Category Archives: cooking

This week’s pie was inspired by Sue (Awesome photos if you’ve never seen a saving white sturgeon photo essay.)

I told her I was working on pies and she said she’d had a terrific margarita pie with a pretzel crust. That sounded worth checking out.

Some of the first recipes I found involved stirring margarita mix into Cool Whip and then scraping into a graham cracker crust. I didn’t think I’d learn much from making that so I held out until I found a super complicated recipe with lime curd and frothing egg whites and folding whipped cream. A recipe that would get every dish in my kitchen, except the frying pan, dirty.

I had trouble with it. I get nervous with recipes that say, “mix until just combined” which is why my cornbread always has big flour lumps in it.

In this case, “lightly fold just until streaks are gone.” I was folding and folding and folding and more streaks appeared. By this time I was tired and had a million dishes to do so I finally scraped it into the crust and hoped for the best.

It’s not pretty but it tastes okay. The recipe called for the pretzels (the Madison pretzels, btw) to be ground fine but I think they could be a little coarse. I’m not the biggest lemon meringue fan and this is basically lemon meringue only with lime and tequila added. It’s worth eating and I learned something, I guess, but measuring “how much I like it v. how much trouble it was to make” I would say we probably won’t be having this again.

Two lukewarm results in a row. I need something epic. There should be fresh fruit by the time I get around to making my next pie.

The other day I saw Mr. Oranges up in the apple tree digging his little paw around top there. I figured there must be something birdlike in there that he was trying to get into. I tried to sneak out to get photos.

I’ve read a couple of Julia Child related books in the last year or so. I read My Life in France and just finished a book of correspondence.

I’m sure I’ve seen snippets of her shows before, but not for years and years.

In fact, I probably have a better memory of seeing Dan Akroyd do Julia Child.

As soon as he saw me he jumped down from the tree and came over to say, Hi. Later I saw a bird sitting up there looking forlorn. Sort of like, “My wife is going to kill me when she gets home and finds out I ruined the birdlets.”

As it turns out, PBS does repeats and I taped one and Bob and I watched it last night. (There are shows online, too.) It was hilarious.

I very rarely watch cooking shows. I don’t have a lot of excess time for TV and I find it tough for me to watch cooking. I want to be doing it. Or, as usually is the case for me, learn by doing it wrong.

The episode we watched is from 1971, La Tarte Tatin, and I was surprised by how awkward it was. Julia knocking over the utensils and then the Tarte coming out (spoiler alert!) a big mushy disaster which she waves off and tells us how we’re going to fix it. But there is a pause where she’s disappointed that she can’t show us how pretty it’s supposed to look. “What a shame.”

Mr. Oranges feels no shame. I still see the bird flying around there so either the cat was unsuccessful or the bird is trying again or I am completely misunderstanding what’s going on in my apple tree.

It’s nice to know you can still find her out there. I already learned something from that one clip which is that it’s possible to make pastry a lot more casually than the way I go about it.

I read about this pie in a travel article a few months ago. It’s a specialty at a bakery in Hawaii. I’ve been trying to improve my pie making and I wanted to try it.

I found a recipe here.

I don’t have coconut extract and didn’t want to buy it and I’ve never seen a measurement for chocolate like that. At first I thought it meant powdered chocolate. It also calls for a regular pie crust which I didn’t think would cut it.

I used the crust from Cook’s Illustrated Chocolate Cream Pie recipe: 16 Oreo cookies zoomed in the food processor and then mixed with 2 Tbls of melted butter and pressed into the pie pan. You put it in the fridge for 20 minutes and then bake at 350 for 10 minutes.

For the chocolate I used 7 oz. of high cocoa content chocolate. I’ve read a million articles about chocolate but I still don’t completely get the cocoa content thing. I used Lindt Excellence, one bar of 90% and one bar of 70% because that’s what they had at Fred Meyer.

It came out fantastic. Pretty and good tasting. I didn’t even bother with the whipped cream topping.

