Dark Side of the Moon

For Thanksgiving I made several desserts. Some I may have posted already, but it doesn't hurt to have them more accessible. Here are the recipes for the first two...

( ~ Pecan Pie and Lemon Chess Pie ~ )

There's a reason. This is what I made a few days after the chutney with the leftover pieces of pumpkin that I'd grown tired of dicing. I searched out several recipes for the dish but I liked that this one allows the pumpkin to cook by itself for a long period of time (no stirring every 5-10 minutes like the chutney) and it came out wonderfully well, very tender and flavorful. This is a dish made in three parts: (1) baked carmelized pumpkin, (2) ground beef & tomato sauce, (3) a garlic'd & minted yogurt sauce. Each part is very easy to make and the combined flavors are astonishing good together.

( ~ Kadu Bouranee, Kaddo Bourani, etc. ~ )


This could be done with butternut squash instead of pumpkin, or possibly sweet potatoes. Or, maybe, a mix of the squash and sweet potato would hit about the same notes? Must try that.

Sometimes I cook from recipes, sometimes I cook from my own native wit. Sometimes recipes fail, sometimes my wits do, too, and then I try to see what else can be done.

Last weekend, I made a side dish based on a recipe that I'd made once but I didn't take the time to find again. It was for sorta southwestern spicty sweet potatoes with brown sugar and cinnamon and chili powder and I used what I remembered and what else I've done with them and what else I had. I made a lot, because I wanted to take the leftovers into work for lunches.

( ~ what's happened to it ~ )
  

"Supreme of Old Rooster"

This is based on the "French Casserole Chicken" recipe in Joy of Cooking, the one that's also called in its introduction "Supreme of Old Hen". The time given is for what I had: a rooster that was, if I remember right, about 18 months old. This is absolutely ancient compared to what you'd find in the supermarket. calygrey said, and I confirmed it on the internet because I couldn't believe I'd remembered correctly, that the breeds raised for meat are killed at 8 weeks old. Seriously, they're 4-5 lbs. by then, and if left alone they wouldn't get much older because their heart gives out. Reduce the cooking time to only 1 hour, or even 45 minutes, if you're using one of those.

( ~ the recipe ~ )  

Busy long weekend.

( ~ Saturday, Sunday, Monday... with recipe for beef/pepper stew ~ ) 
  

Last night was a thrown-together meal, a "what's been sitting in the pantry and never used?" sort of meal, but it turned out pretty good even though it couldn't decide if it was southeast Asian or southwest US.

boneless chicken thighs, cut in chunks
1 jar of habanero-lime salsa, medium hot
1 jar of lime-lemon thin-cut marmalade
1 jar of mandarin orange segments
1 to 2 teaspoons of crushed red pepper

Mix everything and bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes to an hour.  You can up the temperature to 375 degrees if it's taking too long.  Stir it up once or twice so that it cooks evently.  Serve over rice pilaf, or plain rice.

It needed to be something unfussy because I found I needed to re-hem a dress.  My daughter and some of her friends had signed up to be extras in a movie being filmed nearby ("The FIghter") and were told to show up around 9 am today, Thursday.  My daughter had also signed up to start working at Dunkin Donuts.  

Yesterday afternoon around 4 pm, she found out that she needed to work the 6-12 shift at Dunkin Donuts for the initial training session.  

Yesterday afternoon around 5 pm, she got a call that they were changing the clothing requirements for extras: instead of regular street clothes ("no logos, no bright colors or patterns" => no problem) they now wanted the extras to show up in upscale cocktail dresses and suits.  Problem: she didn't have that sort of dress.  Problem doubly compounded by the imminent 6-12 shift and the early morning call.  

Now, we're not in a totally dinky town.  We've got 24-hour drugstores and 24-hour supermarkets, but somehow no one saw the need for a 24-hour place to buy a cocktail dress.   Obviously a missed marketing opportunity.  So we decided to hack up an ex-prom dress to shorter length and that's what I did with my evening, measuring and cutting and hemming (both outside and lining) and ironing.   The last part, the ironing, is something I rarely do, and I couldn't find the iron.

Luckily, one of the 24-hour drugstores does carry travel irons, even if they don't carry cocktail dresses.
    

Kir is a wonderful summertime drink, even for cold, wet summers.  It is less cold today and the wet is more traditional, with passing thunderstorms instead of a stalled grey soaking. Kir also has the advantages of making cheap white wine drinkable, and of simplicity: a glassful of white wine and a few dollops of cassis over ice.

Barley bannocks, on the other hand, suck.  At least, so far.  Two out of four recipes tried, and both went into the trash. They were edible, in that it wouldn't kill you to eat them.  I'm hoping for something a little better while trying not to get too far away from the traditional.

The Mediterranean chicken isn't too bad.  Bake cut-up chicken tenders with olive oil and lemon juice and thyme and garlic powder at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 35 minutes.  Drain some of the liquid off.   Stir in thawed chopped spinach (about 10 oz. pkg.?), diced plum tomatoes (3), and sprinkle with 1/2 lb. crumbled feta chese, return to oven for 10 minutes.   Chopped black & green olives can be served on the side, or mixed in at the same time as the spinach and tomato, depending on how people in your dinner party feel about olives.  Serve over linguine or spaghetti or rice.

