apple crumble buckle

Something about the crisp weather and the fire and cozy animals made me hungry for something sweet and yummy yesterday. So, after taking stock of what baking supplies I had on hand (only one stick of butter! The horror!) and the big bag of apples in our pantry, I decided to try a buckle.

I've been a lifelong fan of crumbles, and crisps are pretty high up on my list of favorite desserts, but I've never made a buckle. Or maybe I have, I'm not really sure what makes a proper buckle. This one was a mix of several recipes I found when browsing around pinterest, a little bit buckle, a little bit crumble, and so yummy. It tasted like fall.

I had intended to give the kids a slice when they came off the bus but there were too many things to hear about - Briton got to play the symbols in band (please oh please don't send them home with him to practice) A boy in Evie's class keeps saying she has a crush on him but she doesn't, because he likes to burp and she would NEVER have a crush on a boy who likes to burp (which probably rules out most of the under 20's for her, thank goodness), they are choosing lab partners in science, Briton knew almost all of the countries on his geography quiz thanks to a combination of Risk and the Princess Bride ("I even knew Greenland. NO ONE knew Greenland, but I did, because, you know 'Unemployed....In Greenland'") And then it was time for soccer and then baths and then dinner.

But eventually, reheated on top of the wood stove after the kids had gone to bed, we dug in. Will said I should write it down so I don't forget and to not tweak it next time, because he liked it just as it is. So here we go, the apple crumble buckle. No tweaking. Except, maybe next time with some blackberries thrown in?

Apple Crumble Buckle

This makes a pretty small dessert, enough for four medium servings really. I baked it in my smallish casserole pot and it was perfect but I bet you could double it and make a big one for a crowd and it would be just as delicious. The buckle part is not very sweet, which works well with the very sweet crumble. So make sure you take a bite of all the layers at once!

For the buckle:
3/4 cup plus 2 T flour
1 tsp baking powder
dash of salt
1/4 cup butter
1/3 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup sour cream
1 1/2 cup apples, cored but not peeled and cut into chunks
1 tsp cinnamon

For the crumble:
1/4 cup butter, cubed
1/4 cup white sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar (packed)
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp vanilla

Beat the butter and sugar for the buckle until they are well creamed then add the egg, vanilla and sour cream. Mix until combined. Sprinkle the flour, baking powder and salt over the mixture and  beat lightly until just combined. Pour into the bottom of a buttered pan and top with apples. Sprinkle the cinnamon over the top.

In a food processor, pulse all ingredients until combined then crumble over the apples

Bake at 350 for 40 minute or until a knife pushed in comes out clean.

granola bars at last

I can't tell you how many recipes for homemade granola bars I've tried over the past decade. Peanut butter granola bars, chocolate granola bars, healthy granola bars, unhealthy granola bars. We have a serious love of granola bars in our house. They, along with frozen yogurt tubes and popcorn, are my go-to snacks. And of the three, the bars top the list since we are always a-going, and they are the perfect last-minute-throw-them-in-the-bag snack for my constantly hungry children. Unfortunately most of my attempts have ended in one of two ways. Either they are totally inedible, or they are good tasting yet crumble to pieces. Part of the reason I always seem to have a canister of granola floating around. It often starts out it's life trying to be bars only to be crumbled into a jar and tossed on yogurt. (Which isn't a bad thing, of course, but still..)

You'd think I would have given up by now. Really, how hard is it to just buy the silly things. But I have a strange addiction to making things for myself (ricotta anyone?) and so I persist. And finally, finally, I've found a recipe that actually works. Yay!

This started out it's life as "The Sweet Bar" from Homemade Pantry and it's seriously good as it is, but on my second go round I made a few tweaks per the suggestions of Briton (where are the raisins? can they be thicker?) and ended up with a good, solid (not particularly healthy but not horrible) yummy granola bar.

Maple Syrup Granola Bars

1 stick of butter
2/3 cup packed brown sugar
2/3 cup maple syrup (or equal amounts of honey and syrup, I've done that one as well)
1 1/2 cup rolled oats
1 1/2 cup puffed rice cereal
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup raisins or chopped hazelnuts (or both)

In a pot (or microwavable bowl if you want to use the microwave) melt the butter in with the sugar and syrup (and honey if you are using it)

Stir in the oats, salt and dried fruit and mix then add the puffed rice, 1/2 cup at a time, until you have a nice sticky but slightly spreadable mixture. You don't want it runny, but it shouldn't be a solid mass either.

Press into a baking sheet lined with parchment and bake at 350 for 15 minutes or until the edges are just barely starting to darken. Remove from the oven and allow it to cool all the way before cutting. I like making 1 inch by 4 inch bars, but squares work too. Whatever floats your boat. We have been keeping these in a lidded Corning-ware pot between sheets of parchment (reused from baking them) and then put what we need for the day in a baggie.

Do you have a granola bar recipe that really, truly works? I'd love to have more recipes for variety.

saturday scones (on a sunday)

Did I ever tell you guys about the time I baked scones for my wedding in my hotel room? Actually, to be totally honest, I cant remember if I baked them before hand and warmed them up in the hotel or if I baked them there. I think I did a little of both.
When Will and I got married, DIY weddings were not as cool as they were today. There was no Pinterest, no features on Design Sponge, not even a lot of books apart from the giant tome by Martha and a few magazines. We didn't really set out to have a DIY wedding. But we were poor students and considered ourselves (wrongly, I suspect) very style forward. So we enlisted a lot of help from family and friends, especially after the caterer doubled his prices and I fired him. So the bridesmaids mixed huge vats of punch on the floor of our hotel room, one uncle took photos, cousins were bridesmaids and flower girls, appetizers were made and brought from other Aunties and Uncle's kitchens. We assembled bouquets the morning of the wedding on my bed. My mother made my dress based on a few blurry photos and my descriptions, embroidering tiny flowers and beads around the neck. (And you thought I was the crafty one!) I picked up the tea sandwiches from a deli and made the scones.

I think it might have been the first time I ever made scones, to tell you the truth. I'd like to say I at least did a test run, I know I should have, but it might have gone by the wayside in those last few weeks. Lucky for me it was a good recipe.

And one I've hung onto.

Before we had kids, I made these scones almost every Saturday. We'd sleep in and then I would lazily churn out a batch while the coffee and tea steeped. It was our thing. Before walking the dogs or cleaning the house or heading off on a Saturday adventure, we had to start with scones. After Briton was born the habit fell a little by the wayside. Too many early mornings I suppose, or maybe I just forgot how nice it was to sit around in your pajamas eating hot, buttery scones with your coffee.

This week, Will reminded me about those scones. It's not that I've never made them in the nine and a half years that I've been a mom, but it's been a while. We were having a case of the remembers.

"Remember when Briton thought he could run with his eyes closed if he pretended to be a bat because he had eco-location?"

