The new kitchen won’t entirely feel comfortable until I do some serious cooking in it. I don’t have a lot of time for that, what with being gone every weekend, but I can squeak a little in here and there. So when the local paper had a recipe for homemade marshmallows in the food section, something I’ve always wanted to try, I went for it.

I do make candy every year, so it wasn’t that foreign to me. The first part is a standard candy-making procedure, melting sugar on the stovetop. No pictures of this phase, as there’s no way to hold the pan, stir, and click without the tripod, which is in the mountains.

 

But once it hit the ideal temperature, into the mixer it went. Man, I love this mixer. It took half as long as the recipe said to fluff it up to the consistency of marshmallow fluff.

Then I spread it out into the pan, sprinkled with powdered sugar to keep it from sticking. I couldn’t keep the sugar up on the sides of the pan and I paid for it the next day, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.

I let it dry for almost 24 hours and then pried it out and cut it into squares. I dusted the edges with more powdered sugar and ziplocked them with lots more to keep them from sticking together too much.

I hauled them out around the campfire and we made S’mores with a couple. They are more tender and flavored a little more strongly than the commercial variety, but it’s not terribly different. They melt much better, but all in all, I spent an hour and several bucks on something that costs about $1.39 at the grocery store. It wasn’t about the price though; it was about having fun in my new kitchen. They certainly served that purpose.

I forgot to bring the leftovers home; we’ll see if they go stale as fast as storebought marshmallows.

If we didn’t fail this course, we didn’t do so awful well either. I give us a generous C+.

It started out fine. I had an overly-optimistic plan, as usual. Remember the Great Meat Jello-Mold fiasco of 2007? Junior, who hasn’t yet exactly learned how I am with overly-optimistic plans, thought he’d help me out with it. I’ve always wanted to learn to smoke, and rolling a turkey up into a big fat doobie just isn’t practical, so he brought over his bullet-style smoker. I picked up some mesquite charcoal and applewood chips, and had every intention of having smoked turkey for dinner.

 

Like any good rednecks living in town, we did this little piece of performance art in the driveway. The neighbors were delighted. But hey, the dogs would have knocked it over in the backyard, and where better to sit with a beer and watch grass grow all day?

Oh, and did I mention that, even though he owned the smoker, he didn’t know how to use it either? So we were both going in cold, with some instructions for a similar model that I’d swiped off the internet. We had to figure out a lot as we went. That is what I do. It’s driving by the seat of my pants, only in the kitchen. Or in this case, the front yard, because I am classy like that.

 

One of the lessons that took us all day to master was getting the temperature right. We started off with a bang, and let the coals get good and going before we put the turkey in, but then it kept wildly fluctuating. It would sit in the right zone just long enough for us to think we could go do something else. Then the damn thing would see us walk into the house and snicker, and drop the temp down into the red zone. So out we’d come again, and stoke it back up, and try again. Eventually, we figured out that if we took the lid off, which seemed counterintuitive to keeping the heat in, it would let the coals get enough air to really get going. Then we could leave it alone for about two hours at a time.

But it took us half a day to learn that, and at half an hour per pound, with a 17-pound turkey, which is what I had in the freezer leftover from a turkey shoot that Junior won, minus the times where nothing was really happening at all, it looked like we’d be eating dinner at approximately 11 AM next Tuesday. So we had hamburgers, as the natives were getting restless. So much for making other people help me eat 17 pounds of turkey.

Eventually though, the skin looked right and the juices were running somewhat clearly and we were really getting tired of this crazy-ass project, so we poked it with the meat thermometer and called it good enough. Junior stripped the meat out, and it was cooked through, and it did smell pretty awesome, but I was all full from hamburgers and pretty tired of smelling smoke by that point. Although a smoked Junior still smelled delicious.

I was disappointed in how dry it was. Most of my oven-turkeys come out nice and juicy, but not this one. I had some gravy fixins ready to go, but by then it was bedtime. Junior had a sandwich and I grazed a little, but I was in no mood to stand and stir gravy.

