Light and Momentary

CSA Year 7, Weeks 3-5

Stella has taken over the morning guinea pig feeding, with the result that the guinea pigs have had more CSA veggies for breakfast than I might have liked. They wound up eating one of our two heads of lettuce from week 3, along with the purslane and the funky Asian greens from week 4. Whoops! We'll try to feed the guinea pigs more frugally in week 5.

In week 3 we were supposed to get garlic scapes and rhubarb, but the boys swapped out the rhubarb for more garlic scapes at the trade table. I ate them ALL ALL ALL in my scrambled eggs. I do love garlic scapes. The mesclun and the other head of lettuce went into taco salad; the sauted radishes and spring onions flavored the taco meat. We've had sugar snaps every week, and every week we've eaten them straight out of the bowl on Tuesday night. I was going to sauté the radish greens, but I am afraid they deliquesced in the fridge instead.

In week 4 I made a big batch of slaw with the new batch of radishes and the salad turnips. I cooked up the broccoli in olive oil with garlic and served it over pasta; Joe ate up the spring onions in his scrambled eggs one day at lunchtime. I should have eaten a little more salad, because there are a few leaves of week 4 lettuce left over as we start week 5. But it turns out that it's much easier to use up one's CSA allotment if the weird stuff disappears into the guinea pigs.

Heading into week 5: sugar snaps have already been devoured. I would like to roast the beets for soup, but I still have no oven. Would it work to roast beets in a toaster oven, do you figure? Perhaps I will try it and report back. Or bite the bullet and buy an oven. One of the two. Hm. It's 11:00 and I am feeling uninspired. This week's list of veggies that need destinies: cabbage, salad turnips, broccoli, beautiful little red onions, and basil. Pesto slaw might be just the thing.

Year 7, Weeks 1 and 2

This is the seventh year that we've participated in a local Community Supported Agriculture program, and it's easier than it used to be to make use of the food we get. I thought I might blog about it this year, on the chance that it might be useful to someone googling "what do I do with this kohlrabi?" (Answer: make kohlrabi slaw; peel, shred, and mix with shredded carrots, mayo, squeeze of lemon, drizzle of maple syrup.)

Week 1: sunchokes, sweet potato, beets and beet greens, rhubarb, sorrel, green garlic, green onions, 

One of the keys to using things up is batch processing. Last week I roasted the overwintered sunchokes at the same time as the overwintered sweet potato and the new season's beets. I also slid the chopped rhubarb into a corner of the oven with a little water and bunch of sugar; there they cooked down into soft stalks basted with cerise syrup. I didn't plan to use the beets or the rhubarb that night, but they were one step closer to being edible.

Rachel-who-needs-a-blog told me a few years ago to try cooking sorrel in cream and using the resulting sauce on fish. It is a dreadful drab color but just close your eyes: it tastes amazing. I also put some of the sorrel into scrambled eggs, where it was tart enough to be pretty penitential.

Over the weekend I took my rhubarb syrup and turned it into a gelatin dessert with a little coconut milk. It was not a hit. The kids don't really like the taste of rhubarb. I like the way it tastes, but you need so much sugar to make it edible that I prefer not to eat it. When I first unmolded the jelly it lay on its plate like a pale pink flower. The kids ate about two-thirds of it, after which it warmed up into a flabby mess the color and consistency of an uncooked chicken breast, left out on the dining room table for any peckish children. I pitched the last third of it.

Some of the green garlic went into scrambled eggs along with the beet greens, but I finished up the week with green garlic and green onions left over.

Week 2: more green garlic and green onions, basil, arugula, mesclun, carrots with tops, sugar snaps, and a big bunch of funky unfamiliar greens

The sugar snaps vanished over dinner, as they always do, straight out of the bag of CSA goodies.

I am going to use the green onions and most of the green garlic in this recipe from the NYT. I probably don't want the baby garlic bulbs in there, since overbrowned garlic gets unpleasantly acrid, and I am going to save out the scapes for my scrambled eggs. But I figure it should work to add in the greens. I'll report back.

The mesclun and some of the arugula will turn into lunch salads, which I will enjoy more if I make myself a batch of carrot-miso dressing. And hey, I have just the carrots for that. Our farmer encouraged us to use our carrot tops in pesto, but probably we will feed ours to the guinea pigs instead. The big bunch of funky unfamiliar greens will go into green potato soup, where they will be joined by the remaining arugula. That leaves only the basil. Caprese salad tomorrow, I suppose, to accompany the...whatever I decide to serve under the garlic-onion sauce, and pesto on Thursday with the remainder.

Top tips for CSA newbies overwhelmed by greens: cook 'em down (spinach soup for one meal rather than spinach salads for six meals), blend 'em up. That bunch of herbs is less likely to turn black and squishy in the fridge if you turn it into pesto than if you dole it out a few leaves at a time.

