recipe: african stew

Last night, while I should have been revising my novel and cretiquing my partners' work, we took time off to make dinner with friends and play some mahjong with the set H brought back from China for us. I can only say that this is one of the most delicious soups I have ever had, and we have firm plans to make it again with different vegetables and different meats to see how it goes. We're thinking orange veggies, like butternut squash, pumpkin, sweet potato, things like that would be good as a blended soup. We're thinking potatoes and carrots. We're thinking beef stew meat, left to cook for several hours, maybe in a crock pot.

We served this in handmade bread bowls (handmade by Publix, but still handmade), and it was perfect.

Ingredients

4 cups water
3 each chicken bouillon cubes
1/3 cup curry paste (or can be dry curry)
2 Tablespoons ground coriander, toasted
2 Tablespoons granulated garlic
4 cups coconut milk
¼ cup sugar
3 Tablespoons soy sauce
2 pounds beef/pork/chicken, large diced
2 cups mixed red and green peppers, diced
2 cups onions, diced
½ cup whole kernel corn, frozen
1 bay leaf
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 Tablespoons cornstarch (make slurry)

Method:

1. In kettle, heat water, chicken bouillon cubes, curry paste, ground coriander, and granulated garlic. Let boil and add in sugar and coconut milk.

2. Add in the soy sauce and the diced meat. Let simmer for 20 minutes.

3. Add vegetables, spices, and cook until tender.

4. Bring to a boil and add cornstarch slurry slowly to the mixture and whisk until thickened.

From the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disney.

Acorn squash soup

Making the best of leftovers.

It's really hard to take a decent picture of soup on a cellphone.

This is basically a different sort of what'cha'got soup. Normally, I'd throw it all into a minestrone sort of deal or maybe into a Gypsy Stew*, but today, I didn't have the right ingredients for either of those things, so I went for the Ally Method of what'cha'got soup making. I had 2 very old acorn squash, one fire-baked potato, one fire-roasted onion, some shallots, some garlic, some milk, some stock cubes, and a selection of spices and herbs**.

The method!
As usual in situations like this, I didn't measure anything, so you'll have to eyeball it.

Cut the acorn squash in half, clean out the seeds and the worst of the fibers, and microwave for about 6 or 8 minutes under damp paper towels until soft enough to scoop out.

While that's nuking, sautee your fire-roasted onions (previously cooked for about a half hour in in tinfoil in the embers of a fire pit), your shallot and your two or so cloves of garlic in a mix of olive oil and butter until everything is sweet and caramelized. The roasted onion gets a jump on that, but if you don't have one, you can caramelize from raw, it'll just take longer.

Put your stock cubes in hot water and make it into stock. I had one each of veggie, beef and chicken, and added five cups of boiling water (which is one cup less than the stock instructions called for, but that's how big by bowl was and it seems fine).

Scoop out all the meat from the squash and just drop it right into the onions. Don't burn yourself too much. Stir it all around and mash it up some with the spoon. Chop up the old baked potato with most of the skin taken off, and throw that in, too.

Add all the broth, stir it up real good, and mash it some more. I used a potato masher. Start seasoning. I have no idea how much I threw in, but it was about two rounds of the following: Fresh cracked black pepper, sea salt, thyme, a little saffron (this only went in once because it's expensive and I don't have much), cinnamon, nutmeg, five spice powder, sage, cayenne, bay leaf, . Old squash are apparently not as sweet as fresh, so I added some wildflower honey (local, of course, because I'm a honey snob). Cook it a lot.

While it's cooking, periodically mash it up more and stir it vigorously to get it all breaking down. Check on flavorings. It should be sweet and savory.

Mine started burning on the bottom of the pan, and that really just added to the roasty flavor and gave it a nice orangy-brown color, but I wouldn't let it burn too much.

Once everything starts looking like it's not going to mash up any more without help, you can blenderize it or use one of those motorboat blenders. Our blender was mouldy and we don't have a motorboat, so I ran the whole giant batch through a fine-mesh sieve***, which took way too long and used up, like, three mixing bowls, but came out with a nice texture.

Throw it all back into the pot, stir it until it's smooth and check on seasoning. Add about 2/3 to a whole cup of milk (less if you have cream) and some more butter, and heat it back up until the butter is totally melted.

