My friend P, who has been visiting from NY this week, took me out to dinner at Mela tonight. Dinner was fabulous but I feel bad for poor P - he arrived on Monday, got to have one fun night out in Asheville and then his hostess, me, promptly succumbed to the flu and he ended up being sort of farmed off to Bat Cave and beyond. Now that he's going back, of course he's feeling a bit out of it too, so I am probably returning him to the north with a nice case of Asheville flu. Poor P. He will never come back here, I'm sure. Well, mice, men, plans, etc. What can one do?
One can wildly overdo, if one is me, and end up feeling fairly gruesome again. Naturally as soon as I started feeling better yesterday I had to party like a lunatic and then as previously blogged wake up before dawn and then clean the living room completely and go to Lowes and work in the garden and so on, with the predictable result that I'm feeling like I may be vanishing back down the illness rabbit hole again. Gah. Boo. Hiss.
But at least I'm kind of caught up on my picture a day backlog, even if this isn't a prizewinner. Still, I'm a sucker for that dancing shadow - either Krishna or Shiva I think. Making the world or just making it with the cowmaids - Indian deities have more fun. Gods the food was amazing though - I want to move to India; I always have, although I've accepted the likelihood that I probably won't be able to marry Kim (damn) but I'd be happy just to eat Indian food every day for the rest of my life. Yum.
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Sniffles & Trifles & A Couple of Recipes
Well, I've been issued my personal version of the cold that all Buncombe county residents must, by law, have this December. Sore throat, sniffles, stomach ache, dizzy out of it feelings - I've got it all. But actually, on a horrible dreary day like this one, I've been just as happy to do nothing but slowly make my way occasionally from the bedroom to the kitchen, pausing en route to admire the complete disgusting mess that is my house. It's a nice respite from all the frantic activity of yesterday & the days before.
Also, I've been tipsy all day from repeated forays into the leftover trifle. Mmmmm, trifle is really good if you load it down with about a half a pint of dark rum and it just keeps on getting better. Actually, if I do say so myself, there's been some stellar food around here the past couple of days and yesterday, when I made Christmas dinner at my mother's was no exception. It was a little fraught though - it turns out that my mother thinks I have always overcooked my green beans (oh, quelle horreur) and, get this, the reason noone in the family has ever been able to duplicate my mother's potatos, which she has always called Pennsylvania Railroad Potatos, is because she uses a stick of butter for every three potatos. Yes. A. Whole. Stick. We grew up eating those; it's a wonder that we grew up at all. So here, have some recipes.
Night before night before Christmas fancy chicken
Boneless skinless chicken breasts
figs
bleu cheese
garlic
pancetta
mushrooms
a little lemon juice
1. Put the breasts between two sheets of wax paper and whale on them with a rolling pin until they're nice & thin. Salt & pepper them.
2. Mix up the figs and the bleu cheese and the garlic and the mushrooms and a little lemon juice in the food processor. It is possible that I had sauteed the mushrooms first; I totally can't remember. They were baby bellas, though.
3. Spread this stuff on each breast.
4. Roll the breasts up.
5. Wrap the rolls in pancetta.
6. Bake in the oven at 375 for about half an hour, 40 minutes or until done. Finish under the broiler to make crispy.
Very elegant and gourmet, also delicious. I served it with risotto (used the recipe from the back of the arborio rice bag) and green beans.
Trifle
Yellow cake. (I made a Duncan Hines classic yellow cake box cake the day before, you could also buy pound cake or whatever, really.)
A can of vanilla pudding
A can of lemon pie filling
1/2 a pineapple
2 kiwis
1/2 a plastic grocery store freezer thing of sliced strawberries in syrup - thawed.
1 bag of frozen berry/cherry mix, which is to say, frozen fruit leaning towards the strawberry/blueberry/cherry end as opposed to the melon-y end of the frozen fruit spectrum. Thawed.
coconut. I used the flaked canned kind with sugar.
whipped cream (I did this myself but what the hell, you could use the canned kind.)
At least half a bottle of dark rum.
A trifle bowl.
1. Find & wash the trifle bowl. You probably had a plant in it at some point; god knows I did.
2. Cut the cake up into big chunks and put a layer of them on the bottom of the bowl.
3. Cut up the pineapple & the kiwis and put them on top of the cake.
4. Pour some rum over all that.
5. Put another layer of cake chunks down.
6. Pour the vanilla pudding and about half the lemon pie filling on top of that layer of cake.
7. More rum!
8. Another, probably final, layer of cake chunks.
9. Put the strawberries & berries on top of that.
10. Sprinkle the whole thing with coconut.
11. Rum! By god, more rum! Soak that thing!
12. You could, of course, keep on going with the layers indefinitely, given a big enough trifle bowl and infinite fruit. Or you could stop, whatever. I stopped here.