Now I’m super full but happy. Highly recommend.

Do you like cheese?

I’ve been sitting on this recipe since about 5 minutes after I read it.

Favorite quote:

Grate two of your half-pound blocks, including the mildest one, completely. Look at the big pile of cheese you have now. Unwrap the third block, look at it, grate a little off the end, and think about how far you want to go. There are no wrong answers here. Relax your mind and listen to what the cheese is telling you.

I don’t make mac ‘n cheese very often because it’s too delicious once we start eating it’s hard to stop.

Tonight I served it with a green salad.

I said, “Be sure to finish your salad. Your digestive system needs something to work with.”

The mac n’ cheese is just as fantastic as you can imagine.

It made me think of those links you see everywhere that say, “Click here to find about the 5 foods you should never eat.”

I clicked on it once but it wanted me to watch a 10 minute video clip and I’m sure the first 9.5 minutes would be shilling some ridiculous and overpriced product and the last thirty seconds would have the arbitrary 5 things. “French Fries, Cheesecake, double bacon cheeseburger, biscuits and gravy AND deep-fried deep dish pizza.” (That’s just my guess.)

Unless it’s “toxic waste” isn’t it okay to eat anything once in a while?

We’re not having this mac and cheese again until 2012 so we’re getting our money’s worth out of this pot.

I have more to say about pants. I didn’t want two pants posts in a row but since I opened with mac n’ cheese I think I can get away with it.

I ordered some pants from an online place where I buy stuff all the time. These are casual pants, not workout pants. The site said these particular pants run big so order your size accordingly. I went a size smaller than normal and out of the package the pants fit perfectly if not a skoosh snugger than I prefer.

But the give. Wow, after I have the pants on a couple of hours they are quite relaxed. I had on some slippery underwear and at one point I thought the pants were slipping off while I was getting on the bus.

The waistband is huge relative to the butt part. Whose body is shaped like that? I like the pants but I have to hike them up a lot. I’m not a belt person. I drink a gallon of tea for breakfast and I don’t want to deal with a belt.

Earlier this week I read an article talking about what looks like a totally annoying book by a soccer mom who discovered yoga. A ton of women commenting on the article wrote about swell and life-changing yoga was for them.

I had no idea people talking about yoga was so annoying.

I am so sorry.

I will try to refrain from talking about yoga forever.

Except for, I tweaked my back this morning carrying the groceries in. What’s the point of all this clean living and yoga if I’m always tweaking my back, shoulder, neck or other random part?

Things to note in this photo: my cinnamon rolls and dinner rolls. At the last minute I decided to try making the stuffing in the slow cooker. Came out fantastic. My Mother-in-law brought me pumpkin pop tarts. I just had one and the sugar is making my heart race. But in a good way.

Yesterday’s meal came out excellent even though I did, uh, unplanned improvisation on pretty much every single recipe.

Screw Alton Brown and his commenters on that brine recipe. I thought the cooking temperatures seemed sorta high and took it down a notch. I checked on the turkey a half hour before it was supposed to be done just to see how it was doing. It looked like a retiree after a long summer on the beach in Miami and when I jammed the thermometer in the breast the temperature shot up to 170 and I screamed and took it out of the oven. By some miracle it still tasted fantastic. Also, I ignored the part about aromatics. I don’t see how shoving an apple and cinnamon stick into a turkey’s ass while it cooks is going to do anything.

[Aside: I was dying to put an update on my Facebook page that said, “Anyone know how to tell which side of the turkey is the breast?”

I thought it would be hilarious but then I knew there would be at least one person who would very earnestly try to explain it to me and it would irritate me for the rest of the weekend.]

The chocolate mocha cake was delicious. I don’t know how to drizzle things on cake to make them look pretty but I plopped some fudge sauce on and then brought the bowl to the table so we could shovel more on our individual pieces.

