What we'll be drinking

I just got back from Arbor Farms where I was picking up the last of the ingredients for our Thanksgiving menu and, most fun of all, picking out what we'll drink:From right to left--Vruit, for the small people, Estancia 2006 Pinot Noir with dinner, and for the cheese course, a half-bottle of Chateau Beylieux 2003 Sauternes.

Arbor Farms has good deals on wine. Their selection isn't the biggest in town, but the store manager loves to talk about wine (he pointed me to the Estancia and said it was a great deal and better than some of the higher priced Pinots he carries) and they give you a 10% discount when you buy any 6 bottles.

I was going to get some tawny port for the cheese course, but then I spied the Sauternes and went for that. The first time I tasted Sauternes was when I lived in Bordeaux and was invited to dinner at one of the profs houses. A fellow lecteur, who was a non-drinker, brought along a bottle of Sauternes that someone had given him; the prof said that it was a really good Sauternes, way out of a lecteur's price range, and when it rolled across my tongue it made me think of liquid gold. Since it is cold and damp and rainy today, I was inspired to bring that bit of sunshine to our meal tomorrow. It probably won't be as glorious as that first sip years ago (especially since this is a relatively affordable bottle), but I'll embellish it with my memories.

The crunch factor

I must say, this is a very curious feeling. I am actually looking forward to Thanksgiving this year. I've bitched about the holiday in the past, but this year, for the first time, I have some agency over the holiday menu--my sweet, lovely, lousy-cook mother-in-law is out of town visiting her brother and so I get to be responsible for the meal planning. I contemplated a rather radical Thanksgiving--turkey with Vietnamese stuffing, maybe some steamed kimchi dumplings, that kind of thing. But when I proposed this to the other people who will be dining at the table that night, I saw some confused looks and not much in the way of enthusiastic cheers.

Then I thought about it a bit more and figured that some small tweaks to a more traditional menu could make the meal palatable to me, and still not rock the boat. What I dislike most about the traditional meal that my mother-in-law dishes out each year is the mush factor--pretty much everything at the table has a squishy texture (except for the turkey which, unfortunately, she cooks until it is dry...): mashed potatoes, stuffing, candied yams, canned cranberry sauce, soft rolls.

I don't care for squish.

I found that adding a little crunch back into the meal makes it one that I can look forward to. I'll still make a few mushy things for those traditionalists at the table (buttermilk mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy), but the turkey will be deep fried (using Brian's birthday present), the hush puppies will replace the rolls, the Brussels sprouts are served tender crisp, and there will be a salad with a nice sharp vinaigrette to contrast with the richness of the rest of the meal. Also I'll reduce the sweetness factor--the cranberry relish I'll make is piquant with ginger and jalapeño, and the sweet potatoes will be smoky with Spanish paprika.

So here is our menu:

• deep fried turkey
• hush puppies (from the Blue Willow Inn cookbook)
  
• sautéed Brussels sprouts with Parmesan
• cranberry orange ginger jalapeño mint relish
• salad—spinach, romaine, blue cheese and toasted walnuts
• roasted sweet potatoes with smoked paprika
• buttermilk mashed potatoes
• stuffing (a Cook's Illustrated recipe with sausage and fresh sage)
  
• gravy
• cheese plate with port, nuts, pears and grapes
  
• sweet potato pie (I'm going to try the vodka-in-the pie-crust trick that Cook's Illustrated raved about. For a pictorial demo of the crust check out Smitten Kitchen's entry.)

If I was a Scarlet Ibis...

...my plumage would be really pretty now. Scarlet Ibis' require beta carotene to keep their plumage bright--take a look at this guy who has clearly been eating his fair share of red crabs, or, since he's a bird in captivity, his beta carotene pills. Now look at this poor guy who hasn't been taking his supplements--wan and pale and pink, not scarlet. (Sorry not to publish the photos here--their licensing requirements are too cryptic for me to figure out).

But since I'm not a bird and I live in the Northern Latitudes and haven't been getting much sun and I don't use tan-in-a-can products, the yellowish glow to my skin is carotenodermia, which comes from consuming too many orange foods rich in Vitamin A.

Whew--this is a really long winded way of saying that I'm stumbled across a few really good recipies using sweet potatoes and pumpkin, so I'm going to shut the hell up about the birds and their plumage and tell you to try these two recipes.