Nom nom nom

One night a couple of weeks ago I followed a New Yorker link from Twitter to read an article about Urvashi Pitre, the Butter Chicken Lady. The blog version of her internet-famous butter chicken recipe is here.

I love butter chicken with a deep and abiding love, and I have a recipe for it that everybody likes. The trouble is that it tells me to string my cardamom pods on a length of thread so I can fish them out more easily later. Which...no. But biting down on a whole cardamom pod is a rather bracing experience. And 15 cardamom pods is too many cardamom pods to retrieve with confidence. So I've mostly been ordering in the butter chicken I've eaten over the past few years, and my ears pricked right up at the idea of a better option. An Instant Pot option! A speedy option!

I tend to dither over cookbook purchases because I have so little space for cookbook storage. But I read some reviews and snapped this one right up. Tonight I made butter chicken. The cookbook recipe diverges just slightly from the blog recipe: more cayenne (1 t.), more ginger (1 T.). You guys, it was SO yummy, and fast, and easy. I got everything into the IP in approximately the time it would have taken me to string together 15 stupid cardamom pods on a length of thread. I am going to eat some of the leftover sauce on my scrambled eggs tomorrow morning, and the leftover chicken for lunch. Definitely worth a try.

Oven Magic

Bearing asked for my roasted celeriac recipe, and I am posting it even though it is not much of a recipe: fat, salt, heat.

You want a moderately hot oven but you have some flexibility in case you're cooking something else at the same time: 375 or 400 is about right. (I am having a moment of nostalgia for the cookbooks of my grandmother's era, which would often enjoin the reader to put something in a slow oven (or a moderate oven, or a hot oven) rather than specifying a particular temperature. Probably I would not feel nostalgia for those days if I had suffered through fallen cakes or crunchy-in-the-middle baked potatoes after making a faulty guess at the right oven temperature, but oh well.)

Peel yourself as many root veggies as your eaters would like, bearing in mind that leftovers will be a treat. Mix it up: celeriac was especially nice last night mixed in with the potato and sweet potato bites, but rutabaga is a favorite of mine and roasted sunchokes, if you can find them, will make you burst into song. Chunk them up into roughly equal pieces; there's no need for precision measurement here. Spread them in a single layer in a foil-lined jelly roll pan. Drizzle generously with olive oil, making sure each piece gets a light coating. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and slide into the oven.

Peek at them after 20 minutes. You may want to flip them over for even browning. You may think that's too much hassle. Stick a fork experimentally into a fat chunk and see how much resistance it meets. I would estimate that you'll need 40 minutes for pieces on the bigger end of bite-sized, but ovens vary, as do vegetables.

An option I use sometimes is to parboil the veggies first. There's a simple method I use that comes from Crescent Dragonwagon's Passionate Vegetarian: parboil small but not teeny potatoes for 6 or 8 minutes and carrots for 4-6 minutes depending on size. (For celeriac I'd cut it into potato-sized pieces and treat like potato.) Rub them with olive oil and roast them for about 45-50 minutes, drizzling them with soy sauce in the middle of that cooking time. She calls these Roasty-Toasty Potatoes & Carrots; my copy of Passionate Vegetarian opens to that page.

There's a more complicated Nigella Lawson method that I use for special occasions and dream about in between. I've never made it with celeriac but I expect it would be fabulous. Cut 5 or 6 pounds of medium-sized potatoes in thirds and boil them for four minutes. Drain them and put them back in the pot, where you will sprinkle them with 2 T. flour, clap on the lid, and shake it like fury. This floury coating will give them a fabulous crisp crust. You can leave them at this stage for a while if you are cooking a fancy holiday dinner with multiple moving parts.

When you're ready for your potatoes to fulfill their glorious destiny, get your oven nice and hot. She says to crank it as high as it will go, but I wouldn't exceed 475, personally. I'd be doing battle with my smoke alarm the whole time if I cranked it up all the way. I usually divide them between two pans: a 9 x 13 pan with vegetarian potatoes cooked in olive oil, and an 11 x 15 pan for the meat-eaters (not a jelly roll pan, though; you need taller sides to prevent a conflagration), in which I use duck or goose fat. Heat the fat of your choosing in the pans until it is sizzling hot, and carefully tip in your potatoes. Nigella recommends 640g of goose fat for this recipe, which is a little less fat than you'd find in six sticks of butter. (I'd be cautious about using actual butter at that oven temperature, though. Seems like you could scorch the milk solids.) Cook for 25 minutes; turn and cook for 25 minutes more. The next time I make these I will keep some back to ensure that I have leftovers. You wouldn't think you'd need to worry about leftovers with 6 pounds of potatoes, but people will eat an awful lot of these.

The birthday cake I keep making

Stella continued the "surprise me!" birthday cake tradition we've had going around here, although I asked her to narrow the options a bit. Last year I made her a surprise cake that she didn't love, and even though she was very polite about it I was hoping to spark a little more enthusiasm this year. She went through a couple of my cookbooks, marking possibilities with post-its.