Gobble it all up like woah. Perfect fall soup, and would likely work with almost any squash, or sweet potatoes, or root veggies. Ally frequently makes her's curried, and that would have been nice here, too, except I unaccountably couldn't find the curry powder, so I went for thanksgivingy seasonings instead.



*Gypsy Stew is defined by old room mates as anything you can beg, borrow or steal, thrown into a soup pot. In practice, it's usually chicken or veggie broth based, and almost always thickened with rice and beans, and usually eaten communally out of small cups with many servings.
**I think you can judge how much people like cooking and eating by how many spices they have. Our collection outgrew anything as simple as a spice rack and now resides in the entire knife drawer beside the stove. We have literally dozens of distinct herbs and spices, almost all bought individually for specific meals we've been making over the last few years, not as kits or anything like that.
***Someone should buy me a hand-powered food mill for Christmas. Or an immersion blender, but I kind of like the freedom of old-fashioned tools.

Tea heals all wounds

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Especially when I'm sick and especially especially when I'm sick in the winter (and this is about as wintery as FL gets, usually (even if this year seems to be trending more like a real winter)), I crave tea. To quote my ninth grade piano teacher Ms Perrette, "My tea cup looks like the inside of a smoker's lung" because it's never empty long enough to bother scrubbing it out. Well, I crave tea all the time no matter what, but in the summer, it's more alone the lines of iced tea* or barley tea**/ mugicha. In the winter, I crave hot, black tea. I rarely sweeten my tea, but I tend to like the ones that go well with sugar and milk in case I decide I want to: this is Rose Black Tea from Butterfly Brand***, the one that comes in an almost-plain box at the Asian Market, for, like, two dollars. It's the best and most rosy black tea I've ever had, less floral than the British rose-flavored teas, but more authentic-rose flavored and scented. It tastes like summer in places where roses grow easily and bloom all through the sunny months. I don't drink it in the summer because it's too... too summery for that. It's distilled summer. Summer for winter days.



* Brewed as black as coffee on the stove for a long time-- like, 45 minutes-- uncut until you pour it over ice, very sweet, and spiked with a fresh lime wedge or two. This is how my mom makes it. The closest I've found out in the wild, strangely enough, is McDonalds or Wendy's; Wendy's tends to be too sweet but is usually dark enough, and McD tends to be too light, but is properly sweet. And ours is about half the time gross with oldness, so I usually go for the too sweet Wendy's.
** Get yer teabag and boil it for a few minutes, then chill the tea in the fridge and it's delicious. I tried the cold-brew kind before and found it both watery and bitter in an unpleasant way.
*** http://steepster.com/teas/butterfly-brand/4141-rose-black-tea?post=56632

Stuffed Cabbage

These are so delicious I totally don't even mind if they're the sort of meal that takes up all the dishes in the kitchen.

You're supposed to make them with ground beef, but all I had was raw italian sausage, so I just took that out of the casing and used that instead, and it was fine.

Here's how I did it:

- Put a half cup of rice to boil with broth instead of water-- I used beef broth, 1 c to the 1/2 of rice. Cook it till it's done, then let it sit around till you're ready with it.

- Meanwhile, try to peel off the cabbage leaves. The really tough outer ones you can ditch, and then the really tight inner ones, just shred like you're making coleslaw; you'll need a little of it for the filling, and the rest goes in the pot. When they're all ready (a big head is supposed to give you 12; ours made 8), boil some water and drop them in for three minutes or so untill they're all pliable and the stems aren't rigid anymore.

- Meanwhile meanwhile, cook three or four strips of bacon on low heat so all the fat comes out. When they're crisp, pull them out and let them cool so you can crumble them, and cook a minced onion and four or six cloves of garlic in the grease. I also used some olive oil so it's really moist. 

- By now, the leaves should be readyish. Take them out and let them cool.

- In a big bowl, mix the raw sausage, the rice, an egg, a half of another minced onion, the bacon crumbles, a handful of the shredded cabbage minced a little smaller, and some pepper. You probably won't need salt.