14. Cover and leave the hell alone for at least 4 hours. If it's going to be longer than that, put it in the fridge.
15. Before serving, add the whipped cream to the top all pretty & peaky like.
This is remarkably delicious, especially the next day.
Mom's Pennsylvania Railroad Potatos
9 or 12 or so biggish russet potatos
scallions
parsley
a metric shitload of real butter
1. Boil the potatos.
2. When they're almost but not quite done, dump them in cold water to cool off.
3. Put a stick (yup. One whole stick.) of butter in a heavy pan and melt over medium heat. Don't let it ever get too hot.
4. Take a potato out of the water. Peel it.
5. Holding it over the butter, cut it into quarters, then slice those quarters into the hot butter so you have thin triangles in there.
6. Repeat, but only do as many potatos as fit nicely into the pan.
6. Leave alone.
7. Stir very rarely.
8. When they begin to look brown, add some chopped scallions and chopped parsley.
9. When they are indubitably brown, put them into a big oven type pan. Salt & pepper.
10. Continue with the butter (yeah. I couldn't bring myself to use that much butter either, but my potatos were totally not as good.) and the potatos until they're all done, never putting too many in the pan and resisting the temptation to stir them a lot.
11. Then put the whole thing into a 350 oven for a while until the entree is done. They'll wait indefinitely, just sitting there in their artery clogging buttery goodness.
Also, I've been tipsy all day from repeated forays into the leftover trifle. Mmmmm, trifle is really good if you load it down with about a half a pint of dark rum and it just keeps on getting better. Actually, if I do say so myself, there's been some stellar food around here the past couple of days and yesterday, when I made Christmas dinner at my mother's was no exception. It was a little fraught though - it turns out that my mother thinks I have always overcooked my green beans (oh, quelle horreur) and, get this, the reason noone in the family has ever been able to duplicate my mother's potatos, which she has always called Pennsylvania Railroad Potatos, is because she uses a stick of butter for every three potatos. Yes. A. Whole. Stick. We grew up eating those; it's a wonder that we grew up at all. So here, have some recipes.
Night before night before Christmas fancy chicken
Boneless skinless chicken breasts
figs
bleu cheese
garlic
pancetta
mushrooms
a little lemon juice
1. Put the breasts between two sheets of wax paper and whale on them with a rolling pin until they're nice & thin. Salt & pepper them.
2. Mix up the figs and the bleu cheese and the garlic and the mushrooms and a little lemon juice in the food processor. It is possible that I had sauteed the mushrooms first; I totally can't remember. They were baby bellas, though.
3. Spread this stuff on each breast.
4. Roll the breasts up.
5. Wrap the rolls in pancetta.
6. Bake in the oven at 375 for about half an hour, 40 minutes or until done. Finish under the broiler to make crispy.
Very elegant and gourmet, also delicious. I served it with risotto (used the recipe from the back of the arborio rice bag) and green beans.
Trifle
Yellow cake. (I made a Duncan Hines classic yellow cake box cake the day before, you could also buy pound cake or whatever, really.)
A can of vanilla pudding
A can of lemon pie filling
1/2 a pineapple
2 kiwis
1/2 a plastic grocery store freezer thing of sliced strawberries in syrup - thawed.
1 bag of frozen berry/cherry mix, which is to say, frozen fruit leaning towards the strawberry/blueberry/cherry end as opposed to the melon-y end of the frozen fruit spectrum. Thawed.
coconut. I used the flaked canned kind with sugar.
whipped cream (I did this myself but what the hell, you could use the canned kind.)
At least half a bottle of dark rum.
A trifle bowl.
1. Find & wash the trifle bowl. You probably had a plant in it at some point; god knows I did.
2. Cut the cake up into big chunks and put a layer of them on the bottom of the bowl.
3. Cut up the pineapple & the kiwis and put them on top of the cake.
4. Pour some rum over all that.
5. Put another layer of cake chunks down.
6. Pour the vanilla pudding and about half the lemon pie filling on top of that layer of cake.
7. More rum!
8. Another, probably final, layer of cake chunks.
9. Put the strawberries & berries on top of that.
10. Sprinkle the whole thing with coconut.
11. Rum! By god, more rum! Soak that thing!
12. You could, of course, keep on going with the layers indefinitely, given a big enough trifle bowl and infinite fruit. Or you could stop, whatever. I stopped here.
