On Yankees and the Cold

I once met a man from Louisiana who accused me of being a Yankee, because I lived in Washington, D.C., even though I am a Texan through and through. He was belligerently Southern and I found him both hilarious and disturbing. But his words have stuck with me and I must say I find myself agreeing with him. He went on and on about how he didn't trust people from up north on the grounds that "you can't trust a man who thinks it is normal to shovel snow out of his driveway before he goes to work." Nor can you trust someone who thinks temperatures that dip below freezing for several months out of the year is any way to live. "That ain't right. That just ain't right. You can't trust a man who thinks that is right," he said.

Indeed. That ain't right. While I have no snow to shovel, it is raining like crazy and when it hits the sidewalk it immediately freezes. Is that what they call freezing rain? I never did understand that term, because I always rather thought that when it was freezing rain turned to snow. I think maybe now I get it and it just ain't right. It sucks. I nearly killed myself getting the newspaper the sidewalk was so slippery. Well, I exaggerate. I did a crazy dance trying not to fall on my ass, but I could have nearly killed myself.

Then there is the dilemma of how do you heat a house built in the 1800s? There should be a class or at least a brochure on things you should know before you buy an old house up north. Maybe I'll write it.

1) No matter what you do, you won't be warm. Your nose and fingers will be popsicles, the pets will need earmuffs and there will be a frigid breeze whipping through stairwells, near windows and doors. The stairways act like breezeways, really.

2) It takes 10 minutes to get the hot water from the basement to the second floor (where all showers are), so your water bill will be extra high. (An on-demand water heater installed on second floor is in my future.)

3) Medicine cabinets installed on an outside wall result in frozen (or very nearly so) toiletries. You must take the deodorant out of the cabinet a good 30 minutes before using and place it in a warm spot unless you want quite the wake-up call.

4) Dishes kept in cabinets on outside walls must be warmed before using. That nice hot cup of coffee becomes lukewarm (at best) upon being poured into the cup. No wonder the man at the kitchen store made a big stink about getting a warming drawer. I scoffed at that as an unnecessary expense.

5) Store your PJs on the radiator. Socks, too. So when you go to put them on, you will be warm for a few minutes.

6) Invest in those fingerless gloves -- several pair -- so you can tend to household chores. Mittens and gloves make writing, cooking and anything else requiring fine motor skills impossible. But you can't go around without insulating yourself.

7) A scarf must be worn indoors at all times.

8) The house makes creepy noises at night. Sleep with soothing music playing to drown them out or you'll lie awake freaking yourself out. This one is especially important if you have a good imagination. And you'll need to be well rested to have the energy to not freeze to death in your own home.

9) In late summer when the temperatures dip at night, your house will get cold and not warm up during the day. So on those lovely September days when it is high 70s, low 80s, you'll be wearing sweaters and long pants inside and will have to change into summer clothes (near the door so you freeze before you get outside) when you leave the house.

I could go on, but I am depressing myself. I had grand plans to go to the grocery store, to search out cool photo albums and then finish wrapping gifts. I'm not leaving the house. I'm going to put on another pair of socks (or two), find my new hat and stay under the covers with the dog, who definitely needs ear warmers.

Even baking Christmas cookies is out, because it is too cold in here to allow the butter to come up to room temperature. I guess on the bright side, you don't really need a refrigerator during the winter. I could just leave all the stuff out on the counter. SIGH.

Venison Pie

We don't eat much meat for a variety of reasons and I have been a vegetarian on and off since high school. I love animals so much it makes me sad to eat them and I have a horror of the meat industry. "Fast Food Nation" anyone? That book seriously changed the way I eat. But I love meat, so every once in a while I fall off the vegetarian wagon and have some bacon.

Then there is the fact that my motto has always been "the cuter they are, the better they taste." Cows are OK, bacon delicious, duck is divine, lamb is fantastic, venison is even better and rabbit is heavenly. I don't see the point in wasting calories on food that is not fabulous, so I don't eat a lot of meat. In fact, in 2010 we are going to start a policy of only eating meat that was killed by someone we know. I couldn't possibly do the killing myself -- I'm not a good enough shot and I faint when I see blood.