"Remember how HUGE Evie's eyes were when she was born?"

"Remember bringing home our first chickens in a paper bag?" (The farm store told us to, just to be clear)

"Remember Saturday scones?"

I didn't manage to get them made on Saturday. But on Sunday Evie and I woke up before the boys and pulled out the tattered cookbook where I scrawled the scone recipe, tweaked a little over the years, so that I'd never loose it.
This was the first time I made them in my food processor and I'm sold on it. Normally I cut the butter up in teeny tiny cubed before mixing, which does have the benefit of leaving little butter pockets here and there, but it takes a lot longer. Sunday's scones took all of six minutes to get into the oven. Just make sure you pulse, the way you would with pie crust. The less you mix them, the better the scone.
Saturday Scones
Makes 12 medium scones

7 tablespoons of chilled butter
3 tablespoons of sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups of flour
1 egg
1/2 cup milk or whipping cream

plus

1 tablespoon of sugar
3 tablespoons of milk or cream

If you are using a food processor, cut the butter into tablespoons. For a mixer, dice into the smallest cubes you can manage with out going bonkers.

Sift together the dry ingredients into the bowl of the mixer/food processor. Add the butter and pulse or mix until you have the beginnings of that small crumbs stage you get when making pie crust. With the mixer/food processor running, add the egg and then the milk, a quarter at a time, until the dough comes together in a nice ball.

Flour your hands and pull the dough out, dividing it in half. Form each piece of dough into a flat disk that is about 3/4 of an inch thick. Cut each circle into six wedges and pull them slightly apart from one another. This helps the scones to get nice and cooked all the way through but still have a soft, pull apart edge to them (because as they rise they will expand toward each other a little)
If you don't like wedges, you could also roll the dough out and cut out circles or squares or dinosaurs with a cookie cutter, but I find that the re-rolled extras get a little tough after the second re-rolling, so this is the most efficient use of dough I've come up with.

Brush on the extra milk and sprinkle with sugar and then bake at 400 degrees for 12-15 minutes or until the edges are becoming golden.

*Just as a note, these aren't "American" scones which I've never really loved. They are more like a slightly sweet biscuit. Occasionally I've added currents or dried cranberries but I think they are best plain, with just a little sugar dusted on top and heaps of butter and jam inside - or if you happen to have some handy, which I didn't this time, clotted cream and jam.

root veg goodness

Cooking and me and the city have, thus far, not been very...copacetic. I've written before about my theory on New Yorkers and eating out and I still pretty much think it's true. Unfortunate, being on a student budget and all, we can't do a whole lot of eating out. Hot dogs from the cart or noodles from the cheap but yummy noodle bowl place are about as fancy as we get take out wise. Add into the mix the fact that this term Will has a night class twice a week and isn't home for supper on those nights till very late and you get me, falling back on easy to make meals. Not even meals. Easy to make things. Mac and cheese. Cheese on toast. Scrambled eggs and cheese (cheese figures highly into most meals since, along with pasta, it is something Evelyn will always eat). It's not how I'd like it, but this year I'm giving myself a bit of a pass. Budget and time is tight. Life is crazy. You gotta make things easy on yourself where you can.

The good news is that it's finally cool enough that our apartment isn't 100 degrees every time we (or really anyone below us) turns on the oven, and this is bringing back a little bit of the cook in me.

Lately, on Will's late nights, I make the kids something very kid friendly and then cook myself something that only I would eat. Out of the four of us, I'm the most adventurous eater. Followed, probably, by Briton, although Will has become much more game to try new things over the years. Still, there are lots of foods (especially of the vegetarian ilk) that my family probably wouldn't eat as a meal. A side, sure, but not as the whole meal.

Right now I'm having a love affair with root vegetables. I've always been a big fan of Parsnips and Sweet potatoes, but again, as a side. And last year I discovered that I really like beets (who knew? I also love brussel sprouts which, after a bad run in with bubble and squeak during my formative years I thought I'd never eat) So a lot of my solo cooking experiments have been centered around whatever root veg I can find at the farmers market.

This weeks favorites (and, sorry, no pics, these meals are usually made and eaten after the kids go to bed, by which time our apartment is so dark and yellow that photographs look very unappetizing) have included Sweet potatoes loaded up like a taco (avocado, sour cream, corn salsa, black beans) and roasted beets with kosher salt, sesame oil and greek yogurt. Delicious. I can't stop eating them. I almost accidentally bought $30 worth of beets on Sunday (15 pounds might have been overkill) and I saw a little mention somewhere about beets with curry spices which might be on the menu next. By the way, the sweet potato taco thing ended up on everyone's plate the day after I tried it and everyone (except Evelyn, go figure) liked it. The beets I'm keeping to myself for the moment. Because, really, I don't want to share.

Do you have any root veg as a main dish recipes that you like? Share, please!

simple and good

For Will's 30th birthday I took him on a surprise trip to Rome, which sounds glamorous and extravagant when I just say it like that. In reality, it was a very, very shoestring budget vacation. We were already living in Europe so we took advantage of some uber cheap Ryan Air flights and instead of staying in a hotel, I found a convent near St. Peters that rented out rooms. Yes, a convent. Run by Phillippino nuns. Which meant that the language barrier was quite something when it came to checking in and out.
Because we were a) on such a tight budget and b) had a toddler in tow, we didn't eat at very many restaurants. I can only recall one, actually. Instead we bought groceries at the little market across the street where the nuns shopped, stopped in delis and at Pizza windows or bought sandwiches from a lady down the street who had a small shop and who adopted us the first day, squeezing out cheeks and kissing us every time we passed. I've never eaten so well in my life. Honestly I could have spent the rest of my life eating foccicia hacked from giant slabs in the market bakery, fruit ripe to the point of bursting from greengrocers, and squash blossom pizza. And also salami sandwiches. Salami sandwiches made up a good percentage of our meals because Briton would eat salami by the pound and because it was easy to buy the ingredients, toss them in our bag and have them ready to go whenever we got hungry, a beautiful thing when you are travelling with a two year old. They were simple. Fresh bread, fresh mozzarella, torn apart with our fingers, and slices of spicy, buttery salami. Nothing else. Nothing needed.
I've been in a cooking funk lately. Too tired, too busy, too blah when it's humid to really be interested in standing in the kitchen. So we've been having a lot of really simple suppers here. Some of the time that means Mac and Cheese or Ramen, I'm not going to lie. But it's also mean grilled chicken and lettuce on naan or sliced steak (grilled again, I'm taking full advantage of the grill while I can!) on tostadas. Or Salami sandwiches. They aren't quite as good as those Roman meals. But I'm amazed at how wonderful a really really simple meal can be.
What's your favorite simple meal?