One of the recipes came from the aptly named blog, Simply Recipes. I followed the recipe for Creamy Sweet Potato Soup to a T up until the final moments. The author garnished her soup with chopped celery leaves and I went a less healthy route topping each bowl with some crumbled bacon. A while back I had a bowl of sweet potato soup with bacon at Eve and thought the combo was good, though one does have to go light on the bacon or the sweet potato flavor is lost. Brian was very happy with this soup. First he said "this is good." Then he said "this is very good." Then he said "this is you-should-make-this-again good." Brian doesn't comment much on food (opposites attract, right?), so for him to express himself three times about something he is consuming means it really had an impact. I had hoped that one of the small people might taste it; if I had known she would refuse, I might have added a little bit of cayenne too. There are three representatives of the allium genus in the recipe--onion, leeks and garlic--which help balance out the sweetness; add the smoky hit from the bacon and you have a really nice soup.

The other recipe is for pumpkin bread. I know there are so many recipes for pumpkin bread out there that the world hardly needs another, but I really like this one. I don't often make quick breads for my own consumption (I do make muffins for the small people a lot) because many of them are too sweet for my taste. This one isn't.
I took this recipe from Epicurious and modified it slightly so it is marginally healthier. I've made it as bread twice and muffins once and liked it so much that, well, as I said, my skin is turning yellowish.

Cranberry Walnut Pumpkin Bread

1 C all purpose flour
1 C white whole wheat flour
1/3 C ground flax seeds
1 t ground cinnamon
1/2 t ground ginger
1/4 t allspice
1/4 t nutmeg or mace
1 t baking powder
3/4 t salt
1/2 t baking soda
6 T (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 C sugar
2 large eggs
1 C canned pure pumpkin
1 t vanilla extract
2/3 C buttermilk
1/2 C dried sweetened cranberries
1/2 C coarsely chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350°F. Spray a loaf pan with non-stick spray, or line muffin tins with papers. Sift flour, spices, baking powder, salt, and baking soda in medium bowl to blend. Add flax seed. Beat butter in large bowl until fluffy. Gradually add sugar, beating until blended. Beat in eggs, 1 at a time. Beat in pumpkin, then vanilla. Beat in dry ingredients alternately with buttermilk in 2 additions each. Fold in cranberries and nuts. Transfer batter to pan. Bake bread until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 1 hour (about 20 minutes for muffins). Cool bread in pan on rack 15 minutes. Turn bread out onto rack.

Name mix up

The reason I hadn't read the wildly entertaining book, Heat, is that I thought the author was someone else. Heat is by Bill Buford. I thought it was by Bill Bryson.

Bill Bryson is an author of many books, all of which I think have entertaining features about them, but would be better as magazine articles. The first chapter or two can be fun to read, but then his voice starts to grate on me and it feels cutesy and over done. This is not a widely held opinion of the author's books--plenty of people like them from start to finish. I think they usually have one or two good moments and the rest is repetitive.

So when people told me I had to read Heat, I told them that I thought the author became tiresome after about 50 pages and I didn't have the stomach for it. My sincere apologies go out to Bill Buford whose book I am about half-way through and am enjoying as much as a novel (which is high praise from me). I have laughed and learned and tried hard to keep track of a vivid cast of characters.

The book is also making me very hungry, so it is a good thing that at last night's auction, I was the winning bidder on a basket of delicacies from Morgan and York. This morning I enjoyed my morning coffee with some toasted baguette slices topped with a poached egg, a little sea salt and black pepper, and drizzled with the Montalbano olive oil that I acquired last night. I think I have a new favorite breakfast.

Right now, I'm at the point in Heat where Buford is learning about pasta and I'm pretty sure that later this weekend I'll be making some fresh pasta to drizzle with this golden elixir.

Sweaters for the small

I finished knitting the sweater for my kid's preschool auction a while ago, but didn't finish the damn sweater because of this:
a completely idiotic number of ends to weave in.

I've made this baby sweater (and a matching hat) many times and yet each time I start it, I forget that I could make it a hell of a lot easier on myself to modify the pattern and knit the front and back as one piece and the sleeves and hat in the round. Of course being a bit of a procrastinator, I left it until last night to finish the sweater (which had to be turned in to the auction today) and this morning I gave it a quick steam press and ta da!
One baby sweater and hat to go to someone's small person.

Meanwhile, I have started another baby sweater that is much more fun to knit and will have minimal seaming when the knitting is completed:
It is the February sweater from Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitter's Almanac. You have to love a pattern that is only a half page long! I'm using Lion Brand Cotton Ease in Lime (it doesn't look very limey in the above photo...). This yarn was discontinued--and the Lion Brand website still says is discontinued, get it together people--but came back! It's only $3.99 for a 100g ball so it will total $8 in yarn cost for the baby sweater. I really like the yarn--it feels like pure cotton but the acrylic makes it much less likely to split while being knit. If you want to see what it (hopefully) will look like when completed, look at some finished versions on Flickr.