- Back at the onions, add a can of chopped tomatoes (this was supposed to be plain tomato sauce, but chopped is what we had and it turned out fine), and maybe two more cups of whichever broth you used, and a few tablespoons cider vinegar and / or red wine vinegar, and a palmfull of sugar. More pepper, then a tablespoon or so of paprika. Mix it all up and let it simmer on med-low while you do the rest.

- Dump the leaf-boiling water and fill the bottom of the warm pot with half the shredded cabbage.

- Fill the leaves by putting them so they curve up like little floppy bowls. Scoop about a palmfull of the mixed filling and shape it into a loaf shape-- something about the size of a nokia phone or something, 2" by 4" ish. Pushing around so it nuzzles hear the sharpest par tof the curve, and push that part down over the meat, then fold the sides in and roll the rest up. Keep them seam-side down so they don't unroll and keep going until all your leaves are full. They should be full, but not so full that they don't close-- you want to be able to pick them up.

- If there's any meat left, layer it over the shredded cabbage in the pot, and top with the rest of it. If there's no meat left, just throw the rest of the cabbage in. Even it out and pack it down just a little bit. 

- Put in all the wrapped cabbage leaves. It's okay to pack them in so long as they're still little logs-- don't deform them. It's also okay to layer them.

- Spoon in all the tomato-onion sauce evenly over them. Wet it down with some more broth to make up what eveporated while it was simmering. 

- Put a tight-fitting lid on it and let it cook on a high simmer for an hour to an hour and a half until the sausage is cooked through.

- Eat them and the nummy potbits under them as quickly as the heat will allow because they're so good that eveyone else eating them with you will eat them all if you dawdle.

** These can apparently be made the same way in a crock pot-- just instead of putting them in a stovetop pot for an hour, put them in a crockpot for 4 to 8.

Yummy Pasta!

We've decided to get proper nutrition by taking turns making dinner. Last night was C's turn, and in classic C fashion, she made a whole dinner for four with no idea what it was going to be before she made it. 

And it was delicious.

It's onions sauteed with garlic to start, then chopped portabellas, and that's the base of the sauce. Then it's a can of tomato paste and Italian seasonings and salt and pepper to taste, chopped sauteed Italian sausage (the johnsonville ones have lots of yummy fat and salt and fennel), and literal handfulls of parmesan cheese, and all of this mixed with boiled egg noodles, which give it a different texture and flavor than the usual spagetti or regular pasta.

Om yom.

Here's a bonus picture of the lovely H (of BrokenLanguage.net) dishing up the meal for us. I somehow managed not to get a pic of C, even though she's the one who made it! What a bad one I am.

Happy Pancake Day!

I don't know how many people here in the states celebrate it, but when I was in Scotland, the tuesday before Lent was all about pancakes-- apparently, you were supposed to get rid of your butter, eggs and flour before the fasting of Lent, so what do you get when you combine them? Pancakes!

We ate ours boozy with rum-butter so we could also give a nod to Mardi Gras. Heh. So much for deprivation!

Also, chesck out my new camera! Good pictures! Whoo!

Also also, I need to work on looking better while I eat...

Stamppot Boerenkool By Way of Bangers and Mash

I saw this on the Food Network ages ago, and really only remembered that there were potatoes cooked in beef broth, weensy-chopped kale and sausages. I couldn't find a recipe that was exactly what I was thinking, so I read, like, seven and combined them the way I wanted to, and came out with something similar to what I was thinking and similar to Bangers and Mash. I'm pretty sure they cooked it in a crockpot sort of deal on FN, but I did away with that. 

Here's how it went:

Peel and chop a bunch of potatoes and set them to cook in a whole box of beef broth. Boil like you would for anything else.

Meanwhile, put four pieces of smoked bacon on low heat to melt out all the fat and cook them until they're crispy as you like, then remove them and let them cool while you cook a thinly-sliced onion in the fat. Cook until it's all melty and golden, then remove and replace with a sausage for everyone who's eating. I wanted a smoked brat, but I couldn't find any, so I used regular brats, and they turned out just fine. I think it's the sausageyness that matters, not what kind of sausage you use, though the recipes usually call for 'smoked sausage' or 'farmer's sausage'. I'm not huge on keilbasa, but that's probably good too.

