Hello everyone! We are 10 days from Christmas, and I don’t know exactly what we’re going to be doing for our family celebration. We had 10 people for Thanksgiving, so we kept to our state’s limit, but for Christmas we’ll be just our immediate small group: the five of us who live here in this house plus my brother-in-law. The vaccines are rolling out even as I write this, and we don’t want to expose ourselves unnecessarily right as help is on the way. We’ll be sure to do a Zoom call with my sister-in-law and her husband at some point.
A Nice Addition to your Roll Repertoire
Hello everyone! Just a quick post today with the promised roll variation. I’m not posting a picture of anything–just the brief description from my own recipe files. This is from my Cook’s Illustrated magazine that my son subscribes me to every year for my Christmas present. I’ve changed it just a little bit to make it simpler and more streamlined (of course),but other than that it’s basically the same. I like the addition of the molasses and the oatmeal. It’s like a warm, cozy, nubby sweater for fall!
A Thrown-Together Soup that Was a Great Success
Hi folks! I keep saying that I’m working on my cookbook, and indeed it’s still being formatted and edited by my tech guy. I hope to have it out well before Christmas, or even Thanksgiving. Maybe I’ll do a little series before TG of my favorite recipes for that holiday. Are people getting together this year? We’re having our usual fairly small family gathering, probably no more than a dozen people, so that should be okay as far as health guidelines are concerned.
But for today I want to share a recipe from this past Saturday, when I was in charge of the mid-morning snack and the lunch at a women’s retreat at our church. We had only 25 attendees, partly because of last-minute cancellations and partly because, I’m sure, of COVID. But the ones who were there were very enthusiastic, and I enjoyed serving them. I’m going to share a soup recipe with you today and my new roll recipe later on this week. Both are wonderful fall items that you may find useful this month. Let me take you through my thought process in coming up with the menu.
More Wedding Thoughts–What Went Right?
I had a comment on my previous post asking about what went right for the wedding food I made this past weekend, so I figured I should write a little more about that. (Although I did have a few positive things to say in my previous post, I always figure that warnings to someone who may be doing the same thing are more useful than my raving about how delicious everything was. Which it was!)
For one, the little lemon tarts were fabulous, with the crusts staying crisp even after sitting for awhile. I’m not going to re-write the recipe here but instead will direct you to “A Set of Sweet Mini Tart Variations” earlier in this blog. The lemon recipe is the fourth one down. The brownies also came out well, and as it turned out these two items had the most leftovers, for some reason. In spite of my agonizing about the oversized cupcakes and cheesecakes there weren’t really all that many left when all was said and done. The tarts and brownies were the most freezable of the items I made, so they’re now safely ensconced in freezer bags out in our extra garage freezer.
A Lovely Wedding–and My Part In It
I haven’t been writing much on this blog lately (as you well know if you’re a subscriber), but I am working away on m cookbook, my compendium of party food, tentatively titled Feeding the Masses without Losing Your Mind. I had said that the last thing the world needs is another cookbook, but I’d already written quite a bit of material for it. So I’m putting it together, editing and testing the recipes, and saying more than you could possibly imagine on various food-related topics, such as proper muffin mixing technique and how to make many mini tarts.
Saturday I got to put some of my ideas into practice as I was asked to do the food for a outdoor wedding. My dear friend Nancy’s second-oldest daughter got married in their back yard, a necessity for this era of social distancing, and you just would not believe all the work they did making their already-lovely back yard into a veritable fairyland. Strings of lights! Acres of organza/netting/tulle, much of it wrapped around said lights! Flowers! Refreshment tents! So great.
A Couple of Food Articles–Signs and Salad Dressings
Hope you enjoy these! The salad dressings should keep you covered permanently and the menu sign ideas should come in helpful as we go back to giving parties:
“Theme and Variations on Homemade Salad Dressings”
and
Homemade Salad Dressings and Croutons–plus Costco Thoughts
Jim and I made our way to Costco yesterday morning, the first big shopping trip since everything started shutting down. It was my first venture out for maybe two weeks. I had made the prediction that either the parking lot would be empty or that there would be a line out the door waiting for this magnificent place to open at 10:00, and, as usual, neither of my predictions was accurate. Instead, the whole experience was perfectly normal, with the exception of limits on certain items, the fact that a smiling woman was handing out packs of toilet paper, and that other items were missing entirely, notably chicken parts and regular pasta. (I was tickled to see quite a bit of gluten-free pasta on the shelves. Since this snarky comment is in parentheses, please feel free to ignore it.) The lines were no longer than usual; everyone was friendly and efficient, and we were in and out in under an hour. They had even opened early. I came home encouraged that the great engine of American capitalism is probably not going to grind to a halt any time soon, even as many are suffering from its slowing. We’re going to get through this, folks!
