one thing, he used plain beet juice but I had a can of pickled beets. The pickling liquid was already a bit sweet so I only added 1/4 cup of sugar to my broth. That seemed to be just right. I also played around a bit with the vinegar, using 2/3 cup of apple cider vinegar and 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar. Tasty!

Then there was the matter of heat. I do love the spicy stuff, you know. I put in one of the Knorr brand mini-cubes which is supposed to equal one chipotle pepper. Just to top it off, I also gave a healthy sprinkle of Mrs. Dash chipotle seasoning. Took a sip. Oh yes. Very fine. Most excellento.

The eggs. Went to the market today and picked up 2 dozen eggs, figuring on using one dozen for this project. Now, you know -- you KNOW -- you never ever want to use really fresh eggs for hard boiling. Not if you want to peel them smooth and unmarred. So I loaded a dozen of the little beasties in the pan and poured the cold water over them. Oh shucky-darn. They all lay flat on the bottom like they were glued there. Totally fresh. Not even a hint of age.

I grumbled a bit and returned the eggs to their carton and pulled out the next dozen. They didn't seem to be all that much older but at least they stood up on their pointy ends and some of them even made token efforts to levitate just a bit. Okay. I probably should have waited at least a couple of days but I wanted to do this pickling thing TODAY. (Please, Lord, grant me patience and do it right now!)

It worked out pretty good. Only two out of the twelve ended up with chunky gouges in their hides. I'll just eat them first. In fact, those will be the ones I eat before the week is up and the fact that they're not perfectly smooth will keep me from feeling guilty about jumping the gun. I'll just claim to be tidying up the neighborhood.

What I'm anxious about is penetration. I've done pickled eggs before, once or twice, and the color didn't go in very far. I notice Drew's eggs absorbed the color (therefore the flavor) right up to the yolks. In cruising around reading through assorted recipes, the consensus seems to favor pouring hot pickling brine over the eggs to achieve maximum penetration. Makes sense to me but an awful lot of the recipes call for cold brine. We'll see. This time next week, I'll slice one of those bad boys open and then we'll know. Will the pink penetrate partly or will it penetrate profusely?

Oy, the suspense! The thrill of it! Reminds me of the old Saturday matinee cliff-hangers. Maybe I'd better check the popcorn supply.

Definition of Exciting

2009-08-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

Well, it's getting close to time for the annual September visit from brother Merle and SIL Linda. He and I were talking on the old fashioned telephone (insert smile) the other day and he said I should be thinking about something exciting for us to do when they get here. "Okay," I said. "I'll be thinking on it."

So I thunk and thunk and, by golly, just this afternoon it came to me. Trumpets tootled and lights flashed and bells rang and I think there was even a bit of ahoogah horn in there. Which is to say, my idea is absolutely smashing and has the potential for extreme excitement.

I am going to introduce them to the mighty Tim Tam Slam!

Now, you've heard me rattle on about Tim Tams before. You know I believe Tim Tams are possibly the greatest export Australia has ever -- uhmm -- exported. I saw them referred to on one web site as "a chocolate religion" and that's not far wrong. All by themselves they're good enough to make angels sing and shout. But when they're used in that magical Australian rite called the Tim Tam Slam -- well, that's when they become positively orgasmic.

I am not making this up.

It's not always easy to find a stateside source of Tim Tams and even when you do, they don't always have the particular flavor in stock that you want. I, for instance, adore the dark choccy version but my supplier is out at the moment. I was able to score a couple of the originals and a couple of the double-choccy versions, though. They should go out in the mail tomorrow, which means they'll arrive here in plenty of time.

It's a bit worrisome, though. They're coming from Texas. This is summertime. It is HOT. I sure hope they're not all melted together when they arrive. Not that such an event would prevent me from enjoying their Down Under deliciousness. It's just that it's a lot easier to suck a hot beverage through a single bikkie than a clump of them, don'cha know?

Dear Family, if you are reading this and you find yourself questioning my definition of exciting, I refer you to the embedded YouTube video at the bottom of this post. There are lots of videos of people demonstrating the Tim Tam Slam but this one is my absolute favorite, featuring Graham Norton and Natalie Imbruglia. When you see Graham's reaction, you'll understand why.

There's just one thing -- at the very end of the video Natalie says something that I just KNOW is funny and -- judging from Graham's reaction -- probably risque but I'll be darned if I can figure out what it is. I have played that darned video over and over and the line remains a mystery. Coffee Mates, can you help me out, here? Do any of you understand what she says? If you can solve that puzzle for me, I would be so -- so -- excited.

Take One Apple . . .

2009-08-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

Yeppers, that's all it takes -- just one apple to make two of those little mini-cakes. You don't even have to peel the apple if you don't want to (I didn't.) but you do need to grate it up. Or you could use some of that zucchini that seems to be everywhere this time of year -- or a couple of carrots or whatever. Just so you get about a cup of juicy grated stuff. I found the recipe on the Taste of Home web site but I've messed with it a bit so I'll show you what I did here and you can click on the link to see what the author of the original recipe did, okay?

Before we get to the recipe, I need to mention something about eggs. I never did buy into the booga-booga stuff about cholesterol and eggs. Sure, they have cholesterol but, as was pointed out in Prevention magazine way back in the '70s, they also have plenty of lecithin, which emulsifies the cholesterol and fat. Also, the eggs have more of the good cholesterol than the bad . . . and dietary cholesterol is no longer considered such a culprit anyway. Here's a pretty good short article on the subject. I mention this to explain why I added the yolk to the lemon sauce even though it wasn't mentioned in the original recipe. That said, everybody's body works different so you have to march to your drummer, not mine.

Okay, here we go with the little cutie-pie apple cakes with lemon sauce. The batter will be divided up between a couple of small ramekins -- I used two 12-ounce Pyrex dishes that worked fine. I think one could probably even make about 4 cupcakes with this amount of batter.

MINI-APPLE CAKES

2 tablespoons shortening or butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg white
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup shredded apple
1/4 cup chopped pecans
Mix fat and sugar together until crumbly. Add egg white and vanilla and mix well. Add dry ingredients and mix well again. Batter will be very stiff. Fold in apple and nuts. The moisture in the shredded apple will loosen up the batter a little. Spoon into greased 8- or 10-ounce baking containers. Bake at 325 degrees fairy height for 30 minutes.

If you compare pictures, you see my cake came out a darker brown than the other one. I think that's because I baked mine in the countertop roasting oven and it took twice as long because there is no way the little oven can maintain the kind of heat you get in the big one. No problem. The cakes were just right when I took them out. Nice and moist and nummy. And here's the lemon sauce, which takes only a couple or three minutes in the microwave:

QUICKIE LEMON SAUCE

3 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon corn starch
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 egg yolk
1 1/2 tablespoons butter, cold, cubed

Mix sugar, corn starch and lemon juice together and microwave on high for 1 minute. Whisk, then add a couple spoonfuls of the lemon mixture to the egg yolk and whisk it in to temper the egg. Then whisk the egg mixture back into the lemon mixture and microwave for another minute. Add the little cubes of cold butter and whisk until the butter is melted. If the sauce looks thick enough then, you're done. If not, another minute won't hurt.

In the photo above, you can see the sauce got thicker as it cooled. When I get ready to eat that cake, I'll slip the sauce in the microwave for maybe 30 seconds to make it a bit easier to pour over the cake. Nom, nom, nom!

And it only took one apple . . .

Why We Have Comfort Food

2009-07-30T20:49:00.000-07:00

Okay. That's done. Now . . . what shall I eat next?

Hooboy. This child is full to the brim. I just polished off the last portion of yesterday's Pratchett Pot meal. That brought my total meals from one cooking session to four. (Count 'em, folks -- 4.) Not too shabby for a mere 2-quart pot. Especially since I added about a quarter-cup of crumbled feta cheese to the last serving just before I nuked it. The flavor explosion was fantastic. I will make a note and remember to use feta the next time I cook something like that.

I forgot to add this until later so some of you may have missed the link to Elizabeth Yarnell's web site. You can click over to here, or maybe even better, here, where you'll find all kinds of articles and recipes and there is a really good FAQ page that answers a lot of questions.

One thing you'll notice is that she pushes the Le Creuset brand of Dutch oven. While I'll agree that it's one of the top quality brands of cookware, it's also one of the more expensive. Sure, it will perform beautifully for a lifetime but you know what? After you reach a certain age, when folks try to sell you something based on "lifetime guarantee," you don't know whether to snort or laugh. There are other high-quality brands of cast iron cookware, both plain and enamel-clad, and you don't have to mortgage your first-born to swing the financing. I noticed KitchenAid has come out with both a 3 1/2 quart and a 4 1/2 quart size in a very spiffy enamel-clad dandy and the price isn't too horribly horrendous. I'm lusting a bit there but I can keep it under control as long as my Pratchett Pot continues to serve me.

Oh! If any of you decide to get the book (Glorious One-Pot Meals), Amazon has -- I think -- the best price. Be sure you get the 2009 edition, which is upgraded from my 2005 version to the tune of 60 more recipes. That's double what I've got. Sheesh.

I shouldn't be surprised. That's just one example of the Gotcha Syndrome, of which I am often the hapless victim. You know how that goes . . . you shop carefully all over the place to get the very best deal and the day after you've committed your hard-earned, the darned thang goes on sale. Or what you bought is discontinued and you will never be able to get replacement parts. Or, as with the cookbook, the new model is better and has the audacity to cost less. That kind of "gotcha."

And that, Coffee Mates, is why we have Comfort Food.

The Pratchett Pot

2009-07-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

One of my very favorite writers in the whole universe -- this or any other -- is Terry Pratchett, author of the impossibly sublime Disc World series. He is both wise and witty and possessed of the most incredibly fertile imagination it has ever been my pleasure to enjoy. Although what he writes is considered fantasy, methinks he speaks more truth than most -- and makes you laugh out loud while he's at it.

Of course Disc World is overflowing with high magic and all the wild adventures that entails, as well as some interesting effects one cannot be blamed for dismissing as imaginary. For instance, Pratchett often describes spaces that look to be small on the outside but expand to enormous dimensions inside. Perfectly normal on Disc World, the reader well knows, but patently impossible on good old Earth. At least that's what I thought before this evening. Now I find the man was not only telling the truth, I am actually in possession of an example of this strangely dimensionally flexible space. Yes, Coffee Mates. I have a genu-wine, boney-fide Pratchett Pot.

It all started when I read a most intriguiging book -- Glorious One-Pot Meals -- by Elizabeth Yarnell. She has developed a cooking method for which she actually holds Canadian and U.S. patents, wherein she cooks an entire meal in a Dutch Oven and it's NOT a casserole. What's more, she assures you that you can blithely mix both fresh and frozen foods together and they'll all come out perfectly done at the end of the cooking time.

Yeah. Riiiiight. People make remarks like that and I tend to inch discreetly away, looking at them out of the corner of my eye. Still, I kept coming back to her tantalizing claim: load the pot with layers of food that take maybe 15 minutes to prepare, put it in the oven and walk away. Relax. Have a glass of wine. Take a bubble bath. Forty-five minutes later, pull the pot out of the oven, dish up your dinner and enjoy the fact that you only have that one pot to wash up later. (Well, okay, also the dinner plate and the silverware and the ... you know what I mean.)

I was not only dubious about the fresh/frozen concept, I couldn't see how the layers of different kinds of foods could be kept separate while cooking or when dishing up later. And that was before it registered that she was saying all the recipes are for two people and will be packed into a 2-quart Dutch oven. Do you realize how small a 2-quart pot is? Look at your ruler. Put your thumb on the 2 5/8 inch mark. That's how deep it is. Slide your thumb over to the 7 1/2 inch mark. That's how wide it is from rim to rim. And you're going to feed two full-grown, presumably hungry people?

Yarnell says cast iron is best for this method of cooking but allows as how enamel-clad steel is also okay. She feels the results aren't as consistently perfect as with the cast iron but you use what you have, right? And I don't have a cast iron Dutch oven, either plain or gorgeously enameled. After hours of diligent online searching, I also discovered the 2 quart size is woefully hard to find and, hooboy, some of those little rascals are horrendously expensive, don'cha know?

Then I got to thinking about my cookware set -- the one I treated myself to back when I was working for wages. Chantal. Enamel-clad steel. Colbalt blue. (smile) Glass lids. Steel handles and knobs that won't melt in the oven. And one of the sauce pans was the 2-quart size. The only thing that worried me was the glass lid. Certainly it's tempered glass but Yarnell has you baking your meal at a whopping 450 degrees fairyheight and according to the Chantal people, the lids were safe up to 375 degrees. But another Chantal owner told me she has a dish she cooks quite a long time at 425 and has never had a problem with the lids. Hmmmm.

Okay. Chantal is probably going to give the consumer a cutoff temp that is low enough that they won't face a probable lawsuit but the glass will probably manage a bit more with safety. On the other hand, I really didn't want to push it too far. That stuff's way too expensive to be careless with it. I compromised. Instead of 45 minutes at 450 degrees, I did 1 hour at 400. As you can see above, it worked. The meal came out perfectly and it really was as easy to fix as Yarnell claimed it would be. And the layers stayed layered while they cooked. And when I began spooning out each layer for my dinner plate, the different foods still stayed separate. See below.

On the left we have the macaroni and sliced onions that went on the bottom layer. Because the macaroni was uncooked at that point, I poured in 3/4 of a cup of liquid that consisted of the juice from a can of chopped tomatoes with enough chardonnay added to make 1 cup. (basil, oregano and marjoram were added to the liquid) You'll see in the upper right position the chicken breast that was plopped down, frozen solid, for the next layer, sprinkled with coarse kosher salt and freshly ground pepper. Then came a sprinkling of chopped garlic and a layer of the drained, chopped tomatoes. Then came a layer of chopped zucchini and crookneck squash (bottom half of the plate), a final sprinkle of salt and pepper and the last 1/4 cup of tomato liquid. At this point, as per instructions, the food was packed in to the absolute brim of the pot. I sprayed the lid with olive oil (also sprayed the pot before laying in the food), set it in place firmly and popped the whole shebang in the oven . . . and crossed my fingers.

It was when I'd finished dishing up my plate that I realized this was a Pratchett Pot. Coffee Mates, I barely made a dent in the contents of that pot. I'm pretty sure there is more food in there now than when I started so the pot HAS to be bigger than it looks. Yeah, I know -- the macaroni takes up more space when it swells -- but there wasn't supposed to be any more space, even if you account for the shrinkage of the veggies. I mean, one sort of evens out the other. Gee, how about that? You really can feed two hungry people this way. Or one hungry people two (or more) times. (That would be me.)

The only problem with this method of cooking is the heat factor. Summer is not the time to be firing up the regular oven for an hour, a fact for which I can stand my glistening self up and testify. However, my countertop Nesco oven goes up to 450 degrees and doesn't put out anywhere near the heat the big oven does. The long-handled Chantal pot won't fit in there but some of my Corning Ware casserole dishes do. I think I have a 2-quart one that might turn out to have Pratchett Pot tendencies. I hope so because Yarnell has a lot more recipes I want to try.

As soon as I've finished working my way through this first magically expanded meal.

Addendum: Oops! I forgot to give you this link so you'll have a better idea of how these One-Pot meals work: Elizabeth Yarnell. Check it out!

Chuckledoodles

2009-07-26T21:46:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought it was safe, here I am with another Snickerdoodle recipe. Well, they're sorta-kinda Snickerdoodles. For one thing, I am still out of cream of tartar because, much to my dismay, Lee doesn't seem to carry it in his spice section at the market. Oh pain. Oh agony. I'm told one can substitute either vinegar or lemon juice for cream of tartar but I'm not convinced the results are the same. Close, but no banana. (I don't have any cigars, either.) That would probably be okay if you weren't as bull-headed as I am. See, as far as I'm concerned, if it doesn't have cream of tartar, it isn't a Snickerdoodle. It's just a sugar cookie. A very good sugar cookie, to be sure, but only a pretender.