White chocolate pain-in-the-ass

Today my group finally finished what we dubbed "white chocolate pain-in-the-ass."
It's actually a teardrop shaped dark and white chocolate mousse, with raspberry and chocolate sauces, whipped cream and a chocolate lattice. And all but the white chocolate mousse was pretty fun to make. We screwed up the first batch of mousse by overheating the white chocolate. It melts at such a low temperature (since it is cocoa butter with no cocoa solids) that you can't melt it over a double boiler, not even one on super low heat. It'll seize up and become crumbly and nasty if you don't melt it over hot tap water. And it takes forever--I think I built some new musculature in my forearm from stirring the stuff over the warm water bath for so long.

It ended up looking ok, though Brian pointed out what we all were thinking--the teardrop ended up looking kind of like a whistle...

It tasted pretty good, though I'd have preferred all dark chocolate mousse. I'm not much of a fan of white chocolate--too damn sweet for me--which is too bad because the other dessert we made today also featured white chocolate:
That's three almond tuilles with white chocolate whipped cream, fresh raspberries and raspberry sauce. It tasted pretty good and since the white chocolate was melted with some cream it wasn't such a pain in the ass to make. Personally, I would have preferred a higher fresh raspberry to the rest-of-the-sweet-stuff ratio. So I made a little one for myself:
I molded the tuille on an upside down mini muffin tin to make the cup, then put a rosette of the white chocolate whipped cream inside, loaded on the raspberries and topped it with some purloined candied almonds that another group made for a cake.

In case you think I am living in La La Pastry Land, I also present to you a dose of reality:
These are the cupcakes the kids and I made for Ian's class Halloween Party. I made vanilla cupcakes and French buttercream that got tinted lurid shades of green, yellow, purple and pink to match the Laffy Taffy tentacles. Yes, you read that right--I paired French buttercream with sour apple, banana, grape and strawberry Laffy Taffy. I'm sure that is considered a crime in some places. My cupcakes turned out messier than the great ones I saw on Flickr--I had a hell of a time getting the marshmallows to stick to the M and Ms for the eyeballs. Of course, some of the kids in the class ate the Laffy Taffy and the M and Ms and then threw away the vanilla cake and French butter cream. But Ian actually ate the whole thing, which may not sound impressive (cake and candy, geez kid) but for him, the picky eater extraordinaire, is quite an achievement.

Metamorphosis

Halloween is coming and Fiona is being fickle. She has refused to wear the "legacy" costume--far from being a hand me down, this one is more like an inheritance. Her Aunty Anna was a cockroach, I was a cockroach, her brother was a cockroach (twice), but will Fiona be a cockroach? Nope. My parents made this costume for us when we lived in Houston and were plagued by, you guessed it, cockroaches. It has a brown shell with a tight fitting hood, electrical wire for antennae and looks pretty creepy. Maybe I can lobby for her to wear it next year.

So with the cockroach rejected I went on to my back up-the hand-me down alligator costume. But she has been adamant that she wants to be a dragon. So it was time for that alligator to undergo metamorphosis.

Here we have the raw materials--alligator costume, wire coat hangers, purple satin fabric, some red and yellow scraps. Not pictured: the essential sticking stuff--duct tape and glue gun.
First I took a couple of wire coat hangers and formed kinda crappy wing frame:
The shape of the top part of the frame was all I really cared about because the bottom would be defined by the shape of the fabric:
I sewed the top seam on the sewing machine and then used the glue gun to attach the fabric to the frame and to seal the bottom, spiky-part of the wing shut.

I attached a figure eight of elastic to the center of the wings--one loop goes around each arm over the top of the fuzzy alligator suit.
I also added the forked tongue.
Now I just have to figure out how to attach the purple feet with yellow toenails (made of cardboard with fabric glued on) to her sneakers.

Playing with sauce

My group in my pastry class has moved on to plated desserts and that gives us lots of opportunities to play with sauce! This week we made apple charlottes and plated them with creme anglaise and caramel sauce. The charlottes were really lovely--the bread edge was slathered with a cinamon butter sugar mixture before being put in the ramekins. This created a crispy, chewy, buttery ring that encased soft apples. Nice contrast.

First we tried the pool of creme anglaise striped with caramel:
Then we decided that the caramel sauce was so delicious that it should be more prominent:
This one also got a little scoop of maple ice cream on top that another group had made. Not absolutely necessary, but another nice contrast.