 

I’m going to be eating smoked turkey for the rest of my life, approximately. I have the carcass in the fridge waiting to be made into stock, and turkey meat coming out of my ears. I had a smoked turkey caesar salad for lunch yesterday. Junior took some more sandwiches to work. I’m considering making turkey Divan tomorrow night. I expect by Friday, I’ll be eating smoked turkey sprinkled over ice cream or whirled into a smoothie.

Perhaps it’s time for another overly-optimistic cooking project: Meat Canning 101? I suspect he’s learned to run away screaming though.

A thread popped up on one of the boards that I frequent, about antique cookbooks and actually using them.

“Hey,” I thought, “I have several antique cookbooks, and this could be fun!”

So I went straight to the oldest one I have, published in 1908. It was probably my great-grandmother’s, and was handed down to me through my great-aunt’s line. It still has her juvenile-delinquent pencil drawings on the figures showing the cuts of meat, putting a saddle or a draft harness on each animal. She always was a rebel, my Aunt Muriel, and a kick in the pants.

That cookbook was called:

The White House Cook Book

A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home

containing

Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-Giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the Sick, Health Suggestions, Facts Worth Knowing, etc.

I found surprisingly little that I could use in it. I wanted a dish that showed its age, but which we could still eat. A whole lot of it revolved around large families and dinner parties and situations for which I am simply not equipped. While I’d love to corn my own beef, I’ve looked into it before and learned that saltpeter is really hard to find these days. And I’d have to scale that back anyway, as I won’t be corning a whole side of beef at a time anyway.

I will also rarely need to call on this book to make terrapin soup, although I could see squirrel stew coming in handy once in a while considering my hobbies. I will not be making eyewash from eggs, nor Grandmother’s Universal Liniment from scratch. No, I can rely on the local Walgreen’s for my modern-day liniment needs.

There was a startling paucity of vegetable recipes, and of those that I could find, so many were so extremely overdone. An otherwise promising-looking recipe for Cucumber A La Creme called for boiling them until they were soft? Boiled cucumbers? I boggle.

But I did find the following likely dish:

Corn Pudding

This is a Virginia dish. Scrape the substance out of twelve ears of tender, green, uncooked corn (it is better scraped than grated, as you do not get those husky particles which you cannot avoid with a grater); add yolks and whites, beaten separately, of four eggs, a teaspoonful of sugar, the same of flour mixed in a tablespoonful of butter, a small quantity of salt and pepper, and one pint of milk. Bake about half or three-quarters of an hour.

So that’s more or less what I did. I cut it roughly in half, because there are only three of us, and of course, I couldn’t find green corn, but I figured yellow would do. I didn’t measure much, flying by the seat of my pants like people did then.

It started to look familiar by the time I had it mixed up and ready to pop in the oven.

And when it came out, it was clear. Yup, I’d reinvented creamed corn. It was slightly eggy, but still good, and perfectly normal.

The next one though, oh the next one. I don’t know what exactly I thought I was smoking, but I thought it would be fun to jump to the 70s, and pick something that totally showcased that poor, misbegotten decade. Yes folks, I made a jello mold.

And not just any jello mold.

No; I made jellied meat.

For this culinary masterpiece, I went to the 1972 Good Housekeeping One-Dish Dinners. There is not a doubt in my mind that I have this book through some sort of diabolical plan of my mother; maybe she slipped it into a box of perfectly normal, self-respecting books when we were cleaning out my grandparents things. Surely she couldn’t have made anything in it. Right?

This creation was actually titled Shimmering Chicken Mold. It contained chicken, ham, grapes, and watercress. Grapes. In chicken. Yes.

I cheated on this one a little too. I got me a canned ham (perfectly period, and not the cheating part), one of those roasted deli chickens, and spinach, since I couldn’t find watercress.

I dutifully halved my grapes, cubed my meat, and layered things into the closest I could come to a salad mold, a mediium-sized mixing bowl. There was a whole lot of sitting and waiting for gelatin to set with this recipe, which I bet was one of the appeals during this decade, or at least in this cookbook, which was perpetually bragging on how little time each recipe took.