Soup's On

So it's cold out. Not freezing cold, just yay! time to wear a hat and scarf in the morning cold. Remember those slippers that took me forever to knit? Well I'm loving them now. Worth. Every. Stitch. And cold weather means soup in our house. Lots of soup. I would eat soup every day but the wild things probably wouldn't go for that, so for now, I'm trying to limit it to once a week. Ok, maybe twice a week.

I love all soups but recently I've really been into beans. I think I had a bean-phobia before because I really haven't cooked with them much beyond warming up black beans for burritos. But between my "eat less meat" thing and my "make healthier food" thing and my "crap, let's lower the grocery budget again" thing, well, beans are making a stand in our house. And boys howdy, I didn't know what I was missing. Beans are good! No, really! Beans are GREAT! WHo knew (ok, everyone else knew)

I've been filling up our weekly menu with bean meals. White bean and chicken enchiladas, homemade falafel, beans and rice and our favorite - white bean and sausage soup. Or if you want to get fancy, cassoulet.

Now I am neither french nor any kind of trained chef so when I say this is cassoulet, I'm using the term loosely. I read a bunch of recipes, mixed them all up and then cranked out this soup with what we basically had in the pantry and freezer. But it was a winner for us. Will even went back for seconds. Usually he patiently eats his bowl and then fixes himself a sandwich, soup just isn't enough food for him I guess.

But this is more stew-y than soupy. It's yummy and filling and easy, although it does need a little time to simmer away. I've been making it at lunch for the evenings dinner but I've also noticed that it's even better the next day so I think it would make a great night before kind of meal.

1/2 yellow onion, diced
2 T soup mix *
3/4 cup sliced carrots
3/4 carton chicken stock
2 cans of navy beans
4 chicken apple sausages, sliced 1/2 in thick
salt to taste

Sweat the onions in a teeny bit of oil until they are golden and slightly translucent, add the soup mix and sweat a few minutes more. Dump in the rest of the ingredients, give it a stir, pop the lid on and let it simmer on low for three hours. Add a little more stock before serving if you want a thinner soup. Serve with sour cream and minced parsley.

*Soup Mix - this is a homemade bouillon of sorts that I made in August which I LOVE and will make a ton more of next summer. Actually, I probably make more later in the winter because it's fantastic. The basic recipe came form my favorite canning book but I adjusted the ingredients to utilize what was coming out of the garden at the time.

2 cups carrots, finely chopped
2 cups parsnips, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves
1 cup of parsley

Whiz this in a food processor (or crappy mini chopper if that's what you've got, don't feel bad, me too) until you have teeny tiny pieces. Weigh the veggies and add 1/4 the weight in kosher salt. Stir well and spoon into jars. The salt preserves the veggies. You only need a tablespoon or two to start off pretty much any soup, stew, casserole, really anything you might add bouillon too.

What's you're favorite cold weather meal? Any good bean recipes?

Garden Clean Out Chutney

I've had it on my list to make chutney all summer long but somehow it always got pushed aside by jellies, jams and sauces, not to mention everyday cooking. But finally, finally, I got around to it yesterday and now I have two lovely jars sitting in our pantry waiting to be eaten up throughout the winter.

I haven't always been a chutney person. When I was doing my student teaching, my mentor teacher gave me a jar of kumquat chutney for Christmas. It looked beautiful, but I had no clue what to do with it, particularly on our ramen noodles for dinner budget. It sat in our fridge for ages, eventually getting stirred into some kind of stew I believe, before it went bad. What a waste. But hey, I was young and clueless.

When Briton was about two I fell in love with Indian food. Hard. I'd had curries before, but mostly of the homemade and basic variety. It wasn't until we were living in Dublin, where curry take-out is the norm and fantastic Indian food can be found cheap in almost every neighborhood center that I really discovered it, and chutney.

And then our supper club had a burger extravaganza and one of the offerings was a lamb burger with goats cheese, good mustard and sweet-savory chutney (try it! you'll never look at a burger the same again!) and I finally got what all the chutney lovin was all about.

It's a good thing I finally got around to making some then, eh? I'm calling this Garden Clean Out Chutney because most of what's in it was what was left when I ripped out everything from three of our four beds. But I could also call it Pantry Clean Out Chutney, because it also has some strange-o things that I pulled out of the back of our shelves (chili spiced mango from Trader Joe's anyone?) After reading a bunch of recipes though I think you can use pretty much any combination of fruits, veggies and spices that you have hanging around, but here is what I made:


Garden Clean Out Chutney

4 cups diced green tomatoes
1 cup diced green apples
1/2 cup raisins
1 small jalapeno, finely chopped
1/2 cup chopped dried chili spiced mango ( you could just dried fruit, but then you want to add chili powder to taste)
2 cups apple cider vinegar
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 tsp ground ginger
1 T salt

Mix all ingredients in a heavy bottomed pan. Simmer on medium until everything has muddled down and reduced by about a third. Pour into sterilized jars (this makes about 2 pint jars, I used 1 pint jar and one of my tab top jars because I needed an excuse to get down my Wide Mouth Jar Rubber Box and have a laugh) and process as you would with jam.

Sunchoke Harvest

When Will, Briton and I (Evie wasn't born yet so sadly she missed it) lived in Dublin, we were devotees of the local farmer's market that was held every Saturday morning in the play yard of one of the local elementary schools. And I say play yard because it was just a yard, no play equipment. I guess Dublin children don't need play equipment at school. They're tough. Or maybe just more imaginative.

Anyway, back to the farmer's market.

This market was wonderful. WONDERFUL. To the extent that farmer's markets here in the US, nice as they are, just can't quite compare and tend to be a let down. To be fair, this market was more like the street markets that are in Paris than a normal farmer's market. You could just about buy everything you needed food-wise for the week there. And we often did. Fresh meat and fish, cured sausages, pesto, mustards, muesli, dried fruit, cheeses that would make a gourmet shop here weep with joy, hot samosas, cold bottles of cider and vegetables...oh the vegetables. Specked eggs sat out in a shallow box nestled in newspaper and you had to know to bring your own carton to carry them home. Truffles, the first I'd ever seen in person, were kept safe in a rice filled container (we splurged and bought a teeny one for risotto..ummmm) and a whole table was filled only with a zillion varieties of potatoes, tiny ones, huge ones, blue ones, faintly pink ones.

Not everything was familiar. I had no idea, for example, what to do with celeriac, wasn't quite sure what a quince was and was a little baffled by those bumpy, ginger looking things called Jerusalem artichokes. But the stall owner, a sweet older man who knew his customers by name and could tell you just the thing to do with that particular variety of potato, was patient and filled me in as I bought something new on each visit. The celeriac wasn't bad, although Will wasn't a big fan, the quince were pretty darn yummy, but kind of a pain to deal with, but the Jerusalem artichokes, now those were a hit.