Luckily, Drew's dad is a hunter, so we get quite a lot of venison every year and I made venison pot pie based on a recipe out of the November issue of British Country Living called "Venison, Guinness & Chestnut Pie." I didn't have chestnuts, so I added mushrooms and used a bottle of Duck Rabbit Milk Stout. I bought the beer because the logo is fabulous. The beer is so-so.

I cubed some venison cutlets, dipped them in salted and peppered flour, browned the meat in a large pot and set the meat aside aside. Then I sauteed leek, garlic and carrots and set that aside with the meat. Next added stock and scraped up the browned bits from the venison pan, added the meat and all the vegetables and the bottle of beer and some sprigs of thyme. Once it was bubbling gently, I put on the lid, turned down the heat and wandered away for about an hour until the meat was tender.

After the meat was done and the sauce thickened, I poured it all into a 2 quart baking dish, topped with pie crust decorated with pie dough antlers and baked it at 375 degrees until the crust was browned. YUM. Here is the recipe as I made it.

1 to 2 lbs. venison stew meat

3 TBSP flour

Salt and freshly ground pepper

2 to 3 TBSP butter or olive oil to over bottom of pan

1 leek, chopped

3 carrots sliced

4 garlic cloves crushed

several sprigs of thyme

1 bottle stout beer

2 to 3 cups of beef or game stock

1/2 to 3/4 lb. mushrooms

1 recipe of pie crust for a single crust pie (only butter in the pie crust, please)

1 beaten egg to glaze

Toss the venison in flour, salt and pepper. Melt butter in a large pan and cook in batches until nicely browned. Transfer to a plate. Add leek and carrots and cook 15 minutes, add garlic and cook until fragrant and soft, sprinkle in thyme. Transfer to plate with venison.

Add the stock and bring to a boil, scraping up meat residue and browned bits. Add meat, vegetables and beer. Bring back to a boil, lower heat, cover and simmer until meat is tender, one hour or more.

While cooking, heat butter or olive oil and saute the mushrooms until they give up their liquid and are browned. Once the meat is tender, add cooked mushrooms. Leave to cool or the pie will boil over when it goes in the oven.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Pour the filling into a large pie dish or baking pan. If there is too much liquid, reserve it for serving as gravy. Cover the filling with the pastry, using the trimmings to shape antlers to decorate the pie. Brush with beaten egg to glaze and bake for 45 minutes until deep golden.

Pumpkin Scones Part 2

These scones are based on the recipe from the Joy of Baking site, but I ramped up the pumpkin for a deeper pumpkin flavor, took out the raisins and pecans and added nutmeg, because pumpkin simply cries out for a bit of nutmeg. These scones have more of a flakey biscuit texture than a cakey texture, because I simply prefer the flakiness. They are slightly sweet, but get flavor much more from the pumpkin and spices. They make an excellent breakfast treat without the resulting sugar coma you get from other overly sweet baked goods.

Pumpkin Scones

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Ingredients:

1 ½ cups all purpose flour

½ cup whole wheat flour (or 2 cups all purpose)

1/3 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed

½ tsp ground ginger

½ tsp ground cinnamon

¼ tsp nutmeg

1 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

½ cup (one stick) cold, unsalted butter, cut into pieces

1/3 cup buttermilk

1 cup fresh or canned pure pumpkin

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Roasted, salted pumpkin seeds to top (optional)

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, spices, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

Cut the butter into small pieces and blend into the flour mixture with a pastry blender or pulse in food processor. The mixture should have different sized pieces of butter – small and large.

In a separate bowl mix together the buttermilk, pumpkin puree and vanilla and then add the buttermilk mixture to the flour mixture. Mix just until the dough comes together. Do not over mix the dough. You may had to toss in more flour if dough is too sticky – just add a sprinkle or two at a time until you have the right consistency.