Because I too have a significant evil streak, I didn’t tell the kids anything about my little social experiment. When they saw me unveil the thing, gasps of horror drowned out the television. John said, jokingly, “Is that Jello?” He was completely unnerved when I told him that yes, and it was meat jello no less.

We all talked a little, between snorting laughs about just how wrong the 70s were. He thought something like this had to come from the hippies, but no, I don’t think so. I think this came more from a generation of women brought up by full-time homemakers, but suddenly thrust into the working world, and trying to balance that with maintaining a 50s-ideal of a perfect household. Yeah, I might go off the deep and and make meat jello for my guests too, if that were dumped on me without notice.

They were sports, I have to give them that. We were all laughing too hard to eat at several points, but I really did want them to try it. And they did, and pronounced it disgusting. I ate more than they did; it wasn’t bad at first, if you could get your head away from the concept, but so salty, and so, so bland. Greens are simply not meant to be suspended in essense of chicken. Sweet bobble-headed Mary, was that shit bad. I gave the kids their leave to leave it, but they had to eat their corn before they fixed anything for themselves.

And I may have discovered the trick to getting the kids to eat their vegetables without complaint; make something truly horrifying, and the corn will seem positively mouth-watering in contrast.

And the worst part? I took all of the chickeny-hammy goodness out to the dogs. Who looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Well, maybe I had, but I was pretty damn funny.

Because I love my own cooking and my shiny new macro lens, I spent a lot of time this evening getting up close and personal with my food.

You’d think the kids would have learned by now; that camera is an extension of my body. But no, I had to put up with completely unreasonable questions such as, “Mom, why are you taking pictures of food?”

Well, because it’s pretty, goofy kid!

We got up this morning and I had a vegetable jones, one that wouldn’t be satisfied with plain ol’ grocery store dreck. So off we went to the serious Farmer’s Market, the one without the jugglers and the food on a stick and the hordes of oddly dressed people. No, we went to the farmer’s version, which is just a little ol’ parking lot with some vendors set up, and a curious mismatch of yuppies, foodies, and poor people trying to eat on the cheap.

I spent most of my money at the same farmer whose stand I pass twice a day on my way to work, which is silly, but he wasn’t the only one.

No, I found good tomatoes and cucumbers, which was cheating a little, since I’m growing both of those. But they’re not ready yet and I’m not a patient woman.

I found a local olive oil producer who warned me that the one I’d selected was really strong. Good! The stronger, the better for some things, and this stuff is delicious.

And I found the sweetest, ripest little apricots I’ve had since we had a tree in our yard when I was growing up. Man, I should plant a tree here; apricots are by far my favorite fruit. Seamus liked them too.

I didn’t just cook local stuff tonight. I wanted to grill a tri-tip, and I like corn and artichokes with that, so that’s what I did.

I wrapped both the corn and the artichoke halves in foil with garlic butter, and threw it all on the grill as low as it would go and just left it.

Tri-tip’s got a good layer of fat on it and is notorious for flaming up and getting burned. The last time I cooked it, it was on someone else’s grill and I couldn’t get the meat far enough from the fire or the flame low enough, and it was a little too crunchy on the outside for my taste. But I know my own grill’s quirks, and it came out perfectly; maybe not quite as rare as I like it because I had to let it stand while I fixed John the noodles I’d forgotten, but it was still extremely juicy and yummy.

But the best part was the salad with those fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, a chunked-up avocado, and drizzled with that beautiful oil and salt and pepper. That couldn’t wait until dinner; it was half gone before anything was off the grill.

Now that’s what summer tastes like!

I’ve had a very domestic weekend.

First off, after doing some early jobs on Saturday, I dragged out my newly-refurbished little tiller and finally got my garden redug.