Fimo is not as good as Premo!.  But Fimo was on a very good sale and it's not nearly as bad as basic Sculpey.  So now I have more clay for art pieces.

I'm still hoping to get to Readercon.

My mother broke her hip. She's 85 and fragile, just come from a hospital visit for another condition.  They will do surgery tomorrow morning because my sister, who is there, knows (and I agree) that it would kill her to be bedridden with a broken hip, even at home.  So now it's a question of if she will survive the surgery.
  
More Kir.  Kir Royale, btw, is made with champagne instead of white wine.  Just so you know.
  

It was a wonderful Mothers Day.  My daughter sent flowers (twice! a mixup between national company and local florists, we think, since the note was exactly the same), my son gave me very good chocolates, and my husband  gave me a lovely orange-scented perfume.    Beccause I love to cook, I got to cook, and that went very well, too.

( ~ Garbure Provencale with Sausage ~ )
  

The weekend started with a very nice party on Friday evening, got somewhat busy with errands and projects on Saturday (projects somewhat derailed by books picked up from the library), and over-busy on Sunday with an SCA event, so I decided to skip life-drawing this time. Things that did get done:

( ~ applique, embroidery, macaroons ~ )  

Last week I'd posted the first two tests of recipes appropriate for a "Clouds & Ashes" themed event. This past weekend I tried two other recipes.

( ~ Cloud Cookies and Tres Leches Coconut Macaroons ~  )

Last Saturday was leftover ham baked with sweet potatoes & onions. Sunday, it was a half-leg of lamb and a side dish of spiced barley with dried fruits, served with yogurt.

( ~ Recipes ~ )
  

nineweaving  has a book coming out very soon and the title is "Clouds & Ashes." She's talked about having a book party, and parties need food, and I started looking for recipes that might go along with the theme. Meringues, obviously, but the weather's been iffy so I tried a couple of not-straight-meringue recipes first. (There's time, the party won't be till July.) The first was a Fudge Meringue Cake recipe from "Joy of Cooking" and I made it in cupcake form, un-iced. Very light, very yummy, but not very impressive. I'd added coconut to it because I'm also starting to think of lightning (coconut dyed yellow?) but that sort of disappeared in the batter. The second try was a very simple Cloud Cookie based on whipped topping and cake mix. I used a dark fudge cake mix, no coconut this time. The cookie spread a LOT so you can only bake about 10 per pan, which isn't very time efficient. There's also a very slim margin of time between moist, chewy cookies and crisp (or even slightly burnt) ones. I like the landscape effect though, and the cookies are fairly tasty, so I might play with this more. But I'll try this other Chocolate Cloud Dookie recipe first since it looks to be a much better cookie.

For lightning effects, this is what I've come up with so far:
dyed coconut
candied lemon and/or orange peel
fresh lemon and/or orange zest
crystalized ginger
edible gold glitter flakes
thin-sliced dried apricot

Any other ideas?

Next weekend, hopefully better weather, and meringues!
  

Brought to a potluck dinner last Sunday...

( ~ Spinach and Red Pepper Phyllo Tart ~ ) 
  

Some of you know that tomorrow there's an SCA event called "The Twa Corbies Tavern" and I'm in charge. There's been the normal amount of work involved in coordinating this, plus some extra roadbumps, and some completely unnecessary outside stress. We have a project that went live at work, so those of us involved are carrying pagers, and yesterday evening my pager went off. This was during the drive home on a major highway in rush hour traffic, and I got a little tense because the rules say you have to respond to a page within a set time, but I made it (eventually) to the next exit and pulled off that road into a parking lot to check the pager and see who I needed to call. No page. Pager clock says : "00:05 AM 01/01/00". In going over a pothole, the battery had briefly disconnected and then reconnected, and the pager beeps when you put in a new battery, to let you know it's working. So, extra stress for nothing.

What can help reduce stress is a nice goblet of warm spiced wine. (See, I did work in a relevance!) But most event sites won't 'allow you to have alcohol without a lot of extra regulations, and the SCA itself won't let it be paid for by the event. So tomorrow we'll serve "hypocritical hyppocras" which pretends to be what it isn't.

( ~ Hypocritical Hyppocras ~ )

rufinia posted about the Cooks Guild meeting that made curd cheese from a Roman recipe, which reminded me of a collection of non-SCA-period recipes I'd put together at one point.

( ~ four methods of making curd cheese ~ )

"Uisquebathe", "usquebath", "usquebaugh", the water of life, which word eventually became "whiskey", though the recipes from the 16th-18th century for this "Irish cordial" are very far from what whiskey is now.

( ~ Usquebath, the Irish cordial ~ )  

Lemon balm + rosemary => balmarie, of course.

( ~ Balmarie Cordial ~ )

Another brandy cordial, this one with a multiplicity of orange peels.

( ~ Orangerie Cordial ~ )

The third, and last for today (the other three will appear tomorrow).   This one is whisky-based, and the idea came from a couple of commercial liqueurs.  Sortilege, a Canadian product, was the first, and I can't remember the name of the second, but it was from either Vermont or New Hampshire (maple syrup, and the New Hampshire State Liquor Store, go figure). 

( ~ Maple Orange Whisky Cordial ~ )

  

Second one of the group.  More to come later.

( ~ Lemon Cardamom Cordial ~ )