The other thing about this particular recipe is that the cookies don't crackle on top. I don't know why that is. Instead of crackling, they just crumpled. Maybe they're really polite cookies so instead of snickering, they decided to chuckle. So I'm calling them Chuckledoodles, okay?

Crackled or crumpled, they still came out doggoned good. Tender crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. Which is the way they're supposed to be. That's another of my bull-headed Snickerdoodle roolz -- we're not having us any of those cakey-type cookies here, thank you very much.

I got this recipe from the Taste of Home web site, which is a really good place to go for all kinds of nummy stuff. The reason I tried it was because it was very close to my regular Snickerdoodle recipe but doesn't make as many cookies. I just wasn't in the mood to bake a whole kajillion of the little guys. I ended up with 43 cookies. Well, to be more precise, it was 42 regular-sized cookies and 1 little bitty guy. And this am the way it goes:

CHUCKLEDOODLES

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

Cream together the butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla, beat well. Add flour, soda and cream of tartar, beat well. Dough should be soft but just firm enough, if you handle it lightly, to roll teaspoon-sized blobs into something like walnut-sized balls. Roll the balls in a mixture of sugar and cinnamon (I like to add about half as much cardamom as cinnamon) and place on cookie sheet. Bake at 375 degrees fairyheight for 10 to 12 minutes.

Okay -- I should stress you want to test a few cookies in your oven. In my oven, 8 minutes is just right. Anything past that and the cookies would be too hard. Don't like hard cookies. Tender crunchy, that's the goal. Also, if I'd had a fresh supply of cream of tartar, I'd have put a full teaspoon in. Absolutely. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

I should point out there is no vanilla in my regular "go to" Snickerdoodle recipe -- and I don't miss it when I do the cookies that way. But it's nice in this recipe. The presence or absence of vanilla in this venue does not fall under the scope of my bull-headed roolz.

But I'm still calling these Chuckledoodles.

Thumbs Up & Thumbs Down

2009-07-25T20:33:00.000-07:00

I went toddling off to the market today to pick up a few groceries. Leaned over to grab a bag of flour and, when I raised up, there before my astonished eyes was the display for corn starch -- in a brand new type of container. Although I still have a goodly supply in the old style box (see above), I grabbed the new kid on the block because . . . well, just because.

I love this new container. It has a bigger footprint on the pantry shelf than the box but, as the label points out, getting the corn starch out when you want it is no longer a messy proposition. Not only that, the container is a lovely size for other things once you've used up the corn starch. Now that I'm making my own dry mixes for various and sundry food items, I tend to keep an eyeball peeled for suitable containers. And here's the kicker . . . the price is the same on the 16 ounce plastic container as it is on the 16 ounce cardboard box! Woohoo, Argo! Kudos to ya! Thumbs up.

Now that I've said the nice things, let me rant just a little. What I call my therapeutic bitching. Remember that bag of flour I just mentioned? Yeah. Five pounds of my trusty Gold Medal all purpose flour. I love their flour but I cuss every time I open one of their paper bags. I swear they must be using Gorilla Glue to seal the damned thangs. It takes saintly patience and perseverance to separate the folds of paper from the glue weld. Any time I can pry a bag open without making a mess, I feel I should pop the cork on a bottle of champagne because it's such a notably rare occasion. Why, I ask every time, why in bloody blue hell do they package their flour in such a frustrating, belligerent fashion? Do they take perverse pleasure in making me puff up with righteous indignation? Do they think just because they are selling one of the main ingredients for the staff of life (aka bread) they can test my better nature and taunt me with impunity?

Given the simple beauty of the Argo container, the question became even more urgent. So I went online and Googled for enlightenment. Well. I'll be dipped. Gold Medal has come out with a flour container that uses the zip seal type of closure. Haven't seen it myself but I guess it's been around for a little while. Investigating further, I was disheartened to find this more convenient packaging contains less product for a heftier price. That's just not even nice. Shame on you, Gold Medal. Thumbs down.

I don't know what it's like elsewhere but here in the states, more and more different kinds of food are being packaged in resealable containers. The nice thing about it is the containers are usually a heavier plastic and can be washed and reused to freeze food when the original contents have been consumed. Recycle. Recycle. Recycle. Which makes me believe Gold Medal -- and other flour companies -- could do the same thing without hurting their profit margin -- or gouging their customers.

Okay. I've stalled long enough. I have to leave you now and wrestle that flippin' sack of flour into its cannister, hopefully without poofing way too much of it all over way too much surrounding real estate. Then I'm going to fix myself a nice batch of maifun rice noodle stir fry with chicken and I'm going to have it with a nice glass of decent chardonnay. It is entirely possible that I will have managed to stop sulking by the time I'm finished. If not, well . . . heh! I'll just have to compose a serious letter to Gold Medal, that's what.

Put the Blame on James, Boys

2009-07-21T19:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, I've been sadly remiss about posting these last few days -- but I have a really good excuse. I'm blaming my grandson James (with apologies to Rita Hayworth in her Gilda role) for the delinquency but please note it is a benign blame. James (see above) has been home on a surprise leave from Uncle Sam's Canoe Club (otherwise known as the Navy) and two of those nights he spent here.

It was great fun and, fortunately, I had whupped up a big batch of Snickerdoodles and an apple cobbler before I even knew he was home. Whew! That means I get to keep my Granny card a while longer. As we sat there at the dining table, talking until the wee hours, James inhaled the cookies and made short work of the cobbler which he artfully topped with whipped cream. Gotta keep that hollow leg of his well packed, don'cha know?

Yesterday I turned the culinary wheel in a different direction and made some soft cheese with a quart of Nancy's Plain Yogurt. Remember that trick? You just plop the yogurt in a cloth or paper towel-covered strainer and let it drain for several hours, then you use it like you would soft cream cheese. Today I decided what I was going to do with at least part of it. I got to feeling the hungries for a spicy sandwich spread to go with a freshly baked loaf of bread and the sliced ham in the fridge.

These are just rough guesstimates as far as amounts are concerned but the mixture went pretty much like this: about a cup each of yogurt cheese and finely grated cheddar cheese and a couple of tablespoons of dried onion flakes, a teaspoon of Mrs. Dash Chipotle seasoning and 2 tablespoons of ground Brazil nuts. Mixed it all together really well and taste-tested for quality control. That's when the infamous Domino Effect clicked in. You know -- as in "one thing leads to another." Instead of spreading the bread with my mix thus far and then laying the ham slices on it, I decided to run the ham through the chopper and add the ground results to the mix. So I did. Another taste test. Almost just right. Almost.

Aha! Another domino fell. I grabbed a handful of dried cherries and ran them through the chopper and mixed them in with all the other goodies. They turned out to be the perfect tart-sweet complementary accent for the savory ham and cheese combo.

I slathered generous globs of spread over two slices of bread, cut the slices into triangles and laid them out on a pizza pan. Slid them into a 400 degree oven for about 12 minutes. Enough time for the bread to nicely toast and the topping to get hot.

I dutifully snapped the above photo and then sat down and ate every single bite of every single triangle. Coffee Mates, that is righteous chow, really. And I'm thinking that filling would be great on crackers or as filling in turnovers or -- oh yeah! -- topping on a big fat baked potato. A glob smacked down on a serving of steamed veggies would be nice, too.

And healthy. Don't forget yogurt cheese is healthy. Just don't tell your grandkids that.

I Love a Mystery

2009-07-15T21:06:00.000-07:00

Excuse me? I don't DO mystery food.

Our little bunny buddy would fit right in here. See, I finished doing the archeology project in the freezer today. Found my missing Lemon Drop chili peppers (yay!), separated a huge bag of oriental veggies and a huge bag of whole kernel corn into more reasonable pint portions, bagged up a freshly cooked batch of black beans and managed to fit everything ever so neatly on each shelf. I not only have a clue about the contents of my freezer, I can even find the different items.

Except for the mystery food.

Every now and then I pick up a 2-pint container of Nancy's Plain Yogurt. The handy thing is, after you've emptied the carton, you can use it to save leftover food in the freezer. They even have a space on the side where you can label the carton so you know what's in it. The trouble here (you know what's coming) is that I neglected to do the label thing. I remember thinking there would be no problem remembering what I'd tucked inside. I don't remember what I would have no problem remembering.

I could have popped the lid to see if I could figure out what was in there. Decided to hold off on immediate exposure because where's the challenge in that? No, I'm sure it will be a lot more fun to speculate. If there were more of me hanging out here, I could even run an office pool for guesses.

Oh, wait. The Voices are informing me they're willing to play. Well, alrighty. We have us a horse race. One Voice has already hollered out, "Taco soup!" and another Voice chimed in with, "Naw, it's a noodle casserole." Personally, I'm thinking it's a veggie soup with rice. I'll wait a bit to see if anyone else jumps in the pool and then we'll have the Grand Opening. Winner gets to eat the contents.

Clams & Clapton

2009-07-14T21:14:00.000-07:00

Darn it. Every time I have Dalmatians for breakfast, I break out in hives!

I'm sure glad I have Lolcats to draw on because I can't think of a thing I did today that needed to be photographed for posterity. Some days are like that.

Not that I wasn't busy. And I'm not done yet. Shucky-darn. To make it all move along easier, I've been running assorted CDs through the stereo. Roy Orbison is serenading me at the moment with his cover of Blue Bayou. Linda Ronstadt made the Big Bucks with it but ol' Roy, along with a fellow named Joe Melson, wrote it. Here's an interesting piece of trivia for you . . . according to the Wikipedia entry: Because of this song, Dickson's Baseball Dictionary records that a "Linda Ronstadt" is a synonym for a fastball, a pitch that "blew by you."

The biggity-big thang I did today was process some of the horseneck clams Patti and Roger shared with me awhile back. They were cleaned and frozen but whole. Had to be peeled and minced before use. So I thawed them out and peeled until I was cross-eyed. Then I decided I'd cook them before the slice-and-dice phase of the operation. That's when I got a flash of inspiration. (Braced yourself, Wendy, I'm proselytizing again.) Clams are among the sorts of seafood that get tough if you cook them too much. But I wondered what would happen if I ran them through the pressure cooker.

It took some serious searching because most recipes were for chowder and had you putting in the minced clams after the pressure cooking part was done. I think all those recipes were referring mostly to the canned minced clams you buy in the store. Finally I found a source that suggested cooking them for 5 minutes, then letting the pressure fall off slowly. Well, I wasn't going to find out if I didn't try it, right?

Tossed the horsenecks in the steamer basket and set them in about 3 cups of water, sprinkled them generously with Chef Paul Prudhomme's seafood seasoning and locked the lid down tight. When they were done, I raised the basket out and let them drain and cool. As soon as I could handle them, they got a turn in the chopper until they were minced up nice and neat. Then I crossed my fingers and popped some of the mince in my mouth to see if I'd managed to keep them tender.

Oh yeah. Perfect! And right tasty, too, thank you, Chef Prudhomme. So I was able to divide them up between two pint-sized freezer bags and pop them the freezer for later attention. I dunno -- something like linguini with clam sauce? What do you think?

And now I think I'd best pour myself another mug of the sacred liquid and see if I can finish up my To Do list for the day. I do believe I'll have my main man, Eric Clapton, keeping me company the rest of the evening. That'll make me happy as a clam. Hmmmm . . . have you ever wondered about the person who thunk up that particular cliche? I mean, have you ever seen a clam grinning? Or even chuckling? No, I didn't think so.

Fat Round Things

2009-07-13T22:05:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am a little tired. Why do you ask?

Boy howdy, I do believe this child is going to sleep well tonight, that's what. It's been a really busy day, including a hike up to the market so I could pick up some more butter and replenish my cheddar cheese supply. It wasn't until I got back that I realized I'd forgotten the treat I'd promised myself. After a week of overcast and occasional drizzle, today turned out so gorgeous I was going to sit at the little picnic table beside the market and indulge myself in a decadent ice cream cone -- a waffle cone, to be specific. Dayum.

Ah well. Something to look forward to on another sunny day, I guess. Besides, my culinary project for the day turned out rather well so I can't really complain. Okay, I can really complain but my heart isn't in it.

See those fat round things just below this paragraph? Those are sorta kinda mini-foccacias. Or should that be "focaccia?" Because I keep finding it spelled both ways. [Pause for Google search.] Okay, according to Merriam-Webster, it's focaccia. Fo-caw-che-ah. Of course. I knew that. I just forgot I knew it.

Anyhoo, what I did was whomp up a batch of pizza dough and seasoned it with good stuff like cumin and oregano and lemon dill. Then, after it did its rise gig, I divided it up into 8 balls and patted them out into more or less round shapes. Some of them were of the free-form persuasion but I didn't see any reason to discourage their individuality so I let 'em hang it all out. Not owning a dandy gadget like a dough docker, I forked the daylights out of them so they wouldn't rise up too terribly much in the middle. That's because they're slated to serve as fatso pizzas when I'm in the mood for a fatso pizza. I could have rolled them out really thin. Some folks like a thin, crispy crust. I happen to like a fat, chewy crust that lends itself to dipping in whatever looks tasty.

I cooked them at 375 degrees fairyheight for 10 minutes, then brushed them with olive oil when they came out of the oven. When they have completely cooled, I'll slip them in Ziploc bags and toss them in the freezer. Then, when I'm in the mood for a quick and tasty meal, I'll pull one out, top it with whatever happens to be handy and slide it into a 400 degree oven for another 10 or 15 minutes. Shazaam!

For those of you who counted the mini-focaccias on the platter and came up short a deuce, I can assure you there really were 8 of them a little while ago. The thing is, by the time they were all baked, I was so outrageously hungry I could have eaten a horse and chased the rider with a fork. I had planned to make a nice little batch of garlicky white sauce for a pizza base but my tummy didn't even want to wait for that. I just minced up some ham, slapped on a couple of slices of mozzerella and cooked those bad boys before I fainted. The one you see below is now residing in my pacified tummy. The other one is waiting for my midnight snack urge, should it happen to rear its head tonight. If I end up impersonating my feline friend above, then I can count on having a tasty breakfast. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Chili Killers

2009-07-12T11:16:00.000-07:00

For something like 25 flippin' years, I have believed that Jack and Georgia invited me over that Sunday for Chili Killers. Jack was the chef and, oh my stars and garters, that was a wonderful brunch. I can no longer tell you exactly what was in it but Jack filled everyone's plate from a huge skillet full of chopped tomatoes and melted cheese and scrambled eggs and I don't know what all. Nor can I call up and ask, darn it. Both Jack and Georgia have gone on to dimensions that have neither phone service nor e-mail addresses.

I got to thinking about Chili Killers the other day, wistfully wishing I had written down Jack's recipe instead of foolishly believing I couldn't possibly forget the details of such fantastic food. Ah well. I have learned my mighty friend Google can alleviate much of the pain of dubious memory so I went online to sleuth my way to authentic Chili Killers. That's when I began to realize the term was either Jack's and Georgia's nickname for the dish or I had misheard the phrase. That would make the term a mondegreen on par with Gladly, the Cross-eyed Bear.

I got my first clue with a Google link to Spryte's Place, where the title of the blog entry was "Chilaquiles (aka Chili Killers)". "Ahhhhh," I said to Self. "Self, I think we need to Google another term."

And we did. And we discovered chilaquiles is pronounced chee-lah-KEE-lays and there has to be at least twenty-seven squajillion variations. That is not surprising when you consider that the concept of chilaquiles was invented to use up leftover food -- especially leftover tortillas. Inevitably, it becomes a dish that lends itself to the artful blending of pretty much all those interesting bits and pieces you don't want to waste. I must have skimmed dozens and dozens of versions and I don't believe I have yet found any two alike.

You can check out how Spryte did it if you click the link above. Lots of good photos there. I took a different tack entirely. There's no recipe to give you. It was just a matter of using all the "bits and pieces" that I thought would (a) live in harmony with each other and (b) fit in my wok-style skillet.