I really like serving individual desserts, maybe because I'm pretty lousy at serving slabs of cake and pie. There is also such a content feeling about having your own little complete plate. The only problem I'm having now is converting the recipes for the sauces to reasonable quantities--we had way too much of both sauces when we were done. One really only needs a little creme anglaise, even if you decide to go with plating variation 1. Caramel sauce is a little less problematic, since it can be saved in the refrigerator and reheated in small quantities, say, to top that late night bowl of ice cream.

Apple Charlotte with Caramel Sauce and Creme Anglaise
makes 8 portions

5 apples, peeled, cored and sliced 1/4 inch thick
2/3 C plus 1 T sugar
pinch salt
1 1/2 T fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 loaf (at least 8 good sized slices) of brioche, challah, raisin bread or quality white bread. Sliced, with crusts removed.
1 stick butter
1 t ground cinnamon
8 ramekins

Caramel sauce (recipe below)
Creme anglaise (recipe below)

preheat oven to 350.

Put apples, 2/3 C sugar and lemon juice in a sauce pan and cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes, or until the apples have softened. Don't stir too much--you don't want them to get mushy.

Place the butter, 1 T sugar and cinnamon in the bowl of an electric mixer and cream until smooth.

Slather each piece of bread with the cinnamon butter. Really load it on. You need about 1 slice of bread per ramekin. Cut each slice into 3 pieces and line the sides of the ramekins with the pieces; kinda squish them in there firmly so they don't fall apart when you unmold the charlottes (the buttered side should be touching the walls of the ramekin).

Compactly fill the inside of each ramekin with about 1/4-1/3 C of the apple mixture.

Bake the charlottes for about 30 minutes. Check and see if the bread has crisped and looks caramelized. If not, bake a little longer.

Remove from the oven, run a knife around the edge of each ramekin, then invert onto individual plates.

Make a circle of caramel sauce around the charlotte. Make drips of creme anglaise in the caramel sauce and then take a toothpick and run it in a circle around the plate and through each drip of creme anglaise to make the heart shapes.

Caramel Sauce
This makes more than you need. It can be stored in the fridge and rewarmed. Tastes great over ice cream too.

1 1/2 C granulated sugar
1/2 C water
pinch of salt
1 C heavy cream

Combine sugar, water and salt in a heavy bottomed (small) saucepan. Dissolve sugar over low heat. Then increase the heat to high and cook without stirring until the sugar is a golden amber color. Use a pastry brush dipped in water to wash down the sides of the pan to prevent sugar from crystallizing. (Be patient, this takes a while, but don't turn your back because the after the sugar turns amber, it quickly burns).

Remove from heat and slowly stir in cream a little at a time. Return to heat if necessary.

Creme Anglaise
3 egg yolks
2 oz sugar
1 C milk
1 t vanilla extract

Combine yolks and sugar in a stainless steel bowl. Whip until thick and light.

Scald milk. Temper the egg yolks mixture (add a little hot milk to yolks and beat it up, add a little more milk, until you raise the temp of the yolks without cooking them). Then add yolk mixture to remaining milk, whisking to combine. Heat over a water bath stirring constantly until it thickens and coats the back of a spoon.

Strain into a bowl. Cool over an ice bath. Stir in vanilla.

Home effort

Brian requested a chocolate mint cake for his birthday on Sunday, which gave me an opportunity to put some of the Pastry class skills I've been acquiring to use. The above pictured cake is the result of my effort and, while it looks a little lumpy in places, it tasted really great. It had three layers of chocolate cake, two layers of chocolate mint ganache and chocolate mint buttercream.

I'm still pretty crappy at getting the buttercream to look right on the cake, and not having the right equipment (offset spatula, cake comb) didn't help the matter. But the taste of the buttercream was by far the best thing about this cake.

I've never liked the kind of buttercream that you make with powdered sugar--it is just too damn sweet and makes me feel like I'm going to go into diabetic shock. And frankly, it freaks me out to see a recipe with a whole pound of powdered sugar in it.

One of the best things I have learned in my pastry class is that there is a buttercream that I can love--French buttercream. There is only 1 C of granulated sugar in the recipe which makes a buttercream that is far more palatable to me, and it also has a great texture with none of the chalkiness that can come from powdered sugar. The technique sounds like a pain in the ass when you first hear it, but it really is pretty simple--beat up some egg yolks until they are thick and light. While the mixer is beating away, heat up the sugar with 2 oz water and make a syrup that reaches the soft ball stage (240 degrees). Then with your mixer still running, slowly pour the sugar syrup down the side of the bowl (so it doesn't splatter or make little hard droplets in your buttercream). The heat of the sugar cooks the yolks so they are safe to eat. You can add your melted chocolate and peppermint extract now. Then you leave the mixer running and beating the hell out of the stuff until it is pretty cool. Then blop in pieces of room temperature butter until it is all combined.

