Giving Thanks

This week, how could I write about anything else, really?

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, the Mother of all Food Holidays. Yes, there are other holidays with food associated with them, but few others are so focused on the Feast.

It really is my favorite holiday. I love cooking for other people. I love the turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy (“Gravy, gravy uber alles”…everybody sing!) and sweet potatoes and green bean casserole and, yes, even the cranberry sauce.

There are other things, too, that can be part of the feast. My mom always put out a relish tray.

What, you say, is a relish tray?

At our house, it consisted of a tray (or two) of pickles (Dad’s dills, Mom’s 14-day sweets, sometimes bread and butter pickles or pickled beets or dilled green beans, all homemade, of course) and olives. As kids, we used to put the black olives on our fingers (like you didn’t…come on, admit it). I wouldn’t touch a green olive…hated them and their suspicious-looking red centers. I have since changed my tune and will eat almost anything that can be called an olive, especially when stuffed with things like pimiento or garlic.

Other families munch on things like smoked oysters and smoked clams. That’s great for them. I won’t deprive them of their joy.

And speaking of seafood, some really awesome sisters make shrimp ball, some of which is sitting in my fridge right now because I am too full to eat any. Shrimp, cream cheese, onions…oooooh…so tasty!!!

There are so many variations on the theme. Turkey wrapped in bacon. Chicken wrapped in duck wrapped in turkey. Turkey stuffed with herbs and aromatics. Turkey stuffed with stuffing (don’t listen to Alton Brown. Stuffing is not evil if you are careful. The best stuffing in the world is the stuffing that comes from the turkey.).

Then there’s the stuffing. Cornbread stuffing (my mom’s favorite), oyster stuffing, sausage stuffing, apple stuffing, plain old bread stuffing. Start with butter, onions and celery and go hog wild if you want. My favorite is plain old bread stuffing, but made with some good artisan bread, plus lots of fresh sage and extra turkey or chicken stock to get it nice and moist. I love getting Grand Central Bakery’s bags of stuffing bread. It’s their bread, already cubed and dried and ready. Oh, so good! And it supports a local business!

Some families have varieties of fermented fruit to drink with the meal (and before and after, too). One friend loves to have cranberry wine (and why not?). Some would say that one must serve white wine because it’s poultry, but a light red like a pinot noir is wonderful with turkey (as evidenced by last night’s bottle with dinner, Pinot Evil.). There are lots of fruit wines (in my basement) that would go well with Thanksgiving dinner. Or to go with dessert after dinner.

Oh, dessert. I nearly forgot.

Traditionalists would say pumpkin pie only. Truthfully, that would be enough for me. I would be very happy with a big slice of pumpkin pie with a mountain of whipped cream on top (no Cool Whip, please).

But there are other wonders of the pie form that would be equally appropriate and delicious. Apple pie, for example. Apple is a fall fruit and is wonderful in a pie, particularly the crumb-topped variety (like the one my niece made for yesterday’s dinner. The one we had to fight my brother-in-law to get a piece of. We just claimed it was for the 2 year old and got away with it.)

There are other forms of pumpkin dessert that can grace the table, too. One friend does not like piecrust, so she makes a pumpkin custard in ramekins and serves it like that. Or there is pumpkin cheesecake, like the one made by my other niece for yesterday’s dinner. With a little chocolate swirled in to make it sexy. :o) The 2-year-old like that one, too.

But for all the various forms the meal itself can take, one thing remains constant. The gathering of family, however you choose to define the word, to feast and give thanks.

It can make the absence of lost loved ones ache in your chest and your throat. But ultimately it creates joy and reminds us all what is truly important in life. Good food and the company of good friends and family to share it with.

I have said it before and will say it many, many times more. The most satisfying, humanizing, communal thing we can do is sit down and break bread with one another. It is nourishment not only for the body, but for the soul as well. And today, both body and soul are full up to here!

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!
Thanks for stopping by!

PS – And a Happy Birthday to my son, who is 2 years old today!

