The Cookery Garden

June 2nd, 2009

It’s called the cookery garden because that’s where it’s at, right outside the cookery door, but it’s not really a true kitchen garden.  Tried that approach last summer, but only ended up feeding the local wildlife.  The Farmer’s Market is 2 1/2 blocks away, so it seemed silly to waste energy and time and money making war with the bunny and the squirrel and the birdies.  Flowers, now, are a different matter, and there’s enough to go around for all of us.  image014

The giant alliums are about as big as my head, the irises are going crazy, peonies are doing their thing, and sage and yarrow are about to pop with color.  I get to look at it all every morning while baking and making soups, and can sometimes take short breaks out there while waiting for a batch of muffins or cookies to finish baking.  The best part is having a husband who is a professional photographer =:D

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When the World is Too Much With You, Cook a Feast

May 20th, 2009

Honestly, give it a try. Went through several days of mental brownout, information overload, whatever you wanna call it, where I either didn’t know what to say about anything, or didn’t trust myself to say it right. One thing I did know was that I wanted to treat my son and daughter-in-law to a blowout meal at one of the great restaurants downtown–but the money just ain’t there, and I can’t add to my stress level by whipping out the credit card, either. It was also about time for me to experiment with new recipes. Solution: create a restaurant-worthy dinner for four within my means and my abilities and my space.

We started with crab cakes for an appetizer–but baked ones, as opposed to the usual fried. Fried crab cakes are absolutely wonderful, but baked ones are so light and tender–and don’t sit like rocks in tummy hours later.

I love the recipes from The Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, but often can’t afford the exact ingredients called for. Anyone price shallots lately? Her recipe for Roasted Pears with Arugula looked absolutely mouth-watering, and I thought it would be a nice course between the crab cakes and the marinated grilled salmon I planned for the main course. Pear halves are topped with a mix of bleu cheese, walnuts, and dried cranberries, drizzled with a mixture of port, lemon juice, brown sugar, and apple cider, and then roasted until done. When cooled, they are set on a bed of arugula dressed with olive oil, lemon, and leftover pan juices from the pears. The recipe calls for 1/4 cup of apple cider. We don’t normally drink apple cider, especially out of season, and buying a half-gallon for 1/4 cup was just not going to happen. I left it out. Arugula was also not to be found in the grocery store, but they had some irresistably tender Boston lettuce, which I love, so I substituted that. Turned out just fine, although I think I will use about half the brown sugar next time.

The salmon fillets were marinated with a mix of low-sodium soy sauce, lemon juice, and a little salt and pepper for a couple of hours, then grilled–get this–on a Foreman grill. I topped each fillet with a slice of lemon before grilling, which looked really neat. In the meantime I cooked wild rice in a good chicken broth, and roasted a bunch of organic carrots that were tossed with a little olive oil and kosher salt (a la Barefoot Contessa). There were separate bowls of lemon butter and a yogurt-dill sauce with green onions and capers. Red wine and a warm loaf of French bread went along with the salad and main course. The nice thing about grilling salmon on the Foreman is that it’s right there on the counter, up close and personal, and easy to determine the very moment of perfect doneness without worrying about dropping it in the coals or getting smoke in your eyes. I sprayed it with cooking oil beforehand, and the salmon took on great grill marks without sticking.

Desserts tend to be my strong suit, as I am a baker at heart. After a winter of cheesecakes, pies, tarts, carrot cakes, and whatever, it was time for something different. A great restaurant favorite of ours is creme brulee. The last time I made it, it was tasty but the texture was a little too close to pudding. It also made too much. I cobbled together a recipe that I thought would make the right amount and have a silky texture. It used 2 cups of cream and 4 egg yolks, which made a little over 1/2 cup of creme per person. I baked it gently and then chilled it for a couple of hours before topping it with powdered sugar and browning it with a kitchen torch. I don’t own a Viking Range with an indoor grill, but I do own a little kitchen torch for creme brulee! I topped each creme with a few fresh blackberries. Perfection! Silky creme, delicate paper-thin crisp crust, and plump berries. Made pecan-topped merengue cookies out of the leftover egg whites, too. That was a fun meal to make and to enjoy in a leisurely manner, which we did. I felt restored and cheerful and much more myself, even after the ungodly pile of dishes we had to do!!!

