Baked Beans.

Ok, I'm pitiful.  I forgot I had this blog.  Another post, right here, and it's not like I have any followers, right?

So, I tried making baked beans again, today.  (This recipe: http://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/maple-baked-beans.html )  I changed up a few things about how I did it.

The first was this: I didn't just soak them overnight, I also boiled them for a while.  Change #2: I didn't make them in the slow cooker, and end up with way too much liquid.  I used my cast iron dutch oven.

Only two changes, but such a difference!  Although, I still needed more water in the soaking and more in the boiling.  (The beans absorbed nearly all the water overnight, so the top ones didn't look soaked enough, and while there was plenty of cooking liquid left, they would have benefited from another ten minutes of boiling.)  I took off the rind of the salt pork, and sliced it thin, and then chunked up the slices.  I used good dry mustard, and grade B maple syrup, as well as dark brown sugar.  I ended up liking the flavor of the sauce, very much.

The funny thing is that I always think my Lodge dutch oven is much smaller than it is, so when I put my 1 lb of beans and 3/4 of a pound of salt pork in, it only filled the pot about halfway.  I kept thinking it didn't look like enough.  Of course, it was a lot, and they're a little rich.

I also kept thinking about Laura Ingalls Wilder, describing her mother's baked beans in The Long Winter.  She boiled the beans, and they all drank the cooking liquid as broth for lunch.  Then she took the boiled beans, put them in a pan, decorated them with "scrolls of molasses" and a "bit of salt pork" and put them in the oven to bake slowly for dinner, and then, that was all they had for dinner.  (Eating these beans tonight, I could understand that.  They're very hearty and leave your stomach all warm and full.)  I've never been much of a bean fan.  My mom never made them.  But I keep reading about French beans, cooked with lots of pork and duck, or I try these beans and think that maybe my antagonistic feelings about beans are some prejudice I picked up from someone else, because really, I quite like them.  When I can remember to make myself eat them.

Recycling, the foodie way.

I picked up a rotisserie chicken and some asparagus...ok, a lot of asparagus for dinner, for yesterday.  I also realized that all I needed to make chocolate chip cookies was baking soda, so I bought that, too.

The chicken will be recycled tonight into yellow rice with sausage and chicken.  The carcass will make soup tomorrow.  The asparagus will go into a frittata with bacon on Thursday.

I love doing that, I feel so...thrifty!

Thomas Keller is a /GOD/, I tell you!

I'm sorry, I don't have pictures for this one.

So.  My sister bought me the Ad Hoc At Home cookbook, as I think I've mentioned, and I already knew that the Roasted Chicken on Root Vegetables recipe is heaven

Today was the turn to try the Leek Bread Pudding.  It's a savory bread pudding that he intends as a side dish.

Oh, did I mess with this recipe.  To start with, I didn't measure anything beyond the cream, milk and technically, the eggs.  I did slice the brioche bread into cubes and toast them...for half the time called for.  (I might go for the full 20 minutes, next time.)  I diced up half a pound of bacon, and browned that up, then pulled it out.  (Using good bacon means not a lot of fat gets rendered, just the right amount for the three leeks I used.)  I sauteed the leeks in the bacon fat, roasted the asparagus (which was already cut into chunks,) for 20 minutes with some truffle oil and kosher salt.  I chopped up the leftover chicken from the earlier recipe.  I made up the custard, and then realized that there was not enough liquid (my own fault, I deliberately shorted it,) and fixed that.  And then I put it together in a dutch oven: a layer of bread cubes.  Some chicken, some bacon, some asparagus, some of the leeks.  The rest of the bread cubes, the rest of the chicken, bacon, asparagus, leeks.  The custard.

Then I shoved it in the oven.  Then I came back, an hour later, to find that the oven was...off.  I burst into tears, turned it on, and an hour and a half later, found that it was PERFECTION.  It was so good, I nearly cried again.  Tadlet ate some of it and decided he didn't like it.  My SO ate some and said it was 'ok, but didn't knock his socks off.'  My roommate ate some and proclaimed it AWESOME, and could she have more, please.  There's about half of it left, I made a lot.

This stuff came out light, fluffy, savory, tasting lightly of the thyme I put in and not at all of the marjoram that I noticed.  It was just barely salty enough, between the bacon and the actual salt I added.  The brioche gave it enough sweetness to offset the bacon.  The chicken gave it a nice meaty texture and let me pretend that it was a balanced meal, between the chicken and the asparagus.  I added the last layer as leeks and those got lovely and crunchy.

It ended up being a lot of work, so this one won't be done too often.  I'd like to have a proper casserole dish to put it in, too, because I used the large pot that I make my mashed potatoes in, and it filled it most of the way.  Half the amount would make one /hell/ of a stuffing for a turkey, if you took out the chicken and possibly added some kind of fruit, instead.