We ate them quite a bit over the almost two years we were there. Mashed, roasted, pan fried, in soup. They appeared almost as often as potatoes on our table I think, which, given that this was Ireland, is saying something. But in the years since we've been back, I haven't really had much chance to indulge in eating them since I almost never find any here. So when I was puttering through seed catalogs during the snowy evenings last winter and came across some tubers, I had to try growing some.

When they arrived I read a little more about their growing habits and decided that their height (8-10 feet) would be a little cumbersome in the veg patch, and as they are part of the sunflower family (news to me, but OK. Although that explains their other name - sunchoke) I planted them with the flowers.

All summer they grew, and grew and grew. And drove Will nuts because they kept falling over onto our gardenia (which I think they killed, but we're hoping for a comeback). I would tie them up to the fence and they would get bigger, and heavier, and the string would break, and down they'd go again.

Today Evie and I were sprucing up the yard for this weekends home tour when I decided I'd had it with propping the stupid things up. I knew they weren't done growing but oh, well, I'd just go without Jerusalem artichokes this year, and cross them off for next too. Because really, they did fall over all the time, and ten feet of plant splayed across the flowers isn't very pretty. So up they came, and with them, about ten POUNDS of tubers. Holy cow! After forking out all the tuber from the first two plants I pulled, I decided to leave the third (I mean, wow, 10 pounds out of two plants is a lot!) for later.

Evie and I bagged them up. Then she tried to haul the bag behind me as I went to the compost heap which caused the bag to break, so then they got loaded into the doll stroller until the doll needed it when they went back into a pile on the ground and finally back into a bag that I promptly put on the counter in the kitchen, just in case she got any more ideas.

I scrubbed and sliced up a few to saute for my lunch and they were divine, just as I remembered. Nutty and rich and somewhere between a potato and an artichoke, which I know sounds strange but there you go, it's the best I can do to describe them. If you get a chance this fall, pick up a few pounds and give them a go. I know they look weird and knobbly but you don't need to peel them, just give them a good scrub and your ready to get cooking. And if anyone out there is already a fan, got any recipes? That is one big bag in my fridge, I'm open to suggestions...

Apples! Apples!

I am honestly amazed that my kids aren't sick with the number of apples they've consumed over the past few days. Seriously, the two bags Evie and I brought home plus the bowl full of apples we already had are pretty much gone. Fortunately they seem to have stomachs of steel, not surprising since they are my kids and I can gorge myself on fruit and nothing but fruit and come out fine. Or at least I could when I was a kid, now, eh, not so much.
Yesterday Evelyn and I made applesauce, one of her five major food groups (the others are yogurt, pasta, string cheese and bananas - see the beige theme there). And while eating applesauce from"her apples" was definitely exciting, it wasn't nearly as cool as running the apple peeler.

Will bought me the apple peeler back before we were married, which might sound like an odd sort of gift to give your girlfriend, but in reality was one of my favorite presents, as now, he knew me well. Over the years it's gotten a lot of use, so much so that the handle is missing and the little protector plate that keeps the screw from damaging your counter has long since gone. But I still pull it out in the fall to peel and core apples, and it never fails to please, the kids or me. Briton is a master of apple peeling by now, but it's only this year that Evie is old enough to turn the crank.
Would it be breaking the child labor laws if I put her to work peeling enough apples for a years worth of applesauce? I suppose considering we are currently going through two jars a week, it probably would. Oh well, I can always rope her brother into the job as well. :)
This weekend we are, hopefully, going to tackle siding the old porch, the only part of the house that didn't have lovely clapboard siding on it under the old aluminium stuff. And the door will get a fresh coat of (red! Thanks guys!) paint. What are you up to this weekend?

Homegrown Popcorn

This weekend Evelyn was puttering around the yard with a mini wheelbarrow, hauling things here and there. Dolls from the porch to the treehouse. Piggie from the picnic table to the steps. Leaves from the raked pile to back under the tree (gee, thanks Evie) One of her trips took her by what was the popcorn patch and she returned with four ears of corn that I'd missed when I was ripping out the stalks last week.
Our sweet corn did dismally this year, ripped to shreds by the freak storm we had mid summer, right about the time that the ears were just starting to look promising. We ended up giving all the underdeveloped ears to the chickens and stuffing the stalks into the compost bin. But on the other side of the fence, in a the spot where out compost bin used to be, the popcorn did fantastically. I ordered it on a whim, not even sure popcorn would grow here, and not wanting it to cross pollinate with the regular corn, we tossed the packet of kernels in the uneven but apparently well protected little plot and just let it go. No watering, no tending. Just sun and rain. Maybe we should take that approach with the whole garden!

We started pulling ears mid August and they've been drying in a bowl in the dining room ever since. But I hadn't decided how (or even if, they are so pretty on the cob) to pull off the kernels. The cobs Evie found were a few that I had thought weren't ripe enough, or pretty enough I guess, to bring in. But now they were dry and vibrant, and the kernels popped off easily when you ran your fingers along them. The kids sat on the neighbors driveway and pulled off the red and purple and golden kernels.Popcorn is, in general, a favorite around here. A tab top jar of unpopped corn has a permanent home on the counter near the stove. Since we don't own a microwave so we pop it the old fashioned way, over the stove with a little oil which, I must say, I kind of prefer. No fake butter taste, no burning hot bag, just the rattling lid on one of our heavy pots. It reminds me of being a kid and watching my parents pop corn in the giant avocado green pressure cooker, our heaviest, biggest pot.

The popcorn was perfect. Sweeter than the variety we usually get and whiter too. At Briton's request I added melted butter and sprinkled it with a little sugar and salt. They ate it down to the last kernel.
Add it to the "in next year's garden" list - more room for homegrown popcorn.

Holy Grits

The summer after fifth grade, my parents moved my brother and I from the small, picturesque Northern Idaho town where I'd grown up and my brother had been born, to San Antonio, Texas. It was, you might say, something of a shock. We moved there at the beginning of August, and I still remember stepping off the plane and into the sweltering humidity of a Texas summer. I thought I was going to die. I thought my parents were crazy. But no, they were just ready for a change.

My father was starting his Master's Degree at the University of Texas and so for the next two and a half years he was home with us, studying, instead of spending his days in a crowded and noisy newsroom. I loved having him home more. We had two fantastic summers that involved lots of trips to the Alamo (my brother was obsessed, REALLY obsessed, with Davy Crockett) boat rides along the river walk, day trips to the missions, hot afternoons at the Texas Folk Life Festival, and jalapeno grits.

My dad had started a garden the first spring that we lived there. Nothing new about that, we'd had a large garden in Idaho brimming over with potatoes, beans, tomatoes, onions and peas. But in San Antonio, the things we normally planted didn't grow as well. I'm probably remembering this wrong, seeing it in my mind as I did at eleven, but I think the only things that really grew in that garden were peppers and okra. And I hated both. Okra I disliked on principle. They were slimy and ugly and even the name sounded bad to me. I turned my nose up at them without even tasting them, and admittedly to this day, I'm not sure I've ever tried okra, which is probably something I should remedy. Peppers, however, I lived in mortal fear of.