While they're browning up on both sides, finely chop a whole bunch of fresh freen kale, disgarding bad leaves, yellow or tough bits and stems. You can save the stems for soup or something. 

When the sausages are all browned, but not cooked through, add the onions, the bacon and the kale on top of them, and ladle in enough of the broth from the potatoes to make it, like, three-quarters of an inch deep. You're braising here, not boiling. Cover it with a lid, and let it cook on medium or medium-high while the potatoes finish cooking. 

When they're done, pull them out of the broth (don't throw it away!), and mash them like regular mashed potatoes, but with alot of pepper and some of the broth as well as milk and butter to make them creamy. 

Pull out the sausages, which should be almost cooked through, and spread the kale, onions and bacon on top of the mashed potatoes. 

Throw the cooking broth from the potatoes into the pan where the sauage and bacon were cooked, and simmer it until it's thickened up and starts to look like onion gravy, then add the sausages back in to finish off.

Serve the topped potatoes with one sausage and some gravy, and there you go!

~:) Delicious Dinner (tm)!

BLT Pasta Salad

We all know BLTs, right? Well, yesterday, H turned it into a pasta salad that was perfect for dinner. 

Like So:

Cook chicken with alot of garlic and dill, chop up and set aside.

Cook up bacon, chop up and set aside (H used turkey bacon, but we think it'd be more punchy with regular piggy bacon).

Cook pasta and set aside (we used a whole box of elbow macaroni).

Chop a tomato, a cuke with all the seeds scooped out, and all the greens from a whole bunch of green onions (we replanted the ends in the garden-- the roots are just fine, and they'll grow us new onions fro free!), and half a bag of baby spinach (to stand in for the lettuce, which really has no place in a pasta salad).

Cook fresh or frozen peas (you want the solidity of non-canned, but if canned is all you can get, go for it).

Throw it all into a really big bowl that you can move it around in, and mix it with about a third a bottle of ranch dressing, a few dollops of Miracle Whip, a spoon or two of mustard (we used orange honey mustard because that was the one we had), and chill for a few hours. 

Eat it all up. It served four dinner, three leftovers and two lunches today.

Om nom.

Home Made Hummus and Winter Tabouleh on Home Made Pita

Yeah, I totally made pita. That's what happens when I want a specific bread and we don't have any, but we do have flour. And lemme tell you, they were the best pitas I've ever had.

Start with tap-hot water and two-thirds of a cup of steel-cup oats. This is for the Winter Tabouleh, not the pita, so if you're not making that, skip. (note: normally, this is bulgar wheat, but I didn't have any, and oats are wintery. Be sure they're 'steel cut'-- rolled oats will only get squishy.)

Make the pitas thusly:

Mix two teaspoons of yeast with a third cup of warm water and let it sit whil you prep the rest. I added a blob of brownsugar to give the yeast something to eat.

Sift three cups of flour into a big ol' bowl with a teaspoon and a half of salt. 

Add a tablespoon of honey / sugar / sweet stuff and two tablespoons of olive oil / veggie oil / melted butter. I used honey and oilve oil because I figured they'd be more historically accurate. mix in the yummy yeast-water; it should look like soy milk if the yeast has woken up-- thick and offwhite and creamy, a little frothy. Add up to another cup of water while you keep stirring-- add it in spashes, and stop when the flour is all wet and it forms a big sticky ball in the bowl. I used a rice paddle because I'm convinced they work for everything that needs hand-stirring, but, like, a wooden spoon or the like would work too. I guess a standup mixer would work; I don't have one, so I don't know, but I do know that some of them come with bread attatchments. I think they're cheating, because bread isn't that hard to make. 

Flour the counter and dump the breadball onto it. Knead it for ten minutes or so by folding the far edge toward you and squishing it in with a rolling-way-from-you sort of motion. Like making big circles: pull the edge toward you and then squoosh all the middle parts away from you. Then turn it and do it again. And again and again and again, adding more flour whenit even looks like it might get sticky-- but just a dusting. Too much makes it crap. When it feels firm and even, roll it all back into a ball and oil the scraped-out mixing bowl. There shouldn't be much to scrape if it's mixed well before hand. Drop the breadball back in, and flip it or spray it so the top is oiled, too... just not, like drenched. You want it like tanning spray, so it doesn't dry out while it's rising. Cover it with a clean towel, sprinkle some water over the top, and let it sit for one and a half to two hours.