Good for what ails you

This week we decided to pull an old, cold weather staple out of the hat. Cold, rainy weather has always means soup to me. So we made garlic soup!

Mmmm…garlic soup. Let’s just enjoy that for a moment, shall we?

Even if you have never had it in your life, even if you have no idea what to expect, it sounds fabulously yummy, doesn’t it?

So what is this wonder that we call garlic soup? I’m sure you have your own version of it, but here’s mine. It comes from a cookbook my mom bought me years ago. I think it was called 365 Italian Recipes. I don’t even think I know where the cookbook is. I just know the recipe by heart. :o)

Garlic Soup (from 365 Italian Recipes)

Serves 4

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp olive oil

12 cloves garlic, quartered

6 slices of Italian bread, cut into 1 inch cubes

6 cups chicken stock

½ cup dry red wine (and more for the chef, of course)

2 tbsp fresh Italian parsley

4 eggs

grated parmesan cheese

In a soup pot, heat the oil and butter until the butter is melted. Add the quartered garlic cloves and sauté for a minute or two. Do not brown garlic.

Add the cubed bread, tossing to coat it in the fat.

Stir in the stock, wine and parsley. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes.

One by one, crack each egg into a small dish and slip it into the soup. When all four eggs are in, cover the pot and poach the eggs until the whites are solid and the yolks are still runny (3-5 minutes, depending on whether your eggs are room temp or refrigerated).

Serve with grated parmesan cheese.

* * * * *

It is such a simple soup to make. And the poached egg makes it so soul-satisfying. N and I always start to crave it when the weather turns chilly.

I know you’re probably wondering about all that garlic. Twelve cloves? Really?

Here’s the thing. You quarter them, not crush them, so there’s less of the oils released into the system. And the garlic kind of gets poached in the oil and then the stock, so it comes out very mellow. Not as sweet and decadent as roasted, but still nicely present but muted. It’s a great flavor. This is definitely one of those soups that is better the next day. If there’s any left, that is.

One warning – you will burn your mouth if you don’t wait for a couple of minutes after you’ve dished it up to start eating. All of that bread holds the heat, so it’s like eating napalm until it cools off a bit. So just to be safe, you might want to undercook your egg a little. Because there are few things in life more disappointing than a poached egg that doesn’t have a runny yolk. ;o)

No rats were harmed in the making of this blog

There are, in fact, no rats in ratatouille (as opposed to Ratatouille, which does contain rats…many of them).

Now I can’t speak to what the real thing is like. I don’t think I have the desire or the patience to cook each vegetable individually, cut each of them precisely the same size. It is, by all I’ve read, a very fussy dish to prepare.

There are those I know who wouldn’t even think of attempting to cook it because it has that vegetable of no nutritional value: eggplant.

That’s another reason I wouldn’t be likely to make it. I’m not a huge fan of eggplant. It has to be prepared just so for me to even be interested in trying it. And by just so, I mean with TONS of garlic.

I’m not really selling this, am I? I mean, you don’t even know why I’m writing about ratatouille this week.

We made it in the crock pot. Really. Nancy looked in Slow Cooker Revolution last weekend to find something for us to make this week. When she said, “What about ratatouille?” I took a look at the recipe and said, “Why the hell not?” We’d been wanting to eat more veg and, hell, I’ll try anything once.

It did take a lot of prep, though not as much as the classic preparation. I had to cube two eggplants and three zucchini, slice two onions, mince a few cloves of garlic, chop fresh thyme. But I had my good chef’s knife.

I also had to brown the veggies in batches, eggplant, then zucchini, then onions, garlic and herbs. But at high heat, it didn’t take long to get some brown on them and get them quickly into the crock pot.

According to the recipe, the browning is one of the big reasons it works. So how could I not, right? They haven’t steered me wrong yet.

I even remembered to turn the crock pot on the right temperature this week!

The suggested cooking time was 4-6 hours on Low. My plan was to cook it only 4 hours, but time got away from me a little bit and I ended up cooking it almost 5.

