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.