Cream Improves Practically Everything

I do not usually have heavy cream in my house, but after buying some for a recipe, I used up the remainder by adding a bit anywhere it seemed called for. Suddenly everything I made was calling for it--even my coffee, in which for years I've been preferring milk to half-and-half. The pinnacle of this orgy of butterfat was an amazing salad, quite possibly the best I have ever eaten. Granted, cream alone would not have been enough; the cream was ably assisted by a serendipitous assortment of odds and ends that had collected in my refrigerator.

It started prosaically enough, with a salad-in-a-bag (a romaine/red cabbage/carrot blend on sale for 87 cents--I'd bought three, ironically with the intention of some light, healthy meals to counteract Thanksgiving and its leftovers). I added walnuts, bits of leftover turkey, and apple cubes (a Holiday apple, my new favorite variety, which I have only found at Johnson's Fruit Farm by the cabin). Then I made a dressing of olive oil (the California Estate variety from Trader Joe's that has had me looking for new things to drizzle it on), balsamic vinegar, red wine vinegar, garlic, pepper, and a little salt and sugar. I mixed crumbled blue cheese and bacon (from the pig, cooked so its fat could be used in the poor, unloved Thanksgiving maque choux) in to the dressing, then tossed it into the lettuce mix. I wonder if I will ever have all the right ingredients together again, or if I am destined never to recreate this sublime (and ridiculously rich) salad experience.

The recipe that made me buy cream in the first place is pumpkin stuffed with everything good, a recipe published everywhere to entice one to buy Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours. (I have so far resisted the actual buying, but it's sitting in my Amazon cart tempting me.) I'd tried stuffing a pumpkin with good things once before and it was disappointingly bland, but the concept seemed so wonderful that I tried again, and I'm glad I did. The key difference was probably that this time I had a better pumpkin: sweet and smooth-textured where the other had been stringy and watery. More of the good bacon left from making maque choux fat helped, as did lots of garlic and fresh chives and thyme (dug from under snow in my backyard, but still good). I used raw-milk Swiss cheese. (The recipe's suggestion of cheddar as an alternative seems wrong: I love cheddar cheese but in this recipe Swiss is a natural accompaniment to the bacon, garlic, and herbs.) And of course there was the magic cream. It was very, very good, and very, very rich. It would be better to eat with a group of people so each person can only have a small portion; tempted into a second helping, I felt a little ill afterward.

Finally, I rediscovered how much more delicious even the most delicious pasta sauce becomes with the addition of a little cream. For the pasta in the picture, I improvised a lemon-cream sauce using lemon-flavored sea salt. It was good but would have been better if I'd had an actual lemon. Even better is adding a little cream to a tomato sauce, any tomato sauce.

Delicious as this creamy interlude has been, I hope that I can stop it from becoming a staple. I admit I bought a carton yesterday, but it was only because I had a coupon, I swear.

Maybe this will have to be a New Year's resolution.

Thanksgiving

My job was rolls and vegetable. Rolls should have been easy, but I managed to mess them up (not too horribly--they were one of Betsy's favorite parts of the meal and Brian commented favorably on them--but they were dry, lacking the chewy quality I look for in a dinner roll). I followed the The Fannie Farmer Cookbook basic recipe, increasing the butter and sugar a bit as my "Aunt Timmy's Dinner Rolls" recipe card says one can do for richer rolls. Probably one of my mistakes was not increasing them enough: I think I used just one extra tablespoon of each. My next mistake was that because I was baking them next to each other in cake pans I decided to bake them for a longer time at a lower temperature, as one might for a loaf of bread as opposed to rolls (none of Fanny Farmer's suggested shapes had the rolls touching each other during baking). Finally, using part bread flour when I ran out of all-purpose might have had an adverse effect.

I couldn't settle on a vegetable. Green beans, Brussels sprouts, corn, and creamed onions all seem Thanksgiving-y to me (though none are traditional parts of our family meal) and there was a spinach recipe that just sounded really good to me, so I headed to the grocery store still undecided. This probably wasn't a good idea as I ended up making three vegetables, two of which were practically untouched.

