Happy Side Dishes Day

I always did like the side dishes better. Potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberries. These are a lot of my favorite things. I wouldn’t want them all the time, but if you’re going to do it, do it big, right? Maybe that’s just me.

So Jeff took pictures of me periodically from about 1 pm when I started until about 6:30 when it ended. Yes. I cooked for 5.5 hours. And it was SO MUCH FUN. This was about 2 pm when I was chopping butternut squash.

It was a Food Network meal. I made Emerilized Green Bean Casserole (the kind where you use fresh green beans from Jennifer’s garden) and make your own french onions and wild mushroom mushroom soup. Except I used Alton’s baked onion rings from his casserole instead of Emeril’s fried ones.  This is me about 3:30 chopping the last of the veggies – garlic. The squash had finished roasting.

Then I made Roasted Butternut Squah & Maple Soup, also from Emeril, with tarragon oil – fabulous, by the way. Plus I made Michael Chiarello’s Definitive Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes, which are TOTALLY OMG AWESOME. I also made a Celebration Roast (veggie roast) with butternut squash, mushroom and apple stuffing, which I think is better than tofurkey. Oh, and gravy! This was around 5 pm and the food prep was done and things were cooking. Jennifer was pureeing garlic for the potatoes. I had gained an apron. This was Intense Cooking Time.

Did I mention there are two pies? Oh dear, I don’t know how I’m going to eat them. I’m writing this in a lull between food eating and pie. The goal is to stay awake. Seriously. You know what I mean. Don’t lie. This is about 5:30 pm, and Jennifer and I are surprised here by Jeff. The soups are done, the potatoes cooked, the green beans blanched. I’ve used four dutch ovens to cook dinner and 7 bowls, and 3 saucepans, not to mention two baking dishes.

The day was not without injury. I sliced off a bit of my left index finger and grabbed a hot pan. Burns are normal for me, but slicing not so much. Luckily, the finger slice didn’t hurt. I lost feeling in my thumb and first two fingers of my left hand when I had spinal surgery, so it just bled and I went on. You see Wesley is interested in what’s going on. This is around 6:30 pm. There are things in the oven now, and everything’s nearly complete. This is me and MIL in her kitchen.

7 pm. Wrapping up, cleaning up. I’m cooking the garlic puree to put in the potatoes. The soup’s warming. The green bean casserole’s cooking.  The herbs that have been in the foreground all day are finally in the pots. The baked onions are out on the right.

FINALLY DINNER. TASTY.

Hope y’all had a lovely, food-stuffed time with your loved ones. TTFN. I’m going to go have pie.

Cooking with Canning

I mentioned in my last post that I’d finished up using almost everything I canned last summer (just in time for this summer). I used my few cans of tomatoes, my salsa, my peaches very sparingly since I had so few.  It was a lot of work just to make a shelf’s worth of canned goods, so the fruits (haha!) of my labor were parceled out to worthy projects:  a warm pot of chili just as winter started, a small and rich batch of tomato sauce a couple of weeks ago, a peach crumble, some peach ice cream.

When I cook something I canned, I use all my special ingredients – usually things I get specially from other places, like my Dad’s basil and oregano.  I use rosemary and bay leaves from my mother-in-law. These things teach me about the importance of ingredients, when you see it grow or put the work in to preserve the food. I learned long ago, from I don’t know who, to not waste food. I scrape bowls when I cook. I keep my leftovers. I learned to use up my food in the order in which it goes bad.  I’ve never been wealthy, so I guess I learned a lot from watching my pennies at the grocery also.

Farmer’s markets are great, and I will always go to them, but really, it is my dearest wish to have garden. With lots of sun. And lots of stuff I eat. My backyard has now decided to add 2 kinds of purple flowers and some weird bush to its usual crop of rocks and trees, but it leaves much to be desired. And it’s not my house, so I just can’t bring myself to fix it up really nice when I know it’s a temporary arrangement.