I started with an almond cake that I've probably made a dozen times now. It's easy, as long as you're using machinery to do the whisking, and its list of ingredients is short and gluten-free. It bakes up into a cake that's flavorful and tender. You can take it in a slew of different directions if you're so inclined. So if you're looking for a new birthday cake recipe, here you go:

Preheat your oven to 350 and grease a 9-inch springform pan. If you are going to want to remove it from the base, you'll want to line it beforehand.

Start with six eggs; separate four of them. Beat the whites until you have soft peaks; add 2 T. sugar and keep beating until the peaks stiffen up. Next, beat your four egg yolks and your two whole eggs with a half-cup of sugar until they reach the ribbon stage. Gently fold in 150g ground almonds, the beaten egg whites, and the flavorings of your choice (recommended: 1/4 t. salt, zest of a lemon, tiny dribble of almond extract; I've also used orange zest, vanilla extract, and I know that I once did a coffee version but perhaps I only put coffee in the filling). Scrape it all into your springform and bake for about 50 minutes. Do not peek; it may come crashing down because it's mostly eggs and air. After it's cool, you can split it for filling and frosting.

Today I just filled and frosted with lightly sweetened whipped cream piped into a zillion stars, but I've told you before about various versions of this cake. I've done adventurous gelatin-stabilized sabayons and I don't even know what else in the middle. Whether you go simple or complicated with the filling, this cake is easy to split horizontally because the eggs lend a helpful degree of tensile strength to the layers. 

She loved the poncho and wore it all day, and after she asked for second helpings of cake she ate every last bite. In between I think she had a lovely birthday.

Better living through garlic and saffron

Earlier this evening I tweeted pitifully: 

Me: Hi, Google, what can I do with chicken breasts before the fam gets back from Mass that isn't awful even though boneless skinless breasts are stupid and cottony and the GLOOM, Google, I can't deal with the GLOOM and

Google: You might need some nice SSRI chicken, Jamie.

— Jamie (@mostgladly) November 19, 2017

And then I stiffened my socks and pulled up my upper lip (or something along those lines) and got to work. I heated about two glasses of wine to boiling, and pinched in saffron so it could steep. (I have almost emptied the little box of saffron I bought at the Indian grocery store two or three years ago. It's a much less pricy way to buy saffron.) I cranked the heat under a skillet in which I had put generous quantities of fat, a mix of butter and olive oil. When it was sizzling hot I threw in three fat chicken breasts, seasoned them with salt, pepper, and paprika, and let them get nicely seared on both sides. (Bonus points if you set off the smoke alarm. Our smoke alarm goes off if someone dreams of cooking bacon, I'm telling you.) When the second side was almost done I tipped eight cloves' worth of slivered garlic into the chicken-free spaces, and shortly afterward I poured in the wine and saffron.

Once it boiled I covered the pan and turned the heat way down, in hopes that nice gentle poaching would ward off dryness. After 10 minutes or so I added the juice of one lemon. When the chicken was done I pulled it out to scrape up the fond and reduce the sauce. After I sliced up the meat I plopped it back into the sauce and kept it warm. Later Pete mentioned that artichoke hearts would have been a great addition. He is not wrong.

Usually the evening Mass is quicker than average, but this weekend's homily was a long one. I wasn't sure when the gang would be home, so I decided to keep cooking until they arrived. I made a root vegetable puree that was not a success and a carrot-radish slaw that was. I boiled up a pot of edamame to serve with the Smitten Kitchen carrot-ginger dressing, and cooked up some orzo to soak up the chicken sauce.

This year I am having more trouble than usual with the November blues-- so much so that I was thinking about requesting an SSRI prescription when I go in tomorrow to get my beta blocker prescription updated. But at this point I don't think the advantages outweigh the side effects, so I'll probably just keep plugging for a while longer. Sunshine helps. Sunshine-colored food helps too. It's only four months until spring, right?

Rites of Fall

Let Stravinsky keep spring: if I were a composer I would create a work in honor of fall and gumbo. Today Elwood and I made Crescent Dragonwagon's Gumbo Zeb together. We do this about once a year, because it's a hassle. But we do it every year, because it's delicious. Late fall, when we are awash in lovely CSA greens, is the natural time for it. The recipe I linked to is the one from Dairy Hollow House Soup and Bread. She cut it in half when she put it into Passionate Vegetarian. We made an intermediate-sized batch today, with 4.5 bunches of greens, and it's a lot of gumbo. But if you're in the mood for a kitchen Project that will keep you happily fed all week long (and maybe longer), I can recommend this one enthusiastically.