While that' sitting, make all your yummies.

Hummus is easy: a drained can of chickpeas, a bunch of garlic, some lemon juice (a few tablespoons; i like mine lemony), salt and pepper, either some tahini, some sesame seeds, or a very very very small amount of sesame oil. Very small. Like, eighth of a teaspoon or less, or that's all you taste. Blenderize or super-mash it while adding a little olive oil at a time until it looks like hummus and has a spreadable consistency. Chickpeas can take alot of oil, so this isn't really all that difficult.

The Winter Tabouleh is easy, too, but takes more time. Take your soaked oats-- they should be eatably soft but not mushy-- and drain them as best as you can without squahing them into goo. Finely mince a cup and a half of carrot tops (organic and clean so you can eat them, of course. they taste like strong parsley, which is the more usual Tablouleh ingredient, and are a little tougher, so just be sure to mince them really small), and toss it in. Chop some tomatoes-- I used about a handful of grape tomatoes, chopped in half and then in quarters. A little salt and pepper, some olive oil and lemonjuice, a lovely good mix, and there you are.

Preheat the oven to 450ish. 400 if you have a hot oven; I don't. put a cookie sheet upside down on the middle rack if you don't have a pizza stone (most of us dont).

Now, back to the pitas. Once they've risen for two hoursish, re-flour the counter and dump the bred on it. Squish it down a little-- just a little. Working it will squish it more, and you want some of the yeasty gases to stay in. I just patted it like I was making a snowman or something. Chop it into eight sections (i used a metal flipper because I don't have a decently sharp knife or a board scraper), and ball them into little rounds. Let them sit for 20 minutes under the dampish towel. When they've rested, flatten them down a little and then pretand you're making little pizzas-- pick them up and stretch them and pull them into little rounds about 6 or 7 inches across and less then a half inch thick. When the oven is hot, toss them directly onto the hot cookie sheet and keep the oven closed for three minutes. You can take them out now, if you like really soft pitas, but I like mine slightly toastier, so I flipped them and waited another minute and a half, then pulled them. Wrap them up in a towl to keep them warm and tender while the others cook-- I could cook three at a time, so it took three goes with one batch of only two. In ten minutes, you've got pitas!

The way they puff up, they make their own little pockets. When they're cool enough to handle, stuff them with the hummus and tabouleh and nom nom nom to your heart's content!

CSA Soup!

Unfortunately, the pictures I took of the haul were entirely blacked out by a stuck shutter that I didn't realize I had, so you can't see it, but I figired it out in time to take this picture of the soup I made the first night:

Note the offcentered-ness because the lcd is still busted. But I kind of like it.

Anyway, it's made like so:

Into the biggest pot you have, throw a bunch of broth. I used the last of our turkey stock (one old yogurt tub, so, like, two cups? three?) and a tub of roasted chicken stock (probably about two cups). Turn the heat on and let them start to melt as you prep, if they're frozen; if not, leave the heat off until everything's in.

sautee some thinly sliced meat. I used chuck, which is fatty and flavorsome. Add it to the broth.

Sautee an onion and a few cloves of garlic (but a few, I mean, like, five; we're garlic-folk) in olive oil until they're all yummy and golden. Toss them into the broth.

Chop and toss in two stalks of broccoli, florets and as much as the stalk as will chop easily (stalks are tasty and full of fiber!); four carrots and the minced tops of one of them, if the carrots are organic and with tops; two big red potatoes, skins on; a handful or so of fingerling potatoes, skins on; a half to one whole sweet potato, skins on; a half-pint of wee little tomatoes, chopped some.

Add salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary and basil. 

Boil it a bit until everything's eatably soft, probably somewhere around a half hour, then add a big handful of chopped fresh spinach and continue cooking until the spinach is all soft and melty.

Eat it up yum yum!

CSA CSA CSA!

