One a day, plus iron

The local grocery had 2 lb. bags of broccoli florets for $1.00 each, which is like fifty cents a pound for the broccoli. In this economy, that's a fucking bargain. Obviously, I bought two bags (four pounds) and have been eating a lot of broccoli of late. (I do not like it frozen, it gets soggy and I just... can't.) Triple garlic linguini with steamed broccoli was one of my experimental efforts this week to address the broccoli situation.

Experimental recipes are usually edible, infrequently ... not good but edible, and occasionally outstanding. This one was outstanding.

( What the hell is triple garlic? I am intrigued... )

It's going. I am getting some things done and dragging my feet on other things.

( Read more? )

I'm trying to get some rides on my horse while the clinic is still fresh in my mind and BEFORE the pumpkin army comes to visit. It's also "build a fire when you walk in the door" season. So, my evenings are pretty busy and by the time I get ready to make dinner, I'm kind of starved. Hunger is the best sauce but also then I need food, stat.

( What is so fancy about pasta? )

You know what's not at all effing difficult? Those caramel sugar decorations for desserts. The hardened-drizzle things that stand up and look dramatic, those things. Not hard. Also not durable in an ambient-temperature east-coast August afternoon but should be fine in a low-humidity wintertime or somewhere with brutal air conditioning. But for me, stuck in the sauna of August, it is clear that, like peanut brittle, caramel sugar decorations are a seasonally appropriate food item.

But super easy. Some practice will help, but sugar is cheap and it doesn't take long to do.

Want dramatic looking toppers for your cupcakes? Super easy.

Fancy wedges of whatever to put on your cheesecake slices when served? Not any problem at all.

Get some sugar and a heavy saucepan and at least a spoon (though other props can be pretty fun, too). Get some parchment paper. Heat up the sugar to the color caramel you want, let it cool a little, and get to drizzling.

The decorations will firm up quickly and can be lifted off the parchment paper and used in fairly short order.

Seriously, give this a try, it is super easy.

Update: These are a hundred times better if you also ADD SOME SALT.

Corn and Kidney Bean Salad is a thing that I make. It is a thing I made up myself out of nothing though I am sure there are other similar things. I like it. My friend Laur likes it. Perhaps you might also like it.

( Here's how... )

Here in the Mid-Atlantic, there's about two weeks left before humidity becomes A Thing again. In this space of time, you can still have peanut brittle if you want it and haven't managed it yet this year. After humidity becomes A Thing, though, efforts in the general direction of peanut brittle are disappointing and you should really wait until the cold of November to give it a go.

Also, since peanut brittle goes directly to your ass and stays there for the next thirty years, it is critical to make the absolute best peanut brittle possible. If you're gonna eat this shit, which is absolutely no good for you, you ought make sure it's worth it. (Old Dominion, you are not worth it. Planter's? You are also not worth it. The stuff below the cut... well... yeah. Once a year, it is totally worth it.)

( Walk away now, while you still can! )

For some reason the phrase "hand pie" sounds vaguely obscene to me. Good thing we're not on tumblr. But anyway it is not obscene. It's a hand-held dessert pastry, made bright and early this morning by me in honor of (a) the snow shitstorm bearing down upon us (b) Waylie getting out of jail (c) Lala winning the weight loss challenge thing at her work and coming home four hundred dollars richer plus also able to eat again and (d) Lala's friend Amy who got me ten pounds of unshelled walnuts for xmas (after Lala told her I really adored pecans) and who carefully, via the Lala relay, expressed a desire for cherry hand pies in exchange. She is going to be disappointed.

( The spirit of xmas is not Give So You Can Get In Return. )

Sand Tarts, a holiday cookie. NOT FOR BEGINNERS

1 1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup butter (real, best you can afford. Plugra is my favorite)
1 egg
1 egg yolk (reserve white for later)
1 t. vanilla
1 t. lemon rind, freshly grated
3 cups flour
1/4 t. salt

Cream sugar and butter, add egg & yolk & vanilla & lemon rind & salt. Finally add flour. Dough is VERY FIRM and you may need to use your hands and kinda knead to get it all mixed in. Make into 8 equal-size hamburger-style patties, put patties in ziplock baggies (two patties fit in a quart ziplock, they cannot touch or be stacked) overnight in the fridge. Patties will be FAR EASIER for you to roll out on the morrow, not even remotely kidding here.

Roll thin. (Cookies are translucent when made properly. You can see light through them.) Cut out into (ideally) spade shapes. Decorate each cookie with egg white glaze, sliver of sliced almond, sprinkle of sugar.

Bake until slightly brown around the edges. They cook fast. You are allowed to take them out, remove the brownest ones, and put the tray back in for more browning.

Bake at 400F for about six to eight minutes. Watch very carefully.

DO NOT MAKE THESE COOKIES IN THE SUMMERTIME, HUMIDITY WILL RUIN THEM. (I say this because I have done it. They lose crispyness in about thirty minutes. It is horrifying. DO NOT make these cookies in the summertime.)

Mrs. Weaver's Chocolate Cake. Reposted from the old homepage.