First I drizzled in some of that nummy olive oil. Then I sauteed about half a chopped Vidalia sweet onion and a couple of cloves of fresh garlic, minced, and about half of a big jalapeno, also minced. Inspection warned me the green Bell pepper wasn't going to hold up much longer so I stripped and chopped that, too, and added half to the mix. (The other half -- also chopped -- went into the freezer.) Then I took half a dozen stale corn tortillas and sliced them into skinny matchstick strips and tossed 'em in with the veggies. Stirred everything around until all the strips were coated with oil. Dropped in a small can of stewed tomatoes and snipped the tomatoes into small chunks with the kitchen shears. Stirred everything together and let it simmer while I whisked a couple of eggs nice and frothy. Poured the eggs over the contents of the pan and let the liquid begin to set while I rinsed off the bowl and whisk. Then I gradually worked the egg into the rest of the mixture, continuing until all the egg was cooked. Plopped a huge pile of chilaquiles into a soup bowl, sprinkled everything with a generous helping of crumbled feta cheese and sat down to enjoy.

Oh my. Yes indeedy. Some chilaquiles recipes have you fry the tortilla pieces until they're crispy but I had a different goal. My matchstick pieces absorbed the tomato juices and sort of reverse engineered themselves into what I think of as reconstituted polenta. The end result was something very like a fluffy, moist cornbread stuffing.

Got three meals out of that batch, the last one being my brunch this morning. Every bite was nummy. I may find myself keeping a supply of stale corn tortillas just to see how many different "chili killer" combos I can invent. Every time I score a new version, I can put a notch in the handle of the fry pan. You GO, Killer. Heh!

Priorities

2009-07-07T18:15:00.000-07:00

How do those Lolcat folks know when I need an illustrative photo for the blog? And how do they always manage to come up with just the right one? This little furkid arrived in my daily Lolcat newsletter this morning and just cracked me up. Almost wiped out my tiny mad entirely.

What? Well, yeah, I'm a teensy bit miffed at myself for not posting last night. I was trying so hard not to leave gaps after my long hiatus and what do I do? I fall asleep at an unusually decent hour and miss the boat altogether. Sheesh. Adding insult to injury, after midnight came and went, I kept waking up off and on for the rest of the night.

Not that there was all that much to report yesterday. I managed to share some of the puff pastries with daughter Patti and SIL Roger Sunday, thereby saving myself from about a kajillion feral calories. Then I had the very last one for breakfast Monday morning. Since I used the last of my butter on that batch, I can't make any more until I go grocery shopping again. I'll be sure to concentrate on eating really healthy between now and then so I can indulge without guilt.

Toward that end, putting my pressure cooker back into service has made it easier to put more beans into my diet. I really do like all kinds of beans but all too often give a pass to the recipe in question because I haven't got time or inclination for the soak cycle -- not even the quick soak. And I refuse to buy canned beans, with all the sodium and mystery chemicals. Besides which, they're just that much more weight to pack up the wooden mountain and then I have to rinse and flatten the cans for the garbage and haul them back downstairs again. Pffftt!

What I do now, is, I toss a pound of beans in a bowl of water and let 'em soak for 4 hours. Then I rinse 'em off and do them in the pressure cooker for however many minutes are required for that type of bean. Once they're cooled, I spoon them into pint-sized Ziploc freezer bags and toss them in the freezer. Each bag holds 2 cups, which is just over what a can holds. Any time I need beans for a recipe, shazaam! There's a bag waiting in the freezer. What's more, the bags can be rinsed out and used again. Even though they're plastic, I'm still using them "green" so I get to feel virtuous.

Oh, yeah . . . it's a lot cheaper this way, too. So I can buy more butter to make more puff pastry. Heh. Priorities. We haz 'em.

Whirled Peas

2009-07-05T22:16:00.000-07:00

I don't getz it either. Today I realized world peace is not possible -- if you define that concept by celebration of what we have in common and respectful tolerance for our differences. I don't "getz" how we can attain that lofty goal when you have the basic problem of potato salad. Let me 'splain . . .

It started out innocently enough. There I was, browsing through one of my favorite food blogs (see Pioneer Woman Cooks in the sidebar) and checked out Ree's version of potato salad. She always presents her recipes with scads of great photos and this one is no exception. What was unusual, though, was the tenor of the avalanche of comments in response to the recipe.

Now, you know and I know there are a kajillion different potato salad recipes out there. Everybody has their own way of doing it but, while some folks are involved in the adventure of different salad styles, others are totally committed to specifics. (The difference between involved and committed is best illustrated by an egg and ham breakfast. The hen is involved but the pig is committed.)

The point of contention began with the fact that Ree fixed a salad with potatoes that had been pushed through a food mill -- or a ricer, I forget which. Okay, mashed potatoes. Well! You'd have thunk she was advocating the advent of the antiChrist. "That's not potato salad," came the protests. "That's -- blech! -- cold mashed potatoes with stuff added."

There was a great rattling of sabers and the rumble of tanks and the thunder of artillery. It was like a religious war, with everyone declaring they had the handle on the One True Religion. Over here was the Vaunted Church of the Redeemed Peeled Potato and over there was Our Lady of the Unpeeled Red Potato. Every now and then someone with a beard and sandals strolled by wearing a sandwich board that proclaimed the need to add bacon or the End of the World would ensue.

It got more complicated as the comments rolled on. There were specialized splinter groups peeled off (you should excuse the expression) from the main churches. Some preached Mayo and called Miracle Whip a tool of the devil. The Miracle Whip folks, of course, were convinced the Mayo folks were false prophets. The Sour Cream contingent has a smaller church but their hymns have a catchy beat.

From there, we had arguments over whether or not to add pickles and how coarse or fine they should be chopped and which was best, sweet or dill. Same-same for hard boiled eggs. And for what kind and how much onion. Celery in or celery out. Likewise olives. And paprika. And mustard. Strangely, nobody responded to a minor blasphemy proclaiming the virtue of adding apples to the mix.

I hasten to point out that I am exaggerating just a bit for effect. The commentors on Ree's blog are unfailingly considerate and there was certainly no flame war going on. It's just that this particular instance displayed an unusual degree of adamant opinion about what is "right" and what is "just wrong." It got quite exciting.

Me? I don't belong to any of those churches, although I'm willing to visit. Mostly, I'm just a simple food pagan, perfectly willing to stick a fork in whatever isn't moving. If it flinches, I pass it by. My recipe for whirled peas.

Puffy Fireworks

2009-07-04T23:09:00.000-07:00

Do I know how to celebrate the Fourth of July or what? See that plate of raspberry puff pastry turnovers? That's what I did today. And then I ate two of 'em, and all the crust scraps that I'd sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. And then I took the pictures before I went completely nuts and ate all the evidence. Because it IS puff pastry.

Yeah. Puff pastry. Light and buttery and built of nothing but tender flakes and air and unicorn magic. Okay, I know it's terribly rich and not one of the ten healthiest things you can eat but you have to let it all hang out once in awhile. Especially when it comes to pastry. Listen, puff pastry is to ordinary pastry what champagne is to Annie Greensprings wine. Trust me on this. And this is especially true when you stumble across a really easy recipe.

I already had an easy puff pastry recipe but thanks to our friends at King Arthur Flour, I now have a super-easy version. You can go here for the recipe (you can choose to read the measurements by volume or weight) for Raspberry Puff Turnovers but be sure to click on their link at the beginning of the article and go to the blog called Baker's Banter. On that page you'll find a really terrific photo tutorial that takes you step-by-step through the whole process -- with options for mixing the dough with a food processor or by hand. I noticed the hand version made use of the Danish dough whisk. She didn't mention it by name but one of the photos shows part of the business end and I know KAF sells 'em. Besides, I had already pulled out my own rug beater to do the job.

I really don't know how a recipe that simple can turn out to be so abundant in flakes. Just look at those tender layers! They just go on forever.

Yes, I know . . . there is a certain amount of filling ooze going on. My fault entirely. You're only supposed to put about a teaspoon of filling on each pastry square and I kept getting just that silly little bit more. Heck, I had stuff oozing out of the durned thangs before I even got them on the cookie sheet. It doesn't turn out to be a big problem. You don't lose much and the dribbles thicken up rapidly when you put the turnovers on the rack to cool.

Not having any of the large-crystal sugar that they used at KAF, I didn't bother putting any on the turnovers before shoving them in the oven -- although I did brush on the egg wash. Then I sprinkled a cinnamon-sugar mixture on them after they cooled. I guess you can see a little of that in the above photo. Which is not as sharp as it should be but sometimes I don't seem to hold the camera as steady as other times. But that's okay. You get the idea.

Speaking of ideas -- I was thinking how terrific these turnovers would be in a savory version. Can you imagine a filling of some kind of salmon or shrimp spread? With maybe some tasty cheese included? And some coarse crystal kosher salt on top? Oh dear. Somebody talk me down. I simply cannot allow myself another dose of puff pastry too soon. One needs to space royal treats out in a more stately fashion, pace the bliss, so to speak. I'm pretty sure that's in the fine print somewhere.

The Great Sushi Throwdown

2009-07-03T21:02:00.000-07:00

There we go, Coffee Mates. This was the scene on my dining table this afternoon -- which didn't do a lot for the lighting, I'm sorry to say. Too bright in some spots and too dark in others. (sigh) Just so you know, starting from the upper right, we have sliced avocado (dipped in lemon water so it wouldn't turn brown), strips of cucumber, strips of ham and, huddled in the shadows, a pile of coarsely chopped pineapple. Laying in front of that neat array is the first sheet of nori, rough side up, shiny side down.

Out of camera range is the bowl of sushi rice, waiting to make its stage entrance. I should have taken a picture of it because it turned out perfectly. The dressing was also excellent -- a mixture of vinegar, lime juice, sugar and salt, sprinkled over the rice and carefully folded in until each plump little grain was coated.

I said to Self, "Self, this bodes well. You can't hardly go wrong when the rice is right."

Self said, "Yay-uh," and smiled.

When I had finished slicing all the fillings and laying them out in my very best cooking show style (eat your heart out, Emeril), I said to Self, "Self, it just keeps getting better. You can't hardly go wrong when all your stuff slices up so neatly."

Self said, "Yay-uh," and licked her lips.

Then I flexed my fingers and dipped my hand in the bowl of lemon water so the rice wouldn't stick to me. Scooped up what looked to be a reasonable blob and carefully laid it on the nori, evening up the sides and using the side of my hand to make a little ditch down the middle. Put some ham strips in the center of the ditch, carefully placed an avocado slice on the right side, some pineapple chunks on the left side and a cucumber stick down the middle. Dried my hand on the towl and pulled the lower corner of the nori over its filling. Kept rolling -- gently but firmly until the whole thing was wrapped up like an ice cream cone.

Sort of. Some grains of rice and one chunk of pineapple fell out of the open end and the end that was supposed to be pointy . . . wasn't. It just sort of hung there, taunting me.

I said to Self, "Well, that was just a practice one. I'm getting the feel for it now. The next one will be better.

Self said, "Uhhhhmmmm," and raised one eyebrow.

Laid out another nori sheet and went through the same routine again, this time paying extra special attention to the angle of the roll. Some more rice and another chunk of pineapple fell out. The pointy end . . . wasn't.

After the third try with the same unfortunate result, this is what I had lined up on the platter I'd been planning to fill with neatly shaped sushi cones (see below).

I said to Self, "Self, why are we doing this?

Self said, "It seemed like a good idea at the time?" She was shaking her head and staring at the pathetic cones as though she were viewing corpses that had been prepared by a drunken undertaker.

I looked at all the rice still in the bowl. Then I looked at all the carefully sliced filling that was still artfully arrayed in front of me. There was a blessed moment of epiphany. I said to Self, "Self, there is more than one way to mix and mingle!"

Self said, "Say what?"

But I wasn't listening. I was furiously chopping up all those lovely slices and tossing them into the bowl with the rice. And tossing all those chunks and grains of rice together in a gorgeous bowlful of nummy-nummies.

I said to Self, "Self, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned Sushi Salad."

Self said, "Shazaam!" (Emeril is always saying "Bam!" but Self is into the magic stuff.)

That's how it all ended. The three pitiful sushi cones are covered with plastic wrap and waiting in the refrigerator to satisfy my midnight snack compulsion. I've enjoyed -- thoroughly -- a bowl of the sushi salad and put the rest of it in the fridge for tomorrow. Just to validate the whole thing, I went online and did some Google action. Guess what? Sushi in a bowl -- what I call sushi salad -- is enjoyed by millions. Okay, maybe thousands. Hundreds?

Whatever. The point is, there must be a lot of other people out there who like to cut to the chase, too. They even crumble some of the nori into the salad so they don't miss out on that. Besides which, the salad form allows room for a lot more magical ingredients to be added. You can't go wrong when you can add ingredients to your tummy's content.

Digging Treasure

2009-07-02T19:21:00.000-07:00

The above picture has absolutely nothing to do with anything. It's just that I took one look at the expression of resigned desperation on Mama Tigger's face and thought to myself, "Oh yeah. I remember that." Actually, the feeling is not gender-specific. I know lots of Daddies who would stand up and testify, too.

Went on an archeological dig to organize my freezer to day. I know I'm not quite finished because I just realized I haven't dug up my stash of lemon drop chili peppers yet. That's practically the culinary equivalent of finding golden artifacts in a pharaoh's tomb. Ah well. I'll do some more excavating tomorrow. Today I got sidetracked with using some of the recovered items in a chicken and rice one-pot meal in my trusty pressure cooker.

I do loves me my pressure cooker, especially when the weather gets warm because you don't have to have the burner on very long to do the job. One cup of Arborio rice in the mixture and it still only took 6 minutes under pressure. The rice was perfect and so was everything else.

This is quite an attitude adjustment from my feelings of unease about the earlier, older models of pressure cooker. Unease? Pffft! I skipped unease and jumped straight to stark terror. When that little jigger started jiggling on top of the vent I KNEW the damned thing was going to blow up. I figured the food would be on the ceiling and thick slabs of hot metal would impale me to the far wall. Mom used to laugh at the way I'd cautiously stick my head around the corner to check the jiggle motion. I didn't care. I was way too young for impalation. And I still am.

That all changed a few years ago when I treated myself to what folks call the "new generation" of pressure cookers. Got a dandy Fagor and it doesn't jiggle even a little bit. (Fagor is made in Spain but I don't know if the factory is mainly on the plain, with or without the rain. Sorry. A little humor under pressure there. Heh.)

Okay. You're right. I'll go to my room now. I'm sure I'll be better behaved tomorrow. Right after I find my chili pepper stash.

Old Favorite -- New Style

2009-07-01T23:10:00.000-07:00

Youngest daughter Patti is always surprising me with fun stuff. She sent down a goody package with Albert (my grandson-the-chef) that contained, among other things, a package of nori half sheets. That turned out to be both a blast from the past and an introduction to a twist that's entirely new to me.

Y'all probably know this but just in case you don't, nori is toasted seaweed in sheet form. That's the stuff you see wrapped around sushi rolls. I was first introduced to it by my late sis-in-law Betty, who was a fabulous cook. I would watch, fascinated, as she expertly made sushi rolls on the bamboo sushi mat, layering rice and colorful veggies into little round works of art.

While she was doing that, I would be nibbling away on a nori sheet, which I found to be as hard to resist as potato chips. Betty would finally have to slap my hands so I didn't short her supply of sheets. Good memories.

For some reason I never got around to making sushi myself. Always promised myself I'd get a bamboo sushi mat and then I'd forget. But now -- hooboy! When I flipped the package of nori over and read the back, I discovered there has been a new way of doing sushi that doesn't require a mat. Am I the only person in the world who has never heard of hand roll sushi? Also known as cone sushi because it's rolled up like an ice cream cone.

Well! It just so happens I have a sack of sushi rice in the pantry. I just need to trot up to the market for some assorted veggies to go in the cones -- like cucumbers and avocados and whatever else strikes my fancy. Can't do that until Friday, though, so I can't show you any photos of the adventure until then.