The frosting is silky smooth with just the right amount of sweetness and richness. Brian tasted it and his whole face lit up--it is that good--and both of us had to resist sitting down and eating it with a spoon.

Chocolate Mint Buttercream
adapted from Recipezaar

enough to frost and fill a 3 layer cake

8 oz granulated sugar
2 oz water
4 egg yolks
10 oz butter, softened
1/2 t peppermint extract (switch to 3/4 t vanilla if you want plain chocolate buttercream)
3 oz good quality bittersweet chocolate, melted over a double boiler and cooled slightly

1. Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan and bring to a boil while stirring to dissolve the sugar.
2. Continue to boil until the syrup reaches a temperature of 240 degrees F.
3. While the syrup is boiling, beat the yolks with a wire whip or the whip attachment of a mixer until they are thick and light in color.
4. As soon as the syrup reaches 240 F, pour it very slowly in a thin stream down the side of the mixing bowl into the beaten yolks while whipping constantly.
5. Beat in the peppermint extract and melted chocolate.
6. Continue to beat until the mixture is completely cool and the mixture is very thick and light.
7. Whip in the butter a lump at a time. Add it as fast as it can be absorbed by the mixture.
8. If the icing is too soft, refrigerate it until it is firm enough to spread.

Home in progress...

In between dealing with the zucchini and tomato overloads, small person wrangling and pastry making, I've been slowly attempting to improve our living space. Our house is a work in progress and Brian and I are leisurely at best, and lazy at worst, about making the necessary improvements (did I mention the three foot deep pit that rendered the front door inaccessible for over a year?). But every once in a while we get a burst of improvement energy (or present environment disgust) and tackle another project.

The room which is currently our (small) living room (previously the dining room and before that, the kitchen--we've been shuffling rooms for a while now) finally got walls in August (trim coming in November!) It was down to the studs for a few years, then we insulated it and stuck up some plywood, and three years later I finally had the energy to push for drywall.

It isn't the greatest mudding job since I did it myself, but it is my hope that within the next 3 years (ok, maybe 5 years...), we will have started to build a living room addition on to the back of the house and the current living room will be transformed into a hallway/pantry and a half bath. Thus the lumps and bumps in my mudding will eventually be covered with shelves or tile.

After the drywalling, I painted the living room. First a hideous shade of too-bright almost-lime green (another of those "Whoops! looked ok on a swatch" moments), and after a couple of days of squinting and thinking that I needed sunglasses to stay in the room, I repainted it a softer green. I picked a Martha Stewart paint swatch (Fern Shoot) since all her colors are sort of subdued and I wanted to be sure we wouldn't be blinded by the room. I had them color match it using Olympic paint since it is zero VOC and I've done enough damage to my brain over the years without voluntarily inhaling toxins.

I like the color--it is cheerful without being overwhelming, but it does represent a decorating challenge. It needs neutral colors to balance it out. I have a bunch of nice black and white prints of my dad's photography that are matted and framed in silver frames that will look good on the walls. But our furniture? Well, that's another story.

Our couch used to be red twill, though it has faded and been beat up over the years of pet and kid ownership. It looked fine in a cream or white room, but horrific with the green walls. We have a beige ultra suede slipcover for the thing that we are currently using and which provides a neutral couch experience (a rich chocolate brown one would be nicer, but right now our aging and ailing cat often is puking on the current one so this is not the time to invest in an upgrade). Big bonus--the thing washes and drys well and fast.

So it is to the couch throw pillows I have turned my attention. I bought some fabric from Fabric.com to cover the hideous, but really comfy big pillow:

In the process of being swallowed, ahem, covered.

And I think it looks pretty good next to the nifty $7 Ikea Hedda covers.
I like the way the Queen Ann's Lace botanical print softens up the modernist plant on the Ikea pillow. Much as I love mid-century modern stuff (that would be my Dad's aesthetic and the one that I grew up with), Brian and I are a little too quirky to go that pure route. But the modernish-accents help keep our weird stuff, like this print (look closely--under each cow is a car brand or model), or Brian's Fez collection or my subversive toile, from looking too kitchy.

I also bought a couple of yards of the negative of the pillow fabric (currently on clearance): I haven't decided what to do with it yet--cover some more pillows? Make a roller shade for the window in the room?