While I cooked I decided to listen to record albums. Yes, we have a turntable in our house. We keep it next to our electric typewriter and our rotary phone.

Records are a pain in the butt. You can see how that mp3 player thing took off. I listened to The Babys Anthology, [aside: this is the first time I noticed the creative pluralization. Did they think “The Babies” was too stupid?] Dramarama Cinéma Vérité, and Skid Row featuring my favorite Gilmore Girls bit part actor Sebastian Bach. How do you think Sebastian feels these days when he has to sing Youth Gone Wild? I felt pretty great singing it in my kitchen.

I was doing my air guitar solo and Bob came in and said, “Hey Eddie Trunk what’s this you’re listening to?”

I don’t know why I’m putting all these URLs in or make these references because there is only one person who looks at this website who is going to have a clue what I’m talking about.

Our speakers are screwed up and I got tired of messing with them so I gave up on records before I could get to Camper Van Beethoven, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart.

We have one of those turn your records into mp3 turntables so later I’m going to set up a recording station and put this stuff on my iPod so I can be ready for Thanksgiving next year.

A long time ago I borrowed a cookbook from Auntie called The Italian Country Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper.

It’s the first time I ever read a cookbook like an book, cover to cover. It’s a great cookbook if you’re into that kind of stuff.

I don’t know how this link is going to work: Sweet Pumpkin Bread.

It’s a yeasted bread and I gave it a try. I had a lot less experience with yeasted bread than I do now and I’m surprised I didn’t freak out because I was pretty nervous about it last weekend when I tried it again.

Here are the critical ingredients. The pumpkin (from my garden), the lemon zest and the rosemary. The zest looks like an impossibly huge pile, but don’t worry, it tastes great in the bread.

The lemon zest and rosemary are heated with a little oil. It makes your kitchen smell fantastic.

Here’s the mixer going to town. It was the wettest “dough” (d’oh!) in history. I was having a mild panic attack and slowly adding more and more flour. The recipe said it would be sticky but this was ridiculous. The recipe says better a too soft dough than a too heavy one. I hoped soft meant “batter-like.”

The recipe said I could let it rise in the refrigerator overnight so I shoved it in there and this is what came out in the morning. That’s about 500 pounds of bread dough. My mild panic attack resumed.

I went ahead and split into three equal piles and didn’t let the extreme stickiness of the dough scare me. I got them formed into their respective loaves. The yellow is cornmeal that you rest them in and later bake them in. You might as well know right now that cornmeal is going to be in every corner of your oven and kitchen. Also it burns in the oven making your house smell like burned popcorn.

I had an additional problem because the recipe said to put all three loaves on one baking sheet and I didn’t have a baking sheet the size of a football field. I had to keep moving my cornmeal and my loaves (gently!) from sheet to sheet until I found two that would fit in the oven at the same time and fit all three loaves. More cornmeal dusted into the cracks and crevices of my kitchen.

But it came out great. A tad on the heavy side, but not bad. I don’t mind dense bread. I ate a half a loaf when it came out of the oven and could barely fall asleep I was so full.

We have plenty in the freezer to enjoy later.

October Photo of Backyard Flowers

Same view today

What a lovely couple of days we’ve had. I broke out all the wool, long underwear, scarves, hats and my big giant coat. At least it’s supposed to get back above freezing tomorrow.

Turkey’s about ready to go into its brine bath. The directions say to turn it over halfway through. I guess if I do it right before I go to bed it will be close-ish. I’m sure I’ll forget.

I read the “how to organize your cooking time for Thanksgiving” tutorial this morning which was about 24 hours too late. Too bad that isn’t a super power. It doesn’t really matter. I’ve got it all under control.

Cake just came out of the oven. I’m going to do a couple more things after dinner and be ready for tomorrow. The only thing I biffed on was not buying enough flour. I usually have a ginormous bag plus a spare and I’m down to about 1 lb. I’ll measure more closely tomorrow but we may skip the rolls. We don’t need them. I just want them.