As long as it took the engine guy to fix, I was seriously kicking myself for not just having Jose do it a month ago when he offered. My tomatoes would have a healthy start by now if I had. But no, I just about outsmarted myself, thinking I’d save a little money and do it myself. A rebuilt carburator and who knows what else later, and I did not save money. But the thing purred like a damn kitten on crack, and tore both ways through my little garden bed on one tank of gas. And it should still work next year, although I’ll have to do it for the next five to make it cheaper than Jose’s prices. My arms finally stopped tingling too.

I went down to Lowe’s and got me some vegetables. After last year’s heat wave that killed off all but my cherry tomatoes, I went a little crazy and planted six different kinds. If I have too many, so what? I really like tomatoes. And I got a few herbs and a tomatillo and a cucumber tucked in there too; everything I need for a perfect summer salad. No watermelon this year, as it cross-pollinated with my cucumbers last year and made them disgusting.

Still feeling gardeny, and since I couldn’t shut the garage door until I off-loaded the potting soil and closed the tailgate on the truck, I also repotted (finally!) my poor lime tree. Between January’s freeze and the ant colony living in it, it was in sad shape, but it’s sort of pretty now. Let’s hope I didn’t shock it too much, but I’m beginning to think that it’s the Energizer Bunny of citrus trees. Without actually ever giving me any limes, but I’m an optimist.

Then, on to the cooking!

Jeff’s mom is having a welcome-home party for him tonight, and I’m bringing cheesecake and a strawberry pie. The cheesecake is just my usual, but the pie’s new to me, as is the concept of making pie crust. I was not very happy with my first effort, so I didn’t take pictures.

I do have lots of strawberries left over; daiquiris, anyone?

I was on my feet and in the kitchen for several hours all told, and after the tilling, my back was squawking. Makes me seriously wonder if I’m nuts for thinking about switching careers over to one that’s much more physical. I’m hoping that I’ll get into a little better shape with all of the valve-exercising and plumbing that I’ll have to do, but I predict some serious “what have I done” thoughts in the first few weeks of that job. Which I do not have yet. I am, however, about to sign a contract on a pure consulting job for them, which is either an audition or a gateway to being hired without an interview, I’m not sure yet.

All of that domesticity, and the laundry pile seems bigger than ever. I guess I’ll get to that next. Stupid laundry!

I was browsing Chowhound last week and found an entry about homemade tortillas. That’s something that I’ve always wanted to try, so I figured I’d do it this weekend, and printed out a couple of recipes. I’ve talked to my neighbor Maria about them before, and she always mentions that I should come over some time while she’s cooking them, to see how easy it is.

She looked at the recipes that I’d printed, and said, “Oh, no no,” and right there in the street, rattled off her own from memory while I frantically scribbled it down.

Here’s Maria’s recipe:

5 cups La Pina flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup shortening
2-3 cups warm water
a little butter to brush on

In a big bowl or on the counter, combine the dry ingredients well. Add the shortening, crumbling it in by hand, until the whole dough has a nice grainy texture. Slowly add the water and mix it in as you go. Don’t over-water, or it will be sticky. Knead the dough, but not too much, as it’ll get tough. Seperate the dough into individual balls for tortillas, brush a little butter on them so they don’t develop a crust, and let them rest for a while - 20 minutes in this weather, 40 in cooler weather. Roll them out as thinly as you can; I dusted my bread board with flour each time, but I didn’t have any problems at all with them sticking, so that might have been overkill.

Then just fry them up in a dry pan. I have a tortilla pan for reheating, but it’s not as non-stick as my grandmother’s old cast iron, so I used that, which limited me to 12-inch tortillas. Flip them a few times. You’ll see when they’re done; they’ll puff up into layers. I found cooking them slowly over medium heat was good, but I could have gone with a little lower heat, as they were a little thick and I still had a slight raw flour taste when I was done. That will probably go away when I reheat the leftovers.

Maria insisted that La Pina was the flour to go with. It’s just a Mexican brand of all-purpose flour, as far as I can tell, but who am I to argue with the expert? I went and got some La Pina; fortunately, the Mexican grocery is right across the street.

They were good, basically very tender gorditas. I filled mine with chili-lime shrimp done on the grill, with grilled pineapple on the side. The kids aren’t huge fans of shrimp, but they liked them.