A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump

I used to think self-rising flour -- flour with added salt and baking powder -- was an old-lady kind of purchase. My mother only ever bought it by mistake. But moving to Scotland changed my mind about flour. (And healthcare too, but that's another post entirely). There's a much stronger home baking culture in Britain, and self-raising* flour, as they call it there, lowers the bar between a busy home baker and a pan of biscuits. True, it doesn't take very long to measure out salt and baking powder, but it's quicker still just to weigh up** one ingredient and pitch it in.***

Earlier this week soul cake recipes were flitting across my feeds, and all of the ones I saw were unleavened. Blech, I thought to myself, that sounds pretty hockey-puck-y. Last night a Twitter pal and I agreed to test this recipe in the morning. I split my butter-sugar-egg mixture in half, and put self-raising flour in one bowl and plain flour in the other. It wasn't a perfect test -- I didn't divide quite evenly and needed a splash of milk to moisten the leavened batch.

So I can't say if it was the milk or the leavening, but the cakes with self-raising flour were browner as well as airier and less crumbly. They were the hands-down winners among the kids, although Elwood insisted the unleavened ones were all right. (He has a contrarian streak, does Elwood. He also thought I was telling him to get out of bed in order to try my "tuna soul cakes," so perhaps the warm dried-cherry-scented hockey pucks were delicious in comparison to his fish-flavored imaginings.)

Kids prefer the leavened version. pic.twitter.com/937Zp1XmUg

— Jamie (@mostgladly) November 4, 2017

If you decide to whip up some soul cakes here in the month of the dead, I suggest a little leavening. Unless, of course, penitential baked goods are part of your prayer and sacrifice plan.

*Self-raising is a better name than self-rising, IMHO. The flour raises itself. It can't rise itself, since rise is an intransitive verb.

**Have you taken the kitchen scale plunge? Do it! A few batches' worth of uncertainty and you'll never go back, I predict.

***Does it seem a little inconsistent that I am pro-SR flour and anti-Bisquick? The difference is the fat. In order to make Bisquick cheap and shelf-stable, they use shortening + additives. Butter forever, that's my motto. Love might make the world go round, but butter greases the axis****.

****Light & Momentary: come for the mom chat, stay for the alternative geophysics.

Colossus of Roasts. And Cheesecake.

Remember when Col, my giant Instant Pot, arrived in July? He and I have slowly been getting acquainted. I signed up to review the occasional book here, and the first one that arrived in my mail was Coco Morante's The Essential Instant Pot Cookbook.

I have Thoughts about cookbooks. I want them to have a distinctive voice and to be carefully edited. I want them to tell me some things I wouldn't have figured out on my own, and to push my boundaries a little bit but not too much. I have exactly 2.5 feet of cookbook space, which means I am choosy about which cookbooks get to stay.

The short version of this review is that this book makes the cut.

There's an accessible introduction to using the Instant Pot, and there are reliable step-by-step instructions in all of the recipes. My husband is very skeptical about the Instant Pot. "It beeps," he says. (He has fond memories of a world in which appliances didn't beep.) Even so, he was able to follow Morante's directions with no fuss.

For the most part, the recipes are interesting but also straightforward. I read an Amazon review complaining about her reliance on weird ingredients, but that's (literally) a de gustibus kind of thing. I am excited, not annoyed, about the idea of mail-order sumac and ras el hanout. There are some funky recipes (honey-turmeric tonic, anyone?) and some plain-vanilla recipes (macaroni and cheese), but mostly they inhabit the space in between. In a few cases, I think she was stretching to demonstrate that a recipe could be adapted for the IP when really it would have been easier to fire up the stove already.

Instant Pot cooking works best with foods that should be nice and tender. My husband likes his green beans still firm enough to be used as bludgeons (very small bludgeons. elf bludgeons), but I am a child of the South. I thought Morante's recipe for Italian stewed green bean recipe was perfect, as was her kale with apple and onion. (I was less enthusiastic about the Indian-spiced okra, but in fairness I should add that I was missing two of the spices.)

After I made a couple of the meat recipes, I felt ready to riff on them. She has no recipe for tongue, but I dove in and made tacos de lengua in the Instant Pot because I felt comfortable with the settings and the beeping. Making broth isn't complicated, but it was nice to have clear instructions for how to do it in a pressure cooker.

I was most curious about the desserts. Poached pears, sure (thumbs up from the kids on that one), but cheesecake? in a pressure cooker? for real? I was so intrigued that I bought a 7-inch springform. Turns out that pressure cooker cheesecake works really nicely. I made her New York cheesecake, to which you add a topping of sweetened sour cream after it emerges from the steam. Adding a topping is probably a good idea, because condensation from the top of the IP can mar the top of the finished cheesecake. Well worth the hassle for cheesecake with a 30-minute cooking time and no need to rig up a bain-marie. After this success with steaming a dessert I am going to see if I can manage a steamed suet pudding in the Instant Pot. That's not a recipe anyone sensible would include in a book for an American audience, but I bet you can get around that crazy 4-hour cooking time and wind up with the same lovely texture.