On one of our first nights in San Antonio, we'd gone to eat at the Alamo Cafe. I was fascinated at the tortilla makers behind the glass partition and couldn't wait to try them out, crisp and hot, straight out of the pan. When a basket of chips arrived at our table I picked one up and dug it into the bowl of chopped tomatoes, loading up my chip and shoving it in my mouth only to find that my head felt like it was on fire. I'd never tasted Salsa in my life and I sat there, tears running down my cheeks from the pan on my tongue, wondering what I had done to deserve this horrible fate.

So when my dad's garden produced a bumper crop of pepper and he tried to introduce us to Jalapeno Grits, there was no way I was going to try them. I didn't do peppers thank-you-very-much! I didn't do spicy at all. And somehow, grits, in my mind, became just another part of the "No Thank You!" that the peppers had caused.

And I've spent the last twenty odd years no eating grits because of it. Until a few weeks ago when my friend Stephanie invited us over for Pulled Pork and Grits. Now I still had my fear-o-grits, but a few things convinced me to give it a try. First, Stephanie is a great cook, so how bad could they be? I've never eaten anything at her house that wasn't stellar. Second, poor Will loves grits. He's a Texan for goodness sakes. They give them Dr. Pepper, steak and grits as soon as they pop out! And in all the years we've been together, it's probably the one thing I've always refused to make for him. Also, the older I've gotten, the more open I am to trying things at least one. So I tried. And guess what. Yep. I LOVED them.

This wasn't just "humm, that's pretty good" love either. This was have two giant bowls full, holy cow what have I been thinking my whole life, dream about it at night love. I LOVE grits. I also, incidentally, tried Sriracha hot sauce that night. Yeah I know, everyone and their dog is talking about sriracha, but I hadn't ever tried it because, well, I'm still a wimp when it comes to spicy things (see salsa story above) Ya know what, pretty darn delicious too.

So now I'm a grits freak. It's my new go-to meal. Will thinks he's died and gone to Texas heaven. It's like the day halfway through my pregnancy with Briton when I went from vegetarian to "I WANT RIBS!" I thought he was going to cry with joy.

Stephanie used the WIlliams Sonoma Cheese Grits recipe which, as I said, is really good, but has a lot of butter and extra cheese and is slightly more time consuming than I'm willing to go for when I want grits. So instead I've been using this very simple recipe, which is fantastic with a few shrimp tossed on top. Excuse me while I go stuff my face.

1/2 cup stone ground yellow grits
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup water
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cups cubed cheddar cheese

Bring 2 cups of water to a boil and slowly stir in the grits. Cook on medium low for 10 minutes. Stir in half the milk and stir until absorbed. Add cheese and remaining milk stirring as you go, and dribble in water as needed. Season to taste.

Freakishly Healthy Banana Muffins

I've made a lot of banana bread in my time. In fact, I think it's a requirement of motherhood that you make banana bread at the very least a dozen times a year. This is, or course, because children love banana's. I've never met a kid who didn't. Banana was, sort of, my first word. I say sort of because I called them "das" so I'm not sure if it really counts as a first word, but my parents knew what I meant. But the reason that banana bread is a fact of parenting isn't because kids love bananas, since if they really loved them, their wouldn't be bananas left to make bread from, but because children love to mess with your mind. The LOVE banana's one week, so much so that the next week you buy three pounds of them so that your child can have all the banana's they want. And that's when they decide they don't care for bananas after all. It's just a law of life, right about the time you think you have something figured out, it changes. Thus banana bread.

The other things about banana bread is that it's almost healthy, sort of. At least healthy enough that you don't feel totally guilty giving them a few slices for their snack (or meal, who are we kidding), much better than, say, that bright blue gogurt they wanted at the store (why would yogurt makers think it was a good idea to make neon blue yogurt? It just screams BAD FOR YOU! But I digress).

So I've made a lot of banana bread. And because I really like to tinker and toy and try out new recipes, I've tried several different versions. I had high hopes for Molly Wizenberg's recipe. It was good, but not as great as I'd hoped. The kids weren't too nuts about it. But this version, they seriously love. I mean, gone in a second, they don't want anything else for lunch but banana bread when I make it crazy for it.

And the best part is -not that I would ever tell them because then they'd probably turn their noses up at it - it's by far the healthiest version I've ever EVER made. Or even come across I think. Maybe they aren't really freakishly healthy but they are pretty darn good for you. I've made this as a loaf but I think it's even better as muffins, so that's how it works in our kitchen. Super (shhh..healthy) good banana muffins.

4 very ripe bananas
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup Splenda (or sugar if you don't like Splenda)
1 can pear halves (I use the packed in juice variety)
2 eggs
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose white flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 T cinnamon

Mash the bananas and pears in a medium bowl with a potato masher before stirring in sugar, Splenda and eggs. Sift in dry ingredients and fold gently until combined. The batter should be slightly lumpy with chucks of pear and banana.

Scoop 1/3 cupfuls into lightly greased muffin tins and bake at 350 for 20 minutes. Remove from pan immediately and allow to cool slightly for a few minutes before serving.

As soon as these are cool I put them (what's left of them that is) in a Pyrex dish with a lid to keep them moist. But I don't think we've made it through the end of the day without eating the whole batch, so I've no idea if they keep longer than that :).

Ter-maters

When Will and I were in college, we had this monster, MONSTER vegetable patch in our way overly large for two college students yard. And when I say the thing was big, I mean it. Right now our garden is plenty big for the four of us (which doesn't stop me from making plans to expand it) and I'd guess that it's a third the size of the space we planted back then. I'm not sure what we were thinking. Actually, Will was thinking I was crazy and just went along for the ride and I had - no surprise here- dreams of growing most of our food. It hadn't occurred to me to get chickens at that point, probably good since we were poor as dirt and couldn't even splurge on things like, say, tomato cages, so building a chicken coop would probably have been beyond our means a bit, not that we wouldn't have done it anyway.

Because we were experimenting in pretty bare bones gardening, our cageless tomatoes were held up, sort of, with some sticks tied together with yarn. Not much help. By August the tomato patch, which was oversized, even by our garden's standards (I had started tons and tons of tomatoes from seed because I had heard it was hard to get them going, and then they all lived, and I couldn't stand the thought of killing any of my little plants so, yeah, there were a lot) was a giant tangled jungle of brandywines, sweet one thousands, yellow pear and beefsteak tomatoes. We couldn't possibly eat that many tomatoes. Not even if we'd had them for breakfast lunch and dinner. I wanted to preserve them, somehow, and sauce seemed too complicated with all the warnings about botulism and spoiling and the need for a presser canner, which, given the fact that I didn't have tomato cages, was not high on my priority list of things to buy.

