The big cooking day

So, today was busy.  It started with roasting bell peppers, and braising this piece of meat.

It's a veal breast, or 5 lbs of one anyway.  This is the dish I am most nervous about this year.  It's the one that has the highest probability of getting messed up.  After braising, I had to remove the roast from the pan without the fork-tender-meat coming apart, and then take out the bones and cartilage.  This is what it looked like afterward:

I'm very thankful that my mother was here to lend me two extra arms to sort of maneuver things on this one.  After cleaning it out, you fold it in half, and then smush it.  Tomorrow I will cut a round out of it.  6 of them hopefully.

It was supposed to be smushed down to 3/4" thick, and I was having a hard time with this, so I put my marble cutting board, my cast iron griddle, and an iron skillet on top to try to flatten it out.  It currently sits like this in the top of my fridge (it's in there, I promise).

Then I whittled some carrots to look like little footballs, and gave up on the other cute shapes for the turnips, celery root, and beets, and just cut them up, blanched them, and put them back in the fridge to await assembly tomorrow.   Mom helped me strain my fennel oil (which is a vibrant green), and I made these delicious things to go on top of the pea soup that I'll make tomorrow.  These are parmigianno-reggiano crisps.  Cheese that has been made into a chip-like texture, only more fragile.  The fun part about this, is that they often break and so you get to eat a lot of them while you're cooking, hence the missing one.

And the tastiest thing I made today was this lemon tart.  It's like lemon curd, in a crust, and then broiled, so it  has a creme brulee sort of flare to it.  The only part I sampled was the lemon curd part, and mom and I both licked the pan.  I'm pretty excited to eat it tomorrow.

 Meanwhile, my dad was working on the chicken coop.  I owe him a fancy dinner in return for all his hard work.  Unfortunately for me, the forecast for tomorrow is: 100% chance of rain.  Evidently, my chickens are going to spend their entire life in the dog kennel or else I'm going to have to work in the rain.

Mostly on Schedule

So, I haven't made anything interesting enough to take a picture of it yet.  So far just chicken stock, vegetable stock, balsamic glaze (which is just vinegar that you cook for like 8 hours until it's really thick), beet glaze (beet juice & red wine vinegar reduced as previously stated), fennel powder, creme fraiche (yes I make it), and fennel oil.  I did almost cut off the middle finger on my left hand while cutting off the fennel fronds to blanch for 15 seconds before pureeing them in the olive oil to make the infused oil.  It didn't really hurt, mostly because I think I've probably cut through all the nerves in that finger trying to cut it off before, but as soon as I did it, I thought, oh rats, I need to get a band-aid on that before I get blood everywhere.  Anyway, I'll spare you most of the details, only to say that I stained a perfectly good pair of gloves afterwards while working on the chicken coop, because apparently water proof band-aids are only waterproof from the outside.  Once they get full, they just overflow all over the place.  Anyway, so far, all the chicks are still alive, and tomorrow I'm actually cooking something interesting, so I'll try to take pictures.  

The Preparations Begin

Well, it's time.  I put 3 things in the freezer before our Florida trip: Veal stock, which was really beef stock because I couldn't locate veal bones anywhere, The pine-nut crust for my lemon tart, and the ravioli, which I previously wrote about.  I did end up making more, and I got so good at rolling out that pasta by hand that I actually got 43 ravioli out of the 48 that I should have had from a pasta roller.  So we have plenty of ravioli to eat.  The only thing that I was a little irritated with myself over, is that I accidentally used whole wheat flour when I made the second batch.  I'm so used to using it in everything that I didn't even notice until it was already made, and I wasn't about to do it again.  So we're having about 5 white flour ravioli and eating our hearts out on the whole wheat ones.

These items were only supposed to spend one week in the freezer, but we had an unexpected second trip to Florida that left them in the freezer for an additional week, and well, I think it'll probably be fine.  I did have to freeze my veal breast that I ordered, because I ordered that before the first Florida trip.  I'm thinking that should be ok, too.  I'm just not going to be a perfectionist on this one.