In addition to the experiments I want to try, there are a number of recipes I still want to cook as written. That's a little unusual for me. The FTC wants me to spell out for you that I received a complimentary copy of this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for writing a review, but I assure you I'd let you know if I didn't like it. If you have an Instant Pot that's a little dustier than you might like, or a little more intimidating than you expected, this book is a fun way to figure it out.

Receipts

About 20 years ago I organized all of my recipe clippings. There were dividers and topic headings and sub-categories. And then followed 20 years of reading about food and cooking for a family. Oh, and stashing kitchen equipment manuals, because I might need a refresher on how to adjust the peeler thickness on the apple peeler-corer-slicer. Or how to make jiu niang in my Instant Pot. Wouldn't want to forget that, would we?

It was a MESS, is what I'm saying.

As I tried to sort it out I realized that there were at least three different kinds of recipes in there. There are the ones I like and want to make again, like pan bagnat. (But I don't want to look it up on the NYT website, because that yellowing clip from August 2007 reminds me powerfully of picnics past. It stays.) Then there are the aspirational recipes, like Sri Lankan Dal and Stuck-Pot Rice and Lentils. I would like to be the kind of cook who knows exactly where to buy curry leaves and exactly how to coax a perfectly browned rice crust out of the bottom of the pan in one piece. Someday I would like to host a traditional New Orleans brunch, with Eggs Sardou and Crêpes Suzette.

Finally, abundantly, a little absurdly, there are the sentimental journey recipes. 

In the summer of 2011 my husband and oldest son went together to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. In theory, I was 100% on board with this trip. But they were gone for almost three weeks at a time when Stella was sleeping like a feral little batlet. Which is to say, hardly at all. Near the end of that time my mother-in-law drove to Gladlyville and we took the other four kids south to my aunt's farm. We met up with my mother, and I spent a few days surrounded by grown-ups who loved me and cooked for me. My aunt made this bean dish and it tasted so ambrosial in the moment that I asked her for the recipe. Her handwriting is like and yet not like my mother's. And when I hold this recipe in my hands I remember the fierce heat of that day, the noise of the cows cooling off around their pond, the blessed relief of being tended after two weeks of relentless tending. I can't recycle that, even if I will never make this bean bake.

"What's a can of real celery?" asked Elwood, who did not grow up reading the Riley sisters' handwriting. "It's red kidney," I told him.

When Joe was 6 or 7, judging by the spelling, he wrote up a recipe for Goo. It calls for 31 cups of marshmallows and 12 inches of chocolate, which you must mirowave for 20 seconds. "Well," said Elwood, "we'd have to find a mirowave if we wanted to make that one." But I will never recycle that recipe either.

Most precious of all, I found a cake recipe in my grandmother's handwriting. She's the person who taught me to bake as we turned out pound cakes together, Saturday after Saturday. It's the only thing I have in her handwriting in this house, though there may be some old letters lurking at my parents'. It is jotted on the back of a school lunch menu; a quick search of the day-month-year alignment suggests that it dates from either 1970 or 1964. I am never going to make a prune-spice cake that calls for 1 C. Wesson oil; it's just never going to happen. But when I brush my hand across those words, gently and with a full heart, it is a form of connection with my long-dead grandmother, who wrote those words on this paper when she was still strong and capable.

It's not only the recipes from people I know and love that have sentimental value for me. Back in 2002-3, Nigella Lawson wrote a column every other week for the NYT. That was the year we were living outside NYC, the year when I was so lonely and miserable. Every other Wednesday I would thump down the stairs happily, eager to read her column over a cup of coffee. I look at those clippings and I remember: there are always bright spots. Hard times do get better.

I suppose that a person who keeps blogging about how BAKING = LOVE is destined to have a hard time trimming down her recipe collection. And organization is just not my defining trait. (Can you imagine if organization were your defining trait? I'll pass on that one, thanks.) I do not know quite what I will do with this pile of potential and remembrance and useless old Vegetarian Times recipes taped to the back of recipes that I do actually want to keep. For tonight, I will pat my grandmother's recipe one more time, tenderly, and tuck the loose odds and ends back into the binder pockets.

People used to call them "receipts" instead of recipes, and there's something fitting about that name: receipts are confirmations that something has been given and received. I can't flip through these pages without remembering all the gifts I have been given.

Poll

What's the most uncomfortable place you've ever spent the night? 

Deeply delicious salsa verde

Half a pound of tomatillos in this week's CSA pile, and they dove bravely into the food processor to meet their fate. They were joined there by a clove of garlic, and a baby onion (maybe the equivalent of an eighth-sized wedge of an ordinary onion), and the leaves from a small bunch of basil, and a hot pepper, and a quarter-teaspoon or so of salt. This is based on a Crescent Dragonwagon recipe that called for cilantro instead of basil, but all of my cilantro has bolted and I had basil sitting wistfully in the crisper drawer.