Transfer to a lightly floured surface and knead dough gently four or five times and then pat the dough into a circle that is about 7 inches round and about 11/2 inches thick. Use 2-inch biscuit cutter for small, round pastries. Squish scraps together and pat down to use all dough, trying not to overwork the dough.

Place the scones on the baking sheet. Brush the tops of the scones with buttermilk (or an egg wash) and sprinkle with pumpkin seeds if desired. Bake round scones for 12 to 15 minutes until lightly browned on top.

Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Yield: About a dozen small scones.

Pumpkin Scones

I've been obsessed with pumpkin scones ever since Whole Foods started selling them in the fall several years ago. I bought one every chance I got and tried to make them at home, but they were never the same as the marvelous ones at Whole Foods. Once the holiday season ended and spring was in the air, the pumpkin scones would disappear and I would pine for them for the rest of the year. (If anyone thinks I am kidding, just ask Drew.)

Then the worst happened. Whole Foods changed the recipe and added raisins. I HATE raisins. I hate raisins on par with my hatred of tomatoes. It is a horrible thing to do to a grape. They ruin everything. The worst is when you have this marvelous, meaty savory dish and bite into a raisin and it's icky, bitter, raisiny nastiness just ruins the dish. But I digress.

So ever since the raisin disaster, I've been trying doubly hard to find a good pumpkin scone recipe. I thought I may have found one on the Joy of Baking site http://www.joyofbaking.com/index.html. It is run by this woman who just loves to bake. Then she posts her recipes for everyone to try.

I found the pumpkin scone recipe this week and thought I would try it this morning. I assembled all the ingredients. I even had some roasted pumpkin seeds to sprinkle on top, thinking the salt would be a nice touch with the subtle sweetness of the scones. Then I proceeded to leave out the sugar. When you leave the sugar out of a scone recipe, you get biscuits. They actually taste pretty good, but it certainly wasn't what I had in mind.

You can't really taste the ginger nor the vanilla, which is good, because that would have been really weird. But you can't taste the pumpkin, either. I don't know if I need to use freshly roasted and pureed pumpkin rather than the stuff in the can or if the pumpkin just needs to be increased. I'm going to keep trying and experimenting and if I come up with a good recipe, I will post it here. Of course, I will try this one again with the sugar this time to see if that brings out the pumpkin flavor.

I've decided these would be good with maple syrup and bacon, or maybe that maple cured bacon and perhaps just not on top, but cooked, diced and baked in. Everything is better with bacon, after all. My neighbor is going to put citrus butter on the ones I gave to her.

Oceans of Sugary Vomit

Our dog, Walter, is obsessed with food. He will eat anything remotely edible, so we have to keep all food products up high and out of climbing range and the pantry doors shut tight. I should have known that I couldn't leave a bag of sugar in the bag on the kitchen floor, but I wasn't ready to pour it into the glass jar where I keep the sugar because I wanted to use the rest of that sugar first. Alas.

I was away for a couple of hours and came home to a ripped open bag of sugar, a paste of drool and sugar surrounding the bag and oceans of sugary vomit. He drank an entire bowl of water and threw up every where. The kitchen, the side entrance hallway, the entry hall, all over the rugs upstairs. I gave him more water, which he promptly drank and projectile vomited all over the bed. Not even after the great couscous-raisin binge of 2008 did Walter throw up that much. He sat there whimpering and looking absolutely pathetic. I had visions of a doggie diabetic coma and other horrors dancing in my head. Of course, one does not go into a diabetic coma from too high blood sugar -- that happens when blood sugar is too low. (Things you learn when you have a diabetic cat.) But I wasn't thinking clearly -- I just saw my poor little sweetie suffering and I freaked out and took him to the doggie emergency room.

It was a total over-reaction. He refused to go inside once he realized where we were and I had to carry him in. Walter does this brilliant impression of a dying dog, so the hospital staff rushed to us. I had to explain he was OK, just acting extra pathetic to try to get me to take him home. When I sat him down he did his awkward dog dance to prove he was fine. I almost said "oh never mind, he is OK," but I figured we had come all this way and all the puking in the car had me concerned.