And several days later, my sister's tried it and her reaction was so visceral that she turned beet red.  Sometimes, you manage to pull off the Platonic ideal of something.  This one certainly had a shining moment.

A good day.

In fact, this was a series of good days.

To begin with, I bought a set of Harmony interchangeable needles from Knitpicks.com.  I love these things immeasurably: I prefer wooden needles, they don't hurt my hands.  And these are just beautiful, all colorful and laminated.  And I am knitting Knitty: Convertible on the size 6s, in a laceweight red silk yarn that makes my heart sing, it's EXACTLY the color red of the silk blouse I used to own, a bright, in your face red that lets you know, there's no other color it could be.  It's red.

HOWEVER.  Much to my dismay, one of the layers on one of the needles started to come off, just enough to snag the yarn at every stitch.  Knitpicks sent me a new set of size 6 tips!  I finished up a section and a half in one day, it made me sincerely happy.  Thank you, Knitpicks!

Then, there was dinner, last night.  It was Roast Chicken with Root Vegetables from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home cookbook.  I should likely wait until fall to do this one again, my root vegetables, which are usually so insanely good as to make a person cry, just weren't that wonderful.  Or I'll skip the parsnips.  I'm not sure.  Dessert, however, was a brainwave.  Because I used to read the French Laundry At Home blog, all the time, until it ended, and now I read her Alinea at Home blog.  But Carol Blymire did a roasted pineapple entry, one that intrigued me.  And I had a whole, fresh pineapple from the grocery store, already peeled and cored.  So I sliced it in half, lengthwise, and into half-rings, the other way, dotted it with butter, sprinkled on vanilla extract, in generous amounts, and lots of brown sugar, then baked it. 

And then ate a lot of it.  And want to make it again, now, it was better than it had any right to be.  It was sweet, tart, buttery, vanilla-y, and reminded me of the topping of a pineapple upside-down cake without the too-sweet cake.  I can't wait to make it again!

Let's try this again.

So, another blog, The Cupcake Project, made me decide that I truly needed to try making this. It's not really fair, given that I keep deciding to cut down on sweets and start exercising, then I find something that I MUST make. This time, it was dulce de leche.

All you do is buy sweetened, condensed milk. Take the labels off. Put the unopened cans in your crock pot and make sure they're submerged in water. Set the crock pot to low. Go do other things. (For me, it was buying some strawberry plants at Home Depot, getting my sister's birthday present at Teavana, and some cleaning, not in that order. I have one of those Topsy Turvy upside down strawberry planters, that I'm itching to try. It's springtime in the Pacific Northwest, which means it's time for me to start killing some perfectly good herbs, (rosemary, lavender, and peppermint,) and try my hand at strawberries.)

Well, I did that. I took the first can out, and I opened it up. It...ejaculated, all over the wall, one line of dulce de leche coming out and splashing. I wish I could have filmed that, it was hilarious.

Then I tried it. If I were a guy, I might have imitated the can, it was that good.

I tried a spoonful with a few crystals of kosher salt and almost cried. We topped some Samoa Ice Cream with it. That made my fiance and son very happy. I actually preferred it with a bit of salt, and plain. We've got a little less than half a can left, plus the one I put back in the crock pot, because I want a darker caramel flavor. And I've been informed that if I made homemade cheesecake to go with this, sex would become unnecessary. I don't think that's much of an incentive to make the two at the same time!

Cobbler. Or maybe Clafouti. Plus, a scarf.

So, there I was, four against four hundred. Toughest four we ever fought. No, wait. There I was, at the farmer's market, this week. And I was with my son and the only thing I knew for certain is that I wanted some kettle corn. But the produce was lovely, so I ended up with some leeks, a bunch of carrots that are everything carrots should be, and a half-pint each of raspberries and some of the biggest, tastiest blackberries I've ever bought. (I prefer picking them in my back yard, but for various reasons, didn't happen. Spiders and not being able to reach them were the biggest problems.)

Anyhow, I ended up with gorgeous berries and no clue what to do with them, beyond eating them. The thing is, I love cooked raspberries, but the fresh ones always taste too tart to me to eat them fresh. Enter The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond.

I remembered seeing a recipe, not very long ago, about individual raspberry cobblers. I checked out the recipe: milk. I had that. Self-rising flour. I only had all-purpose, but I also have baking powder and salt. Vanilla extract. I have that. Butter. I have that. Raspberries. Ladies and gentlemen, we had a winner.