We didn’t eat it that first night…I started cooking in the late afternoon on a Sunday, so it wasn’t finished cooking until almost 9pm.

But even microwaved the next day, the vegetables, especially the zucchini, still had some crunch to them.

I topped the dish with some homemade pesto I’d taken out of the freezer.

I admit to some trepidation before I ate it the first night. I just couldn’t imagine it turning out tasty, even though it really did smell delicious. I was so afraid of slimy eggplant, I almost wasn’t able to make myself try it.

But it really was delicious. I tired of it by the third night, but it was a great way to get some tasty veg. We got a roasted chicken from the grocery store for our protein.

No rats. But now I want to watch the movie again. :o)

Happy Friday, y’all. Thanks for stopping by!

Oops, I did it again (or Always Have a Backup Plan)

So, this week, we picked another recipe from the Slow Cooker Revolution.

It’s called Bachelor Beef Stew…probably the lowest maintenance recipe in the book. Frozen peas, baby carrots, frozen potatoes. They do recommend using beef tips instead of stew meat, which means you would have to cut up the meat. But you even use frozen chopped onions, so no crying! Canned broth, tomato paste, a little soy sauce to deepen the flavors. And you thicken the gravy with a couple of tablespoons of tapioca. Brilliant!

Simple, right? No possible way to screw it up, right?

I’m sure you’re not surprised when I say “Wrong!!”

I did cut a couple of corners…I used stew meat and I didn’t microcook the onions before I put them in the crock pot. Nor did I add the fresh thyme it called for (because I forgot to get some).

But otherwise I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter.

it’s supposed to cook for 9-11 hours on LOW. So Monday morning I put everything in the pot, turned it on and went to work.

When I got home about 10 hours later, the house smelled pretty good, but it wasn’t as fragrant as I expected. I went to check the pot and the meat at the top looked oddly not brown. Usually the stuff at the top gets a bit brown, at least around the edges. And the sauce hadn’t thickened like I’d expected.

Apparently that doesn’t happen when you set the cooker to KEEP WARM!

I was in a hurry, wasn’t paying close attention, and didn’t turn the crock pot to the right temperature.

It could have been worse, for sure. I could have turned it on high and come home to an incinerated mess (or the fire department hosing down my dinner). This, at least, could be salvaged.

I turned the temp up to HIGH so it would get really hot and make sure everything was cooked through. But we sure didn’t have it for dinner that night.

Thank goodness for the rice I’d made that morning and the frozen gyoza from Costco.

And with all that, it still tasted pretty darn good. The next night I got home, put it in a soup pot and let it heat to bubbling on top of the stove. I added the frozen peas, microwaved the frozen potatoes, stirred it all together and voila!

The gravy was dark and thick, the peas were bright and green, the meat was fall-apart tender. It really was a delicious meal. And it lasted us the rest of the week.

I also made some pumpkin bread last weekend using the pumpkins I roasted a couple of weeks ago. Our friend Carolyn had given us two sets of mini loaf pans before Gideon was born with the thought that we could make some quick breads in these handy, single-serving sizes and freeze them so we would have them after her was born and we didn’t have the time or energy to cook.

They really are great. They're the perfect size! I made a double recipe of the pumpkin bread which made 12 mini loaves. We have half the dozen in the freezer and have consumed all but one of the other half dozen over the last week. G loves it, which is great, because he is being very fussy about what he eats lately.

But that’s another story that will have to wait until such time as I am not falling asleep at the keyboard. T.G.I.F!

Thanks for stopping by, y’all. Have a great weekend and cook something fabulous for yourself!

Nearly November already???

I’ve quite gotten out of the habit of reserving Friday nights for sitting and writing, so it feels good to head straight for the computer tonight.

Before I start in on the food, I want to give a shout out to my friends who are participating on NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. For those of you not familiar, the goal is to write a novel, or at least 50,000 words of one, in 30 days. That is an average of 1,667 words a day.