In the end, I dried them. I took all the screens off our windows, hosed them down and filled them up with slices and halved tomatoes, stacking them inside the barbecue that we got at a garage sale for $5 and which almost blew up the first time we used it (scared us off of gas grills for years!) My reasoning was that the barbecue would help collect the heat, covered in black who-knows what as it was, and I could close the lid each night to keep the evil raccoon that lived under our house from eating my garden largess.

Surprisingly, it worked. I had stacks and stacks of sun dried tomatoes. Most went into baggies and then into the pantry, some were packed in jars of oil, and for the rest of the year we ate sun dried tomatoes in and on and with, just about everything. Not a bad way to dine for a couple of starving students.

I've never gone that crazy with tomatoes again. It was too much work to keep up with the harvesting and drying. And besides, we use our grill too often these days. But I did plant eleven plants this year. Most of them heirloom varieties that came in a mix from Southern States Seed Exchange with a few garden center romas thrown into the mix. Despite the heat of the summer, it wasn't until last week though, that any of our fruits were ripe enough to pick. But suddenly we have tomatoes coming out our ears. And isn't that always the way, you wait and wait for that first garden tomato and then all of a sudden you have more than you can handle.

So far I'm not drying them, although I have a scheme that involves Will building a solar dryer like the one my grandmother had in her yard. But that really hinges on how bold I feel about harvesting the figs off of two trees down the road (the owners are away in France all summer, last year I took some here and there, but for this to work I'd need tons. On the other hand, they are just falling to the ground up there...) In the meantime, I've decided to try making sauce.

I still don't have a pressure canner, but after perusing many, many recipes, I think I've come up with a plan that will produce a good sauce without killing my family. Batch number one is in the works right now, cut into chunks and roasting in the oven (no oil! Oil is bad it seems in terms of canning) making our whole house smell wonderful. And if at the end of the day, it doesn't taste good enough to jar up, well, I've still got another basketful of ripe beauties waiting for some other recipe, and several more that will be ready tomorrow.

And now that I think about it, we do need to pull off all the screens to paint.

Bread, Butter and Beans

Well the other thing that kept us all busy this weekend was cleaning up the yard and the garden after a mammoth storm we had on Thursday. Storm doesn't even seem to be the right word for what we had in fact. The weather people are calling it a "micro burst" but let's just call a spade a spade, this thing was basically a tornado. As my neighbor said, it was five minutes of sheer terror. The kids and I were at a bouncy castle play gym (which is a whole other thing I can visit later, or not, who knew there were bouncy castle gyms?) when the storm hit. The windows of the car were down since it had been hotter than hot that day and there was NO RAIN in the forecast. Suddenly the lights went out (and with it the power keeping the bouncy castles up - there was a lot of screaming) and the windows of the place started to shake. It was seriously crazy. When it was over we drove our dripping - literally - car home past uprooted and snapped in half trees toppled onto houses. We were lucky and our ancient cherry tree, the best part of our yard, escaped with just one large limb broken, so I can't really complain, but we also lost a lot of the garden.

Saturday we set to work trying to salvage things, picking the beans from the ripped up vines, pulling off the ears of immature corn (My corn!! Wahhhh!) and digging up the onions and shallots whose stems had simply snapped off. I need to dig the potatoes tonight, I thought that the plants might make a come back but it seems they are done for as well.

The problem is that I'm not ready for food storage. Oh sure, I have a little room in the jam cupboard, but other than that I'm just not ready for it. I had planned to have a big space in the basement cleared away and set up for hanging braids of onions and jars of pickles and bags of Potatoes. And a freezer. I was going to get a freezer. That was going to be my "I used to be cool and ask for clothes but now I want a chest freezer for my birthday" request. But oh well, you gotta do what you gotta do.

So in the afternoon I made some net bags for the onions and shallots (most were stemless hence the bag instead of braided stalks, I did get a few bunches braided) which are hanging inside the basement staircase. And then I made more pickles. When I was cleaning up the garden I pulled out three more giant cucumbers and since I had no room to freeze all the beans that went down in the storm, I pickled both.

I brined the cucumbers the same way I did before, but this time I added a cup of sugar to the vinegar mix, nixed the dill and chopped up a shallot and one of the peppers from our (miraculously ok) pepper plant. The result is something like a bread and butter pickle, except spicy. In a good way. I also packed the beans into jars with some dill, garlic and another pepper and used the original vinegar solution on them, also very good, and slightly spicy.

I'm running out of room in the fridge but still haven't progressed to processing the pickles. Mostly because I've been collecting these Kilner style jars and have to wait for the new rubber rings to arrive in the mail (Amazon has everything!) before I feel like it's safe to process using them. I could just stick with jars, but these are so fun, and pretty! And since I've been picking them up at second hand stores, cheap!

Tonight - potatoes. Which means I should probably look up how to store a big pile of potatoes. I also suspect there are another couple of cucumbers ready to go. Hopefully those rings arrive quickly.

Accidental Goodness

So I'm sure I'm not the only one that this happens to, but sometimes my baking projects just plain go wrong. Things don't rise or I leave them in too long or whatever. Hey, it happens, right? And unlike cooking, where you can more often than not just deal with things as they are, add a little more of this or that and go ahead and dig in, I find that baking gone bad more often than not just needs to be binned. I mean, who wants to eat a dry cookie right? Or worse, a dry cake? But occasionally the going wrong leads to something better than what you intended. And honestly, it's for those times that I love baking.

This weekend the kids and I decided to make a batch of graham crackers, something I've been meaning to try for a while, they seem to pop up on a lot of the blogs and cookbooks I like. I read through a few recipes and settled on a variation of Alton Brown's. The variation being that I didn't have graham flour. But I'd seen a lot of versions that called for whole wheat flour instead and that I had.

The other variation was that it called for a food processor and I don't have a food processor. I know, I hear you, what in the world am I doing without a food processor? Well, tell it to my husband. I've been saying it for years. The problem is that I do actually have one, it's teeny, and I mean teeny. It holds just one cup of whatever needs to be chopped. Which is perfect for nuts or onions or a small batch of babyfood in the days that I made babyfood, but for baking, it's crap. Still, it works, after 13 years, it works. It's held up better than my Stand Mixer, and I think it cost me all of $7. So until the thing dies, I have to live without. Which is normally no big deal (although, Will, if you are reading this, I would really like a food processor because, come on! I cook!) But I think it may have been the downfall of this recipe. Or maybe I should say the saving grace.

Because I couldn't really get the butter and flours worked together in that magic pea sized crumble, the dough didn't come together quite enough to roll it out thinly. So half of it we rolled out as best we could, to about 1/4 inch, and the rest we made into squeeze cookies, something I read about last year on Chocolate and Zucchini. The "crackers" puffed up quite a bit and ended up with a soft, chewy, almost gingerbread like consistency (real gingerbread, not cookies) and the squeeze cookies had a little crunch on the outside while still being soft on the inside.