Verdict: yes, please. I made it as a relish-y thing to serve atop calamari, but after dinner one of the boys said, "Could you just leave the salsa out so I can keep eating it, maybe with chips?" Yes indeed, I said, because I'm pretty sure the organic tomatillo part cancels out the pile of chips part.

Colossus of Roasts

The Instant Pot won't fit in my pantry, but I found another spot for it, and a name. I am going to call him Colossus of Roasts (Col for short, I think -- a little nod to Prydain), and tonight was his first outing.

First I pressure-cooked the CSA beets in the steamer while I prepped onion and carrots. The bigger beets needed a few additional minutes, but it was quick and easy to get them cooked through. Disclosure: I have been using a pressure cooker for years, so I have already done the mental work of thinking BUT IT MIGHT EXPLODE PERHAPS ANOTHER DAY WOULD BE BETTER. I tipped the beets into a bowl to cool, rinsed out the inner thingummy, and put it in sauté mode with the heat on max. I like my base veggies good and browned, which is the #1 disadvantage to my slow cooker: either you brown separately and have to deal with tipping all your hot food + fat into the narrower mouth of the slow cooker, or you don't brown things in advance and it winds up tasting like undifferentiated slow cooker stew. (Or at least that's my experience. Maybe I would have better luck if I didn't eschew seasoning packets?) 

Browning my onions and carrots in the Instant Pot worked swimmingly, leaving me enough time to peel and chop and dress my beets, and when the veggies were done to my liking I added two turkey legs. (Why do we have turkey legs in July, you might ask? Because I married into a family that cannot resist a bargain. My SIL picked up some astounding quantity of frozen meat on sale, and my MIL implored me to take a turkey off her hands the last time I was at her house. Elwood roasted it earlier this month.) I put the IP in soup mode with a freezer bag full of stock, and 30 minutes later the meat was falling from the bone. I fork-shredded it and scooped some out for me, and then I stirred in leftover pasta for everybody else and put the IP in "keep warm" mode.

We ate our beet salad first-- 4 chopped beets, juice of half a lemon, goat cheese and olive oil to taste along with salt and pepper, scooped into the hollow of a quartered avocado. (It didn't stay put. More like "sprawled across a quartered avocado.") Our turkey soup was an unusually frugal dish but it was also very pleasant. Col made it significantly faster than it would have been without pressure-cooking, and more streamlined than it would have been with my old pressure cooker. And cleanup, as promised, was easy-peasy.

Self-evident

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that the Fourth of July requires potato salad, and that the making thereof is an act of resistance against would-be authorangeitarians. It's been ten years since I posted my potato salad recipe for the Fourth of July, but some things never change. (Except that I do usually cook my eggs separately these days. I prefer eggs to simmer and potatoes to boil vigorously, and I don't mind washing an extra pan nearly as much as I did in 2007.)

Yours in the pursuit of freedom and bacon,
JMG

Trouble-choux-ting

Joe asked if I'd make pastries for his birthday today -- profiteroles or eclairs, he had in mind -- and I said BAKING = LOVE, KID. So this afternoon I mixed up a batch of choux pastry and popped it in the oven.

The first couple of times I made choux pastry I had trouble with soggy insides, but I'm better at getting the innards dry these days. I baked my buns at 400 for 20 minutes, poked holes in them and then dried them out in the oven for another five minutes. The trouble I keep having is that most of the round buns defy gravity. Just a tiny thin crust sticks to the baking sheet, and the rest of the pastry hurls itself skyward. This makes for buns that look pretty but aren't really fillable. It's possible that the trouble comes from piping spirals -- I wonder if I'd have better luck if I piped out a single big blob instead.

Then I ran into trouble with the crème pâtissière. I've made incremental progress from my first few attempts, when I wound up with something tasty but totally drinkable. I was hoping for something a little better than incremental progress, though. This afternoon I took it off the heat when the flour started thickening up, thinking that it would keep on thickening as it cooled. But clearly I needed to be a little braver. This was milkshake consistency rather than milk consistency, but still not thick enough to stay put inside a choux bun. It oozed out gently rather than pouring out, but let's hope for a bigger step forward next time.

It worked well enough. I'm not baking for Paul Hollywood over here-- except that Joe loves to trot out his Paul Hollywood impression. "Underproved!" he shouted as I stirred the ganache. "Sweetheart," I told him, "you do not want me putting yeast in your chocolate ganache." Undeterred, he moved on and inspected the custard. "Underproved!" he told me again. "Underproved!" he said insistently as he picked up a bun. (That sounds obnoxious but it was all in fun. He's the most willing to bake something complicated, and -- perhaps in consequence -- particularly appreciative of complicated baking efforts.)