In the meantime, I am slapping my own hands every time they try to sneak over to the nori package and open it. If I start nibbling now, there won't be any seaweed left by Friday. I'll just have to be brave. Maybe I'll distract myself with chocolate. Note to self: lots of chocolate.

Turtle Time

2009-06-29T23:10:00.000-07:00

Oy vey. I can't decide if my brand of slow is more like the turtle or like the snail on his back. Either way, I have not been particularly efficient today and nobody would accuse me of trying to pass for Speedy Gonzales. Just one of those easy-going, amiable sort of days, you know? No big deadlines. That's probably the problem. I find I tend to get less done when I have lots of time to do it.

In any case, I ended up getting totally distracted with a John Grisham book, "The Broker," and didn't even notice the sun had gone down until I finished the last chapter and looked around to see where I'd left my coffee mug. Ooops.

Well, see, that means there are several things on today's To Do list that I have to slide over to tomorrow's To Do list. Which means I'll have less time to do the stuff than I had today -- therefore, according to the theory, I should be able to manage to get 'er done.

Or not. In any case, I think I'd better hurry up and post this before the day is completely used up. Then I can see about programming myself to catch up on all the things I missed doing today. In the meantime, hope y'all are having a perfectly super day. Or night, depending on the time zone. Don't trip over any turtles.

Dust to Dust

2009-06-28T22:13:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure I laid this one on you somewhere back there in previous blog posts but this seemed to be a good time to -- uhmm -- dust it off and bring it out again. Remember, last night I promised to tell you about Magic Dust. Yes, I know this cartoon is about happy dust but little green Miss Thang is a funnier illustration than a photo of a pile of mixed spices. Trust me on that.

Mike Mills, billed as a champion BBQ pit master and restaurateur, came up with this blend of spices and shares the recipe with the rest of us. The neat thing about it is its versatility. Often used as a dry rub on fish, fowl or red meats, it works equally well on just about any vegetable you can name and is a handy seasoning for all sorts of casserole or combination dishes. As noted yesterday, I like to sprinkle it on melted cheese -- and it doesn't much matter what the cheese has been melted on, the seasoning enhances it.

MAGIC DUST
1/2 cup paprika
1/4 cup kosher salt, finely ground
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons mustard powder
1/4 cup chili powder
1/4 cup ground cumin
2 tablespoons ground black pepper
1/4 cup granulated garlic
2 tablespoons cayenne

Mix all the spices together thoroughly and store in tightly covered container. If you want it hotter, add more mustard and/or black pepper, 1 tablespoon at a time, up to 1/4 cup each. Personally, I found the above measurements to be just warm enough for general purposes -- although I am using the extra hot Coleman's mustard powder. I stored the bulk of the mix in an empty Kraft ground Parmesan container and filled a smaller glass spice bottle with a shaker top for table use.

I've learned a couple of things since starting this kick of making my own assorted mixes. For instance, I'm getting pretty good at saving plastic and glass containers, especially if they have shaker tops, for possible use as homemade mix storage. I've also learned to keep a roll of scotch tape handy to stick labels on the containers once I fill them. That's because, to my dismay, I have discovered some mixes look so much like each other that I don't have a clue which is what. I have a couple of mystery mixes in the kitchen right this minute -- mixes that I was blissfully sure I'd be able to identify with one eye tied behind my back. Hah!

The good news is, I can always offload them in a soup without doing any damage to my taste buds. The bad news is, if I really, REALLY like the result, I won't know what I have to mix up to do it again. Back to the drawing board, Igor. Yes, master.

Revelations -- Sorta Kinda

2009-06-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

Well, Coffee Mates, I just know you can hardly wait to find out what the mystery object really is. Your guesses were really quite astute and even Kate's speculation about its possible use as a bubble wand is probably not that far off. I mean, why not? I bet it would work. We'll have to give Bill (aka The Old Guy) the gold star, though, for cleverly figuring out to mouse over the photo to see if it was labeled in an enlightening way. And it was. And I even thought of changing its file name but it was getting late and I thought, nah, nobody will think to look. Heh, heh.

So, yuppers, that artistically twisted wire and wood thingamajig is officially known as a Danish Dough whisk. Made, I'm told, in Poland. It's apparently not yet well known on this side of the pond but you can get it online at several places like King Arthur's Flour or the Breadtopia website. I got mine at FGPizza, a friendly place run by Frankie and Gail, who want to save for their daughter Natalia's education. Not only do they offer the best price for the whisk, they also have the lowest shipping and handling charge. Works for me. Besides, I watched the video where Frankie and Natalia mixed some cookie dough with their whisks and she's such a cutie, how could I resist, right?

I'm going to reveal something to you now but you've got to promise not to tell anyone because it's a major secret. It isn't really a dough whisk. What it really is (looking around carefully and lowering voice to a whisper) is a rug beater.

Ssssssshhhhhhh!

They aren't really manufactured in Poland, either. They're put together in the Shire. By Hobbits. That's why they're smaller than the rug beaters our grandmothers used. Hobbit rugs aren't as big as human rugs. I'm not making this up. Look at my face. Is this a face that would lie? No, it is not. Creatively embellish the truth, perhaps, but never lie.

Anyway -- does it work as a whisk? Yes indeed! The whole idea of the open design is so one can efficiently mix stiff doughs without a great deal of effort. It makes sense. Think of the difference in effort needed to sweep your hand through water with the fingers close together and then with the fingers spread apart. The dough whisk easily -- and thoroughly -- cuts through any heavy mixture like dough or meat loaf without putting any strain on the one doing the mixing. And if Uncle Arthur has been messing with your shoulder joints, believe me, the whisk is a blessing.

Just for the fun of it, I whupped up a batch of English Muffin dough with my rug beater today. I used a tweaked version of Alton Brown's very good recipe but I had to get really creative with the cooking part. See, his method allows you to cook the muffins in a pan on top of the stove but you need rings to contain the dough in an orderly shape as it cooks. I don't have any rings or even empty tuna fish cans, as suggested for substitutes.

For that reason, I didn't use quite as much liquid in the dough as Brown did. I ended up with dough (see above) that was almost as thick as biscuit dough but still very wet and sticky. I lightly sprayed the frying pan with olive oil, flopped in a heaping big spoonful of dough and put the lid on. It took a couple of experimental sacrifices before I finally got the correct combination of heat and timing. I ended up with the heat on medium-low for about a minute-and-a-half on each side. The resulting muffins were fat and fairly free form. When they had cooled and I was able to slice them in half, the interiors were done but nicely moist and the flavor was great.

I think I got around ten muffins out of the batch of dough. After inspecting the surfaces of each to make sure I hadn't baked on a religious image I could sell on eBay, I loaded the two halves of one muffin with some cheese and gave it a turn under the broiler. Nom, nom, nom. Most excellent. Just because you don't manage to cook up religious images doesn't mean your eating experience can't be considered a spiritual thing.

What? Oh, the red stuff sprinkled over the cheese is something called Magic Dust. It's pretty cool. I'll tell you about that tomorrow, okay?

Oh. If any of you are skeptical concerning my revelation about the true nature of the whisk, I refer you to the following photograph showing a sampling of some of the many designs rug beaters took. I rest my case.

Chagrined -- With Fingernails

2009-06-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

There's a certain type of photo puzzle that can be hugely irksome sometimes. You know the ones -- where they take a photo of some perfectly ordinary object but they get sneaky about it. The picture is either an extreme closeup or at an angle that is confusing or distorting. The maddening thing about it is, if you can't figure out what the object is, as soon as you get the answer you just want to slap yourself silly because you knew that. Of course you did. You just didn't know you knew, that's all.

Well, brace yourselves, Coffee Mates. I'm gonna lay a photo puzzle on you this very minute. But I'm nicer than those other people. This is not a trick photo. Nope. Uh uh. See that thingamajig over there on the left? That's the real deal. No sneaky stuff. Instead of an unusual shot of an ordinary object, this is an ordinary shot of an unusual object. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, [cue theme music from Mission Impossible] is to identify the mystery object. I regret to say there are no fabulous prizes for having the correct answer. On the other hand, the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you're right is in the general vicinity of fabulous. Unless you're wearing your bunny slippers again. That's a different sort of warm and fuzzy.

Speaking of Mission Impossible, remember that tv show from the sixties and early seventies? Peter Graves, Greg Morris, Martin Landau, among others. And Barbara Bain, who played Cinnamon Carter with such elegance and style. I had to look up her character's name just now because I don't really remember details about the silly show. Just that they always had these cool adventures every week and managed to ace the challenges in slick and totally unrealistic fashion each time -- but you happily went along with the gag because it was so much fun.

There is one detail I do remember, though. Ms Bain's fingernails. Yup. She had these incredibly impressive fingernails. There was almost always some scene where she had to manipulate some gadget that was crucial to the success of whatever sting they were running. The thing was, her fingernails were so long, you couldn't understand how she could do that complicated stuff without chipping the polish or -- gasp! -- breaking at least one of the darned things. Listen, I'm sure everybody was thinking the same thing because the cameras always moved in close so you could watch with awe and amazement. But, hey, Barbara was a pro. She made it look easy. And classy. Hooboy. Impressed the hell out of me.

What? The mystery object? Oh. Sure, I'll reveal its identity.

Tomorrow.

Feel free to offer your best guesses between now and tomorrow evening. And I'll tell you this right now -- if I find out all of you already know what that thingamajig is, I am going to be SO chagrined. CHAGRINED I tell you.

Hooky, Hepburn & This Must Be Heaven

2009-06-25T20:48:00.000-07:00

Well, durn my hide. When I play hooky, I don't mess around, do I. Or, put another way, I mess around entirely too much. Thank you, dear Coffee Mates, for checking up on me. My apologies for taking so long to respond. There has been absolutely nothing wrong around here and I've been having great fun with assorted projects and family stuff. But doing anything on the computer except checking mail and researching aforementioned projects just wasn't happening. I think it's called burn-out. Big time. I thought about posting blog entries, really I did. But then I'd lie down and the thought would go away.

I can make it up to you, though. I have just discovered what has to be the absolutely best brownie recipe I've ever blissed my way through. I thought Katherine Hepburn's brownie recipe was pretty darned good but -- sorry, Kate -- the one that follows is even better. I found it on the ever-helpful Recipezaar site, recipe #32204, titled "Whatever Floats Your Boat" brownies. A few other folks agree with me -- when I checked today, there were 750 reviews, almost all of them positive. Here's a shot of the batch I just baked, basking in the afternoon sun. They're really darker than they look here and, oh! The flavor is even darker and richer and deliciously decadent -- which is what a proper brownie should be.

If there is anything I've learned while researching brownies, it's that there are sharply varying standards about what a brownie should be. This is not scientific but my impression is that most folks prefer moist, fudgy brownies rather than drier, more cake-like concoctions. Interestingly, there seems to be even more disagreement on what constitutes the right level of "sweet" and even the right degree of chocolate intensity.

Two things I've learned: don't overmix the batter and don't overcook. The toothpick test will keep you on the right path. Stick it in the middle and pull it out. If there is still liquidy batter on it, it's not done yet. If it comes out clean, you've overcooked it. Apparently the perfect result is to see a few moist crumbs clinging to the toothpick. Keep in mind that ovens vary. Check for doneness at least 5 minutes before suggested time. This recipe calls for 25 minutes but, in my oven, it was perfect at 20 minutes.

Here's a handy trick for you: fold a strip of cooking foil so it's the same width as your pan (I used an 8" x 8" glass pan) and line the pan so each end of the strip drapes over the edges. Grease the foil and the exposed sides of the pan. You can do another strip and lay it in perpendicular to the first but I don't think it's necessary. The idea is, when you bring the finished brownie out of the oven, you can use the ends of the foil strip as handles to pick it up and set the whole thing on a rack to cool. The brownie will be much easier to cut when the time comes. Oh! A pizza cutter works wonderfully for that, by the way.

It will be worth your while to take the time to skim through the various reviews because you'll get all kinds of ideas for variations, including ways to cut calories. My "boat float" for this batch was a big handful of dried tart cherries. Dried cranberries would have worked as well (which is very well indeed) as would about a cup of frozen raspberries folded in. Sometimes I'm in the mood for chopped pecans. Other times I venture south of the border with touches of cinnamon and chili pepper. Cha, cha, cha!

Go ahead and whup yourselves up a batch. You know you want to. It doesn't take hardly any time at all and you've probably got everything you need because the recipe is so basic and simple. And you'll be in good company. This might be only a devilish rumor but I've heard this is the brownie recipe approved by 9 out of 10 heavenly hosts.

Happy Easter

2009-04-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

In time for the Easter celebration, all the laurel trees are loaded with their spring blossoms. I think they look like lacy candles, the way they perch upright on the branches. Must admit to a bit of subterfuge though. I was going to go outside and take some shots of the blossoms for tonight's post but it's been raining and blowing like the dickens out there. But wait! (Drops eyelids to half-mast and looks furtively about to see if anyone is watching.) Heh -- we just happen to have a shot of last year's blossoms on hand. And here's a coinky-dink -- they look just like this year's blossoms.

So -- I hope it's been a lovely Easter for everyone.

Even if it was raining.

Wiggle Room

2009-04-10T23:10:00.000-07:00

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking this is a variation of the three wise monkeys -- speak no evil, see no evil and hear no evil. That would be wrong. What this picture represents is a pretty good illustration of my readiness to put up a post tonight. Think of the little froggie fellers as saying, from left to right: "Dayum! I'm speechless!" and then, "Oh no. I can't see what I'm thinking." and finally, "I wonder if this hairdo makes me look fat."

Some days are like that, you know. It isn't that nothing happened. Something always happens. It's just that what happens is really of no earthly interest to anyone else. Pleasantly blah. Like the weather. Not too wet, just somewhat wet. Not too overcast, just somewhat overcast. Neither too hot nor too cold. Like I said, pleasantly blah.

Actually, there was one thing today that pressed my enthusiasm button. I got to thinking about reviving my little old worm farm. I still have the handy-dandy Can-O-Worms I was using a few years ago. Herded a bunch of fat and sassy Red Wigglers who happily ate whatever I threw in there for them and they returned the favor by producing a huge quantity of worm castings, some of the best fertilizer on the planet. Picture hundreds of cheerful little folk singing, "Just wiggle while you work . . . "

Not that I'm gardening here but I can always pass the castings on to Patti and Roger for their garden. In the meantime, the worms will recycle kitchen scraps, making the garbage load lighter. Yeah. A very green thing to do. And easy. And fun.

Well now, look at that. It wasn't such a dull day after all. Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle . . .

The Results Are In

2009-04-08T22:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I left you with fair warning that I was going to fiddle a bit with the recipe for Norwegian Apple Pie. It just so happened there was a perfectly good window of time this afternoon for me to make good on that threat. I could have taken a picture of the result but it would have looked just like the photo illustrating yesterday's post and you would have been dizzied with feelings of deja whooptie-vu. Which is why I decided to go with the above photo of another food experiment. Fortunately for all of us, my results worked out a lot better than Mr. Pup's.

I won't repeat the recipe here since you only have to go back one post. The main idea was to use a different flavoring -- I used 1 teaspoon of lemon extract instead of vanilla -- and to see if I could get away with using less sugar. By golly, I think I did. Instead of 3/4 cup of sugar, I used 1/2 cup. There seemed to be slightly less volume in the batter but that was okay. Didn't cause any problems. I was glad to see the tender-crispy crust was still produced even with the smaller portion of sugar. It wasn't quite as robust as the previous crust -- almost a ghost of its former self, you might say. But that's okay, too. It still made an elegant topper for the whole shebang. And, yes, the lemon flavor was lovely with the apples.

How about that? We now have two perfectly fine versions of a scrumptious dessert and our only problem is going to be which one to choose. I can live with problems like that.

AWOL No Longer

2009-04-07T21:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I've been AWOL for a bit. I do that every now and then. It allows me to feel wickedly irresponsible if I can mount a minor rebellion against order once in awhile. Some fun and interesting things have happened and I'm sure I'll manage to inflict all the bits and pieces on you in due time. For tonight, however, I bring a gift to reward your patience. That's one way of putting it. Another way to put it is admit to bribery and corruption to avoid scolding. Whatever works, you see.