I have participated once, writing just under 30,000 words that year, and I will again someday. I’m shooting for next year, ladies. Just so you know. :o)

So here's to you!! Knock ‘em dead!! And have a donut for me when you go to Portland on Tuesday! :o)

And now, the food. Because that’s what I assume you are really here for!

With the advent of autumn, we have gotten back into the crock pot big time. After all, we have a whole cookbook of recipes to try out.

Yes, I am referring to what I think might be the crock pot bible, Slow Cooker Revolution from America’s Test Kitchen. We have now tried four recipes and they have all been fantastic.

Two weeks ago we made a white bean chicken chili. Hopefully since I am crediting them, I won’t get slapped for sharing the recipe here.

White Chicken Chili – from Slow Cooker Revolution by America’s Test Kitchen

3 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 15-oz can white or yellow hominy, drained & rinsed
2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 onions, minced
4 jalapeno chiles, stemmed, seeded and minced
6 garlic cloves, minced
4 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground coriander
3 cans (15 oz) cannellini beans, drained & rinsed
3 lbs bone-in chicken thighs, skin removed, trimmed of fat
salt & pepper
2 tbsp minced jarred pickled jalapeno chiles
¼ c minced fresh cilantro
2 avocados, pitted and diced

Puree 2 cups broth with the hominy in a blender until smooth, about 1 minute. Transfer to slow cooker.
Heat oil in 12 inch skillet over medium high heat until shimmering. Add onions, jalapenos, garlic, cumin and coriander and cook until vegetables are softened and lightly browned, 8-10 minutes. Stir in remaining 1 cup broth, scraping up any browned bits. Transfer to slow cooker.
Stir beans into slow cooker. Season chicken with salt and pepper and nestle on top of vegetables. Cover and cook until chicken is tender, 4 to 6 hours on low.
Transfer chicken to cutting board, let cool slightly. Shred into bite sized pieces, discarding bones. Let chili set for about 5 minutes, then skim fat from the top.
Stir in shredded chicken and pickled jalapenos and let sit until heated through, about 5 minutes. Stir in cilantro, season with salt & pepper to taste, and serve with avocado.

* * *

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. FOUR jalapenos? Really?? I have to admit, I agreed. I was a wimp and decided to only include 3 because they were rather large. Turns out adding the fourth would have been fine. In the slow cooker, the chiles cook until they are very mellow. And since you don’t put in the seeds, really there’s nothing to worry about.

Where you control the heat of the dish is at the end, adding the pickled jalapenos. Those mothers still have the seeds in them. They’re very tart and hot and you can add extra to your own bowl of you want to. I was a little surprised at finding them in the recipe, but the add the acid you need to help brighten up the slow cooked stew, along with the cilantro (which, if you use it sparingly, does not taste like soap. Really.)

The addition of the avocado gave it creaminess and freshness without adding cheese. Avocados are such a luxurious food…creamy and decadent and really good for you. How can you argue with that??

If you wanted to add cheese? I’d say get some queso fresco or some cotija. Something light and white. But this really didn’t need it.

The only downside of making this is that I have been craving a margarita ever since.

Since we’re running a little long tonight, I’ll give you the quick low down on the Swiss steaks we made last week. Again from the Slow Cooker Revolution book, they were a little labor intensive, but totally worth the work.

It required a pound and a half of mushrooms until they were dry and browned…close to 15 minutes. Then cooking thinly sliced onions with thyme and paprika until the onions were very soft and starting to brown. Add a little flour and cook just long enough to get the floury taste out, then add broth and dry sherry to deglaze the pan.

I did all of that one evening after dinner. By bedtime, the house smelled glorious. But we had to wait two days before I was able to actually cook the dish.

You dump the veg into the slow cooker, add the steaks on top (6 6-8 oz blade steaks) and cook 9-11 hours on low. When they’re done, you remove the meat, skim the fat from the gravy, then stir in ¼ of heavy cream and some fresh parsley. Serve the steaks with the gravy.

I would highly recommend some mashed potatoes to go with this stuff.