14. Cover and leave the hell alone for at least 4 hours. If it's going to be longer than that, put it in the fridge.
15. Before serving, add the whipped cream to the top all pretty & peaky like.
This is remarkably delicious, especially the next day.
Mom's Pennsylvania Railroad Potatos
9 or 12 or so biggish russet potatos
scallions
parsley
a metric shitload of real butter
1. Boil the potatos.
2. When they're almost but not quite done, dump them in cold water to cool off.
3. Put a stick (yup. One whole stick.) of butter in a heavy pan and melt over medium heat. Don't let it ever get too hot.
4. Take a potato out of the water. Peel it.
5. Holding it over the butter, cut it into quarters, then slice those quarters into the hot butter so you have thin triangles in there.
6. Repeat, but only do as many potatos as fit nicely into the pan.
6. Leave alone.
7. Stir very rarely.
8. When they begin to look brown, add some chopped scallions and chopped parsley.
9. When they are indubitably brown, put them into a big oven type pan. Salt & pepper.
10. Continue with the butter (yeah. I couldn't bring myself to use that much butter either, but my potatos were totally not as good.) and the potatos until they're all done, never putting too many in the pan and resisting the temptation to stir them a lot.
11. Then put the whole thing into a 350 oven for a while until the entree is done. They'll wait indefinitely, just sitting there in their artery clogging buttery goodness.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Thanksgiving, a Post Post
I forgot the most important moment in the earlier post - the moment when I came home from Earthfare, put my bags on the kitchen table. One bag contained two bottles of Pellegrino fizzy mineral water. That would be the bag that inexplicably exploded about five minutes after I put it down. Yes, the bottle just exploded for no apparent reason, and thank the gods it was in a bag that caught all the broken glass and most of the water. At the time I chalked it up to just one of those weird ass things. But it was a portent! A sign! An omen!
And fuck thanksgiving. I'm done with this particular nightmare.
My two favorite Thanksgiving dishes are creamed onions and rutabagas. I didn't do the rutabagas because I totally ran out of time and the creamed onions? I pellegrino'ed the creamed onions. I have no room in this kitchen and so I pulled them out of the oven and set them on the stove top. On a burner. In a glass bowl. The burner that I then turned on to High, because I twisted the wrong dial.
Exploding creamed onions in a glass bowl are not fun.
I fucked up the gravy.
I burned the rolls.
Dinner was cold.
But the living room looks fantastic. The party never really happening does at least leave the house a bit cleaner (I have so many dishes to wash, I'm developing pre-emptive wrinkled hands) and there's lots of leftover beer (most of the wine was undrinkable.)
Ah. It's over! It's over!
Thanksgiving, Live from the Trenches
So far today:
8:30 woke up hungover. Naturally.
9:30 fielded phone call from mother. Yesterday morning fought with mother over her desire to participate in turkey, lost battle, mother brined turkey overnight. Now mother freaking out over amount of time necessary to cook turkey. Told mother time fine.
10:00 read Joy of Cooking, called mother back, demanded turkey immediately. Made stuffing. Made frozen biscuits for kids.
10:30 brother showed up with turkey in roasting pan. Went with brother to Earthfare, wandered hungover in daze around store, bought a ton of stuff, forgot cheesecloth, nearly lost vitally important list but recovered.
11:30 stuffed turkey, put turkey in oven.
12:00 realized there were no giblets with turkey, called mother again, fought again over giblets, discovered that mother cooked giblets yesterday, got upset, smoked cigarette, called daughter, complained about mother, daughter fighting with boyfriend and upset, thus completing traditional trigenerational female thanksgiving stress trifecta.
12:30 cleaned bathroom. Scrubbed living and dining room floors on hands and knees. Vacuumed hallway. Semi tidied up bedroom. Yelled at son for doing nothing but playing World of Warcraft.
1:30 started cooking again. Peeled & cut up mountain of potatos, got on stove.
And now it's 2:00 here at Hangover Headquarters, and Thanksgiving is imminent. Whooo eee! Back to the turkey mines!
2:14 son uses guest towels for shower, destroys bathroom. Scream at son.
8:30 woke up hungover. Naturally.
9:30 fielded phone call from mother. Yesterday morning fought with mother over her desire to participate in turkey, lost battle, mother brined turkey overnight. Now mother freaking out over amount of time necessary to cook turkey. Told mother time fine.
10:00 read Joy of Cooking, called mother back, demanded turkey immediately. Made stuffing. Made frozen biscuits for kids.