Our first csa package came in! And our second, because someone else canceled the order after they were on the road, so we got literally a full-table-top's worth of food for 35$! I have pictures, but I can't find the cord; I'll post them later. Here's the rundown: like 10 massive dark-red sweet potatoes; six onions; four pink lady apples, which are amazing, all tart and sweet and all the seeds are fat and healthy, not shriveled and missing; two pints of perfect strawberries; two pints of grape tomatoes; four, count them, four heads of broccoli; two huge cukes; four fat little oranges; four fat little pears; two big bunches of spinach; two heads of red cabbage; two bundles of mid-sized carrots with edible tops because they're organic; and a bonus head of lettuce. Lettuce! Local trumps strictly seasonal, and I haven't had a salad in over a month!

Tonight I'm making veggie soup with the almost-last of the stock I made, and a few handfuls of dried beans + carrots, onions, sweet potato, white potato and fingerling potato we already had, spinach and carrot tops and some beef we have in the freezer and little tomatoes! I'm so excited about the tomatoes! I haven't had one in ages, and the last one I had was not local or even semi-seasonal and tasted like crud.

I already ate teh strawberries, and they're amazing. And one of the apples. And some of the greens...

Winter Fruit Salad

The recipe called for satsumas, and I think that's the same as a tangerine, so that's what I used. Anyway, here's what I did: The zest of one tangerine; One tangerine, peeled and segmented; One red delicious apple, chopped; A handful of raisins; A palmfull of shredded coconut; A few tablespoons of miracle whip; All the juices from the cutting board.

At first, it seemed a bit strange, but a few hours later, when the flavors had merged more, it was actually quite tasty. I wish we had chunks of coconut instead of shavings, though, so they'd be more noticable.

A Year of Eating Seasonally, Day 1

Happy new year!

And now I'm going to attempt to eat only what's in season somewhere near me, or in places with climates like mine. I have a blog about the experience here, and I'm planning on writing a book after it's done and I can make some sense of it.

But here is where I'm posting the actual food info. 

Breakfast:

Sharp White Cheddar and Red Delicious Apple Sandwich -- There's some american cheese in there, too, but it totally wasn't needed. The Cabot cheddar melted way better than I expected, and made the whole thing gushy and wonderful. I made it thusly: on one slice of bread, I put the cheese, and on the other, a slice of american, the thinly-slices apples, salt and pepper, then I toasted the sides indipendently in the toaster oven so the insides would all be cooked. I squashed them together when they came out and voila! Winter-season sammich. American cheese has no season, but cheddar is a late-in-the-year cheese traditionally, because it's aged, and cheeses are available year-round anyway, as their purpose is to preserve milk. Apples are in season now, and even this red delicious, which is a kind of apple I generally consider kind of mealy and dull, was more sprigtly and interesting than usual, and held up against the sharp cheddar very well, as well as talking the savory flavors of salt and pepper well. A great breakfast, and it only took about seven minutes to make, including the slicing and arranging and toasting. I think I'll leave off the proccessed-cheesefood next time, and maybe made my own bread so it's denser and toasts better, but even squishy sandwich bread is good like this.

I ate another apple for lunch, and then dinner was sushi, and after a little research, joy of all joys, I discovered that eel is winter-seasonal, the harvest beginning around the holidays in all the countries it's eaten in, so I didn't have to give up my favorite rolls! I had one YinYang, which is eel and cream cheese (which is one of the cheeses that's traditionally home-made every day, and not really seasonal), and the Banzai, which is eel with avocado, which is in season in Florida this time of year. To round it out, I had steamed edamame, which I know for a fact come into the restaurant frozen, anc which grow most of the year anyway, and two bowls of miso, which is year-round. Ginger tea is recommended for winter because it's warming, and preserved ginger has no season.

All in all, not a bad start to my project! The first day out, we ate out, and while there isn't much else on the menu I could have eaten (the tepanyaki veggies and the tempura veggies are both full of zucchini and other off-seasn things, and at least half the noodle dishes are a mix of seasons), these two rolls were fine, as were smoked salmon and tuna and oily white fishes like grouper, if I'd chosen to go that way.

Christmas Baking!

Only a week late, too!