I could also see making smaller, thicker rounds, and deep-frying them for sopapillas, which I remember having with honey drizzled over them when I was a kid.

Not of myself, no. It’s not an introspective weekend, but a productive one.

First, I took this:

And made stock, soon to become Four-Mushroom soup for lunch:

Then I took this:

Through its steps:

To make this (two batches so far):

And, saving the best for last, I moved the woodpile out front where Marv kindly split it like butter with his hydraulic splitter and I moved it back and stacked it nicely. Isn’t it beautiful?

That’s a lot of hard work right there, but every piece of it was free, either given to me by the County guys who were going to chip it or cut with my own two hands from downed trees on my sites. And now I don’t have to be stingy on fires for the rest of the winter; I’d make one today in celebration, but it’s got to be 70 degrees out!

Crust

2 cups crushed chocolate wafer cookies (1 package)
1 stick butter, melted

Filling

12 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
2 1/2 cups chilled whipping cream, separated
4 Tablespoons instant coffee
2 Tablespoons hot water
3 8-oz packages cream cheese, room temperature
1 cup Baker’s sugar
9 ounces mini chocolate chips

For Crust: Combine crushed wafers and butter well. Press mixture into bottom of 10-inch diameter springform pan. Refrigerate to set.

For Filling: Using electric mixer, beat 2 cups whipping cream to peaks. Set aside in refrigerator.

Bring 1/2 C cream almost to simmer in heavy medium saucepan over low heat. Add chocolate and gelatin and stir until melted and smooth. Mix coffee in hot water and combine with chocolate mixture. Cool slightly.

Using electric mixer, beat cream cheese and sugar in large bowl to blend. Slowly beat chocolate mixture into cream cheese mixture. Add mini chocolate chips and mix. Fold whipped cream into chocolate/cheese mixture. Pour filling into prepared crust. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Since I worked on Saturday (and most ungraciously) I mentally told them where they could stick Friday and ran off and played hooky with my best friend.

This was after a trip to the stealership and an emergency cheesecake second take, but since neither of those were work, all was still well with the world.

See, I was invited to a Christmas party for Friday night, and requested to come bearing cheesecake. I’m a little notorious for that in the work circle, but man, am I getting tired of caramel. Since I’d just made a batch of mocha chip cookies, my little wheels were turning, and I figured that would be a good flavor for cheesecake too. I was laying awake on Wednesday night thinking about ways to modify the recipe — I wanted an end product that was a little denser but still a mousse. I’d seen a recipe for a thicker mousse that mixed the chocolate with the cream before whipping it, so I thought I try that.

So, come Thursday night, that’s what I did. I very gently heated the cream enough to melt the chocolate, stirred in the gelatin, and set it to whipping. And whipping. And whipping. And if a monster-sized KitchenAid isn’t whipping it, I just don’t think it’s whippable at that point. But Eureka! I’ve invented pudding! On setting it’s much more stiff than pudding, but would make an excellent chocolate tart. Which is NOT cheesecake.

I was most annoyed that my fantastic idea didn’t work. It was late anyway, so I threw up my hands and left the mess in the sink and promised myself that I would deal with it all in the morning.

After not dropping the truck off (but getting the parts ordered) on Friday, it was back to the drawing board. Time was getting tight at this point, because a no-bake cheesecake really needs time in the fridge to set and the party was that night.

I tried again, this time using the different ingredients but the conventional methods. I think it might be best to adjust one or the other at a time, not both.

And voila! One fabulous mocha chip cheesecake resulted. I warned my fellow guests when I got to the party that they were about to be guinea pigs, but nobody seemed too frightened. Luckily, this wasn’t the same crowd that had been exposed to the great toothpaste cake disaster of 2002.

I’d chosen the mocha because my host is a coffee fanatic, and he was thrilled. He wanted to buy one from me for another party he’s having (although I had to turn that request down as I’ll be gone.) I don’t sell a lot of these things; it’s not a business or anything, but that’s when I know it’s right. If someone’s willing to shell out the money for one, they’re probably not just being polite.