So, there is a bit of a hairy schedule for the week.  I bought a few groceries today, because I'm making more stocks tomorrow, and fennel oil, and a balsamic glaze.  These things can all keep for a few days.  But I have more shopping to do, and the real cooking begins on Wednesday.  Wednesday is also the day we get our chicks (I think).  15 of them.

SO, we also bought our chick feed, bulbs for our lamp, and feeders today while we were shopping.  We have a chicken coop and run to finish up.  I have pallets all over the back yard just waiting to be either disassembled or used as is to finish up the coop.  I'll take pictures.  I may have to post all this stuff after the fact because I'm getting tired just thinking about it right now.

It's Birthday time... almost

Once we recovered from Christmas, I started planning the Birthday Dinner for this year.  I normally start glancing through the cookbook this early, but never actually finalize a menu this early.  However, this year I was a little nervous because we are going to Florida the week before.  I generally have things together by this point, but the though of coming home and then immediately diving into cooking was a little nerve wracking, because it normally takes me a couple of days to recover from a trip.  Anyway, there are a bunch of courses, and I'm very excited because I haven't ever made any of them.  I realized when planning the menu this year that there are 150 recipes in this book and I've made 30 of them.  And I've already been told that if I make sweatbreads or stuffed pigs head my sweet husband won't eat it.  So I'll just have to make those one day for a very good friend.  This will be the first year that I don't do seafood as the main course, which is a little exciting because even though I make different courses every year, they are pretty much all lobster just cooked different ways, and so this is very different.

So, not only did I finalize the menu in January, I already started cooking.  Can you believe that?  That is almost as crazy as growing my eyebrows out, which I was requested to do as one of "our" family goals for 2013.  I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I feel about that request, but none-the-less, I am doing it, and I'm almost through the really awkward part, where I felt like I was drawing my eyebrows on like my grandmother used to do. At any rate, back to food: There are two things that I intend to make before we go on our trip.  One of this dishes is a sweet potato - bacon - butter filled pasta that will be served with a sage - cream - prosciutto sauce.  I actually can't wait to eat it.  My mouth is watering just thinking about it.  The reason I can make this so early is that the pasta part is freezable, for weeks, and I intend to do just that to make my life easier.  The only thing is, there are just a few things in my life that I have said I will never do.  Most of them involved child rearing, and I said them before I ever had kids.  So I don't count those.  But one of them, I have actually said I will never do again, and I've said it twice, which means that evidently I shouldn't count any time I say I will never do anything.  This thing, is making home made pasta.  It is laborious to say the least.  But I do especially laborious things for the Birthday Dinner, so why not?  If I had all the right tools, then it probably wouldn't be quite as bad.  But since I don't, I usually improvise.

The filling was easy enough, roast some sweet potatoes, fry up some bacon, mix it together with some spices, put in a pasty bag, to pipe it into pasta.  Well, technically, I was supposed to put the potatoes through a ricer, which I don't have.  So I used the following:

I just mushed it through with another spoon.  It probably wasn't a necessary step, I'm sure it had to do with texture.  You couldn't even tell once I stirred in the bacon and spices and butter.  Here it is in the pastry bag, waiting to be piped into "agnolotti" whatever those are.

 Ok, so then comes the part that I hate about making pasta.  It's the actual pasta.   If I had an extruder, or pasta roller, or any such pasta appliance, it probably wouldn't be terrible. Even if I had such appliance,  I'm sure I'd still only do it for special occasions.  But this is what I use for my pasta roller:

The thing is, I was supposed to get 48 "agnolotti" out of my half recipe of pasta dough, which is all that I had enough eggs to make anyway.  This would give each of us approximately 8 pieces of filled pasta each.  My pasta roller is defective, and so I only got it thin enough for us to each have 5 pieces of pasta.  Also, I should note, that I get an 'F' on filling agnolotti.  Here it is before I sealed it:

And then after I sealed it, the filling came squishing out.  I might take a picture of that at a later date.  I was too frustrated at that point to photograph anything, and my arms were about to fall off anyway from rolling out the pasta.  SO, we're getting ravioli instead.  And I'm making more pasta dough, a whole recipe this time, to use up the rest of the fantastic filling which I tasted.  That way we can each have 15 pieces of pasta.  And I won't have to feel guilty about not doing any push-ups the week we're out of town, because I have never, ever, in my life been so sore in my pectorals as I am after rolling out all this pasta, except for maybe the last time I made pasta, which is probably why I swore I would never do it again.  I think that was 5 years ago.  And the first time I made it was right after we got married, so almost 10 years ago.  So sometime between now and the year 2018 I need to invest in a real pasta roller.