I think only Dorothy and I ate any of the creamed onions, this recipe more or less (I added a bit of grated nutmeg and I think used slightly more onions). I'd considered a fancier recipe involving pearl onions and actual cream, but decided that it would likely end up watery if made in advance and transported to Dorothy's house. I'd still like to try this recipe sometime but am glad I didn't go to the expense and bother of pearl onions for a gathering of non-onion-fans. (My mom later said if she'd seen them she'd have had some; I don't know how she missed them as they were the front dish in my trio of vegetable dishes.) Despite their unpopularity, however, I will continue to make the onions-in-white-sauce version for my own and Dorothy's enjoyment every Thanksgiving; I find them the perfect accompaniment to usually-dryish turkey meat.

Maque Choux from A Love Affair with Southern Cooking: Recipes and Recollections was a better (and more authentic judging from various Southern cookbooks I looked at) version of this Cajun corn dish than the creamy Epicurious one I tried last Thanksgiving. But I think I'm going to give up on my attempt to make corn a feature of Thanksgiving dinner, for no matter how appropriately Pilgrims-and-Indians-y it seems to me, no one wants to eat it (I did enjoy having leftovers to eat, so don't regret having made it). Perhaps some year I'll attempt an extra stuffing of sausage and cornbread (would never replace Grandma Dorothy's stuffing, but as far as I'm concerned, stuffing's the best part of Thanksgiving dinner and there can never be too much).

Finally, there was the extremely easy, quite delicious, and wildly popular Roasted Brussels Sprouts recipe from the Thanksgiving Google logo (an Ina Garten recipe that I later discovered I had copied last summer into my recipes-to-try notebook). I plan to make this every year and highly recommend it.

Everyone else made delicious food too, of course.

November 20th: Much Was Cooked

The big project of the day was beef broth made from two large bags of bones that needed to come out of the freezer before the pork and bacon could go in. I anticipated wonderful smells from roasting bones and was disappointed when a dark, smelly substance oozed from one enormous bone, but I threw out that bone and soldiered on. There was a pleasant interlude when the house smelled of roasting onion, but the unpleasant smell of beef fat and whatever it was that oozed lingered in the house all week, which didn't seem like a fair reward for my labors. Of course, I also had some good stock. Once again, I went to The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution for a recipe.

Thyme and parsley from the yard were still usable and I had tomatoes, carrots, onions, and garlic in the house, so the only recipe-specific purchase was celery. I only needed a stalk or two, but as I'd placed it poorly in the refrigerator such that it froze, my first project with the finished broth was braised celery from The Victory Garden Cookbook: delicious, but sadly unattractive.

The stock had to simmer for many hours so I had to cook other things to eat that day. Baked sweet potato chips and mustard greens cooked with onion and hot pepper flakes were delicious together.

Most of the stock became a perfectly adequate beef barley soup, hearty and undistinguished.

Chili

Cleaning out the refrigerator again: note the limpness of the cilantro and the shriveled peppers. Ground beef from the freezer (this happened back before I sold my remaining pounds of ground beef from the cow back to my mom), beans and tomatoes from cans, miscellaneous vegetables, and cumin, oregano and chili powder combined into a chili good enough that I was willing to eat it all week.

An Acceptable Alternative to Take-Out

I came home craving Chinese. Of course, I can't order Chinese without getting a variety of dishes, so I always end up spending more than I usually spend on groceries in a week on three or four times as much food as I need. I had an order planned out, but some show I wanted to watch was starting at 8:00 (this post is so long delayed that I no longer remember what) and I was afraid I wouldn't make it back in time. At 7:30, I needed a true 30-minute meal. (And clearly I need a DVR.)

Carrots and onions are staples I almost always have around and a good part of my sixth of a cow is still in my freezer. Luckily I also had frozen broccoli and in a moment of weakness--I try to resist pre-made items--I had bought a bottle of black bean and garlic sauce at some point.

This all serendipitously combined into an adequate substitute for the takeout I craved, cheaply and in less than half-an-hour, so it counts as a success. Though I'm still kind of craving Chinese.

The Rest of the Chicken Broth

Neither of my results photographed attractively enough for a top picture, though both were delicious. As planned, I took one element from each of the two recipes I'd originally chosen because they were the two I'd already bought: kale and butternut squash. Cooked together in the broth they made an easy, healthy, and delicious soup.