Luckily for him, I did not put any yeast in his choux buns either. 

This is what fifteen looks like: fascinated by magic, enthusiastic about Miles Davis, full of jokes and plans, and somehow two inches taller than me. Happy birthday, sweetheart.

So delicious but no more, please

Tonight for dinner I made tomato soup and corn muffins while Petely made a bean salad beside me. It was a particularly good tomato soup: I browned an onion in ghee (only because we had it handy, not because I am Whole 30-ing or anything (see above re: bean salad and corn muffins)) and then added 5 cloves of garlic and an inch of ginger. When the garlic was golden I pitched in two 14-oz. cans of sliced tomatoes and let it simmer until everything was tender. At the end  I pureed it all and added a couple of spoonfuls of coconut butter because we were out of cream.

(OH DEAR, this is sounding like one of those wacky Paleo sites where I expect you to have sprouted chia seeds on hand so you can grind your own not-flour with them to make crackers for serving under organ meat pate. No need for any of the above. Just use regular butter and cream, for real. Or canned coconut milk, if you have it, because the coconut flavor was nice with the ginger.)

Everybody was excited about the soup, and even Stella-who-is-still-awfully-picky made enthusiastic noises. She ate an ounce or two of soup, and then she decided the muffins were more her speed. "It's very good," she said. "But enough's enough," she doubtless thought.

I rolled my eyes, and then an hour later I got an email from the farmer who runs our CSA. Thanks to your recommendation, it said, one of your friends joined the CSA this year! As a thank-you gift, we'd like you to have $20 worth of produce for freezing or canning later this year! Which kinds would you like?

My heart sank a little. There are a lot of things I love about our CSA: I am really pleased to be supporting a local small business, to be feeding my family beautiful organic vegetables, to be eating what's in season here in my area code, to be expanding my own food boundaries with the various unexpected offerings he brings us. I felt victorious when I found a good way to eat kohlrabi (peel, shred, add slaw dressing along with something fruity like crushed pineapple or finely chopped apple). But it's also a bit of a job to make sure that his beautiful produce gets put to good use. OH MAN this is SUCH a first-world-problems post. Pardon my first-world-problem-li-ness, but it requires some creativity and persistence to make prudent use of those food dollars. The very thought of learning to can in order to dispatch even more produce makes me pine for a Mrs. Patmore (and perhaps an uncomplaining kitchen staff to eat the fruits of her labors).

I realized I was saying exactly what Stella had said. "It's very good! But enough's enough."

Snow Globe Brain

This evening I made cranberry sauce to take to Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. It is the cranberry sauce I always make for my family, but I almost lost my nerve. "How much maple syrup should I add to the cranberry sauce?" I asked my traditionalist 17-year-old son. "None," he boomed, as I knew he would. Okay, then. Jamie's Unexpectedly Astringent (and Honestly Sorta Penitential) Cranberry Sauce goes on the road. (I love it. I have a serious sour tooth. The kids expect it. Our hosts...may find it startling.)

The pop of the cranberries in their pan sounded like the season. Oh, man, now that I have written that sentence it sounds like terrible catalog copy. I will probably look back on that sentence and wince. But it is a true sentence. I have been so unsettled, my own discombobulation greatly compounded by the mental health issues of someone close to me, and I took a deep breath when I heard that first familiar pop.

Next I made the sweet potatoes, my mind awhirl with the news of Haldeman's Medium article and Jill Stein's accelerating fundraiser. These are crazy times, are they not? The sweet potatoes taste a little like the cook was distracted, but I think the maple syrup will cover a multitude of sins, just like the Bible says. I took another deep breath when I saw the peeler slicing down the first sweet potato, opening up a slash of orange in the deep red skin. Thanksgiving has the prettiest ingredients. (It's easier for me to say that tonight since I don't have the pale and flabby carcass of a 14-pound turkey sitting in my fridge. I can admire the glossy greens and leave the dead-bird-wrangling to my friends.)

Further distracted cooking: cranberry curd, in which I reversed two of the steps and realized I had skipped dinner. I had thought I'd spread the curd on a hazelnut dacquoise layer, but I...don't feel enthusiastic about making a dacquoise layer tonight. Will Jamie make the beet-fennel-apple salad she had planned, or will she trudge off to bed, her hair festooned with cranberry syrup and mashed sweet potato? 

I'm sure the suspense is killing you.

Home-Brewed

Earlier this summer my SIL gave me a kombucha scoby and instructions on what to do with it. You guys, kombucha is the easiest call-forth-your-inner-hippie project I've undertaken. Here is the link that got me started. You'll need 3.5 quarts of tea, in which you have steeped 8 tea bags and dissolved a cup of sugar. When it's cooled, plop your scoby in, along with 2 cups of already-brewed kombucha to lower the pH and discourage the growth of mold or unfriendly bacteria. I bought a big glass jar with a spout at Target for something like $12, but I expect you could brew it in any old glass jar. For the initial fermentation, you'll want to cover the mouth of the jar with something like paper towels secured by a rubber band. You want it to be breathable, but you also want to keep the fruit flies at bay.