Christmas is always about the baking to me. In years when I don't have alot of money, I just bake in bulk anad give people bags full of four or five different kinds of cookies, sugarplums, magic cookie bars, anything else I can make. This year, we (C and I) went over to A&Ls to do our baking with them. Here's what we made: 

Cookies: C made ginger-molasses cookies that were supposed to be roll-out cookies, but wound up being balled-cookies because the dough was too sticky, but that really worked in their favor. They were moist and chewy, spicy without being overpowering, and mostly tasted like molasses-- and they kept the other cookies in the box moist with their own moistness. I made my classic sugar-cookie recipe which isn't kidding out the sugar-- two cups to the three cups of flour. L made snickerdoodles, his favorite, which came out light and crisp and the perfect balance of swweet and cinnamon, and were amazing dipped in the hot alibaba tea we had (earl grey boiled on the stove with a cinnamon stick and some sugar, borrowed from the Alibaba Middle-Eastern Restaurant in Longwood). C and A both made magic cookie bars, and they were so different. C made the classic gramcracker-butter crust with sweetened condensed milk, semisweet chocolate chips and coconut on top, while A made ones that started with a cocoa-powder, sugar, flour and butter crust, then mixed the sweet milk with eggs before topping with big fat milk chocolate chips and coconut. Both were to die for, and I kept eating them until I'd eaten most of what we took home and everyone else was wondering where they went. And now I'm ten pounds heavier.

Sugarplums! As in 'visions of...'. I made these for the first time last year, very soon after we moved into this house, and they're one of my favorite things to make. Very simple, no bake, very tasty, and actually pretty good for you. They're one part pitted dates, an equal amount of toasted nuts (which I usually just heat up in a pan on the stove), twice as many dried apricots, about a quarter of a bear of honey (I really like wildflower, because it's strong enough to still be tasted around the other flavors, and I adore the flavor of honey), about half an oranges' worth of zest (or orange liquor, or both), and tons of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice (about twice as much cinnamon as the others, somewhere around two or three tablespoons). Throw it all in a food processor, and pulse it until it's all small bits and it suddenly becomes a ball that spins around the bowl instead of blending further. Scoop out by the spoonfull into your palm, and roll them like meatballs, making sure to wash your hands when they become sticky enough that the balls stick to you instead of themselves. You can dust them with sugar or powdered sugar, but I susually just stuff them in my face.

I think this is about the most versatile recipe. Last year, I added raisins and chopped dried apples and some quick-cook oats and used two different kinds of honey, and they were just as good. Figs might also be good, and one recipe called for actual dried plums, which might be appropriate.

And then there was the cake. Not a light cake, either in weight or in calories, but fab. It's got two cups of white sugar, almost a cup of brown sugar, rum, multiple tablespoons of cinnamon and other wintery spices, a cup or two of mixed chopped nuts, two apples, three eggs, a cup of oil, and mounds of yumminess. I oiled the pan like woah, and it still stuck it was so sugary, but it came across as rich rather than too sweet. I think it'd be great warm with icecream or a maple-butter sauce, room-temp with dusting powder or a glaze, or with about any combination of fresh and dry fruit that will go in a cake. The oil leeches out of it as it cools, which is a little weird, but when you're eating it, it doesn't taste oily; I think next time I make it, I'm going to half the oil and make up some of the difference with butter, which should stay emulsified better.

Roasted Chestnuts!

Yesterday, while shopping for the many small things for the Festival of Starchy Side Dishes (I'm in charge of pie and pudding and canberry and pickles), I came upon these little gems: Sweet Chestnuts! I vaguely remember eating them when I was small and living in the UK, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what they tasted like, nor could I recall having had them in anything but, like, one Godiva fall truffle since I came back oh these many and many a year ago. And, being well under ten the last time I had them, I certainly hadn't made them before. Still, they stayed in my head as something that I should be eating this time of year, and I sort of remembered reading something about a winter fair in Italy (probably in Extra Virgin or maybe it was France and A Year In Provence, but I think it was Italy), and it seemed like a fine harvesty thing to do. So when I saw these at both WinnDixie and Wal-Mart, I was all over them, despite the 6$ a pound price tag.