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Need Some Quiet Time

May 13th, 2009

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I’m still here, but doing the bare minimum this week. Got a lot on my mind, you know how it goes…

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Cupcake Madness

May 4th, 2009

An order for 200 decorated cupcakes is not something I’d normally consider tackling, but there it was and I wanted to see what would happen. The result was triple vanilla cupcakes–vanilla cake, vanilla buttercream, and vanilla fondant. The decorations had to be simple and colorful, reminiscent of something I’d do in a painting.

It started with stacks and stacks of cupcakes:

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Read the rest of this entry »

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Teaching an Old Rabbit New Tricks

April 27th, 2009

First it was this blogging stuff. Later on, ’twas Twitter. Considered Facebook and MySpace, but a closer look gave me the horrors and I decided I didn’t want to be that chummy with people from long ago from whom I couldn’t wait to get away long ago. Then there has been all the Deaf Crap–TTY, TDD, close-captioning, subtitles, digital vs analog hearing aids, instant messaging, paging, texting, and variously evolving portable communication devices.

And then: the PDA, the BunnyBerry, my Precious. It does everything short of, well, replacing my rusty auditory nerve with a new one. Hearing people, who comprise 99.99% of my entire acquaintances and family and friends, can now actually contact me via phone. I can even make 911 calls. I can even walk in front of cars while absorbed in my emails just like any other idiot. That’s a level playing field if there ever was one, eh?

The Bunnyberry gives me the sense that it does my thinking for me. Of course it doesn’t really, but I have reconfigured my own thinking in the course of learning how to use this new device. New acronyms have entered my graying gray matter: PIN, MMS, SMS, etc. I am learning to use Flikr, and to Tweet and Blog from my “mobile device.” Just yesterday I learned how to synchronize with my Google Notes and as a consequence I had a digital shopping list at the grocery store, plus access to recipes in case of sudden inspiration among the rutabagas. It was bloody awesome!

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Monday Morning Baking After a Really Fun Weekend

April 21st, 2009

Nudging.  Huh?

Time to get up…         ………..uuuuuuuuugh……….

coffee/////that should work////

—not.            More coffee,,,,, ibu–

profen.                 Warm washcloth over baggy eyes.   Shower, yeah, not bad, can move around better now, get dressed, pull out recipes, fresh apron go out to the cookery and go through the same motions out of habit and set up to begin the day’s cooking and get out the ingredients and the bowls and set the oven temperature and double check with the recipe and oh-

crap.  No bananas for banana muffins.  Look in fridge:  nice lemons.  Look on shelf:  new jar of poppy seeds.  That’ll work.  Pull out carrots for carrot muffins, and now–

the tricky part:

making two kinds of muffins at the same time.    careful, girl.

Can’t find carrot peeler, realize it is kinda dark in the cookery because it is a rainy day.  Turn on light.

the pain in the eyes passes after a minute or so.  there’s the carrot peeler.  weigh out 1/2 pound carrots, peel and trim.  assemble fine shredding blade on food processor, shred carrots.  there.  ready to add at the right moment to the batter.  that messy bit done, clean up worktable.

2 bowls for dry ingredients–check.

measure flour into each bowl.  left bowl is for lemon poppyseed, right bowl is for carrot.  get through the corresponding sugar, baking powder, etc.  so far so good.  2 bowls for wet ingredients–

check.  eggs in each, buttermilk, oil, vanilla.  zest and juice a lemon, add poppyseed to juice, and zap in microwave a little to bloom the poppyseed.  start to fall asleep while standing, shake myself out of it. get wet batters ready, raisins in the carrot muffin flour.  reach up for muffin tins

uuuuuuuugh.  looking up not fun.  wooziness passes.  prep the pans.  combine wet and dry ingredients for carrot muffins, distribute in pan.  same with lemon poppyseed batter.  almost there.  check clock

so far so good, except surprised there wasn’t a little batter left over from the carrot muffins, as usually is.  fingers sticky, need paper towel from food processor table, see shredded carrots in food processor, all nice and fine and orange–

oh crap.  no carrots in the carrot muffins ready for the oven.  take processor bowl over to muffin tin, distribute carrots evenly over each cup of batter, try to mix it in.  uh-uh, not gonna work.  attempt scooping out back into batter bowl.  too slow.  lift tin vertically to pour batter into bowl.  need to move all three of my arms quickly to keep it all in the bowl

only lose a little.  stir batter gently until carrots just mixed in.  get fresh muffin tin, prep, and fill.  set timer, bake muffins, clean up mess, lean forehead against nice cool glass of the window.

this, too, will pass.

and they turned out just fine.