The gift? The most amazingly luscious dessert, that's what. What you see up there in the photo is known as Norwegian Apple Pie. Y'all may already know about it. I didn't, until I stumbled across it the other day in some Google valley or another and said to myself, "Hey, this might be interesting."

And it is. Interesting, I mean. For one thing, although many recipes lend themselves to endless variations, the Norwegian Apple Pie recipe is almost always the same, no matter which link you click. The main difference I was able to find is that some recipes called for an egg while others required 2 egg whites. Should you choose to do the latter version, you beat the egg whites stiff and then add the other ingredients.

I'm not sure why it's called a pie. It's really fruit wrapped in batter for a tender, moist cake but it's supposed to be baked in an 8-inch pie pan so maybe it's just undergoing an identity crisis. I don't have an 8-inch pie pan so I used my trusty Corning Ware bowls which measure 5 1/2 inches and, as you can see, that works just fine. As it bakes, it forms a thin, tender-crispy top crust of a light tan color. Underneath, the cake part is a rich gold, bursting with fruit and, should you want them, nuts. Here's how it goes:

NORWEGIAN APPLE PIE

1 egg
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup nuts, chopped (walnuts or pecans)
1 cup diced apples

Beat first four ingredients together until well blended. Beat in flour. Fold in diced apples (one Granny Smith worked out just right.) and nuts. (I didn't have any nuts so added 1/2 cup dried cranberries.) Spread batter in buttered 8-inch pie pan and bake at 350 degrees fairyheight for 30 minutes. Can be served hot or cold, topped with ice cream or whipped cream or whatever -- or nothing at all. Reheats easily by nuking for a minute in the microwave.

I've gotta tell you -- this is really wonderfully tasty for such a simple and easy recipe. Yes, I know -- that's an awful lot of sugar. I expect that bit could be toned down with your preferred sugar substitute but I don't know what that would do for the texture or that rather special top crust. It might be worth experimenting to see if 1/2 cup of sugar would work as well. I was thinking the next one I bake, I'm going to use lemon extract instead of vanilla so I'll try it with less sugar at the same time and let you know how it goes.

No, no, don't thank me. I'm willing to brave the hordes of raging calories in our continuing search for satisfying sinful food without guilt. Somebody's gotta do it.

P.S. Thanks, Becky, for catching what I missed in the recipe. You were correct: it's "cup." As in "1/2 CUP nuts." Have another cuppa. You earned it.

Chili Pepper From Heck

2009-03-03T19:16:00.000-08:00

By way of cliff-hanging teaser in the last post, I promised to tell you about my shock and awe experience with the mighty African Bird. We are not talking about our fine feathered friends, here. We are talking about a specific kind of chili pepper that grows both wild and domesticated in Africa.

A little background might be good. Chili peppers originated in Central and South America way back "once upon a time." Along with corn and squash and chocolate, they were a basic component of the diet, as well as being used in medicinal, spiritual and disciplinary ways. Chili peppers made their way to the other continents via assorted explorers and quickly made themselves an important component of many other cuisines. The African Bird is one of the Birdseye peppers, of which there are many variations.

Here's an interesting thing -- the characteristics of a given pepper depend heavily on climate and soil. If you take, for instance, a Birdseye from South America and start growing it in Africa, the resulting peppers will be different than the parent peppers. Move those peppers to, say, Thailand, and you will soon have yet another variation. And so on.

Another interesting factoid: birds don't feel the heat from peppers so they can munch away with impunity and then spread the seeds with wild abandon and generosity. Which is, apparently, how the assorted Bird peppers acquired that name.

There's a little thing called the Scoville rating which measures the heat units of a given pepper. Allow for a certain amount of variance simply because crops vary. Also, I understand dried peppers measure hotter than fresh peppers. In any case, the actual Scoville number can fluctuate quite a bit from one source to the next. Loosely speaking, I figure the African Bird is way hotter than the ubiquitous jalapeno and matches or ranges well beyond cayenne but is not as blistery as a habanero or a Scotch Bonnet.

Youngest dotter Patti and her hubby, Roger, turned me on to the African Bird. "If you can see it, you've used too much," Roger assured me. But they loved it and hadn't been able to find any in the local stores. I was delighted to score a couple of bottles from the Great American Spice Company -- one for Patti and Roger and one for me. Heh!

Of course I had to check it out as soon as it emerged from the shipping peanuts. You know that foil cap that's sealed on top of spices to keep them fresh? When I peeled it off of the African Bird bottle, I noticed the oils of the spice had laid a film on the foil. Didn't think twice. Laid my tongue right smack on it, then tossed the seal in the garbage. As I began screwing the lid back on the bottle, my taste buds began to wake up from their collective nap and start to pay attention.

"Hmmm," I said to myself, "that is nice and warm, isn't it?" My taste buds shivered and shook themselves like a dog coming out of the water. My tongue began to sweat. No. Wait. That was me beginning to sweat. The spot on my tongue -- the part that had come in contact with the pepper oil -- began to emit more heat waves than a Nevada highway in August. For a brief moment, I even saw the mirage of an oasis shimmering in the air in front of me. I would have to say a most excellent illustration of that initial taste experience would be the graphic photo below, culled from the wonderful Worth1000 site.

Okay. Gee. I'm just joshin' with ya. I'm not going to claim African Bird can be used to strip paint or dissolve rust. That's just silly. What you do is, you make a paste that, when brushed on, will clean your oven. Heck, if you insert a blasting cap, you can blow up the whole stove.

Actually, in the few days since its arrival, I'm starting to get a handle on the Bird. Perhaps I'm being a bit too cautious, though. When I sprinkle it into whatever ingredients I'm mixing up, the resulting thermal level has been very mild. Earlier this evening I poached a couple of chicken thighs in a mixture of broth and wine, seasoned with onion and garlic powders and sprinkled daringly -- I thought -- with some Bird. Then I slow-roasted the thighs with mixed veggies in the oven and made a sauce with some of the poaching liquid. It was all super-delicious -- but there was no pepper heat at all.

Back to the drawing board. Note to myself: upgrade your wimpy "daring" status. It's one thing to respect the awesome power of the Bird. It's another thing entirely to be cowed by it. The problem is, that's a very wobbly tightrope over the chasm of Overdose by Bird. But, oh my, how very satisfying it is to attain that superb balance of flavor and warmth and happily billowing endorphins. Woohoo! I'm in favor of billowing endorphins. Yes indeedy.

Seeing Isn't Always Believing

2009-02-27T10:20:00.000-08:00

"Really, Dennis, I think you need to stop eating that new bird seed from China."

My Dad used to tell us kids, "Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see." Methinks he would be revising those proportions in this era of Photoshop and all the magical digital manipulations that abound. Both hilarious and alarming examples of creative imagination coupled with technology can be found at the Worth1000 web site, especially if you check in at the Gallery section. The above picture came from one of the nine Chimaera galleries. Some of the pictures absolutely BEG to be given captions. It's just too much to resist. So I didn't.

While the above link will show you lots of eye candy and let you laugh -- or gasp, as the case may be -- this next place I want to lay on you caters more to what makes your tummy laugh and wiggle with glee. Heh! You just knew I wouldn't stray that far from a food topic, didn't you. Well, this is an important one because it allows me to get bulk quantities of some of the stuff I fix -- like the dried chopped onions used in the dry onion soup mix I told you about the other day.

I'm talking about The Great American Spice Company. If you haven't been there, I urge you to check them out.

I like these people for a number of reasons. Right off the top, their web site is super-easy to navigate and sensibly laid out. Then there is the sheer magnitude of the selection, which you will see listed in the sidebar to the left. There's got to be a kajillion different items represented by those categories. As near as I can tell, the quality of the items they offer is tops and, for sure, the prices are very competitive. I like the way they give you good descriptions and usage suggestions for different items when you click on the More Info button. They even break down the cost to the "per ounce" ratio. They get right on the horse when it comes to delivering your order, too. And that's where I got my first glimpse of just how cool their customer service is.

See, I opted for Standard Shipping. I'd rather wait an extra few days so I can spend carefully budgeted money on the goodies instead of the postage and handling. But, shazaam! I made the order on the Thursday before President's Day. Figured, what with a weekend and a holiday in the middle, it would be a long wait for that package. Wrong. The box was sitting at the post office on Tuesday! Great American opted to upgrade my shipping to Priority, which cost them another $10, I might point out. I was amazed, especially since my order was less than $50.

Of course I immediately sent an email to thank them for such generosity. When you find folks who deal you good, you want to treasure them. And, I'll be darned -- there was a prompt personal response. Yuppers. Personal. Not form letter. Here it is:

Dee

Thank you and You are welcome. We don't do much advertising so we try to offer you a great experience and great Customer Service. So far it has work better than any advertising, so please let you family and friends know and we will offer them the same quality of product and same great Customer Service. Also if you are looking for a spice and you don't find what you are looking for on the website, then email or call me and I will try my best to find it. We have the Largest selection of Spices because of customer request, they asked for it and we found it

Thanks again,

Barry L Tippmann
The Great American Spice Co.

Count this as one of my "word of mouth" exhibitions -- for the cause. 'Cause I love these people. And you always want to share folks you love with other folks you love, right, my loveable Coffee Mates? Right!

Now I need to find a proper illustration for my impending tale of shock and awe in relation to the mighty African Bird. You'll see. Don't know about "believe."

Why I Sometimes Scream At My Computer

2009-02-25T21:13:00.000-08:00

Although I love where I live, I pay for that pleasure by enduring the sluggish, frustrating, erratic dial-up connection that is my only choice for this little backwoods hamlet/village/wide-spot-inna-road. My very nice ISP has given me a free Accelerator that usually does a remarkable job of speeding up things but the operative word here is "usually." When it ain't workin', folks, dial-up truly sucks.

I've made jokes about the dial-up connection being hamster-powered. That's so I can laugh on the outside while crying on the inside, don'cha know. I was thinking the Accelerator was like letting the hamsters drink lots of that Red Bull energy drink so they'd run faster and longer in their little spinning wheels. So why the all too plentiful bouts of sluggishness? It was a puzzle, a mystery, a conundrum. Until I found Elliot on his lunch break.

That's Elliot in the above photo. And that's what the hamsters have been eating between cans of energy drink. Glug, glug Red Bull. Zoom-zoom connection. Munch, munch cookie. Plod, plod connection. Coincidence? I think not. (In the interests of accuracy, I need to point out "zoom-zoom," as applied to dial-up, is a grossly misleading description but it makes me feel better.)

I tried to talk to Elliot about the virtues of healthier food but he's not listening to me. Apparently, cookies are in their union contract. And nap breaks. And free psychiatric care when people like me traumatize them with dire tales of excess calories and clogged arteries.

It could have been worse. Elliot could have been selfish about it and refused to share his cookies with me. Not only did he let me have some, he promised to try to find the recipe. Right after his nap. I'll try not to disturb him with my screaming.

Hugs & Wham Bams

2009-02-23T20:06:00.000-08:00

Look! See? I didn't go to hell in that handbasket, I don't care what they told you.

I know. I've been AWOL a turribly long time and I really do apologize. It was just one of those times when, for no discernible reason, sitting down and yapping about what's been happening here seemed -- I dunno -- totally without socially redeeming value. Or something like that. In any case, here I am, with hugs and coffee, trying to get back in your good graces.

Not that I haven't been busy. Seems like there's always something going on to keep me from playing in traffic. Like, fer instance, I have renewed my sporadic interest in crochet this past few weeks. Mom was great at it and so was my sister. Fortunately, youngest dotter Patti learned from them because I never did enough of either crochet or knitting to even have bragging rights. In fact, I had to have Patti give me some tips when I started up again because, come to find out, there were a couple of basic things I've been doing wrong all this time. It worked out well. I learned something new and she got to feel good because she taught me instead of the other way around. Which tickles me plumb fuschia, that's what.

The occasion is the advent of a couple of brand new great-grandbabies. Yeppers. Patti's oldest son is about to become a daddy and her stepdaughter is about to become a mommy and I'm about to welcome great-grandbabies number five and six, by golly. Which led me to think I could crochet a couple of baby afghans for the kidlets. Of course they might be in kindergarten before I finish the project but, hey, my heart's in the right place.

Adventures in the kitchen are always in progress no matter what else is happening. Which is why I just stumbled onto what is apparently a long-time traditional recipe I never knew about before. Like most recipes, there are seemingly infinite variations but the most basic has been reduced to a three-ingredient wham-bam-cook-and-eat. Have y'all tried Cranberry Chicken? Have y'all done it this way? Lay your chicken in a baking dish. Boneless, skinless breasts or thighs work just fine. Mix together one 16 ounce can of whole berry cranberry sauce, one envelope onion soup mix and one cup of (take your pick) Russian, Catalina or French dressing. Pour the mixture over the chicken and bake at 350 degrees fairyheight for 1 hour. Serve with rice.

Okay, I can't tell you how that tastes because I didn't do it that way. The thing is, whenever a recipe calls for a package of this or a can of that, lately I've gone Googling to see if it's something I can make from scratch for cheap -- and with better control over what's actually in it. Or not in it, like assorted chemicals that will keep it from spoiling until about 2917. Found a couple of recipes that worked out really well.

ONION SOUP MIX: Mix together: 1 1/2 cups dried minced onion, 2/3 cup bouillon powder or granules (I used chicken but you can use beef or vegetable), 2/3 cup onion powder, and 1/2 teaspoon sugar. (I did not add the sugar.) Store in airtight container. Four to five tablespoons equals one packet of onion soup mix.

CLEAR FRENCH DRESSING: Blend together: 1 cup olive oil, 4 tablespoons red wine vinegar (I used balsamic vinegar) 4 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 teaspoons sugar, 1 teaspoon each salt, dry mustard and paprika. Dash of cayenne. (Again, I did not add the sugar. As far as I'm concerned, the cranberry sauce had more than enough sugar already. And if I'd made my own from scratch, it would have had less.)

So I mixed the whole cranberry sauce with the dressing and 5 tablespoons of the onion soup mix, poured it over my chicken breasts and baked it. It smelled like heaven as it baked. How did it taste? Oh. My. God. This is one of those dishes that is too good to be legal. (Peering cautiously out the window to see if the Food Police have surrounded the place yet.)

I had it with rice but one cook mentioned layering Stove Top stuffing in the bottom of the baking dish, then adding the chicken and sauce. That sounds like a dandy variation. Another thing to keep in mind is that the sauce would work wonderfully well with turkey or pork. Something I'm going to experiment with is using it with meatloaf, mixed right in with the hamburger.

But don't take my word for the fabulous meal this makes. Wham-bam one up your own self. You'll see.

My Thursday Adventure

2009-01-29T17:42:00.000-08:00

Remember how yesterday I threatened to whup up a batch of hot dipping sauce for my pasties? What I had in mind was something along the lines of Asian sweet chili sauce, which I adore, but starring ingredients I had on hand. Like dried cranberries, cranberry juice and a small can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Something that would, by the way, fit comfortably in that cute little apple juice jug I had saved for just such an eventuality. After a great deal of online research, I succeeded in concocting my own twist on assorted recipes and came up with what I considered a winner -- but not without a certain amount of adventure.

The first part of the adventure dealt with the thermal qualities of the chipotle peppers and the adobo sauce -- both of which are considered by the uninitiated to be somewhere between molten lava and the hinges of hell insofar as heat is concerned. The recipes I looked at suggested using just part of a pepper and taking the seeds out. I have never understood the logic of seeding a chili pepper. That's where the heat is, for heaven's sake. What's the point of a chili pepper without heat? I never, never, never seed my chili peppers. I simply use less, then add more in small increments until I reach the heat level I can handle without breaking out the fire extinguisher.