We blew through them.

Today we made another batch and this time we grated the butter, which helped, but it was still pretty crumbly. I even added an extra 1/2 ounce of honey (I cut the molasses down to 2 ounces and added honey to make up the difference, which also could have had something to do with the dryness of the dough I guess) but since the kids declared they wanted them to be "squeezy" again, well, I wasn't too concerned.

We're almost out again. I kid you not. Better than Oreos though.

So here they are, "Not Graham Crackers"


"Not Graham Crackers"
adapted from Alton Brown

• 8 ounces whole wheat flour
• 2 ounces all-purpose flour
• 3 ounces dark brown sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 3 ounces unsalted butter, chilled and grated
  
• 2 ounces molasses
• 1 ounce honey
  
• 1 1/2 ounces milk
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Sift the dry ingredients in a medium bowl and blend in the butter with a fork or your fingertips until it is as incorporated as you can get (or if you are lucky and have a food processor, use that!) Make a well in the center and add the rest of the ingredients, folding them in until combined. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and chill for 30 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 350.

Roll out the dough to a thickness of 1/4 inch on parchment, transfer to a baking sheet and score into rectangles without separating them. OR, pull 2 tablespoons of dough out into your hand and squeeze it into a ridged oblong shape. Space them two inches apart on parchment. Bake either (or both) for 15 minutes.

Steak and Bok Choy

So I mentioned that we've had a bumper crop of bok choy out in the garden and I thought I'd pass on a recipe that we love to eat, either winter or summer, whenever we get our hands on a good looking bunch.

The first time I made this, we were living in Dublin and I was on a Jamie Oliver kick. I must have seen him on TV, although I can't remember that part, perhaps I just stumbled on his books in one of the four bookstores (oh heaven!) that were within walking distance of our flat. In any case, I loved reading his books. He was so cheerful, and unstuffy. And, unlike the cookbooks I'd brought from the US, the ingredients in the book were almost always easily found in both the larger chains (and by large, I mean small, because even the "big" stores were tiny compared with their US counterparts) and in the teeny corner shop grocery stores in our neighborhood. They were also nice and hearty, which helped us get over the fact that it never got above 65 degrees the entire time we lived there. (Actually, given that it has been in the high nineties here for days, that sounds pretty darn lovely!)

Of the recipes, this was our favorite. Briton, Will and I all love it - since it's not beige, it's not Evelyn's thing - and, to be honest, it's totally the reason I grew bok choy in the garden in the first place. The only change I make is to replace a whole chili - I hate cutting chili's - with a 1/4 tsp of sweet chili sauce. It give it a little kick without being too spicy for Briton. Ok, for me. I'm a whimp. Oh, and we use Strip Steak, not Sirloin, because we like it better.

Steak with Bok Choy and Ginger
adapted from Happy Days with the Naked Chef

2 thickish New York Strip Steaks
salt and pepper
large bunch of bok choy
8 T soy sauce
1 small garlic clove
1 thumb sized piece of ginger
1/4 tsp sweet chili sauce
juice of 1 lime
2 T olive oil


Season the steaks with salt and pepper. Grill until they are as done as you like (we prefer medium) and bring them inside. While they are grilling, set a pot of salted water on the stove to boil and pop in the bok choy when it's bubbling. In a small bowl mix the remaining ingredients (I like to grate both the garlic and the ginger with a microplane). Pour this sauce over the meat as soon as it comes off the grill and let it sit on the meat for a few minutes. When the bok choy is tender, drain and divide evenly between the plates. Slice up the meat and set on top of the greens, drizzle with the sauce.

Pickles!

The summer that I was pregnant with Briton, I went preserving crazy. I made strawberry jam and mint jelly and rose jelly and crazy I don't even remember what went in there chutney. I dried and bottled tomatoes and froze corn. And I made pickles. Actually, I should say I tried to make pickles. After reading through my preserving book I took myself down to the farmers market to stock up on pickling cucumbers. While I was there I chatted with the sweet little old ladies that ran the OSU Extension Office stand about the ins and outs of pickle making and went home, I thought, totally prepared. And to be honest, I'm not sure where things went wrong. They looked like pickles, they smelled like pickles, but they tasted, blah. Just really, really, blah. No crunch, no bite, no taste. It sucked.

So I've never gone down the pickle route again. Until I was poking around in the garden this weekend and discovered that my cucumber plant had exploded. No really. Last week I went poking through all the vines and leaves of my whole garden looking for signs of something, but didn't find much other than some good looking bok choy. Yesterday I thought I spotted a bean from the window and went out to investigate. I found, not a bean, but TONS of beans. And three enormous cucumbers. And corn! Still to small to eat but still, CORN! Feeling around under the potato plants revealed that the soil is packed with two inch diameter spuds. The carrots are starting to look like carrots. Not that I expected anything else, but still, it was exiting. But back to the cucumbers.

We planted Asian cucumbers this year from seeds bought from the Southern State Seed Exchange. From the descriptions, they were similar to the English variety that we love, but grow better in this hotter climate. I kid you not when I say that last week they were less than two inches long so it was kind of a shock to find them over a foot just seven days later. And while we love cucumbers on sandwiches and in salads, three huge cucumbers seemed a little excessive. Which got me thinking about pickles.

I dug through my big Stocking Up book, weighing a few different recipes (I can't remember which I used last time) read a few others I found in books on my shelf, and ended up winging it a little since none called for such a small amount of cucumbers. This makes, in fact, just one, tightly packed mason jar. Which is just the right amount for us. Or maybe not. Because these turned out great. Crunchy and a little spicy and just right. I'm still a little in awe. I didn't really think it would work. But I can see them disappearing faster than pickles usually do in this house, which has led me to do a little fantasizing about all sorts of things I can pickle. Maybe some of those beans. Or watermelon rind which I've never had but always wanted to try. Or Jerusalem artichokes. Can you pickle Jerusalem artichokes? Because I've got a bunch of them growing in the flower garden.

Anyway, if you have a spare pound or so of cucumbers hanging around the house, give it a whirl.

Fresh Packed Dill Pickles
Adapted from Stocking Up


1000 g of water
50 g of kosher salt
1 1/4 pounds of cucumbers, freshly picked and cut in spears
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups water
1 T kosher salt
1 tsp pickling spices
1 T mustard seed
1 small bunch of fresh dill

Make a brine out of the first two ingredients and soak the cucumber spears in it over night in the fridge. The next morning drain the cucumbers and pack them tightly into a sterilized, hot jar with the mustard seeds and the bunch of dill. In a saucepan, bring the vinegar, water, salt and pickling spices to a boil and pour into the jar until it's almost full. Cap with a lid and set it in the fridge to chill. Since these aren't processed, you have to keep them in the fridge. But I would guess that you can put the jar in a pot of boiling water and process for 15 minutes or so. That's part of the next adventure. Along with the beans and the artichokes.

