One a day, plus iron

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.

I don't know what the deal is this year with the holiday. I've shopped for absolutely nobody. I don't feel moved to shop. Fuck it.

On the other hand, I have made two batches of sand tarts, am in the waiting for the butter to soften stage of making a third batch, and have a batch of damn moravian spice cookie dough chilling overnight in the fridge so that I can make the damn things tomorrow morning. They will be round and unmarred by icing, the way I like them. I have no idea why I'm making with all the housewife cookery bullshit, but what the hell. I'm good at it and it's aesthetically pleasing to me. Beats the hell out of randomly slaughtering people in a McDonald's somewhere, anyway.

For those playing along at home, here's the deal.

Moravian spice cookies. These are suitable for hanging on your tree if you're Martha-Stewart enough to want to do that sort of thing. I don't do that because I don't have a tree. They're good with coffee and they keep for a long, long time -- both big pluses for the household of one. They're also really crunchy. I like crunchy.

Combine in a big bowl:
4 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

Fluff this with a fork or a whisk or something to kind of make sure it's all mixed. If you're a true believer, you can sift or run it through the blender but I find that sort of thing is not really necessary and it means more mess and more cleanup. Smells good, though, doesn't it?

In a DIFFERENT bowl, cream

1/2 cup butter (real)
1/2 cup light brown sugar

When creamed, add 1 cup light molasses. Grandma's is a palatable national brand. Mix well.

Add the dry ingredients in thirds. Handheld mixers usually don't do well after the first two thirds. (I do not actually use a mixer at all to make cookies. I use a steel bowl and a wooden spoon. I'm not a fan of mixers for making cookies, though I do own one and use it for some other baking.) Kind of knead the last bit in by hand. It'll seem kind of dry, but give it a minute. It'll get sticky.

Like with the sand tarts, this dough has to sit in the fridge overnight. Divvy it up into four equal lumps, make each lump into a hamburger-patty shape, and put it in a ziplock for the night.

Preheat oven to 375. Roll out dough very thin (aim for 1/8" thick), cut into shapes. I make these round since nobody has seen fit to get me a full set of card-suit shapes. (HINT to the family!! If you people don't want to eat round cookies forever, you will buy me a set of card-suit cookie cutters that all match and are to the same scale. I like metal cookie cutters, not plastic ones.)

Keep the house cool and work quickly. Don't piss around. This dough, like that for sand tarts, gets icky when it warms up.

Bake cookies on GREASED non-air-bake cookie sheets (Look, I just don't like the air-bake sheets.) six to eight minutes. They don't move much, so you can kind of crowd them. You DO have to grease the sheets -- there's so little fat in the cookies that they will stick badly if you don't. I use Crisco for this purpose. IMPORTANT: If you're doing the hang-them-on-the-tree thing, you need to poke holes in the cookies with a toothpick at the halfway-done point. The cookies are done a lot closer to six minutes than they are eight, so watch. Since they're so brown, it's sometimes hard to tell done-ness. Eat your mistakes if you make any.

These will get VERY hard when cool. They crunch delightfully. They're sturdy.

If you're dorky enough to want to frost them (or have children who could be entertained with this project), that is made with 1/3 cup of egg white and 4 cups of confectioner's sugar. You apply it with a toothpick or, if you've got Williams-Sonoma on speed dial, a pastry bag and small round tip. It'll air-dry hard without any work on your part unless you live somewhere hot and humid like Singapore. If you buy that crappy-ass shit in the tube, I do not want to know about it. That shit tastes like wallpaper paste. Please don't do that. You worked so hard... they're really quite nice cookies and they don't deserve crappy-ass tube frosting.