Inviting birdbath

As soon as I finish this post and schedule a post about my pumpkin bread for tomorrow, I am turning this computer off until Friday. (That’s probably a lie because I’m sure I’ll end up having to check a recipe.)

I did all my words plus a surplus to make up for tomorrow. I’m going to read and doodle and do holiday stuff.

Have a nice Thanksgiving.

I have my plan for Thanksgiving dinner.

There are only going to be four of us so I’m not getting too carried away.

Apples in the pot ready to be turned into sauce.

Priscilla is picking up the turkey and I’m planning to brine. I think that recipe links to an Alton Brown recipe that many commenters were raving about. I have the recipe but I don’t know, cinnamon stick? And my market didn’t have allspice berries and I’m not about to drive across town to get some. We’ll see how I feel about this recipe on Wednesday.

I’m going to do the standard family recipes: giblet gravy, sage stuffing, Dad’s mashed potatoes that hit a spot between fluffy and creamy and include a secret ingredient. My Dad used to drive my Grandma crazy with the whole “secret ingredient” business.

Hot apples ready for ricing. Is that even a word? Why is the gadget you push them through called a ricer?

I’m going to make Parker House Rolls. I’d link to a photo but no one makes them in the right shape so if I remember I’ll take a photo of ours.

I bought a teeny bit of broccoli so we can have something green. Haven’t decided on the recipe yet.

I’m not going to do sweet potatoes so we had them last night so I could try out this recipe. It’s really good. You can’t go wrong with goat cheese.

Riced and ready to go. We’ve been eating it all weekend.

We had pumpkin pie a couple weeks ago and I thought I’d make it again but I mentioned that I was thinking about making a cake and Bob looked very happy at that suggestion so after looking through about 2 dozen bundt recipes I decided on Chocolate-Mocha Marbled Bundt Cake.

I normally take the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off because that seems like an excellent day not to leave the house. Co-worker has to be at the airport for a 5pm flight. Yikes.

However, I don’t want to take the leave time and we only have to work a half day anyway. I should be home by 2pm and I’ll make the cake and do the brine and be ready for my Thursday Day of Cooking.

Someday I’ll write about something besides cooking. My brain has been sorta broken lately and I haven’t been inspired.

I’m not sure what happened to today. It was morning and I had all day. Then it was evening and I was rushing around with my projects half finished and all the crap I set aside to deal with on the weekend still sitting there in a big pile.

I shouldn’t have done so many cooking projects.

I tried the NY Times butter pie recipe. How can you not try a recipe for something called butter pie?

I’d take a photo but it would be just one more thing and I can’t deal with looking around for my camera cable and my Bridge (photo organizer program) is possessed and doesn’t do anything the way I want it to.

You use a cube of butter for the crust and then 6 T of butter along with 2 cups of brown sugar, vanilla, salt and two eggs for the filling.

If you’re following along at home you might notice that that’s more-or-less cookie dough without the flour. The recipe says you can add a half cup of cranberries if you want, which seems like a random thing to add, but I figured there should be some actual food in it so I threw it in.

It’s pretty much the most delicious thing you can imagine. I’m going to keep the recipe but I’m not sure if I’ll make it again because this pie is probably going to kill us. I can’t believe it’s even legal to make it.

Everything smells like butter now.

This recipe is funny because it gives too many instructions where you don’t really need them. It told me to flute the rim of the pie crust, “pinching it into a zigzag pattern.” I’m like: “Don’t tell my how to flute my pie.”

But then the filling was all soupy when it was time to come out of the oven and I wasn’t sure if I did it right. I did — it firmed up into a syrupy goo when it cooled.

Also today I finally made apple sauce. I processed a couple more pumpkins for my Pane Dolce di Zucca (sweet pumpkin bread) I’m going to start tomorrow. AND I tried a sous-vide hack which I did completely half-assed and turned out awesome so probably more comprehensive test on this one in the future.