My day off with Marci was great too. I really needed her help to guide me through to maze that is scrapbooking. I need to make one for my grandparents for the cruise — I was assigned that task by my sister the Christmas Nazi. She’s making T-shirts for the lot of us, and while a photo album is a great idea, I’m a photographer, not a graphic artist. She’s the graphic artist. But Marci held my hand and walked me through what all I’d need for a simple one. It’s a little overwhelming — I had no idea that it was such a big thing. There are people that take that so seriously that I kind of wonder how they have time for any sort of lives to document in the first place. I’m clearly not going to pick this up as another hobby.

Then we went to lunch and dished about men for an hour and a half. Like we don’t do that every day online! But it’s fun to do it face to face. We don’t see all that much of each other and when we do, there are usually little people underfoot. It’s good to be able to talk without them now and then. And I see that I may need to develop my man radar a little bit, as she is much better at picking out the likely-looking ones, and I’m the single one.

Lunch time on a weekday at the H0me Despot may be the way to fix that though. Contractors galore! We may have to pick a better aisle to stalk than the bricks and fence post section. We were treated to a ten minute lecture on picking the right fence post when all we were doing was looking at footing for a dog run.

So, not a bad weekend all crammed in to a Friday. The kids and I were going to go see The Chronicles of Narnia on Sunday, but it was sold out. I believe that we’ll wait until after the first of the year to mess with those crowds again. I guess the churches in the area are buying up the tickets, believing that the movie somehow promotes their religion. Me, I’ll just wait until they get over that and go watch a movie based on a book that I used to love as a kid, and try not to read any ulterior motive into it.

Both kids had their parent-teacher conferences this week. John’s actually doing rather well—getting good grades and seems to be well-liked in class, which is a good change from the last school.

Seamus is also doing well, and his teacher had nothing but good things to say about him until the end, when she threw me for a loop. Apparently, during Red Ribbon Week, the teachers encourage the kids to tell them things that are bothering them. I suspect it’s fishing for drug use or abuse at home. When she called Seamus up to talk to her, she said he burst into tears and sobbed for about ten minutes. It seems that John hasn’t been treating Seamus very well lately, and it’s really getting to him.

I know there have been problems; I catch John interrupting him, talking down to him, and just generally being nasty fairly frequently, and I always put the smack down on John when I do. But I had no idea that it was bothering Seamus so much, and I just felt terrible. He’s really a sweet little boy.

I’ll have a talk with John, but for now, I wanted to give Seamus a little bit of a break. I think constantly being with someone who talks to you like that has to be wearing, and at their other house, it’s two big brothers that do it, not just one. So I picked him up yesterday to have a Mom and Seamus day.

We hung around the house and he got to play all of the video games that John usually takes over. We made cookies together, since he loves to cook but it’s really kind of a pain with two kids hanging on me. I let him do most of it, and he was rather pleased with himself.

He likes to run the mixer and dump things in, so I supervised the quantities and let him have at it. He did all of the cookie-placing too, but of course I handled the hot stuff. I’ve never made just a single batch of those cookies, but since we were doing it for the cooking experience rather than the having cookies motive, I made the small amount so they wouldn’t be around begging me to eat them. They’re really very good. They’ve been one of my specialties for almost twenty years, and every time I make them I think of the man who developed the recipe (who worked with my mom.)

Mocha Chip Cookies

12 oz semisweet chocolate chips
2 T instant coffee powder
2 T boiling water
1 1/2 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup soft butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg

Preheat oven to 350˚F. Melt 1/2 cup chocolate chips and cool to room temperature. Mix the instant coffee with the boiling water in a small cup. In a small bowl, mix the flour, salt, and baking soda. In a large bowl, mix the butter, the sugars, and the coffee. Beat until creamy. Add the egg and the melted chocolate. Add the flour mixture gradually. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Cook at 350˚F for 10-12 minutes—take them out while they’re still a little under-done, as these cookies are best chewy.