Yesterday, I carried out the experiment. Into one cup of flour went 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder and .5 teaspoons of salt. Then in went the sugar, and it was all combined vigorously before I added the milk, the vanilla and the melted butter. And then overfilled the muffin tins, and then added raspberries. (I ended up using half of what I had. And I even halved the recipe.) To make matters worse, there was a LOT of batter leftover.

They were HEAVENLY. Best ever. In spite of needing 20 extra minutes because of my oven.

So, today, I decided I needed to use up all the berries I had left. Turns out that with my muffin tins, one half-batch of these things made twelve cobblers and I had just enough berries for 6 raspberry ones and 6 blackberry ones. The blackberry ones nearly made me cry, they were so good.

On the knitting front, I finally almost got back to it. I'm not just a slow knitter, but worse, I developed carpal tunnel, so I had to stop for a while. I'm finally starting to get back to it. This scarf is for someone else, it's using some kind of Lion Brand thick/chunky yarn in charcoal grey, stockinette stitch. It's getting kind of long and it's boring, which is funny because I'd love to knit a Dr. Who scarf. Like that would be interesting? I know, I know.

First.

I suppose a bit of introduction may be in order.

I am currently an unemployed...well, I generally do office work, although I'm schooled in luthiery. (Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, class of Fall, 2003, and haven't done diddly with it since then.) I'm a mother, a very amateur cook, (although I love cooking, most of the time,) a terrible housekeeper, a reader, a very slow knitter, and an opinionated bitch. I'm also intensely liberal. I play RPGs, although mostly, these days, it's a version called mushing, or MUshing. (More about that in another paragraph.) I love to read, watch movies, I'm a sci-fi/fantasy geek, and I can't write fiction to save my life, but I can write essays, which is mostly what blogs are.

My favorite blogs are the ones that talk about people's lives, although I tend to read ones that are skewed towards cooking, or knitting, and mostly cooking, at that. For years, my favorite tv channel was the Food Network, although I'm skewing towards the DIY Network, these days. (I miss the shows that were genuinely informative, that had chefs who became personalities, as opposed to the ones who start off as personalities. Except for Alton Brown, who has always been my personal favorite.)

As for what to expect from this blog, it's going to be a little of this, a little of that...a whole LOT of that. (Oh, in case anyone gets the reference, yes, I'm also a fan of musicals. If you didn't, it's Ben Vereen in Pippin.)

Now, introduction's over, feel free to introduce yourself, as well. In the meantime, I shall offer a recipe, just as an opening gift. It's a take-off on some of the very best stuffing that I ever had in a piece of poultry, from a dear friend's grandmother. The stuffing was mashed potatoes with fried onions, but it was more the apotheosis of mashed potatoes with fried onions, because the juices from the chicken or turkey lifted the potatoes into a realm that they hadn't known before. The friend's grandmother did this with margarine, for reasons of being kosher. I do it with butter, because I'm trayf and I hate margarine. I made this version because I was living with someone who rarely ate at home, and I couldn't see cooking an entire bird when I only like white meat, but I was longing for the stuffing. Luckily, this turned out to be so good that I've had people tell me they dream of it. I even converted my fiance from an onion-hater to a fried-onion-lover with this dish. (The first time I made it for him, I told him that he had to try it, but that if he hated it, I was ok with it. It was the first time I was actually sorry that he loved something I made: it meant I had to share.)

Potato Gunk

Preheat your oven to 400.

Take about five pounds, more or less, of Yukon Gold potatoes. Peel them, chop them, boil them until tender. While you're doing this, finely dice 1 to 2 large onions. (I find that you can't go wrong with too many onions in this dish.) Slowly caramelize your onions in butter, in a frying pan, and cut up 1 to 2 pounds of raw chicken into bits. Sprinkle celery salt over the chicken and set it aside until the onions are done frying.

When the onions are lovely and soft and not-burnt-but-browned, put them in a bowl. Saute the chicken in the same pan that the onions fried in, until browned on both sides. Pour in a little chicken stock, and simmer until your potatoes are ready for mashing. Drain the chicken.

When the potatoes are ready, drain them, return them to the pot, and mash them with butter, salt, pepper and milk or cream. Once they're mostly mashed, crack in a raw egg and stir that in, very thoroughly.

Now, take your pans: they can be a deep casserole, or loaf pans, or whatever you choose, as long as it's deep. Spoon in a layer of mashed potatoes, making sure to cover the entire bottom, and make it a layer that's at least a third of the way up the pan. Put in a layer of chicken bits. Cover the chicken bits with the fried onions. Cover that with potatoes, the rest of the way up the pan, trying not to dislodge either onions or chicken. Bake all of this until the sides and top are crusty and brown, about 20 to 30 minutes. Serve in spoonfuls.

I find that I love the leftovers cold, when I'm lucky enough to have them, and that the potatoes set up nicely enough to be served in slices, if it's cold, first.