Something New for Breakfast

Every now and again, A.

will ask me for "something new for breakfast."  She is a breakfast kind of girl.  Actually, all my kids eat breakfast.  It's the only meal they eat reliably, so unless we're going somewhere I try to make it good.  In my normal rotation is:  french toast, pancakes, scrambled eggs and bacon and toast, cinnamon rolls, smoothies (usually with toast or cereal on a day we're going somewhere), and oatmeal on Sundays.  Evidently, this got old.  So back in November, she asked.  So one day I made an apple dutch baby, followed the next day by these breakfast pizzas (which I actually enjoyed considerably, and they used up my cardboard gluten free english muffins), then scotch eggs a couple days later.  After the scotch eggs, and her not actually liking any of the new things, she said "you don't have to make anything new for a while." Thanks, sis.   But then again, last week, during our bedtime routine when they place their breakfast order for the next morning, she asked again.  So THIS time, I pulled out the pioneer woman.  It's not gourmet by any means, but kids like it. So I made marmalade muffins, not bad, everyone liked them, except I think I used more sugar (even though it was the real kind of sugar) than I think I used in the entire months of November and December combined.  So I won't be making that again anytime soon.  Next up was the Egg-in-a-hole.  Why have I waited so long to make this?  It was perhaps the all time easiest breakfast I've ever made in my entire life, and everyone loved it.  It's totally going to be added into the rotation.  I used cookie cutters for my "hole" because believe it or not, I don't own a biscuit cutter.  I think that may have served me well and made it an even bigger hit, we had a bear, cow, pig, and star for our "holes."

It was almost a failure when the yellow started running out of the eggs, because we like our eggs well done in this family, but when I told them it was a delicious sauce in the egg that they could dip their bread in, everyone brightened and perspectives changed.

Anyway, I have thought several times over this last week, how similar she is to me.  How many times do I look around my perfectly full life, blessed life, and say to God, "give me something new"?  I have been reflecting on the different ways this could be taken.

I guess there are several ways I could have taken it, like "mom, I love your cooking so much that I'm ready for whatever new thing you have in store for me."  I have, on occasion, thought that, in relation to the Lord's blessings; however I'm not sure I always really mean it, or at least I know I am a little afraid of what He could actually come up with, because one of the times I thought that, I had twins, and that whole pregnancy/bedrest/first year with twins thing wasn't exactly comfortable.  Not that I'm complaining, I am actually, in retrospect, grateful for the trial because on the other side of it now I can see how even that blessed me.

If I'm honest, I think that the first thing that came to mind was, the way I took my daughter's request, "what you are giving me isn't good enough."  Wow.  Am I that ungrateful?  Sometimes, yes.  And then He decides to show me how I'm acting, by holding up a little mirror in the form of my daughter. Sometimes that's what it takes for it to sink in.

Merry Christmas and Eat your veggies!

Well.  Here we are a couple days after Christmas, and I'm on here trying to decide what to use my limited amount of time to write about while my parents watch my kids.  Hmmm.  I've had several topics running through my head that I considered blogging about lately.  1) Eating vegetables,  2) Community  or 3) Christmas.   The one I really want to write about it community, but it's kind of deep, at least for me, and I'm not sure I can delve into that right now.  So as usual, I think I'm just going to write about food.  I'm shallow and obsessed.  So I'll combine 1 and 3 somehow.