Oddly, I realized as I was eating this that it was basically my old standby crock pot dish. Beef with cream of mushroom soup and onion soup mix. Sort of. It did bear a passing resemblance to that dish from cans and envelopes. But it was so much better.

Don’t get me wrong. If I am pressed for time, I will go back to the easy way. But if I have the time to invest, I will do this again. It was deep with flavor, the sherry gave it a nuttiness and the cream…well, I used sour cream because it’s what we had and man, did it make that dish.

You may be wondering, has something changed? These are not her perfect, no-fuss recipes here.

I have to say I’ve enjoyed taking the time to build these meals and cook them carefully. I get into a zone and just enjoy chopping and slicing and sautéing. I’ve even been reminded of the joys of cleaning as I go, so that when I’m done there’s no mess.

Perhaps it is the nip of Fall in the air. The cooler weather and more frequent rain always make me want to cook and bake. I even roasted pumpkins for the first time in my life. I’ll be making some pumpkin bread this weekend with the fresh pumpkin.

I guess that’s it. I just love this time of year. It’s Fall. Root vegetable season. :o)
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I need some cocoa.

The Magic of Chocolate

N asked tonight what I was going to write about this week. The first thing that came to mind was the cake I made this week. But then I remember, I made a kickin’ chicken chili, too.

Surely both deserve mention, but this week, it’s just going to be the cake.

There was a bake sale coming up at work. I knew I would make something…I always do. I love baking and homemade things make people happy. Normally I would consider trying something new, especially when we’re in the middle of a season of Top Chef: Just Desserts.

This time, however, I had a request to fulfill.

I’ve been making this Guinness chocolate cake for several years. It all started at my friend Sheila’s wedding. She asked me to make her cake and she told me about this cake she had at a local restaurant. So I found this recipe, and the rest, as they say, it history.

It is, hands down, the most requested cake I have ever made. I’ve made it for four weddings, several birthdays and other special occasions. The first few times I made it, I frosted it with white icing because it was for weddings.

The recipe, however, comes with it’s own icing. A chocolate ganache. And that’s what has become famous among my friends.

The cake is dense and rich and moist. And when you top it with a bittersweet ganache, it becomes mouthful after mouthful of rich, chocolately goodness. It’s not to sweet, exceedingly decadent.

The recipe makes a gigantic cake. Three deep layers of fudgy cake is a lot. So I usually serve only two layers when I take it somewhere. Especially when someone else is going to serve. It’s hard to cut and serve a cake that is probably eight or nine inches tall and three layers.

So, I did a two layer cake with the ganache on top for the bake sale at work and split the single layer (with my fantastic 14” cake splitter knife) and iced it with a simple buttercream for the birthday girl.

The birthday cake was a total hit. The Bunny loves cake and it was wonderful to be able to make her a cake for her birthday.

The bake sale cake…well, I’ve auctioned that cake off at work before, so it’s sort of legendary there. Which is why it was requested. :o) And now a whole new group of people have been introduced to it’s magic.

You may think I’m tooting my own horn quite a bit, but I’m really not. It’s such a great recipe and it’s not fussy at all. Not the cake, anyway. The only thing you really have to be careful of is making sure your cocoa, butter and beer mixture is cool enough before you add it to the eggs and sour cream. If it’s too hot, you could cook your eggs and that would be very bad.

The really nervewracking part of this cake is the ganache. Ganache is relatively simple on paper. You heat cream, pour it over chopped chocolate, stir until the chocolate melts, let it cool until it’s the consistency you need it for your recipe.

Do it right and you get a beautifully textured mixture that goes onto a cake so easily, then it solidifies to a point where you can make the corners and edges of your cake sharp as a knife’s edge.

No problem, right?

Wrong.

If you overheat the cream, it breaks down the fats in the chocolate and you get a lumpy, gross-looking mess that you can’t do anything with. It still tastes good, so you could eat it with a spoon. But you can’t serve it. Broken ganaches make the angels cry. Okay, maybe not the angels, but it makes me cry. It’s made me cry several times before. And say lots of bad words. Lots.