I followed the risotto bianco recipe from The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution and it was delicious. Still, no risotto has yet convinced me it's worth the time spent stirring when there are so many equally delicious rice dishes and Italian dishes that require less effort. I ate it with a sort of stew of Italian sausage, tomatoes, onions, and zucchini.

A Rescue

This doesn't look like much but given the circumstances I was very pleased. I'd sauteed smoked garlic sausage (from the West Side Market coupon-using trip) with onion, then added cubed, cold, baked potatoes. I left them to meld flavors over low heat (not low enough, as it turned out). By the time I returned they were burnt and stuck to the bottom. I quickly removed the pan from the heat and added some cold water. When the burnt part soaked off the pan and into the water I stirred it in. (I know it is usually advisable to rescue the non-burnt part from the rest before the burnt flavor contaminates it, but this was too badly stuck and not too badly burnt.) Because it had just begun to burn, most of the stuck-on part was just deeply browned, so the whole mess turned a deep red-brown and tasted OK. Not OK enough that I was eager to eat it for lunch for the next three days, however, and that was its intended destiny. As I'd be eating it cold, I was inspired to make it a potato salad. I added minced garlic, olive oil, and sherry vinegar, and the result was good enough that I was actually sorry when it was gone.

Fruit-Filled Ladder Loaf

I made this recipe once or twice when I was in law school and, as was then my habit with successful recipes, copied it into a blank book. I later discarded the cookbook, but found what seems to be the same recipe here. As you can probably tell from the pictures, I used the streusel topping rather than the powdered sugar icing and made one with apples and one with peaches. They were good, but if I make them again I will reduce or eliminate the allspice and nutmeg. I think cinnamon alone would complement the fruit without overwhelming it as the mixture of all three did.

Chicken Stock and Beyond

I am remembering to take food pictures far more often than I'm finding time to post. When I took this photo of gallons of chicken stock, I intended to divide it and freeze in the amounts called for in the recipes for Carrot Soup, Risotto Bianco, Curly Kale and Potato Soup, White Bean and Butternut Squash Soup, Spicy Cauliflower Soup, and Red Pepper Soup from The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (which was also the source of the stock recipe. I'm not a fan of Alice Waters and last year resold the few Chez Panisse cookbooks I'd acquired over the years. But then the Tipsy Baker blogger, who is also not a Waters fan, tested and wrote about this book and called it a shelf essential and a fabulous primer (also saying it has the charisma of a turnip:-). Somehow Tipsy Baker's opinions compel me to order brand-new cookbooks, something I normally don't do. I've only tried a couple of recipes so far, and while they have been fine, they've tasted very much like the kinds of things I throw together without a recipe on an average weeknight.

I made all this stock because one of the things I bought on a trip to the West Side Market with my mom to use Entertainment Book coupons before they expired was six lbs. of chicken backs (buy three, get three free!). I like the idea of making a lot of stock to have on hand, but probably won't do it again unless I buy a freezer (in addition to my top-of-the-fridge one). I couldn't fit all the stock in my freezer and didn't have the exact ingredients for any of the recipes, so the first thing I tried with it was a perfectly acceptable and completely unexciting soup onions, potatoes, and carrots cooked in the stock and pureed.

When it reached a point that I had to use or throw out the remaining non-frozen stock, I didn't feel up to any actual cooking but was craving vegetables. (Most of the coupons were for meat so I'd been seriously overdoing protein-heavy meals). I bought fresh spinach, planning to cook pasta in the stock, stir in spinach and garlic, and top it with Parmesan cheese. I'd like to try it again sometime with less stock; I'd been hoping that the stock with the starch from cooking the pasta would thicken into a light sauce, but it ended up pretty soupy. Part of the problem was that I washed the spinach and used it wet, diluting the stock/sauce.

I made this the day storms swept the Midwest and left an amazing sunset in their wake. A nice thing about keeping my camera in the kitchen for impromptu food photos is that I now take impromptu photographs of other things as well. The picture at the top of the post is what the autumn leaves looked like in the sunset light; I decided that vats of yellow liquid made an unpleasant larger picture so used this instead. Here's the sunset itself: 

I finally made it to the grocery store with a shopping list and bought the ingredients for Spicy Cauliflower Soup. I enjoyed it, especially with the suggested toppings of yogurt, cilantro, and lime juice. Next, taking advantage of what I already have, I will probably make a cross between a couple of the recipes listed above, using kale with butternut squash and skipping the potatoes and white beans. Watch this space to see if/when I get around to this; with kale wilting in the fridge, I hope it's soon!