That is, I usually do it that way. Sometimes I throw caution to the winds, laugh in the face of danger and toss the whole durned pepper in, guts, feathers and all. Today was one of those reckless times ... and the pepper was not one of the smaller ones. Nor was the tablespoon of adobo sauce anything like "scant." A preliminary taste test alerted me to that error in judgement. Once I put out the flames and wiped my eyes, I immediately added another cup of cranberry juice to dilute the Scoville factor to acceptable levels.

The next adventure came when it was time to run the sauce through the blender to puree everything down to relative liquidity. I usually shove the lid securely into the top of the blender but today I just set it on top, one hand lightly holding it in place. Don't ask me why. I have no clue. Then I punched the button for the Chainsaw Massacre setting (puree for those of you without such a macho blender).

Hooboy! The powerful torque blew the liquid straight up, lifting the lid completly away from the blender. Before I could slam it back down, I had very hot sauce splashed on my wrist, my watch, my sweatshirt and liberally sprinkled across the neighboring microwave, chopper and roasting oven. Nice move, Dee. (Note to self: always batten down hatches when using blender.)

Okay, I didn't lose all that much sauce in the blender debacle. It just seemed that way while I was mopping it up. I poured some of the sauce into a shallow bowl and put the rest in the apple juice bottle (see above). Then I nuked the other half of yesterday's pasty and sat down to put the sauce to the critical test.

Dip. Bite. Munch. Dip. Bite. Munch. Let eyes widen in appreciation. Moan with pleasure. Not with pain. The heat level is not painful. Although it is hot enough to make my nose run. Blow nose. Continue to dip, bite, munch until pasty is history. Lick fingers. Smile.

The recipe follows. You may, of course, adjust the amounts of the chipotle and adobo to suit your own preferences. By the way, this is not a thick sauce and would lend itself very well to basting roasted or grilled meats. But if you prefer thick, simply put it back in the saucepan after running it through the blender. Bring to a boil and add about a tablespoon of corn starch that's been dissolved in a couple of tablespoons of cold water. Stir until sauce thickens. Remove from heat.

DEE'S SUPER DUPER
CRANBERRY/CHIPOTLE DIPPING SAUCE
AND WORM KILLER

1 tablespoon adobo sauce
1 chipotle pepper, minced
1 cup dried cranberries
1/4 cup whisky (or bourbon or rum)
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 cups cranberry juice

Put all ingredients in sauce pan. Bring to a boil, turn down to simmer, cover with lid and simmer for 15 minutes. Turn off heat and let sit another 15 minutes. Run through blender on the puree setting. Can be served hot or cold. Will keep a looooong time in refrigerator.

A note on the booze: Triple Sec would be good here, as the orange flavor always goes great with cranberry. But you don't have to use alcohol. Pretty much any fruit juice will work fine. Or just skip that quarter cup of liquid. Won't hurt a thing.

Just for the record, I was only kidding about the worm killer thing. Honest. On the other hand, I certainly don't have worms.

Pastiliciosity

2009-01-28T21:30:00.000-08:00

A certain Old Grey Poet is to blame for the advent of these gorgeous critters. All he had to do was mention pasties and I was yearning, lusting, craving my own meal of this ancient and totally satisfying treat. We speak, Coffee Mates, of the famous Cornish Pasty.

If you are new to the phenomenon, you need to know they are pronounced PASS-tee. If you pronounce them PACE-tee, you're talking about the doodads strippers attach to their bazooms and that's a whole nuther endeavor entirely. If you pronounce them PAWS-tee, you might be from Australia. Or, I been told, certain locations in Montana. For information on pasty history (a long and honorable one), pictures and recipes, all you need do is Google Cornish Pasty and you'll have a ton of links to follow and enjoy.

I first learned about them when living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the standard filling was diced meat, diced potatoes, onions and turnips. Sometimes carrots. If you prefer, you can use ground meat instead of diced and you can add whatever blend of vegetables you have on hand that appeals to you. The result is a full meal you can eat in your hand -- sort of the original Hot Pockets, only better.

The filling I used was a mixture of elk meat, potato and onion, seasoned with salt, pepper and onion powder, and topped with a few thin pats of butter. I'd have loved to add some turnip or rutabaga but didn't have any. So be it. Oh! Almost forgot -- I baked 'em at 350 degrees for 1 hour.

The neat thing I want to share with you, though, is the crust recipe I tried for the first time. I think it's absolutely perfect for a pasty crust. There are variations you can Google but this is basically what I did:

SOUR CREAM CRUST

2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons butter
1 egg
1/4 to 1/2 cup sour cream

Cut butter into flour and salt. Whisk egg and sour cream together and stir rapidly into flour mixture, just until dough forms. You may or may not have to add more sour cream. Play it by ear. When dough has formed, divide in half, form into patties, wrap in plastic wrap and chill in refrigerator for at least an hour.

About the sour cream: I started with a quarter cup and kept adding more, a heaping spoonful at a time. One never knows how much moisture flour is going to need on a given day. You just sort of feel it out and go with the flow. You can leave the dough in the refrigerator for a couple of days before using. I made this batch yesterday so it was 24 hours before I took it out. It rolls out easily and smoothly, handles like a dream and bakes up tender and flaky. The important thing here is, although tender, it's still sturdy enough so it holds up without falling apart in your hands while you're trying to eat.

Yes, you eat pasties with your hands. Put the silverware back in the drawer.

See the photo below? I was going to eat the whole dinner plate-sized critter. That's how hungry I was. I only got two-thirds of the way through one half. That's how filling pasties are. Sometimes I like to make a hot dipping sauce to go with a pasty meal but tonight I elected to just eat it naked. I mean the pasty was naked. I was fully clothed. No need to frighten the horses.

Fortunately, pasties are just as good cold as they are hot so I can go back to the uneaten half later without having to heat anything up. Maybe I'll fix some chipotle cheese sauce to go with the other pasty tomorrow. In any case, thank you, John, for such a lovely, beguiling suggestion. Even my tummy is smiling tonight.

Legends Are Hard to Come By

2009-01-26T18:46:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons the camera loves the west coast is the abundance of seastacks, those rugged monolithic upthrusts of rock strewn along beaches and offshore like dragon's teeth and other fanciful shapes. The ingredients of seastacks can vary but I think those in this area are mostly basalt. One source tells me they were once part of an underwater reef complex. That would be a greatly over-simplified explanation of seastacks and good enough for our purposes here. What I want to bring to your attention is how the various shapes of these rock formations so easily and naturally inspire colorful legends.

Not all seastacks come accompanied with their own stories -- like the Indian princess with her basket of kittens or the tribal elder hurled into the sea by an evil spirit. So I'm looking at the above shot of the cove just west-by-northwest of the Port Orford dock and, as you can see, there are a couple of big seastacks close to the cliff, flanked on the right by two smaller formations. I don't know if there are any legends that go with that grouping or not but as I stood there on the dock I got to thinking it might be fun to make something up.

Zooming in on the little guys, we can see they stand there on the edge of the outgoing tide, thoughtfully contemplating the pocket-sized beachlet in front of them. A cozy little space it is, sand covered by rock and tastefully edged with a tangle of driftwood and kelp. Nice place for a picnic -- as long as the tide is out.

I don't know. There may be something warped in my legend-creation mode. I keep looking at those figures and trying to come up with a suitable dramatic story to go with them. No matter how hard I try to dream up characters more dashing, more romantic, I keep getting insistent impulses from a couple of crusty old bachelors named Stanley and Earl. I'm not making this up. They are making it up, I swear it, and this is what they're telling me ...

The little cove is Stanley's living room. Stanley is the pudgy one on the left. Earl has come to visit him -- please note he brought a couple of cases of beer, laying directly behind him. Earl looks around and says, "Jeez, Stanley, is this whachoo call minimalist decor?"

"No, Earl. This is called what's-left-after-the-divorce."

"Oh." Long silence. Then, "I brought some beer. Thought we could watch the Super Bowl."

"Hell, Earl. If you brought enough beer, we've got room to play the Super Bowl."

Another long silence. Then, "Stanley, do you get the feeling we're in a really weird Indian legend?"

"Nope."

"Nope?"

"Nope. I get the feeling we're in a rejected Far Side cartoon."

Well, shucky-darn. So much for "easily and naturally" making up random legends. Stanley and Earl were kind of fun, though. And don't worry about them messing up the cove when they drink beer and watch the Super Bowl. The incoming tide will tidy it right up. Oops. Did I just make a pun?

Of Place Names & Pot Roasts

2009-01-25T11:24:00.000-08:00

This is one of those weird days on the Internet. Not Major weird, just You're-Starting-To-Piss-Me-Off weird. I'm talking about the Comments feature, specifically. Twice I tried to respond to comments for yesterday's post and twice Blogger informed me I couldn't do it. Piffle and phooie. I'm doing a quarterback sneak here and getting another post in place, to boot. Take that, Blogger!

John, you mentioned signs of Spring. Well, I have an even more dramatic harbinger -- just downloaded the online catalog from Tomato Bob's place. There is nothing that gets me more spring-oriented than photos of luscious 'maters of all sizes and colors. Looking through the catalog, one has the urge to sit there with a salt shaker, that's how tempting the pictures are.

Kate, I think there are some place names that take hold in lots of different places. Sugarloaf is certainly one and, for the record, we have a Bald Mountain here, too (without the "y").

Bonnie, you did see Humbug when you were here. You just didn't realize it. See the photo above of Battle Rock? Now, picture this in your mind's eye -- as we stand there facing Battle Rock, you know that just over the bluff to our right is the cove with the dock and jetty. The same southbound view as from Battle Rock, just a slightly different angle. Got it?

Now ... if you shift your gaze just a teensy little bit to the left (which translates to the photo below) -- wallah! There is ol' Humbug, slightly different angle than yesterday's picture from the dock but same distinctive shape. As we stood there, Highway 101 was directly behind us. It wanders south out of town and winds its way along the coast for the six miles it takes to reach Humbug -- which is a state park. There are excellent camp grounds and hiking trails, old growth timber, temperate rain forest flora, including rhododendrons up to 30 feet tall and if you manage to hike to Humbug's top, you can have a picnic, break out the binoculars and do a little whale watching.

I'm not in Port Orford today so I can't say for sure -- I suspect, however, Humbug has a solid cap settled on its brow because it's been overcast and drizzly since the wee hours of 'o-dark-thirty. As a form of retaliation, I have a chunk of beef roasting away in the portable oven. I'll have all afternoon to figure out what sublime things I'm going to do with it.

About that oven -- I imagine you are all familiar with the big roasters one usually thinks about when one mentions such things. You know -- the monsters our mothers hauled out at Thanksgiving and Christmas, when oven space is so crucial, and then had to figure out where to store its bulk the rest of the year. Which is why I never bothered getting one. Way too big and bothersome for me.

Until I discovered, very recently, they make the durned thangs in smaller sizes! Well, as they say in the south, "Butter my butt and call me biscuit." That puts a whole different light on things. I did a lot of research and ended up with a six-quart Nesco that I am learning to love. Just the right size to roast a chicken but not so big it's a counter-space hog. Uses way less electricity than the regular oven and is definitely easier to clean. Has the full temperature control range -- I can use it like a slow cooker, like a regular oven or like a steamer. I'm told it doesn't brown like a regular oven -- at least for some things -- but there are work-arounds for that. All in all, I find myself grinning a lot when I use it. That's a good sign.

Now, if I could just figure out how to download some luscious vine-ripened 'maters from Tomato Bob's web site, I'd be truly in 'em.

This Really IS Humbug

2009-01-24T21:17:00.000-08:00

What you see in the foreground is the southern end of the dock at Port Orford, with assorted pallets and equipment taking up parking spaces along the western edge. To the right, atop the jumble of jetty rock, you can see a gull coming in for a landing. (If you left-click on the photo, you can see a larger version.)

What you see in the background is the view I had for a good share of my childhood -- Humbug Mountain. Six miles south of Port Orford and rising 1756 feet right out of the ocean, Humbug has a reputation for being a sort of weather barometer around here. You can see a thin strip of fog across Humbug's face, like a gauzy scarf, and you can see low-lying ground fog along the beaches, all reflective of the overcast day but nothing to alarm anyone. It's when the sky lowers itself down and lays a cap on Humbug's head that we know the nasty weather is near upon us.

I won't swear to the details of this story but apparently it used to be known as Sugarloaf Mountain. Supposedly, a party was sent out to explore the mountain. Unfortunately, they pointed themselves north of Port Orford instead of south, based, it's said on false information -- or humbug. The term gradually became the accepted name for the mountain. I find that kind of mistake hard to believe when you see how visible the durned thang is. Another story claims miners were zeroing in on the black sands near the mountain because of rumors of gold -- which turned out to be a humbug claim. That sounds closer to the truth.

But we'll probably never really know -- and I like that. A little mystery leaves wiggle room for one's imagination and that's a Good Thang.

More Enchilada Magic

2009-01-23T18:19:00.000-08:00

You can really appreciate the generosity of digital camera technology in a situation like the one that produced the above photo. That's because it took me about a squillion attempts to get a meager few decent shots of wave action against the rocks the other day. I guaran-damn-tee ya, there wouldn't have been anywhere near that many attempts had I been restricted to conventional film!

That photo op came about on Wednesday. I was blessed with an unexpected visit from my brother for a few days and, on that particular day, we went down to the dock in Port Orford for a bit before meeting niece Wendi and having a fabulous pizza made by grandson Albert at the cafe where he works. While Merle was over on the east side of the dock taking pictures of some kind of rigging or other, I was on the west side taking pictures of rocks and surf and kelp and seagulls. This particular shot was the result of focusing in on one area of a channel between the jetty rocks and trying to capture the exact moment the incoming waves would demonstrate their most impressive explosions against immovable surfaces. Timing was everything. Split-second failures were plentiful. The nice thing about it is, with surf pictures, even the failures are fun.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On another note entirely, I just happen to have an alternate enchilada sauce recipe to share with you. It is, I think, just as good as the one I gave you in a previous post, which makes it impossible for me to choose a favorite. I think determining which one to make in the future will depend a lot on what ingredients I have on hand and maybe even how much I need. While the other recipe made about 4 cups of sauce, this one makes 2 -- although you could certainly double it if you needed to.

I found it at a wonderful food site produced by Rockin Robin. There is so much good information and so many good recipes, you'll just have to bookmark her. I'm sure you'll want to read her instructions for the Raving Enchilada Sauce because I sorta-kinda fiddled with it a bit. Turned it into a microwave recipe, is what I did. Five minutes. Here's how I did it:

MICROWAVE VERSION RAVING ENCHILADA SAUCE

In a 1-quart microwave-safe bowl, mix together:

4 tablespoons chili powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 pinch ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon sugar
5 tablespoons allpurpose flour

Using a wire whisk, blend the dry ingredients evenly to prevent lumpy sauce. Gradually pour in 2 cups chicken broth, whisking all the while, until mixture is well blended. Microwave on high for 2 minutes. Whisk vigorously, nuke 1 minute. Whisk again, nuke another minute. Whisk and nuke a final minute, 5 minutes in all. Give it a finishing whisk and it's ready to use.

Okay, the sauce is so easy and quick, it's almost magical. But maybe you're not in the mood to fill and roll all those enchiladas, eh? I certainly wasn't -- which is why I finally surrendered and fixed 'em layered style, like Mexican lasagna. Holy jalapeno, Batman! Not only does the enchilada stack taste exactly as wonderful as the rolled-up version, the only thing you lose is the muss and the fuss.

For my purposes, a medium-sized square casserole dish worked fine and the corn tortillas fit the space perfectly. Pour in a little sauce, flop a tortilla into it, then start laying on whatever you want for filling. Pre-cooked seasoned meats like chicken, pulled pork, hamburger -- whatever. I used bite-sized bits of chicken that I quickly fried with salt, pepper and a sprinkle of liquid smoke. You can sprinkle on chopped onion, sweet or hot peppers, chopped olives or anything else that strikes your fancy. Then a sprinkle of shredded cheese, a drizzle of sauce and another tortilla. Repeat layers until you're out of filling ingredients, top off with final tortilla and a generous drizzle of sauce and a decorative sprinkle of shredded cheese. Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes.