Walter had blood work done to check his electrolytes, he got a shot to settle his stomach and some medicine to keep his stomach settled. This guy has a cast iron stomach, so I don't think he really even needs the medicine. This is the dog who ate an entire bag of dog food in one sitting. Six bowls of cat food in one day. Half a bag of flour. An entire apple, core and all. I can't even remember all the stuff he has managed to scarf down and not even bat an eye.

They told us to watch for "anorexia" and that he might be off his food for a couple of days. Um, no. The second we got home he went around the house trying to lick vomit crumbs out of the carpet that I hadn't had time to get cleaned up in the frenzy of mopping vomit and looking for an after-hours vet clinic.

The good thing about living in Pittsburgh is the trip cost $200. Not cheap, but ever so much better than the $1,000 that it would have cost us in D.C. The best part was I knew that Walter was totally fine.

Note to self: Any food items, even those in cans, go up high from now on.

Savory Baking

I really don't like sweets. I never have. Give me a cheese straw over a cookie any day. Or another helping of meat and skip the cake. Odd, since I worked at CakeLove, where I did eat cake every day and enjoyed it. Nonetheless, I haven't had so much as a sliver of cake since I left there and I don't miss it. So I was thrilled when I noticed way back in April that a new cookbook called "Savory Baking," was coming out in August. This is one awesome book. Almost everything looks promising and while I've only made two things out of it (I've only had it two weeks!), but both were absolutely smashing.

The first was the recipe for Peppered Pear and Goat Cheese Scones. The tang of the goat cheese, the sweetness of the pears and the spiciness of the black pepper come together for one of the tastiest savory scones I've ever had. They get their moisture from yogurt. The recipe calls for plain yogurt cut with some milk to thin it out, but I had some homemade yogurt on hand and as it is thinner than the stuff you get in the grocery store, I just used a bit more yogurt.

I don't know if they are better than the black pepper bacon scones in The Pastry Queen, because they have, well, BACON. But these are darned good and make a perfect snack or savory breakfast.

The second thing I made was the Sour Cream Fig Spirals. I am obsessed with figs. Obsessed. I spent a week pondering giving up figs after my friend, Sheila, told me that figs have dead wasps in them. Her niece or nephew did a report on figs for school and discovered that wasps will crawl inside the flower, get stuck and as the fruit forms and ripens the wasps become a part of the fruit. I read a lot of wasp/fig reports online and I finally just decided that I love figs so much I don't care. Plus, I eat meat so what the heck. But I digress.

The book has a recipe for rosemary fig spread, but I can't abide rosemary. Instead, I chopped some fresh figs, mixed in some dried cranberries drizzled a bit of honey over the top, added a splash of water and simmered on the stove top until the figs broke down. Pulse in a food processor until finely chopped.

The "cookie" dough is made with whole wheat flour and finely ground toasted walnuts with cream cheese. The dough was extremely sticky and I had to toss in more flour than what the recipe recommended to get it to come together properly. Once patted out onto a floured piece of parchment or waxed paper, spread the dough with the fig jam and roll up. Mine did not look pretty like the picture. I need to practice my pinwheel technique and I think I had substantially more filling than the recipe recommends, but who wouldn't want more figs? These need to be cold to slice, so I refrigerated the rolled dough over night. By the time the coffee was made this morning, the oven was warm and 12 minutes later I had delicious savory cookies for breakfast. I had to foist them upon my neighbor, because I would have eaten all of them before noon.

Whole Foods Is An Awesome Company

I just went to the Whole Foods that is in the fringe area near my Pittsburgh neighborhood and was accosted by all these foolish people protesting the company and calling for a boycott all because CEO John Mackey wrote an op-ed on health care in the Wall Street Journal.