Under heat the cream and your chocolate doesn’t get melted all the way. Then you have to baby it either on the stove or in the microwave to get the chocolate just warm enough to melt without breaking. It’s very stressful.

But when everything goes right, when the cream is just hot enough to melt the chocolate, when you catch the chilling ganache at just the perfect moment when it is easy to spread and doesn’t immediately solidify on the cake, it is a wonder to behold.

You can make a pretty impressive, professional-looking cake with a minimum of fussing.

That precision fascinates me. I don’t consider myself a terribly precise person. I don’t weigh my baking ingredients. I tend to measure everything on the generous side. I don’t use cake flour even when a recipe specifically calls for it.

But riding that fine line, looking for that perfect moment when it’s time to move to the next step, watching the transformation of a liquid and a solid into this wonderous amalgam that allows you only minutes to work with it when it’s at that just right place. That is what really gets me jazzed about making this recipe.

Well, that, and the delighted faces of people eating what I’ve baked. Because ultimately it’s feeding people good food that makes me happy.

Birthday Celebrations, Part Deux

This week, we celebrated N’s birthday, which, of course, required cake.

Her favorite is yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Given our busy lives, she very kindly said, “If you want to use a mix, it’s okay with me.”

Let me give you a little background on that. I have probably used one cake mix in the last twenty years. It’s not that I think they’re bad. I grew up on cake mix cakes. My mom made wedding cakes with mixes and guests swore they were from scratch.

It’s just that I tend to not have a cake mix in the house when I want to bake a cake. But I usually have all the component ingredients. If you think about it, most people do. Flour, sugar, eggs, butter, vanilla, salt baking powder and milk.

When it came to baking night, I still had not gotten a cake mix, but I certainly had all those items in my kitchen. So scratch it was.

Since I don’t have a favorite yellow cake recipe, I went searching. I was very interested in the recipes that called for buttermilk, but I didn’t have that. Nor did I have sour cream. But I’ll be trying those cakes at a later date.

What I landed on was this.

Yes, Martha Stewart.

Say what you want…the woman knows her stuff.

The cake is simple. Butter and sugar creamed together. Eggs and vanilla beaten in. Flour, baking powder and salt added alternatively with milk. Thick batter poured into two 8” rounds and baked for 35 minutes.

So simple. So easy to screw up. :o)

I didn’t really totally screw it up. But because I’m currently in the middle of a season of Top Chef: Just Desserts, I’m a bit more critical of my baking right now.

The cake was a little bit dry. But it was totally my fault. It needed a couple of minutes less in the oven and it would have been perfect. But it did have that wonderful butter flavor, delicate and rich. I will definitely be using this one again.

Now, I do have a favorite chocolate frosting recipe. It’s in the old McCall’s cookbook that my mom had. The flavor of this chocolate frosting is really unparalled. But it is complicated. You have to melt the chocolate, let it cool, cream the butter and sugar, add the chocolate, add the egg (yes, I said egg), beat it over a bowl of ice water to get it to the right consistency. If you are in a hurry or not meticulous, you can fuck this mother up. This is not something the middle-aged mother of a toddler should attempt, especially on a school night .

So I went hunting again. And I found this from a food blog called Savory Sweet Life. You have to scroll to the bottom of the page to get to the recipe.

What intrigued me about this recipe was the salt. It’s a pretty basic chocolate frosting recipe, but then it had salt. I knew this would bring out the flavor of the cocoa, so I decided try it.

It is now my favorite chocolate frosting. It’s easy to make, it tastes wonderful. How can anyone argue with that combination?

There is an option to use either vanilla or almond extract. I used vanilla. I’m not all that fond of almond flavoring in things. It is so easy to over do. And it wasn’t the right application here. But I think I will try it at some point. This frosting was tasty enough that I think it would be fun to play around with. Some cinnamon and cayenne, maybe?

In the final analysis, however, what matters is not whether I used cake flour or all purpose, whether I used almond or vanilla extract. What matters is how it tastes.

Well, the birthday girl rated it “awesome”. And that’s what’s important to me. :o)