To serve, I just cut the stack into 4 wedges, pie-style. Additional glops of sour cream or guacamole or salsa are optional. Bliss is unavoidable.

First You Cry ...

2009-01-02T22:10:00.000-08:00

I think this is about my favorite photo of my friend Cecil Talley, taken a few years ago when he was still having his fishing adventures. Since that shot was taken, his world gradually closed in as his body began its relentless process of breakdown.

Not that mere physical problems ever stopped Cees from enjoying life or dampened his irrepressible sense of humor. He never got bitter, never wasted time feeling sorry for himself, never rationed his great generosity of spirit. And his family and friends have been blessed because he has been so utterly indomitable.

Back in 1980, Cees sold a short story to the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Here's what they said, by way of introduction ...

This is the 545th "first story" to be published by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine ... Once again we should all be mightily encouraged by a first appearance in print. The author, Cecil Talley, was sixty-three when he submitted "The Farmer in the Well" -- take heart, all you beginners!

Mr. Talley thinks his wife ("who has endured me for forty-two years"), his two sons, and his five granddaughters will get a thrill out of seeing "The Farmer in the Well" in EQMM. They should indeed! Mr. Talley is "an old sign painter who never made it past the eighth grade." We share their thrill -- as we do with all our new writers, old and young...

Well, that was 28 years ago, and Cees never stopped writing ... not his stories and not his nearly daily e-mail communication with friends. Between his love of wordsmithing, his love of fishing and his delight with the Internet, he kept us entertained with tales of seemingly endless fishing mishaps. The boat wouldn't unload when he got to the lake. Or it would but the weather turned bad. Or he couldn't find a fishing partner when the weather was good. Or the motor went gunnybag on him so he had to get a new one. And the "good deal" turned out to be a dud. And on and on and, as Cees would always query, "Now, would a Texan lie?"

Nor did he ever stop learning new things. He started fiddling with PhotoShop and was constantly sharing experiments and projects that showed off his boundless curiosity and, often, his self-deprecating sense of humor. I still grin when I look at a photo he sent me where he'd imposed his own face over that of a big old longhorn bull. Well, he was a Texan. That explains a lot. (Insert smile.)

Then, a few months ago, he simply couldn't sit at the computer any longer. At that point, his son Lou did more than care for his father's physical well-being. He served as able go-between, printing off e-mail messages from friends so Cees could read them, and keeping us informed about how things were going.

Tonight, sadly, Lou had to tell us Cees died quietly in his sleep.

Well, first you cry. Then you start remembering all the good stuff. The throat still aches and the eyes still leak but the smiles keep coming ... and get stronger. And you can picture Cees strolling up to the Pearly Gates and giving St. Peter a friendly Texas howdy and then he says, "How's the fishing?"

Another Texan friend, Jeri, said it best: "I pray that our Cees now has a boat with a motor that always runs and a lake with an endless supply of fish. And I *know* that now he has a Buddy who loves to fish as much as he did."

Pretender or Contender?

2009-01-01T18:54:00.000-08:00

PERPLEXED. I IS IT.

I am not perplexed because the first day of the year -- in this location -- has been a continuous overcast with equally continuous mild wind, busy tossing about billows and sheets of also equally continuous rain. For that I am simply resigned. This is, after all, coastal Oregon in the winter.

No, my state of perplexity arises from Maggie's comment on yesterday's post, casually referring to the enchilada sauce as mole sauce. (Pronounced mo-lay.) Understand, Maggie, I'm not quarreling with that designation. I'm just confused by it.

See, I've always thought of mole sauce as a far more complicated dish to prepare, using a kajillion ingredients, taking up hours of time to prepare, and leaving a kitchen clean-up of awesome proportions. I get exhausted just reading the ingredient list, with its array of spices, seeds, nuts and fruits. Although there are countless variations on the mole recipe, that complexity seems to be a common characteristic.

Well, until today, that's what I thought. But Maggie got me to tunneling through the Google underground like a mole. (Pronounced like the furry little fellow with the frightful claws.) And, yes, I found tons of recipes in the ingredient-heavy mode. There is a fun and interesting article (with recipe) on the Texas Cooking web site that will give you a good picture of what my idea of mole has always been. And why I've never tried it, she said with a wry smile.

There is a less complicated mole recipe with lots of photos of the process, demonstrated by Adriana on a Mexican cooking site. Be sure to click on the link labeled "Cooking Directory" at the bottom of the page for plenty more good Mexican recipe links.

But I kept tunneling, mole-like, and, yes, I kept finding simpler and simpler mole recipes. I really should have expected it. Busy cooks are constantly experimenting and finding ways to simplify recipes so as to achieve more or less the same result with less effort and time. The traditional mole sauce is not immune. Some of the simpler recipes were exceedingly close to my enchilada sauce recipe. Exceedingly.

Still, I have to question -- gently, timidly -- the validity of those highly attenuated versions. Using chocolate, for instance, doesn't make it mole. It just makes it Mexican. In fact, not all mole recipes ask for chocolate. When I think of the complexity of flavor derived from the wealth of traditional ingredients, I find it difficult to believe the simplified version could really compare. Thus, do they actually have the right to call themselves mole or are they charming impostors with pretensions of grandeur?

Oh. Look. I guess this is where I should have gone in the first place -- the dictionary. And there are plenty of online dictionaries. And definition after definition tells me "mole" is derived from the Aztec (or Nahuatl) word "molli" -- which means concoction or sauce.

Oh. (blink, blink) Mole is a sauce. Whether complicated or simplified, it's a sauce. Which would mean my simple little enchilada sauce is really a saucy mole, just as Maggie said. Oh Maggie, you saucy wench. You knew that all along.

Speaking of "simple little enchilada sauce," I meant to mention in yesterday's post that you can use chicken broth instead of water when making the sauce. I had actually planned on doing that when I was making it but forgot. And then I forgot to tell you. Is there no end to my perplexedness? Is that a word?

Inventing Hogmanay Traditions

2008-12-31T20:04:00.000-08:00

I've been reading up on Hogmanay. It's about time, given that I'm mainly Scottish and Hogmanay is a uniquely Scottish celebration. Hogmanay is, is fact, the Scots word designating the last day of the year and the celebration extends into Ne'erday, a contraction for New Year Day. In other words, the Scots have their own take on doing the turn of the year celebrations, involving fireworks and music and lots of adult beverages and food and merriment. There is "first-footing" and gift giving and swinging fire balls and all kinds of wonderful stuff. Makes dropping the ball in Times Square look kind of tame.

I won't be swinging any fire balls but I decided, in honor of the occasion, I would institute a new food tradition in my household. After careful thought and particular attention to the muted growling from my tummy, I decided the perfect Hogmany dish would be -- tah dah! -- chicken enchiladas!

Okay. Enchiladas are not ordinarily associated with things Scottish, I'll admit that. If I used some Scotch Bonnet chili peppers in them, I might be stretching the connection hard enough to fit. Or if I could find my tape of bagpipe music, I could play that while eating the enchiladas. It only takes a little imagination to Scotchify this south-of-the-border dish. Not too much imagination, though. I did have a brief vision of haggis-stuffed enchiladas but decided that was a bit too advanced for my brand new tradition.

Anyway, the recipe I want to share with you is not for the enchiladas, per se, but for the enchilada sauce. This is tweaked from a recipe I found at Recipezaar. If you go there and type 109685 in the Search box at the top of the page, you'll be taken to the original recipe, which we're told comes from a woman who was born and raised in Mexico City. I figure that gives it the chops for authenticity, don't you?

My version netted me around 5 cups of sauce, which was 2 cups more than I needed. Not a problem -- I just poured the remainder in a quart canning jar and popped it in the freezer for later use. And this am da way it goes ...

HOMEMADE GEN-YOU-WINE ENCHILADA SAUCE

In medium-sized sauce pan, combine:
3 tablespoons chili powder
3-4 tablespoons flour (I used 4)
1 teaspoon cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon cumin

Measure out 3 cups water. Pour in enough to make a sloppy paste. Set pan on medium heat, slowly add the rest of the water, stirring constantly. Keep stirring until mixture thickens. ("Thicken" is a relative term. It would coat the spoon but wasn't as thick as, say, gravy.) Add 8 ounce can of tomato sauce, stir in and remove from heat. Cover with lid until ready to use.

A note about the tomato sauce ... I only had a 6 ounce can of tomato paste. What I did was, I scooped the paste into a 2-cup measuring cup, added 2 cans-worth of water and a half-teaspoon of sugar to cut the acid and stirred it well. That gave me almost 2 cups of sauce, twice as much as needed for the recipe. However, we're told measurements for this recipe can be very flexible so I just used the whole 2 cups. Worked just fine.

No matter how creative you get with this sauce, don't leave out the cocoa! That's the secret ingredient. Very important.

As for the enchiladas, you can pretty much stuff them with whatever you happen to fancy. I poached a chicken breast in chicken broth and then shredded it with a fork. It's amazing how far a single chicken breast will go when it's been soundly forked. Then I tossed the chicken with about half a finely minced sweet onion, a couple of tablespoons of finely minced canned jalapeno peppers and about a cup of cottage cheese. This made enough stuffing for 8 enchiladas, with enough left over for me to eat like a salad as a reward once I got the goodies in the oven.

Ladle some of your sauce in a baking dish, soften your corn tortillas, 2 at a time, for 30 seconds in the microwave. Drag each tortilla through the sauce and plop some stuffing in the middle. Roll it up and place it in the baking dish. (You can use a dinner plate for the stuffing and rolling but I find it easier to just work right in the baking dish. You'll build the last enchiladas right on top of the ones you've already placed.)

Once they're all tucked in, pour sauce all over everything, sprinkle shredded cheese over the top and put in a 350 degree oven for 25 to 30 minutes.

I'll tell you what ... as far as brand new traditions go, I think this one is a keeper. And who knows? Maybe one of these fine Hogmanays, I'll be brave enough -- or senile enough -- to actually do the haggis-stuffed enchilada.

Oh! Dear Coffee Mates -- have a fantastic Hogmanay and an even better Ne'erday!

Trifling With Truffles

2008-12-29T18:52:00.000-08:00

If you don't give me the recipe, I shall have to hurt you.

That's what I told Albert (my grandson-the-chef). He and Holly made up some marvelous goodie baskets for Christmas giving and the item that had me quivering with total bliss was a bag of the most fantastic choccy cookies I have EVER eaten. That's the truth.

I don't think he really believed I'd harm a single hair on his head but, just in case, he dropped by earlier this evening so I could copy off the recipe. Lo and behold, it turns out to be one from a favorite recipe site of mine, RecipeZaar. If you haven't checked it out, believe me, it's worth many enjoyable hours of browsing.

Anyway, rather than typing up the recipe here, I'll link you to the appropriate page so you can easily print off a copy for your files. Go to: Ultimate Chocolate Truffle Cookies and prepare to be tempted beyond endurance.

The cookies are aptly named because biting into one is almost identical to biting into a chocolate truffle. Moist and silky-tender. And decadent. We can't forget decadent.

I really don't think I'm going to tinker with this recipe, which is very unusual for me. That decision falls under the heading of "Don't fix what ain't broke." Okay, one thing I'll do different. I won't dust them with powdered sugar because they really don't need any dusting. Uhmmm. Well. I guess I could dust them with cocoa. That sounds reasonable. I'm just not a big fan of powdered sugar.

I don't have any pictures of the cookies to show you. Can't take pictures of something you've already eaten and, since I just got the recipe, I haven't made any new ones to immortalize digitally. Not to worry -- there are four photos of the cookies on the page at the other end of the above link. Both sugar-dusted and plain, now that I think of it.

One note of caution: it might be wise to run off several copies of the recipe if you plan on sharing these cookies with family and friends. Otherwise, one of those folks might hurt you.

Echoes of Ralph

2008-12-24T10:21:00.000-08:00

Almost all the Christmas goodies are done. Just a few things left to whip out before the big day tomorrow. I'm walking a sort of tightrope here, in terms of flavor, freshness and shelf life. The cheese spreads improve with a couple of days of "ripening" and the spiced nuts will hold just fine but the lemon curd needs to be fresh. That sort of thing.

So I'm sitting here with my morning mug of sacred brew and it occurs to me I haven't yet played my favorite Christmas video. The one that's a cartoon of Santa and the reindeer singing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." So I fired up Google and tapped in "Christmas video" and got the usual plethora of choices. As I started skimming down the list of links, the fourth one from the top caught my eye. The Jingle Cats singing "White Christmas." Hmmm. Wonder what that's all about.

Didn't take me long to realize Ralph must have pointed me to this one. Really. I mean, I got a sort of mind meld thought projection of the kind Ralph was fond of implanting. Usually his telepathic messages had to do with food but this time, very clearly, I got "heavenly choir." And I'm chuckling, thinking, "Yeah, Ralph. I guess you'd think this feline chorus sounds heavenly." And just about then, lo! An angel cat appeared onscreen, complete with wings and halo.

It's a fun video with some cute cats and there's even a cameo appearance by a big dog. Something for everyone, I reckon. And I even noticed, over in the sidebar, is a link to the very video I started out to find. Ralph is nothing if not considerate.

So here it is, Coffee Mates ... a Christmas video for your viewing pleasure, from me and Ralph. With that, please feel utterly surrounded and blissed out with hearty "Ho, ho ho's" and wishes for a wonderful holiday season.

The Jingle Cats - White Christmas - Funny videos are here

Begin With a Pile of Cheese ...

2008-12-18T21:41:00.000-08:00

Seems to me some of the most magical things can happen whenever you find yourself in possession of a big pile of shredded cheese. Take the above splendiferous mound of cheddar, freshly grated on the smallest of the three shred choices on my grater. That was my beginning salvo in the quest for one or more tasty cheese spreads fit for Christmas giving. What I was looking for was something that could be slathered on toast or French bread and broiled until hot and bubbly -- and then devoured with moans of delight. I'm big on moans of delight.

After an awful lot of time spent in the company of trusty Google, I narrowed the search down to two candidates -- a zesty beer cheddar and a more subtle rum cheddar. Both recipes meet my F.E.D. requirements (fast, easy, delicious) and both are so good I can't pick a clear winner. So be it. You know what they say -- two cheese spreads are better than one. Or something like that.

Before I lay out the actual recipes, a couple of tips may be helpful. You can run these through the blender if you wish but it really isn't necessary. Vigorous beating with a spoon does the job quite nicely and a bowl is easier to clean than a blender. It also helps if everything is room temperature and it's even better if you fine-grate the cheese. Also -- very important -- these recipes are highly flexible. Amounts are subject to personal taste and substitutions or additions are limited only by your creativity or current supplies. For example, instead of beer, I used ale -- because that's what I had on hand. I'm sure that garnered me a more robust flavor than beer would have done. For that matter, you can even use a different kind of cheese -- or a mixture of cheeses. It's your call. Isn't that fun?

BEER CHEDDAR SPREAD
3 cups finely shredded cheddar cheese
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon hot sauce of choice
1/4 teaspoon each salt and pepper
2 ounces beer or ale

Beat vigorously with spoon until well mixed. Cover and refrigerate for several hours for flavors to blend. Keeps several weeks in refrigerator.

RUM CHEDDAR SPREAD
1 cup finely shredded cheddar cheese
1/4 cup (2 ounces) softened butter
1 green onion, chopped
1 teaspoon dry mustard
freshly ground pepper, to taste
1 tablespoon rum

Beat vigorously with spoon until well mixed. Cover and refrigerate for several hours for flavors to blend. Keeps several weeks in refrigerator.

Okey-dokey, that's the basic stuff. You can fiddle with amounts to suit yourself or you can fling all kinds of other stuff into the pot. I didn't have any green onions on hand for the rum cheddar but a tablespoon of dried onion flakes worked just fine. I also seasoned the batch with some Mrs. Dash chipotle seasoning. Loves me that hot stuff. Oh ... and the rum was Captain Morgan Spiced Rum. Worked just fine.