Jeff’s mom has mentioned her garden will be growing asparagus, tomatoes, carrots, green beans, radishes, black beans, okra, thyme, dill, basil, thornless blackberries, elephant garlic, eggplant, onion and garlic chives, bunching onions, 1015 onions, butternut squash, acorn squash, bell pepper and cayenne pepper.  I copied that from her email to me.  I hope she knows I’m raiding her garden. I think she planted some of it because she knows I like it.

Apart from cooking and clearing my stores, I got a bug to make jewelry the other day. It was an exhausting day of work, and I was frustrated, and I am not a calm and patient sort of a person. I get anxious and tend to, um, get overexcited about things. I am somewhat … opinionated, I guess you could say. And when I get particularly overwrought, I end up at the craft store, whatever’s closest. Last week I ended up at Hobby Lobby looking at findings and fabric stiffener.  This being a brand new craft, I’ve been teaching myself about what happens when copious amounts of felt glue are applied to fabric and beads. This could get messy.

Hope you’ve all had a fun week. I’m going to do a fair imitation of posting twice this week. Watch out!

Moodiness, Music and Food

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday) I was feeling sort of moody: disconnected and blue. Sometimes I get that way, when the imminent end of the weekend sneaks up on me. Makes me sad. There’s never enough weekend, between the fun stuff I want to do, the other stuff I wanted to do, the stuff I’ve been promising myself I’ll get to sometime soon, and the stuff I just have to do to keep the house from being a wreck and clean clothing in the closet.

My solution to this malaise is cooking for at least 2 hours. I often try to cook enough for about 5 nights of food.  When it’s done I feel better from the soothing activity of puttering in the kitchen, and I’ve accomplished something very real that will make my life easier for several days.  Plus I get to see a smile on Jeff’s face when he tastes what I’ve come up with and spend time with Audrey and Callie, both of whom camp out to see what I might do and if there’s anything for them.

I have a pattern.

• Long playlist of music and my kitchen speakers. I fire up an iTunes Genius playlist, perhaps centered on a Kings of Convenience song or one of the Frequent Flyer compilations, maybe Barcelona.
• My folder of recipes to be tried.  In a vain attempt to actually corral my recipe collection, I keep a folder of stuff that I’d like to try, or things I’d like to make a vegetarian version of.
• These shoes.  These are very silly-looking, but Mario Batali is right about Crocs: excellent for cooking.  I used to need to curtail my cooking to about 45 minutes, but my Croc knockoffs ($12!) mean I can be on my feet for 2 1/2 hours and just be a little footsore. Lovely!

Yesterday’s menu:

1. New recipe: Warm Butternut Squash and Chickpea Salad with Lemon-Tahini Dressing. This is a wonderful, happy, delicious recipe I procured from the Smitten Kitchen site. I was lucky enough to have a Meyer lemon for the dressing. But even if I hadn’t, this is a winner of a recipe. It is so delicious, I can’t explain, but if you come to my house I’ll make it for you and you can see for yourself.
2. Old Standby: White Chili and mexican cornbread.  A simple staple I’ve talked about before, but now made vegetarian.  I’m so familiar with chili varieties that I find it to be something I can easily throw in a pot without thinking.  This kind has black beans and white beans of some sort and is flavored with chipotle and hatch chilis.  I think chili is best when it cleans out your sinuses and makes you sweat.  I threw it together and put it in the refrigerator for slow-cooking today. It was MMM!
3. New recipe: Cheesy sweet potato pancakes.  Epicurious calls them “crisps” but I didn’t flatten them that much, and next time I’ll just make them into regular latkes and add a bit more flavoring and more interesting cheese.  They’re pretty good.  I think sweet potatoes are an overly-maligned starch, unfortunately associated with that eminently-Southern-but-disgusting marshmallow recipe that no one actually seems to like (forgive me if you’re that person).
4. New recipe: So I went completely overboard while shredding sweet potatoes. My Christmas brought a mandoline and a food processor to me (score!), both of which I’m being VERY careful with so as not to damage myself. Thing is, that 14-cup processor can shred five large sweet potatoes in under five minutes, and did. I didn’t want that many latkes. So I found another creative idea with Sweet Potato and Goat Cheese Muffins to use the rest of my shreds. Nice!

Do I have many pictures?  Nope.  I was just cookin’. And tastin’. Cooking is the best.