I started with the Wal-Mart ones to see if I knew what I was doing, and after a quick skitter around the internets, I took ten of them, made little Xs in the flat sides, and dropped them into the big skillet with a little water and a lid. Our lid doesn't really fit the skillet, so instead of shaking them up like JiffyPuff, I got out the old metal cooking spoon and kept them moving. None of them popped, so the lack of the lid was moot, and they were ready around the time as the tea I put on to boil at the same time and brewed while they finished off.

Once they were all black and the Xs had peeled back like the tops of pomegranites, I dumped them out into a clean towel and scrunched them all up with the heel of my hand to crack the shells real good before they could cool and seal themselves in again.

The biggest ones were the ones that cooked the best, coming out soft and meaty and sweet, while the smaller ones (some of which didn't even open up right, even though they were blacker then the rest, so I think it was the nuts and not me to blame), came out harder and denser, but generally still edible. The taste is pretty unique. At first, they taste almost like cooked meat of some sort-- I don't want to say 'like chicken', because it's not really like that, but I can see why they're put with chicken and turkey; the meatyness of them is complimentary to that sort of a flesh-flavor. Anyway, after that first bite, they taste sort of like grill-roased corn, sweet and tasty and nutty the way things that aren't nuts are nutty. And they remind me of cooked hazelnuts, with a similar texture and look. And they're best when they're steaming hot, which is the best sort of food for winter.

I have so many more of these. I'm going to but up all of them and eat them in small handfulls all winter, and I'm going to see if I can get a few of the fresher-looking WinnDixie ones to grow so I can add them to my baby orchard. Dutch Elm Blight be damned!

ps: This whole handling of chestnuts also reminded me of playing Conkers when I was in school, but the ones used for that are the horse chestnuts that can't be eaten, and I always thought that was a shame.

Swedish Meatballs

C bought beef for the first time in months, and I wanted to do something special with it, so I made Swedish Meatballs. Mmmm, food meant for much cooler climates...

This was roughly two pounds of beef. To be entirely authentic, it should be half beef and half pork or veal, but all we had was beef and it wasn't planned, so I went with that.

Start by setting several pounds of potatoes to boil. We used red potatoes because we all like the skins. While they're cooking, make the meatballs.

To make the meatballs:
thawed raw ground beef
+/- 2 slices of bread, soaked in milk until really squishy, or a 1/2 c to a cup of bread crumbs, also soaked in milk until squishy-- about an equal portion of bread and milk
1 or 2 eggs
salt and pepper
mustard powder, allspice and nutmeg, about 1 tablespoon, 1 tbsp, 1/2 tbsp, more if you like them strongly seasoned
1 finely chopped onion, and it can be cooked ahead of time, but is just as tasty mixed in raw

Mix it all up. A fork or spoon will get it started, but to really make it uniform, take off all your rings and dive in with your hands. Gross, but faster and makes a much smoother and better mixed base, and you need to use your hands to make the meatballs anyway.

Ball them up into smallish meatballs-- about and inch and a half across. Go ahead and ball all of them up on a plate before starting to cook them.

Fry them in butter until cooked through. I usually plop them down and drop a lid over them so they start to cook on the top while the bottom is cooking, and so the moisture stays in. There'll usually be one that sort of falls apart-- sacrifice it to the flavor gods and make sure it's cooked through. This batch cooked in three installments, but I have a pretty big frypan.

Remove them to a paper-towel-covered plate to sit while the rest are finished. You may need to remove fallen onions from the pan between batches; put them aside and you can throw them back in when you make the sauce.

To make the sauce:
Once all the meatballs are done, add a tablespoon or so more butter and a few tablespoons of flour, and make a nice roux-- that sounds scary, but really you're just sucking up all the leftover meat-flavored grease with the flour. Cook it until it's just a little brown, sort of tannish. Then deglaze with beef broth or any other broth you have. I used veggie, which makes a lighter flavor sauce, but is still tasty.

Season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens up into a gravy-like consistency. You can stop here, or, if it's tasting too bland, you can add a half-cup of sour cream and some mustard powder. (I actually added too much mustard, but it's still tasty, just... mustardy).

Make your mashed potatoes as you normally would, and serve meatballs and taters with the sauce, and add a dollop of lingonberry jam or cranberry sauce if you have it.

This made enough for all five of us to eat six meatballs and a huge heaping of potatoes apiece.