So I whupped up a batch of each, put them in small covered containers, popped 'em in the fridge -- and tried to make myself forget about them long enough for the magic of flavor fusion to occur. When I finally allowed myself to haul out the two spreads for their debut on a couple of slices of bread, one thing became clear immediately -- the rum cheddar, with it's butter content, needs to come to room temperature to be easily spreadable. The beer cheddar is a looser mix and spreads without a problem even when cold. The second thing that became clear was that the flavors of both definitely improved with "ripening" time -- especially the one with the ale. If that trend continues, they'll be so good tomorrow, I'll probably pass out with ecstasy.

And there you have it, fresh out from under the broiler. The sample on the left is the rum cheddar and on the right, the ale version. Besides using the spreads this way, I can imagine plopping a heaping spoonful in the middle of a baked potato or into a bowl of steamed veggies. Or you could mix in some sour cream and salad shrimp for a totally cool chip dip.

See what comes of a simple pile of cheese?

Rainbow Bridge Traffic

2008-12-16T13:43:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the camera gives us some interesting effects when capturing the eyes. Ralph didn't really have eyes that look like big opals but I wouldn't doctor up this photo for anything. Somehow the jeweled look is just appropriately regal. Ralph could be a royal pain in the patoosh but, by God, he was always royal.

Yes. Past tense there. Without any real warning, something inside of Ralph broke down or wore out last night. He collapsed on the rug and wasn't able to get up. I held vigil with him, stroking and talking, until he seemed to relax enough to doze. Sometime between 12:30 and 1:00 a.m., he stretched out and groaned. As I pet him and talked to him, he relaxed again. And then he just left. Slipped away.

Oh, I'll still sense him around for awhile. That always happens when loved furkids decide to cross the Rainbow Bridge. You catch tantalizing glimpses of them out of the corner of your eye, like after-images.

Needless to say, I slept little last night. But I thought a lot about the years I got to spend with a feline character who was both sweet-natured and sassy. In one way, it seems unkind to lose him during the holiday season but in another, perhaps it's fitting. After all, he came to live with me when my friend Jack joined us for Christmas dinner and gifted me with young Master Ralph the Toddler. Thank you, Jack. He was a gift that kept on giving.

Aside from his professional role as a Mighty Hunter, Ralph occasionally deigned to lend some of his charismatic presence to my book shop. He slept peacefully in a basket or empty box until a customer came in. Then he greeted them in his own dignified fashion -- "You may worship me while you browse." -- and followed them around to make it easier for them to grovel at his feet. One of my favorite pictures of him is the one above, where he is sitting in all his fluffy glory, surveying the kingdom.

Empty boxes were always one of Ralph's favorite things. Not just any empty box, you understand. He had to check them over, each and every one. Those he deemed worthy of his patronage had to be left laying out for whatever period of time he chose to use them. A week, two weeks -- or until the corners split and spoiled the cozy fit.

I expect Ralph will have an interesting time of it over there past the Rainbow Bridge. Investigating all the interesting boxes and hunting meece and getting acquainted with the other furkids. I wonder if he will have an attitude adjustment before long. See, Ralph was never properly socialized with canine furkids and emphatically disapproved of them. Just wait until he runs across Midgie. He won't be able to resist her affection. Well, not for long anyway. He's got to hold out for just a bit to save face. Royalty, you know.

Modern Day Glady-ator

2008-11-25T21:06:00.000-08:00

The only racewalking I do is between here and the bathroom.

Okay, now I'm really in trouble and it's all the fault of a sweet liddle ol' lady clear over in Hawaii. Maybe you've heard about her. Gladys Burrill, also known as the Glady-ator, just turned 90 this past Sunday. So I'm clapping and cheering and thinking how grand that was and then, oh Lordy, she laid the smack on me.

She isn't satisfied with reaching such a great age with her health intact and her brain still nimble. No. She has to make the rest of us -- at any age -- look like a bunch of namby-pamby wimps, that's what. This woman is about to enter her FIFTH racewalking marathon in as many years!

Channel 9 KGMB has the video interview with transcript here. Go ahead. Check it out. I'll still be here when you come back. I'll have some coffee ready for you. It helps with shock, you know. Yes, I'll even add a splash of golden nectar if you want.

You're back. Good. Isn't she something else? Wow. Okay, I see you've stopped shaking so I guess you're ready for this next bit. See, I know zilch about marathons so I clicked over to the web site for the Honolulu Marathon just to see if I could figure out exactly what our Gladys would be doing. I mean, she's saying she'll break the record for her age group if she finishes in 8 1/2 hours. And I'm thinking, whoa! Walking for 8 1/2 hours? Paint me yellow and call me a cab!

If I understand this correctly, the walking marathon, as opposed to the running marathon, is a distance of 10K -- about 6.2 miles. Doesn't sound so bad, right off the top, eh? I remember way back in the day, I could do the 1 mile between my house and the supermarket in 15 minutes without fainting. Heh. According to some quick Googling, average speed might be more like 20 to 30 minutes per mile. I really don't think Gladys will be going for that particular speed, however. If she's aiming at 8 1/2 hours, she's going to be pacing herself at more like an hour per mile, with rest stops. Lots of rest stops.

Well, gee. I think she's absolutely fantastic and come December 14th I'll be cheering her on, for sure. She is just utterly inspiring. And I'll tell you this -- it is only my extreme admiration for her that keeps me from smacking her silly.

Why? Well, just think about it. Any time we find ourselves with a perfectly legitimate need to do a little therapeutic whining, there will be the Glady-ator, smiling and NOT whining and making the rest of us feel guilty for wimping out. Good grief, I'll probably have to eat twice as much chocolate to overcome the angst. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to racewalk to the bathroom again. All that coffee, you know.

The Harwich Who Dunnit

2008-11-24T19:48:00.000-08:00

Imagine you are strolling along a wooded path in a nature preserve. Birds are flitting and chittering among the winter denuded branches of the trees and anonymous little critters scurry about their business, hidden in the brush and drifts of leaves. Everything is peaceful and, above all, normal.

Until you come to the end of the trail. Suddenly things are not so normal at all. There before you stands a lovely, obviously well-maintained upright piano and its accompanying bench, cover lifted, keys shining in the winter sunlight, ready for someone to sit down and begin to play.

The piano isn't making a sound but you could swear you hear the theme music from Twilight Zone. You anxiously look all around you. Are you really alone? Did the phantom pianist just step behind a nearby tree to retrieve some sheet music? Who is this phantom pianist, anyway? And if he -- or she -- is resorting to concerts in the woods, is there something terribly wrong with him -- or her? Or maybe it's just that the poor pianist can't practice at home because the neighbors keep calling the cops?

Okay, I'm indulging in blatant speculation here, I admit it, but I'm far from the only one. Since its discovery Saturday, the Baldwin in the above photo has become probably the most famous piano in the country. As of this writing, nobody knows where it came from or how it got to its spot in the woods near Harwich, Massachusetts. All they know is it took several cops to load it into a truck to bring it in to the police station so it must have taken several folks to get it out there in the boonies in the first place.

Given all the publicity and general hoorah, why hasn't anyone come forward to claim it? Perhaps the owner is away on a trip and has no idea the piano has gone walkabout. I'm thinking the cops could backtrack by way of the serial number, from manufacturer, to storefront, to buyer. Oops, wait a minute. I just thought of something. Maybe the owner was behind in payments and the piano was about to be repossessed and maybe he figured he'd make 'em work for it. Nah. Scratch that idea. That's just mean. I prefer a more whimsical explanation for the mystery.

Or maybe even no explanation at all -- because, like magician's tricks, some mysteries are a lot more fun if you don't know how it's done.

By the way, has anyone heard from the Phantom of the Opera lately?

It's a Ponderful Life

2008-11-23T20:11:00.000-08:00

That's what I've been doing this past week -- pondering. What a strange word that is. Ponder. Pondering. Pondered. It's sort of -- uhmmm -- ponderous. But I digress ...

There's been plenty of ponder-time because my dial-up hamsters have been unusually flaky and erratic. Sometimes they seem to be practicing slow motion. Other times, they fling me off my connection in a manner very much like the hamster flung himself off the wheel in the video for the last post. It was really hard to maintain my appreciative attitude today when that kind of behavior made it cruelly difficult to listen to the radio feed for the Raiders-Broncos game, I'll tell you that. I think my particular hamsters have a mean streak because they kept cutting out the feed just as something exciting was about to happen. I missed a lot of the good stuff.

I forgave them, though, when the final score came out Raiders 31 -- Broncos 10. Oh frabjous joy! Hope lives again in my heart.

On another front entirely, much of my time this past few days has been spent researching and experimenting with a particular kind of recipe. You may recall that we did that choccy cake in a coffee mug gig a while back. One of the things I discovered is that there are two distinct trends in the cake-in-a-mug experience. One: most of the recipes you find are for chocolate cake. Two: for variety in flavor, you have to go with mixing up boxed cake mix and boxed instant pudding mix.

Okay, I ixnayed the boxed mixes right up front. What I'm looking for is something easily and quickly made with basic ingredients most likely to be on hand in any kitchen. More important, since this is a microwave project, I'm trying to produce a cake that does not come across as a microwave cake. You know -- tough and rubbery and dry and just icky. Also -- and this may shock you -- I'm looking for something in flavors other than chocolate.

Listen, you can't do chocolate ALL the time. That's just excessive and probably dangerous. Besides, I would consider myself inadequate if I were only equipped with a single obsession. If one cultivates a variety of obsessions, one will be much more flexible and capable of satisfying raging urges. Choose one from Column A and two from Column B. Or something like that.

Yet another ponder point under consideration is a recipe without eggs. I just feel uncomfortable using a whole egg for one little bitty coffee mug-sized cake. That seems ostentatious. And uneccessary. There are perfectly fine ways to do an end run around the egg. Powdered whole egg or powdered egg white is one way to do it but, dayum, that stuff is expensive. Using bananas or applesauce is, I think, the better way to go.

I managed a really close nearly successful mug cake today using fresh minced apple. It was delicious but just a teensy tad too moist. Too much apple. I will give it another shot tomorrow, adjusting the proportions. If it works out, I'll share the recipe with you. If it doesn't, I'll just have to do some more experimenting.

I know. It's a grueling job but I'm willing to make the sacrifices necessary to bring a pleasing result to your table. Don't thank me. Just send chocolate.

Hampster Powered

2008-11-19T20:11:00.000-08:00

Timmy had Lassie the dog. Roy Rogers had Trigger the horse. James Qwilleran had Koko and Yum Yum the cats. On Green Acres, Fred and Doris Ziffel had Arnold the pig. And let's not forget that modern day heroine, Stephanie Plum, who has Rex ... the hamster.

Hamster? What kind of a hero companion is a hamster? Ah, see, that's the reaction of folks who don't understand hamster power. But hamsters are used to being underestimated. They go through their lives quietly enhancing our lives -- and never getting any credit for it.

What? Exactly how is your life hamster enhanced? Here. Let me give you a clue. Play this short video and see if you begin to get a glimmer. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Poor little guys. I hope they didn't throw up when they staggered away.

But the point I'm making here is that the hamsters had a wheel. Hamsters always have wheels and they are compelled by their DNA to make the wheels turn. And turn. And turn. And we all know turning wheels produce energy. And energy runs other stuff.

One of the major "other stuff" that operates off the energy generated by hard-working hamsters is your dial-up connection. Those of you who have graduated to high speed connections probably don't care -- why should you? But those of us who have to wait 5 minutes for 30 seconds of video to download, we know about hamster power, by golly.

I, for one, have learned to be more patient now that I realize my enjoyment of the Internet rests on the revolutions produced by thousands of tiny, furry little critters. When a download slows to a frozen molasses drip, I say to myself, "Hey, just go get a cup of coffee and let the little guys take five."

I hope this information is as enlightening for you as it has been for me. I'm sure I'm a better person for finally appreciating the unsung efforts of some of our little furry friends.

I can't help but wonder, though -- what creature is powering the high speed connection?

Kudos & Tin Can Bread

2008-11-08T19:12:00.000-08:00

Wow! You Coffee Mates just blow me away! Look at all those comments for the last post. Now -- look at the big grin on the front of my face. Yeah. Y'all did that -- and I wish I could hug every one of you. I'm going to print off the whole comment section and save it, by golly. And, by the way, Bill (Old Guy), if I haven't mentioned it before, you are a punster par excellence. And I do love puns.

And I guess everyone loves show biz. Bonnie said she wanted a picture of the show. You meant the Wives Club show, right? Well, I think I still have a couple of snapshots laying around but I'll be darned if I know where.

Jo, you asked what part I played. Actually, several of us played more than one skit -- or act, or whatever -- because we had a limited talent pool. In one skit, I was a liddle ol' lady getting tipsy at the bar, in another, I was one of the goofy Newfie paperhangers, where we did a sort of Three Stooges routine with ladders and buckets of flour and water paste. Wherein I managed to splash some of the paste on the Wing Commander's wife's lovely blue dress because she was sitting dangerously close to the stage. Fortunately, she was totally gracious about it. (sigh) My favorite skit, though, was my stand-up comedy bit. With the help of a spare "body" of foam rubber and duct tape, I became Fat Aunt Fanny -- sort of a Phyllis Diller with heft. Wore an orange flowered mumu, high top tennis shoes and wore the most godawful wig you ever saw. It was total fun.

Now -- as a thank you for all the great comments, I'm going to share my neat new sandwich with you. Although God took pity on me yesterday and broke our run of rotten weather by letting the sun shine on my birthday (thank you, God), today we were back to rain squalls and wind flurries -- in short, business as usual. It didn't take much gazing out the window to have me yearning for a nice hot toasted cheese sandwich, that's what. Only problem was, I had so much fun with family yesterday, I forgot to make any bread. But that's okay -- as it turns out, I found a flavor suggestion that sounded good and this is how it went ...

TIN CAN SANDWICH BREAD

In your bread machine:
1 cup warm water
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 egg, slightly beaten
salt to taste
1/4 cup finely minced sun-dried tomato
1/3 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups all purpose flour
1 package (or 1 tablespoon) yeast

Put the machine on the dough cycle and let it do its thing. In the meantime, dig out those two tall tomato juice cans you saved. (Okay, you may want to save a couple of juice cans for future use. I just happened to have these two on hand -- for exactly this kind of project.) Give the cans a good spritz with your nonstick spray and when the dough is ready, divide it into two equal parts and plop them into the cans. Spritz the tops of the dough, cover the cans, let rise for about an hour. (If you want to make the bread in a regular bread pan, this recipe makes one standard loaf.)

I didn't want to put the cans on the lowest rack because I was afraid the bottoms of the bread would burn. On the other hand, being the cans were tall, I was afraid the tops might scorch as the loaves baked. So what I did was, I put the bread in a cold oven, set it at 400 degrees and turned it on. After 15 minutes, I turned the heat down to 350 degrees and baked the bread for another 15 minutes. They came out perfectly! Whew.

If you happen to get the juice cans that are banded with ridges, you will notice that gives the baked bread handy built-in cutting guides. Shooweet! What I like about doing the tin can bread is that you get a great size for snacking sandwiches -- as opposed to full-meal sandwiches. The can slice is only slightly smaller than regular sandwich bread.

Now, here's the kicker ... at a site called The CookMobile, a suggested variation on the classic grilled cheese sandwich called for a layer of blackberry preserves, a layer of chopped onion, some chopped nuts and a slice of cheese. One is encouraged to try other jam flavors, too. And I just happen to have some orange marmalade that was jumping up and down and yelling, "Me! Use me!"

So I sliced me a couple of slices of the bread and buttered one side of each slice. Spread a light layer of marmalade on the unbuttered side of one slice, stacked on some of the shredded cheese left over from my cheese puffs the other day -- and cooked the sandwich to a lovely golden brown. And went "Nom, nom, nom!" with every delicious bite. Yes, it was great.

But now I'm really slapping myself. Did you notice what I forgot? Yeah. No onions. No nuts. Dayum! Ah well. I have plenty of bread left. I can do the other goodies with the next sandwich.