Crispy Chicken with Crunchy Garlic

Ordered at Bo Loong. Delicious, but desperately in need of a vegetable side to go with its plain white rice accompaniment. Could have ordered one of course, but didn't.

Banana Pecan Muffins

Too many of these posts begin with having something past its prime that I have to use up. Would that I had enough time to shop for and immediately use the best and freshest!

Or maybe I should consider the blog theme to be "ways to use what needs using." That certainly reflects my cooking style most of the time.

This time it was three bananas that by Tuesday were so brown that when I picked one up by the stem, the rest fell off. I peeled them right then so that the peels could go out for the Wednesday morning trash pickup, and put the fruit in a covered bowl in the refrigerator. Even on the weekend I had no energy to deal with them until today, Sunday, when it was more a matter of time running out than a sudden surge of energy.

I used this recipe. (If you read the blog post it accompanies, notice the link to a recipe for banana bread with chocolate chips and candied ginger: that's the bread I brought to the cabin in August, though I took it from the book (A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table), not the blog.

I'd seen a variation of these muffins on another blog that added 1 t salt and 1 T of vanilla. I decided to stick with the original, mostly because I'm running low on vanilla and my vanilla beans have a few more weeks of soaking in vodka before I can consider the combination vanilla extract. I did add a pinch of salt because I like a bit of salty in my sweet. I probably would have liked them better with the whole teaspoon, but I wanted them to be a reasonably healthy breakfast. In pursuit of this, I also used whole wheat pastry flour instead of white flour and maybe that's why mine aren't as handsome and fluffy as the one in the blog picture, but mine didn't seem too dense so I think it's that I didn't fill the muffin cups as much.

Unlike the muffins, the loaf clung.

Muffin tins annoy me by never being the same size as any other muffin tins. I'm not talking about the tins for mini-muffins or jumbo muffins, but for ostensibly-standard-size muffins. This recipe said it made 18, and even though I under-filled my 12-muffin tin, I didn't have enough left for six more, so I poured it into the bread pan that already needed washing because I'd toasted the pecans in it. I was afraid it would take longer to cook, but was too hungry to stay in the kitchen and watch it, so I turned off the oven and left it in after I took the muffins out. That was a mistake because, having sat and cooled in the pan, it was unwilling to let go.

My new sifter

My bananas were small, so I used all three. I also, as always, reduced the sugar, but only by a tiny bit. For once, sugar reduction was unnecessary, perhaps because the recipe source was French rather than American. The muffins were not at all too sweet and next time I would go ahead and use the full amount called for. Other than that (and the salt and whole wheat) I followed the recipe exactly: I even sifted the dry ingredients (a step I tend to skip because until a couple of weeks ago I didn't own a sifter--if the step seemed important, I'd shake it through a mesh strainer).

Good Combinations

I had a pile of lovely tomatoes I'd been given (my first really good garden tomatoes of the summer) that I left unused for a couple of days. When I realized they wouldn't last much longer I made the best of them into dinner, above, with garlic, basil, olive oil, and asiago cheese. The rest I cooked with pale purple eggplants that, while shriveled, were beautifully white inside. When I cut open even the loveliest standard eggplants, there are usually brown streaks and spots inside, so now I plan to buy these pretty pale purple ones whenever I see them. I added salt, garlic, and herbs from the garden (marjoram, oregano, and basil, I think) for flavor.

No more eggplant posts for a while, I promise. Not that there's anything wrong with eggplant; it just seems over-represented so far.

A couple of my favorite things recently aren't really cooking, just simple combining. Sparkling water over ice mixed with lemon or lime juice and lightly sweetened with ginger syrup is delicious and refreshing. And at our annual school picnic, someone brought what appeared to be just green grapes, feta cheese, and mint; everybody loved it. I wish I knew who made it, because when I list those ingredients, I feel like they wouldn't bind together properly without some moistening, but the version at the picnic didn't seem to have oil or vinegar or juice or anything else. Maybe I'd just try not letting the grapes dry after washing them.