10:30 brother showed up with turkey in roasting pan. Went with brother to Earthfare, wandered hungover in daze around store, bought a ton of stuff, forgot cheesecloth, nearly lost vitally important list but recovered.
11:30 stuffed turkey, put turkey in oven.
12:00 realized there were no giblets with turkey, called mother again, fought again over giblets, discovered that mother cooked giblets yesterday, got upset, smoked cigarette, called daughter, complained about mother, daughter fighting with boyfriend and upset, thus completing traditional trigenerational female thanksgiving stress trifecta.
12:30 cleaned bathroom. Scrubbed living and dining room floors on hands and knees. Vacuumed hallway. Semi tidied up bedroom. Yelled at son for doing nothing but playing World of Warcraft.
1:30 started cooking again. Peeled & cut up mountain of potatos, got on stove.
And now it's 2:00 here at Hangover Headquarters, and Thanksgiving is imminent. Whooo eee! Back to the turkey mines!
2:14 son uses guest towels for shower, destroys bathroom. Scream at son.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Avatar of Domesticity in the Year of the Albino Zucchini
The annual garden deluge is well under way. That means that the garden itself is deluged with morning glories and other less attractive weeds as well as horrible demon bugs of all descriptions, including, but not limited to, Japanese beetles, the showy, glamourous Gianni Versaces of the insect world. Morning glories and Japanese beetles are terribly similar, really, to the kind of thing found in the garment district: parasitic, decorative as hell, amusing and yet slowly killing their struggling hosts.There are bugs everywhere. Something ate my eggplants; the rest of the squash are succumbing to what is either a horrible fungal infection or the depredations of the cucumber borer beetle and it's hot. Meanwhile, I am deluged with green beans, hot peppers (one pepper plant fell over, so burdened with fat jalapenos that it could no longer stand) and zucchini, which curiously this year are almost all albinos. Go figure. Squash is promiscuous and has weird offshot babies whenever you plant more than one variety but I can never resist in the spring. It's delicious anyway, even if M did refuse to finish his last night, saying "God, it's so, so squashy."
So in a fit of enthusiastic pioneer style old fashioned good womanhood (I have them occasionally. Stop snickering.) I decided to can the green beans. Apparently just canning green beans plain is inviting certain death unless you own a $80 pressure canner: I read the articles and the brochure that came with a box of Mason jars and it scared me right off. I don't want to drop dead of botulism or some other less savory doom just because I want fresh canned green beans next December. Instead, I pickled them. After that, having some pickling stuff left over and all those aforementioned jalapenos, I pickled some of those. That's an experiment. It may be a bad, bad one but I'm already half planning to give them away anyhow, sneaky evil me.
Pickling is a lengthy process. First you have to heed all the dire warnings and wash all the new jars and the lids and the rings and then you have to put them all in pots of hot water on the stove and simmer them. During this process some of the lids will inevitably weld themselves together in a touching display of affection and physical love which winds up being a royal pain in the ass. Why? You try separating them using tongs and you will know. Then you take the hot jars and you stuff them with your prepared (washed, trimmed, inspected closely) vegetables. This is also harder than it sounds, since raw green beans and peppers don't like being stuffed into small spaces and also the damn jars are hot as hell. Eventually, however, you get them all in there along with some garlic and a head of dill and some other stuff for the hot peppers and then you pour a boiling mixture of vinegar, salt and water over them. You will burn your fingers again putting the lids on, and it would be good to admire them then, because after processing, they won't look so bright and fresh, which is a pity, but I suppose it keeps you alive and that's all for the best. Processing, for the uninitiated, means that you put the sealed jars into a big huge pot of boiling water and you boil the everliving fuck out of them for as long as the recipe says, 10 or 15 minutes. They are supposed to be on a rack: I don't have a rack, so I use dishtowels in the pot to keep them from banging up against it or each other and cracking. That's why there's a huge pot of water and wet dishtowels on my stove right now, actually. In case you wondered. Then you pull them out with tongs and put them on a towel on the counter and moon over them with pride and if you have done everything right, they will eventually each make an extremely satisfying little Pop! noise which means that they are sealed.So okay, the lawn isn't mowed, the living room isn't vacuumed, the dishes aren't done and the less said about the bathroom the better, but I have 6, count them, 6 beautiful glass jars of pickled things and I am proud. Proud, I tell you, with the kind of housewifely pride that made this country great. Now I can fulfill all my families needs for pickled green beans (none of us have ever actually tasted pickled green beans or pickled hot peppers, by the way, and the kids are showing a distressing lack of enthusiasm at the prospect) for the whole winter.
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