Oh yeah, and happy solstice everyone. Nothing says the first day of summer like pickles, right?

Oh My Panna Cotta

Long, long ago, (well four years at least), in a land far away, Will and I went to a strange and slightly wild late night party at a rooftop flat in Temple Bar. Strange because although the party didn't start till 9 or so and planned to go till the wee small hours, it was a bring your kids kind of shin-dig. Also because the guest list could have doubled for a meeting of the EU. Wild because, well, I'll just say- Temple Bar and Italians. Do I really need to go further?

Anyway, after the dancing on the roof, artichoke flavored liquor (I don't recommend it) and watching the children, including ours, spin in circles until they collapsed on the floor and went to sleep, the desserts came out.

Now, it's no secret that I love dessert. My waistline would thank me if I didn't, but as Will has said of my thought process - the whole point of dinner is to get to dessert, right? And I've never really met a dessert that I didn't like (other than ice cream which - eh, I'll eat it but it's not really my thing) but every once in a while I'll eat something that totally blows my mind. The first time it happened it was the Hot Chocolate sold in the hostel in Rome where I stayed at the end of my high school exchange. Incidentally, I also bought a nightlight in the shape of the Pope's face there for a friend who wanted to be a priest. Just so you understand that it wasn't a fancy smancy place. I could have drunk gallons of that hot chocolate, it was incredible. And at this particular party, I had the same reaction to the Panna Cotta.

If you've never had panna cotta, and I hadn't, it's like jello for grownups. creamy and vanilla-y and only slightly sweet. I seriously considered stealing the plate and sneaking out to the terrace to snarf down the whole thing. Our host, one of those charming and carefree Italian women who always looks like a million bucks but still manages to be sweet and generous, shrugged off the accomplishment. It was just an ordinary dessert.

I've tried out a few panna cotta recipes since then, never with great success. They wouldn't set all the way or weren't creamy enough or were too sweet. Eventually I gave up. Then, yesterday I was dashing through the grocery store grabbing a few forgotten items when I buzzed past a curry products display. Normally this would induce instant cravings for Chicken Korma but for some reason this time I stopped at the coconut milk and that, humm, coconut panna cotta? Why not.

The recipe is based on this very basic Italian one. I liked the simplicity of it and adjusted it for the size of my mold (an SPCA charity shop find - love it!) and the inclusion of coconut. If I'd had time or sense, I probably would have made a chocolate sauce to drizzle over it, but instead I sat on the couch looking at Will who had fallen asleep watching a movie and contemplated eating the whole thing while he dozed. He'd never have known. Don't worry, I held back. But I at my portion without any garnish or toppings, and it was lovely. Not the same as my Italian friends, but just as good. Smooth and melt in your mouth creamy and just the right hint of sweetness. And just what I needed after the Ducks lost the Rose Bowl. Sigh... Maybe in another 15 years they'll try again....

Coconut Panna Cotta
fills a 2 cup jello mold - if you don't have a mold, custard cups or espresso cups make a great alternative for single servings

1 cup coconut milk (shake the can before you open it)
1 cup half and half (you could use cream for a more decadent version)
1/4 cup sugar
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
2 T cold water
1 T vanilla

In a small bowl, mix the gelatin and water to allow it to soften. Set aside. Heat the Coconut milk and half and half with the sugar on medium heat until it just begins to steam, add the vanilla and then stir in the gelatin until it has completely dissolved. Pour into lightly oiled molds (use an unflavored oil) and let set in the refrigerator until set. A two cup mold takes about 3 hours to firm completely, individual servings will be faster. Invert (if you want) to slide the panna cotta out and serve. Berries or chocolate (or both if you want, who am I to decide!) would be great served over this but it's great plain too.

Candied Orange Peel

So yesterday I mentioned that I had candied orange peel strips cooking away on the stove and today I was able to get them just about finished, they still have some more drying to do but for the most part, they are officially candied.

I've never candied anything in my life. At least not that I can remember. But I have this fantasy that one day I will candy all the fruit necessary to make my annual batch of fruit cakes (which reminds me, I forgot to buy boxes for those things today, darn!!) I will probably never be organized enough to get all the cherries and lemon peel and pineapple and odd little bits and pieces of things that are red and green and sweet candied that I would need, but a girl likes to dream.

The recipe for these comes from the River Cottage Handbook #2, which is all about preserves and is my cookbook de jour (even though it's pretty much past time to preserve anything, I still enjoy reading jam and chutney recipes, laugh, go ahead) Having fallen in love with the River Cottage Family book and in like with the River Cottage Cookbook, I was pleased to see that this handbook is just as good, if not better, than the others. If you have any interest in making jam, I highly recommend it. It's not as exhaustive as the giant Stocking Up tome that I have been using (circa 1975) but since a lot of what is in that is beyond what even I would be interested in preserving, I think the handbook is a better bet for the every day jammer.

Candied Orange Sticks adapted from the River Cottage Handbook #2

4-5 large oranges
2 cups of granulated sugar (500 g)
Water

Run a knife around the oranges so the peel is split into quarters. Carefully remove the peel from the orange in whole, quartered pieces, a spoon inserted under the peel helps if they seem to be ripping. And really, you can use them ripped into little chunks if you want, they just wont be sticks, they'll be chunks.

Slice the peels into thin strips and put them in a heavy bottomed pot with enough water to cover. Bring the water to a boil then reduce to a simmer for 5 minutes. Drain completely then add fresh water to just over half covering the peels. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook, covered, for 45 minutes (stir every once in a while or you'll end up with blackened bits like me :)) Add the sugar and stir until dissolved, put the lid back on and simmer another 30 minutes. Turn off the heat and leave the whole thing for 24 hours.

The next day, bring to a boil again, reduce to a simmer and cook uncovered 30 minutes or until the liquid is a thick syrup. Remove the strips of peel with tongs onto a wire rack (with a drip pan beneath) and allow to dry 24 hours or, if you're impatient like me, pop them in the oven at your lowest setting (170 for me) for 2-3 hours.

I tossed about half of mine in granulated sugar to see which I would like better. The plan is to dip these in chocolate closer to Christmas for gifts. If they make it that long. They are yummy little snacks.

The leftover syrup is pretty tasty to, I added a little to a jar of vodka that I have soaking with a lemon and sugar on my windowsill and mixed the rest with the same amount of honey which, by the way, was divine dribbled over a chunk of Stilton with apricots for a little late afternoon pick-me-up. In fact. Even if you don't want candied fruit, I'd say it's worth it to boil a few orange peels in sugar and water just so you can mix the syrup with honey for your cheese eating pleasure. That good. I'm tellin' ya.

Now, I'm off to make a Pumpkin Pie for tomorrow's festivities. I hope everyone out there has a very happy and tasty Thanksgiving!