( recipe, yo )

Dr. Alt retired. Shit. I really thought he was our best shot to balance the ecology of the state with respect to the fucking deer problem.

I spent most of today doing things to prepare for the holiday. I drove to Altoona and picked up a copy of the Alexander Hamilton biography for Grandma. I made one cherry pie (from scratch), about four million (seven dozen) moravian spice cookies, which are fan-fucking-tastic, mixed up stuff for the sable cookies I saw in the NYT a while back (The Hungry Tiger still has the recipe, if you're interested in playing along.), mixed up pumpkin pies (While I CALL these pumpkin pies, they are actually made out of gooseneck squash. There is no pumpkin involved in them. They are also rather fluffier than you probably think they are.) while ranting about the lack of clarity in the recipe, and otherwise made myself useful in ye olde kitchen.

I'm going to hand out the pumpkin pie recipe, because I know you're all champing at the bit (and it's a pelham!) to make something other than that godawful thing on the Libby canned pumpkin lable. (Canned pumpkin is an abomination before God. Even though he's pretend.) I feel certain every single one of my faithful readers is burning with the desire to buy a huge, pale gooseneck at the fall farmer's market, lug the sumbitch home, and risk life and limb peeling the fucker and whacking it into pieces. I expect every one of you is aching to cook lumps of recalcitrant squash until they are soft enough to run through a food mill. (Everyone has a food mill, right? 'Course you do.) Once you've food-milled the squash to a pulp, you measure out recipe amounts and freeze them for when you wish to have pumpkin pie that's not dark or heavy but is, in point of fact, a squash custard pie that you CALL a pumpkin pie.

Anyway. The recipe.

1 pie tin with a bottom crust (raw and unbaked) in it

1 cup of pureed squash, see rant above. (You can use butternut instead if the thought of processing a twenty-pound squash doesn't fill you with all kinds of pioneering enthusiasm.)
1 1/4 cup milk (The recipe says 1 1/2 but this makes the pie pan too fucking full. I can't be having with that.)
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
3 Tbsp. flour
1 Tbsp. cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon (Both spices said "to taste" but I tasted and measured so that you don't have to.)

Combine everything, mix well.

Elsewhere, beat 2 egg whites to soft peaks.

Now, fold egg whites into squash mix and hit with the beaters once over lightly.

Pour the pie mix (it will be frighteningly liquid, runnier than pancake batter) into the prepared pie tin and put it in a preheated 425 oven for ten minutes. After the ten minutes, reduce heat to 350 and bake until done, a total cooking time of approximately 35 to 40 minutes (tentative!!) and nothing like the fucking hour-and-ten that my stupid ass recipe book says.

The recipe I have says "an hour" after reducing the heat to 350 but this is patently bullshit because I'm sitting here looking at an overdone fucking pie that is way, way beyond the standard of brown I was raised with and that bad boy was only cooked for fifty minutes total before I was forced to rescue it from the oven. (I didn't want to rescue it too soon because if it didn't set up in the middle, it would be LIQUID. Liquid-centered pies are doubleplusungood.) I thought checking it twenty minutes before done-time was a reasonable and not-overly-tardy game plan. Shit. And yes, I damn well did turn the oven down. I *know* how to cook, damn it. FUCK.

This recipe comes out of a handmade binder of family recipes, assembled as an Xmas gift for the girlchildren by my aunt Dora one year. I did not get one of the binders that year. I ALSO didn't get a swiss army knife like the boychildren did. *sigh* I can't win for losing. Anyway, when I pointed out my lack o' recipe binder, Dora gave me one the following year, which was nice. (In fairness, it was reasonable of her to think I wasn't very into the Ku Klux chickieboo lifestyle. Hell, I didn't like kids and I didn't go to church -- how was she supposed to guess I'd be okay with the cooking thing?)

Like most of the other recipes in the book, it would appear that the pumpkin pie recipe assumes huge and vast tracts of knowledge that the person making the recipe is supposed to have. This is problematic because I've never actually made pumpkin pie before and am therefore lacking the vast tracts. I've seen it done, but the adult women in my family (mostly Grandma) always made it themselves. I never got a chance to make it myself until I usurped the pie role from dad's wife this year.

Why the FUCK does it say to bake for an hour after the ten-at-425? No damn way. Forty minutes was pushing it hard. FUCK. Now I have to take an unacceptable pie to my people, who will find it wanting. FUCK FUCK FUCK. FUCK. I do not WANT to be found wanting in front of my people on Xmas. The second pie is baking right now. I am going to add some fucking notes to the fucking recipe and we will not have THIS bullshit again. Note to self: This may explain why Sue produced endless runs of overcooked pumpkin pies while religiously following the recipe. The recipe is a crack-smokin' ho who couldn't identify her own children for another hit off the pipe.

7:55. The pie went in the oven at 7:20. By my clock, that's thirty-five minutes total oven time. It's a hell of a far cry from an hour and ten. However, the custard's set and the top is the proper brown-ness and it's pouffy like it's supposed to be and damn it all, it looks done. I'll let all ya'll know if it's done or liquid in the middle when we cut it tomorrow. Stay tuned.