First of all, anyone who thought Mackey was some bleeding heart liberal hasn't been paying attention. He is a Reagan Republican. He's a Texan. And he has created one of the most amazing companies that does more for the liberal causes these people support than any other company out there.

Thanks to Whole Foods, many family farms are doing better than ever. There is a great deal of attention given to the buy local movement. Organic food and more healthful eating is all the vogue. Companies like Giant and Wal-Mart are actually entering the market and encouraging the production of organic food.

Whole Foods makes it a point of going into poor, messed up neighborhoods, opening stores, giving the disenfranchised residents jobs and helping turn blighted areas into decent, safe places to live. It gives their employees health care. It gives them opportunities to go to school. It pays a decent wage. It gives them opportunities for advancement.

The company invests in wind energy and generates enough wind energy to power all of their stores.

The whole of Whole Foods corporate policies should be the gauge by which we measure this company. Not some op-ed written by a conservative guy who happens to be the CEO and who actually knows how to ensure that people get health care.

What gets me is the irony of these Democrats and liberals who scream for the ACLU any time they think someone is denied a voice, criticizing a guy for speaking his mind. This guy walks their walk. He just has a different view on how things get done. Let him talk. Maybe we can learn something from what he has been able to accomplish with his company.

I always shop at Whole Foods, but now I'm all the more motivated to go there for everything.

My Favorite Cookbook

While I have owned Jacques Pepin Celebrates for ages, it is a cookbook I continually returnto and explore, especially for special events. Every recipe I've tried has been fabulous and pretty easy -- even the really fancy-looking recipes.

For example, the fruit salad served in a melon carved to look like a swan is a cinch and everyone at brunch was so impressed with the swan. Fruit salad is so easy, obviously. And if you follow the simple instructions, you've got yourself a melon bowl that looks just like a swan in a few minutes. The pictures and step-by-step instructions make it so easy.

The last thing I made was the stuffed salmon in flakey pastry crust. It was the main course for Easter. It was amazingly delicious and crazy easy. Big piece of salmon, mushrooms, shallot, chives, shrimp. Pastry crust. I was going to skip carving the pastry dough to look like a fish and then figured, what the heck. I'd already been cooking for 12 hours -- I may as well TRY. Again the photos and the detailed instructions made this a breeze. I used a funnel from my flask to made the indentations for the scales and the extra bits of dough for the tail, face and gills. Ten minutes later, I had a piece of pastry dough wrapped around stuffed salmon that looked like a fish. It came out of the oven perfectly browned and looking just like the picture in the book. 

I'm still working up the courage to make the cream puff swans on a raspberry lake with the carmelized bird cage. I know I could do the swans and lake no problem, but am very unclear about the carmelized cage.

Tuxedo Cake DISASTER

I agreed to make a cake for my friend's daughter's school's Cake Walk (got that?). She asked last night and I went through all the cookbooks that haven't been moved to Pittsburgh (living without Baking with Julia is such a hardship) and selected the Tuxedo Cake from Rebecca Rather's "Pastry Queen" cookbook. She is hands down my favorite cookbook author and every single recipe I've ever made from her cookbooks has been fabulous beyond words. I was enchanted by the picture of the tuxedo cake -- creamy whipped cream frosting with chocolate ganache drizzled over the top so it runs down the sides. All on top of a chocolate cake. Yum. 

I should have made the cake last night and save for today my cake-related errands, like finding a box to transport it in (an impossible feat in the District of Columbia) and getting the gigantic quantity of whipping cream for the frosting . 

Alas, I did not. So I had four hours to bake the cake, frost it and get on the road to make the hour-plus drive out to the school and I did not give the cake time enough to cool. I frosted it when it was too warm and when I tried to move the cake into the box, it crumbled. It crumpled. It fell completely apart. I know better. 

The dog was thrilled. He licked lots of whipped cream off my shoe. My friend is going to Safeway for a cake and she wasn't even mad. 

I call mine Tuxedo After a Bender Cake. You definitely can't present a cake like that to a Catholic School cake walk.