Leave it in a dim place where it can sit quietly for 6 days. Start tasting it then; it will get tarter as it continues to ferment. When you like the way it tastes, pour it into bottles, leaving a little headroom. Cap them and leave them at room temperature for a day or two; this will carbonate your kombucha. Store it in the fridge from here on out. Drink up, and imagine your microbiome high-kicking as it welcomes all those newcomers.

(Or maybe anthropomorphizing your intestinal bacteria is not your cup of tea. In that case, drink up and think of...England. Or whatever works for you.)

Joe is not persuaded that kombucha is really fit for human consumption.

Sometimes the twig doesn't even notice that it's bending

My husband and I were talking about our dinner plans for the Fourth: hamburgers, potato salad, cole slaw, deviled eggs, red-white-and-blue dessert.

"Wait a minute," said the 16yo. "You're putting chat masala in the potato salad, Japanese turnips in the cole slaw, and pesto in the deviled eggs?" (He didn't comment on the pavlova, but it might be a little quirky to serve an Australian dessert on the Fourth of July.)

That's right, we told him.

"What about the hamburgers?" he wanted to know. "Can we have those with just lettuce, tomato, and sriracha, like God intended?"¹

That's fine, we told him. Lettuce, tomato and sriracha.

Like God intended.

--

¹He wants you to know that (a) he was surprised, not displeased, and (b) he is 100% right about sriracha on hamburgers.

Easter dinner, streamlined

Last Easter went all kinds of wrong, mostly for messy unbloggable reasons. But it didn't help that dinner was too fussy and I didn't start until the day itself. This year I spent most of Holy Saturday grading (so glad to have that batch of assignments done, though), and I was hoping to avoid a repeat of last year. So I reined myself in, and we wound up with something that was festive but pretty quick.

I always start with dessert. This used to make my husband crazy, but if it still bothers him he doesn't complain about it out loud. I didn't realize until I started filling Easter baskets that he had bought chocolate chips (if I'd known I would have probably whipped up something chocolate, or something chocolate and something lemon), so I decided to make a cake I'd paged past for years in Nigella Lawson's book Feast: lemon meringue cake. It's kind of weird-looking, frankly: you make a little bit of cake batter and spread it across the bottom of two 8-inch cake pans, and then you spread meringue on top and bake it at 400 until the meringue is crispy and bronzed. After it's cool, you slather the bottom layer with lemon curd and whipped cream and rest the other layer on top. The recipe is here if the idea intrigues you. (The kids thought the lemon curd was a little too zingy, but I love tart desserts and so it worked for me.)

As soon as the cake was in the oven and the pans were washed up, I set a boneless leg of lamb on top of some slivered garlic and a few of the thyme branches that are already green again in my herb garden. I poured over some olive oil, some lemon juice, and salt and pepper, and let it soak up flavor while we dealt with vegetables. 

Elwood peeled a vat of potatoes while I halved Brussels sprouts and rubbed them with oil and salt. The potatoes had a cold-water soak while the sprouts went into a hot oven (425 degrees) with some foil-wrapped beets. I set a timer for 30 minutes and threw in a little dish of cut-up broccoli (also oiled and salted) about 5 minutes later. Elwood had peeled and cubed a couple of mammoth sweet potatoes, and they took up the last of the available oven space. The green veggies were done when the timer went off (balsamic vinegar for the sprouts, lemon and red pepper flakes for the broccoli), and their absence made room for the lamb to go in at 475. After 30 minutes I turned the oven down to 350 and let the lamb finish cooking. If I were a really helpful blogger I would report on cooking times for the sweet potatoes and beets, but...I can't remember how long they wound up taking. Mashed potatoes are always a last-minute thing around here, and they were accompanied by a loaf of grocery story ciabatta.

The idea of simultaneously roasting a whole bunch of different veggies with different cooking times comes from Tamar Adler, and I found it to be lower stress than managing something steamed plus something braised plus whatever else. I wondered if all of that olive oil + salt would make things taste too similar, but it turns out that Brussels sprouts do not taste very much like sweet potatoes even if you put olive oil and salt on both of them. Roasted veggies are flavorful enough to enjoy at room temperature, which takes off some of the pressure to get everything ready at just the same time. 

Dinner was a success, the dirty dishes were manageable, and I was 15 minutes early for 5:30 Mass. (I was scheduled as a Eucharistic minister. I'd never been to an Easter evening Mass before. It was good. Also the Vigil was AWESOME and all went smoothly with the RCIA folks and I am tearing up remembering how my friend cried when she received the Eucharist. BEAUTIFUL. Christ is risen, alleluia!)