Since the beginning of the year, when I decided to make war on sugar and vegetable oil (in our home at least, you can only do so much), we have been eating a lot more vegetables and trying new things, and new ways to cook things.  We 'experiment' a lot .  Having said that, I think I always come back around to my all time favorite way to cook most vegetables is just to roast them.  Pretty much any veggie is fantastic roasted, and you can combine them and make little dressings for them to switch things up a little.  Even if you are a beginner, you can roast vegetables.  Just cut them up, throw on some olive oil, salt, pepper, and roast at any range of temperatures until they are done to your liking.  My normal go-to is 400 degrees for about 30 or 40 minutes depending on how small I chop up the veggies.   Green beans, asparagus (although this only needs a couple minutes, or it will be mushy and nasty), beets, potatoes, sweet potatoes, butternut squash (or any kind for that matter), parsnips, brussels sprouts, carrots, cauliflower even.  You can play around with them and add other herbs or spices, or fruit even.  For Christmas dinner this year, I found a recipe (Southern Living) that added cranberries at the end and tossed the veggies in a couple Tablespoons of molasses.

I also made this kale and mustard green gratin out of Bon Appetit (I clearly get too many cooking magazines) that was so good that I actually ate the leftovers for lunch two days in a row and still loved it.  Veggies can be so good if you cook them the right way, it is a shame that people don't eat them very often.  I mean, it's tragic really.  If people would eat a plate full of vegetables then they would be able to eat things like this:

And you could eat the crispy fried fat right off of the top and not feel guilty about it in the least (although, if you eat more than 3 pieces, it's like having too much cake, you start to feel a little sick because it's so rich.  Not that I know that from experience or anything).

And then you can eat things like this Buche de Noel...

...with it's tasty little meringue mushrooms to make it look legitimately log-like, and the chocolate and cream icing, and the kahlua syrup on the inside.  And I must confess here:  I purchased granulated sugar for the dessert.  I honestly did feel guilty about that.  This was the first granulated sugar purchase in all of 2012, and I bought the smallest bag they make so that I wouldn't be tempted to use it on other stuff. I was afraid my other sugar wouldn't work for the meringue.  So I just ate extra veggies to make up for it.  I somehow convinced myself that the mustard greens were absorbing all of the poison from the sugar so that it was just passing right through my body.  I think I believed it on Christmas day, but when I ate the leftover dessert the day after I wasn't as convinced.  But since that day happened to fall on Wednesday, which is the day I usually poison myself anyway with Dr. Pepper, I just lumped it all together.

Gluten Free and More

So,  we were supposed to have company today.  I was very excited about this meal because one of the people, or maybe the combination of them left me with a challenge: No gluten, no corn, no dairy, and no peanuts.  I've been exploring the no gluten thing for a while, because I have self diagnosed myself with some sort of gluten intolerance... but the corn and dairy and gluten all at the same time were going to be a challenge.  It ended up being fine, even though they couldn't make it, which just gives me another opportunity to do it again later.  We enjoyed the meal, and I was a little bit excited about 2 of the dishes because I got to use some new oil and vinegar that I am totally obsessed with, so I thought I'd share.

First I have to explain my obsession. Veronica foods produces the best olive oil and vinegar you will ever in your life eat. I have been waiting for a store to open in Augusta that carries their stuff... I really can't explain it, you have to just try the stuff yourself.  If you don't live here, contact them and ask what stores are in your area, this stuff is life changing.

OK, so the two things I made with my new acquisitions were a roasted butternut squash with fresh sage, salt and pepper, tossed in the blood orange infused olive oil.  I did put just a tad of a sprinkle of rapadura sugar on it - you could also use honey.  This was so good- the best butternut I've ever had.

Second was dessert,  which was particularly challenging considering no gluten or corn or dairy.  I was a little at a loss, so I made rice pudding.  Something that I have never eaten or had the desire to eat, but it seemed like an easy fix - I could just use coconut milk.  So that is what I did, using arborio rice and rapadura (1/2 cup rice, boiled for ten minutes before cooking in the 4 cups coconut milk and 1/3 cup sugar.). It was actually tasty just like this, but then after chilling, I drizzled espresso vinegar on top and it was awesome.

So there you have it.