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Sham-Wowing the News

April 16th, 2009

They are loud, they are insistent, they have one-track minds: the blowhard hosts of all too many cable news programs, of all political persuasions. It is rare that any of them ever treat the issues that affect us most in a reasoned, fact-oriented manner. No, they gotta hard-sell their p.o.v. and shout shout shout, as if matters of government and our political system are nothing more than another “as seen on t.v.” product.

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Planning a Supper Party

April 15th, 2009

One-bowl meals are comforting: soup, stew, pasta, stir-fry, chili, and hybrids thereof. Over the years I’ve had a corresponding attraction to pasta bowl sets, often made of brightly-glazed Italian pottery. Pretty, but they chip and crack if you so much as look at them funny. After the 3rd set in two years became unsafe to use, I popped for plain white porcelain pasta bowls with wide rims, available as open stock at Target. I started with four, and liked them so much that I decided to get four more, because they were definitely party-worthy.

There are three couples we have known for years and who are all friends with each other, and really enjoy all sorts of food. This will make a good group of eight of us and a good opportunity to use the new soup/pasta bowls.

Decided to go meatless: two kinds of main-course soups, one vegetable, one tomato bisque; a generous amount of good aged cheddar; a couple loaves of no-knead bread and/or baguettes; bowls of seasoned roast nuts and raw veggies for nibbling; a huge apple pie and a chocolate cheesecake. Everyone is bringing wine, and we’ll have Apollinaris and some sort of after-dinner liqueur and herb tea and coffee, whatever one prefers.

Our bungalow is, um, quite compact, but I think I have worked out a seating/serving plan which should keep everyone topped up with food and beverages without having to stumble over each other, and without my having to miss out on too much of the conversation. The white bowls will look good against a predominantly black tablecloth; grey napkins will have white ceramic bunny holders; simple silverware; good ambient lighting, but no candles, so as to make the most of the table for the breads and cheese. The colorful soups will look really nice against this setting.

One hard-learned lesson about buying dishes: if space is tight, for heaven’s sake get dishes that neatly stack or nestle. The new bowls do just that–eight of them take up less space than four of the old kind. Gotta look for coffee cups that do that!

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A Weekend of the Small but Important Stuff

April 13th, 2009

Hello, hello, hello. It’s been a busy few days, baking shortbread bunnies, carrot cakes, scones, and casseroles, visiting family on Sunday, and trying to get some housework and laundry done in between. And in between the in-betweens I’ve been doing research on deaf-friendly wireless devices and services.

For anyone who cares, Sprint has an entire division called Sprint Relay, devoted to the telecommunication needs of the hearing- and/or speech-impaired. If you can prove that you are hearing-impaired, you can get your own phone number and an affordable monthly plan which enables you to get relay calls on a cell phone or blackberry. Just a few years ago the devices and the service were prohibitively expensive. But now we can join the 21st century. I’m looking forward to getting a new phone and data-only relay service. Evidently I can post to my blog and to Twitter from a cell phone! Just amazing to me, although I do know that this is all old news to most people.

Another small but important thing is discovering that my father once had a big white bunny rabbit for a pet. Funny it only took him 54 years to tell me that! It created an amusing tweak in my perception of him.

Yet another small but important thing: I ate my vegetables yesterday. Yes, I did have a slice of my mother’s apple pie and a slice of my own carrot cake for dessert, but the shocker was eating a side dish of broccoli, cauliflower, and sweet red peppers prepared by my daughter-in-law. I am famous in my family for not liking cruciferous vegetables. But somehow she made them taste really nice, so much that I had a second helping. Wonders will never cease.

Bunnies are easily amused…

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This Easter Bunny’s Gotta Do Her Thing

April 10th, 2009

Couldn’t help myself: went on an all-afternoon baking binge, making delicate shortbread bunny cookies, then topping them with melted chocolate chips. This is a great combo. You can try them for yourself today at Isabella Bean coffee shop, where they are the free holiday cookie, chocolate bunnies for grownups!

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