Food Thoughts . . .
during this time. I have no great insights, and there are tons of food blogs out there. Just a few things that have occurred to me:
- Don’t waste food. I have a container of ricotta cheese that I bought for something–can’t quite remember what–and didn’t use up completely. Friday morning I decided to make Jim and me a ricotta, pesto and Parmesan omelet with tomato sauce, with the ricotta dolloped over the top. I opened the container. It looked a little pink, which is how such items start looking before they get actually, like, moldy. But the stuff underneath the top layer was perfectly fine. (Note that if it had actually been green I would have thrown it out. As I’ve said to Jim on any number of occasions, “It isn’t worth getting sick just to use up a dollar’s worth of food.” So I am pretty cautious. But in this case it seemed fine, and it was going to be heated.) There was some left after the omelet and I was tempted just to toss the container, but then I thought, ‘No, wait–I can make those ricotta-black pepper rolls with this.” Which I will probably do for this evening. They’ll be baked in a 350-degree+ oven, so any microbes will meet their deaths. It’s a small issue, as it’s a small amount of food, but it doesn’t hurt to have a frugal mindset even in the most robust of times.
- Take an inventory. Probably everyone reading this has already taken stock, but I haven’t as yet. Especially if you have one of those pantries with deep shelves, or a backup pantry somewhere, it’s all too easy to lose sight of what’s in there. In our old house I had two pantries for our little three-person household, one in the kitchen and one in the laundry room. I was always saying that I ought to have some kind of running list on the doors so I could cross items off as I used them and add what I bought. But I need to pull everything out and just see what’s there.
- Buy wisely. Don’t get items with short shelf life. So I bought Napa cabbage this past weekend but not lettuce. We can have some nice fresh greens that won’t have quite the tendency to wilt away. The freezer is stuffed. I have lots of packages of pasta and dried beans as well as cans of beans and coconut milk. I have somewhere around ten pounds of unbleached all-purpose flour, plus maybe 25 pounds of wheat that I can grind in my grain mill. There’s a full, unopened bag of yeast in the pantry. Did you know that, at least according to Michael Pollan, a person can indeed “live on bread alone”? (Humanly, practically speaking, that is.) If you give someone a bag of flour and some water, and that’s all he has to eat, he’ll die of malnutrition. But if that person makes bread out of the flour and water, which wouldn’t require buying yeast but just leaving the flour-and-water mixture sitting out long enough to ferment and then baking it, he/she could live perfectly well. So interesting! (I’ve felt at times that I had too much flour/wheat on hand, but now I’m glad to have it. I can’t claim any particular wisdom in buying these items in bulk–it just sort of happened that way. I even bought a big mega-pack of toilet paper at Costco last Wednesday, not because I thought there would be a shortage but because we were out. If I’d waited one more day to go shopping . . . well, I wouldn’t be feeling so safe and secure in that department as I sit here.)
Post-Partay Thoughts (And a Great Pistachio Cupcake Recipe)
So . . . this past Friday, March 6, was the Irish concert by the Cherry Creek Chorale, a great, great occasion. And afterwards was the reception (which, thankfully, is held only after the Friday-night concert, not the Saturday-night one.) I made three items: my Spicy Cheddar Cookies, Guinness Brownies, and Pistachio Cupcakes. Follow the links to the first two recipes if you’re interested. And for the wonderful frosting I made, go here. I’m giving the recipe for the pistachio cupcakes below. For the Guinness Brownies I’m linking to the post over at Sally’s Baking Addiction. Note, though, that I ended up just using the white chocolate-cream cheese frosting linked to above for those as well as for the pistachio cupcakes. I had made a double batch of the frosting and realized that I had plenty for all of them. I
A Fabulous, Rich Chocolate Tart That’s Vegan–But You’d Never Know It
I’m not a vegan myself nor do I plan to ever become one, but it’s an interesting challenge to have a vegan guest for dinner. My friend Aubrey had made some vegan chocolate tartlets last year for our church Christmas party and I just about passed out when I ate one of them. Astonishing! I couldn’t believe that it didn’t have any butter or eggs in it. So I set out to reproduce this experience as part of our desserts for my sister-in-law’s birthday dinner on Dec. 30 since a vegan friend of hers was coming, and I found one online that sounded pretty good. The original was also gluten free, but I had no need for that and didn’t want to buy tapioca starch and sweet rice flour. I can’t stand being told that I need some specialty ingredient but only a small amount! The original called for only two tablespoons of the tapioca flour, so I’d be buying a whole bag that would then sit on my pantry shelf. But one item that the recipe does call for and which you should always have on hand is tahini, that is, sesame-seed paste. I’ve bought high-end tahini through the mail (and paid a pretty high-end price), but actually I like the stuff you can find at the grocery store just fine. Tahini and chocolate are an inspired combination.