Food Archives - Feeding the Masses

Read this First

Hi Everyone!

I’m now focusing my efforts on my main blog, Behind the Music. Head on over there to read about historical and literary backgrounds about choral music texts. If you think that subject sounds boring, I’d urge you to take a look anyway, as you may be pleasantly surprised. If you’d like to watch a short video in which I explain my purpose on the site, go here. I’ve by no means lost my interest in cooking and especially in the feeding of groups, though. In fact, I’ve written a whole cookbook on the subject, Feeding the Masses Without Losing Your Mind, which you can purchase on that site or through Amazon. I give exceedingly down-to-earth, practical information and some great recipes. If you’d like to read the first chapter of the cookbook, follow this link.

There are some great recipes and food ideas on this site that you can explore in the blog section of the site.

A Pause on this Site

Hi Everyone!

A Frosting Triumph

Hi everybody! Hope you’re enjoying the summer as we head towards some kind of normalcy. I attended a nice dinner party this past weekend and just realized as I sat here writing this post that the thought of masks never even entered my mind. There was a wedding on Saturday for which we’d specifically been told that mask mandates had been lifted, so there was that freedom too. Maybe we’ll even try for a block party on Labor Day. We’ll see.

Anyway, for the dinner party people had been asked to sign up to bring various items, and I thought, ‘If I sign up for dessert I can make cupcakes and try out the raspberry variation for my Swiss buttercream recipe.’ While I had made the master recipe a number of times, of course, I’d never actually made the variation with freeze-dried fruit. I had no idea how well it would come out. Oh my goodness! I used a mini blender to reduce the raspberries to a powder and then added raspberry liqueur (Chambord) and raspberry extract, and it was just the essence of raspberry. People went completely nuts over them. (The cake part was pretty good, too. I used the recipe for the “lemon cream cupcakes” that’s listed in the related posts below this one. This recipe is also in my cookbook. The recipe as written in that post calls for a thin layer of raspberry jam and lemon frosting; just use the cake part with this frosting. Jam would be overkill.)

This image is copyrighted, but hey! I’m pushing people to go there!

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!

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.)

A Festive Dinner to Keep in Your Back Pocket

We always have a special dinner around December 30 to celebrate my sister-in-law’s birthday, and for a number of years I made my special double-the-meat double-the-cheese lasagna with cheesecake for dessert. Then I moved over to prime rib. This year, due to my being so impressed with the beef tenderloin served at our church’s Christmas dinner, I switched to that. I have to say that I’ll almost certainly never go back to prime rib. The tenderloin is cheaper (around $11.99/pound at Costco), cooks faster, and has wonderful flavor and tenderness.

The Thanksgiving Post-Mortem

Roast Turkey just out of the oven How was your Thanksgiving? I have to say that this was one of the nicest I can remember in an unbroken string of enjoyable holidays. We had our 15 people who ate, played games, talked, watched college football, and hung around for a long time. That’s always my yardstick for measuring how successful a party is.

But since I’ve been writing about the food, I’m going to tell you how that part went. Also, if you don’t particularly care about my results, at least scroll down and read about the two things you shouldn’t do when cooking a turkey. As I said in an earlier post, this is a bit late for Thanksgiving but you may end up having a turkey for Christmas too. (I’m hoping to be asked to do some cooking for that meal, too.)

Some Additional TG Pointers on Pie and Turkey

Who am I kidding? (Actually, whom am I kidding?) If you’re the cook for tomorrow you’re not reading blog posts, and this won’t arrive in your inbox until 6:00 this evening, at which point it will be far too late for you to go to the grocery store and buy a butternut squash. I actually should have posted this additional material on Monday, or even Sunday afternoon, as a friend told me at church that morning that she hadn’t been able to access the New York Times articles/recipes by Melissa Clark. But there it is. Maybe you’ll decide to make her pie for Christmas dinner. And you can still roast your turkey the way Melissa says to do it even if you decide not to do the dry marinade. I think you should be able to access the video at least:

The 2018 Thanksgiving Dinner Countdown!

Here it is, Saturday morning, and the Big Meal is, well, four days if you don’t count today or Thursday itself, or six days if you do . . . I never know how to do the inclusion/exclusion bit. Anyway, if you’re in charge of dinner you know when it is! So I thought I’d share my own timetable for the meal in case it helps you get

Thanksgiving Menu for 2018

Everyone reading this probably has TG dinner all planned out, but just in case you don’t, here’s what I’m planning to do right now. We’re up to 15 for the count, with possibly more to come. I’m so thrilled! Back in our old house I always wanted to have 20, but the most we ever had was 13. Which was WONDERFUL, of course. But to me this holiday should be completely and utterly over the top. It’s my favorite holiday of the year. So here goes: