multipurposegoddess

Today I decided to experiment with latkes - usually I follow recipes though I've never settled on a One True Latke Recipe. I made my regular sourdough pancakes and just added a bunch of shredded potato. That turned out pretty well, and I don't know why I never thought of it before. I will up the potato content even more in the future, because  I like my latkes practically hash browns.

I think I have all the ingredients to try making chocolate tamales. Oh, except for corn husks. Whoops. Well, I will check the recipe before I run to the store for those, make sure I have everything I need.

Got the stuffing mixed together, skillet-browned, and into the roasting pan. I'm gonna put my feet up for a bit and then butterfly the turkey* and get it into the brine overnight. So, on pace there.

Had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner, because I am at that stage of the holiday festivities when I have tons of food but hardly any of it is actually in an edible state. If I can get the turkey roasted tomorrow, though, those days will be over.

So the plan for tomorrow is to roast the turkey and try to cover my usual Monday schedule of doing laundry and making yogurt. We'll see how it goes.

*Mission accomplished, but that was harder than I expected. I've gotten pretty good at butterflying chickens, but turkey anatomy is enough different to be challenging. I doubt I will ever do that frequently enough to really get good at it. Oh well.

My box came on Wednesday and I forgot to post about it. I'm sure you're all breathlessly waiting to find out what produce i'm eating this week. 

• Gala Apples (I've eaten half of them already)
• Pears
• Grapes (all gone)
• Bell Peppers
• Beets (in the oven now, greens already eaten up)
• Delicata Squash
• Swiss Chard (also all eaten up)
• Lettuce (half eaten up)
• Fingerling Potatoes
• Yellow Onion

I don't know what I'm going to do with those peppers, but everything else I will devour pretty quickly.

ION, I successfully made mayonnaise with a whisk and bowl rather than the blender today. And t was easy! Well, my forearm's sore from all that whisking (I should do it everyday, I don't think that particular muscle gets a workout doing anything else), but emulsification went so smoothly, I was amazed. I have no idea what I did differently this time from last time, but I hope this is the beginning of a new era of problem-free mayo making for me. I might even be able to make smaller amounts than a pint, because eating a pint of mayo, even over the course of a week, is challenging for me. Maybe if I start making, like, a quarter cup at a time it won't hurt my arm so much, either.

I may not have mentioned, because my brain is being eaten by Mac products, but I upgraded my laptop to Lion, the iPad to iOS5, and my cell phone to the new iPhone all in the past week. I literally forgot to eat and drink most of yesterday because i was messing around with technology. Communicating with the outside world is way down on my priorities.

As unable to keep up with most everything as I get, I am pretty on top of breakfast. 

I hadn't done that in a long time, maybe since I was a kid. We used to make them for my dad - no one else in the house ate eggs, so it was a very dad-specific treat, and even little kids can do the mashing-cooked-yolks-with mayo-etc. parts. I always liked the mayo-mustard combo, even when the actual eggs were nausea-inducing. Mmm, mustard. So, now that I am eating hard boiled eggs with some regularity, and since I had some homemade mayo leftover from that quart of chicken salad (for future reference, that is too much for one person (if that one person is me, anyway) and is said not to freeze well), deviled eggs sounded like a good idea.

I used one of Cook's Illustrated recipes, though I meant to cut it down to make two eggs rather than six. Of course, doing the conversion in my head, or rather not doing the conversion, I ended up with two yolks in enough mayo-mustard-etc. for 6 or 7. Whoops. I added another two and that came out okay, will probably have extra filling but I can always mix that with tuna or something. Had 4 halves for breakfast (sprinkled with paprika, because that's how my mother always served them), pretty yum. I hope I can finish the rest in the next day or so. Pretty sure Walter will help out if necessary, though he is not as interested in hard-boiled eggs as he is in raw or fried.

It's almost a Moebius recipe, in a way: egg -> mayo -> deviled egg

Beet greens, sauteed in butter and left to wilt, covered, for 15 minutes. Finished with a teaspoon or so of Meyer lemon infused olive oil.

Like candy. So good. 

There's  a restaurant near the train station in Martinez that has changed hands several times but has been a Thai restaurant, albeit with different owners, menus and decor, for a long time. Well, it just changed management again. My parents and I went there after seeing Chicago at the Campbell Cabaret Theater (a fantastic production, by the way) and I LOVE the new menu. They offer duck as an option with all the curries and noodle dishes and entree! Not just roast duck and duck curry, you can get just about anything with duck. Love! My local favorite Thai restaurant will make me Pad See Ew with duck, but I get self-conscious about ordering off the menu for some reason. Anyway, nice to have options, and Places to Eat Near Train Stations are always useful to have in mind, especially this particular train station which is a common transfer point between the Capital Corridor, San Joaquin, and Coastal Starlight lines. 

I'm really happy with how this loaf came out. It's soft and light and tender. Also, huge - it rose way too much and flopped over the loaf pan, so each slice kind of looks like the Motley Fool logo (I think that's what I'm thinking of - little square head with a jester cap), it's pretty close to double the volume it should be and won't quite fit in the bread box (but it is not, I think, bigger than a breadbox) -  but I'm pretty sure I know how to fix that next time. If I cut down the flour  and water to accomodate the starter (duh, right? But when it was not rising very much in my cold kitchen, didn't seem like I needed to do that) and don't leave it rising overnight I think it'll be just about perfect. 

This particular loaf is so soft it's hard to slice, and the slices probably won't fit in the toaster. Oops.

I am out of baking powder, and don't have cream of tartar lying around, so I  made pancakes today using a substitution I just learned - baking soda and molasses for baking powder. I left out the sugar figuring the molasses had that covered, but I couldn't figure out a way to decrease the liquids easily, so the pancakes were thinner than usual, but rose pretty well and tasted good.

When I got the stewing chickens, I had making chicken and dumplings i the back of my mind. It seems like every recipe I see for that includes some reference to what you have to do to make supermarket chickens taste like grandma's stewing hens. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn't use those recipes, but I have a 1953 edition of Joy of Cooking that mentions whether you want broilers, fryers, or stew chickens in the poultry section, so I started with their Chicken Stew (which they mention you can serve with dumplings) and adapted Cook's Illustrated Classic Chicken and Herbed Dumplings with Aromatic Vegetables and I am quite pleased with the results! Good thing, because now I have three servings in the fridge and two more in the freezer. I think next time I will cook the chicken and make the stock in the crockpot rather than using the dutch oven all the way through - even after 3 hours, the chicken was not really tender, I'm betting the slowcooker will help with that. I can also use the non-dumpling part as pot pie filling very easily - I think dumplings store as leftovers better, but I do like a nice single-serving pot pie.

Between those leftovers, the pot roast I made for lunch, and tomorrow night's traditional pizza, I'm set for meals through at least Tuesday. Wednesday my Farm Fresh box is due, so I need to plan any further meals around that.

Remember those bagels I started two weeks ago? Why would you, that was two weeks ago, surely they were cooked up and eaten long ago and I just didn't mention it, hardly memorable.

No, the dough's been in the fridge all this time. I finished them up yesterday. The dough was a little stiffer than usual, drier. More like PlayDo, which was kind of nice for the rolling out and shaping into tori step. I let them rise in a warmed up and cooled down oven, like I've been doing with recent loaves to good effect, for maybe two hours, and then maybe another hour on the counter while the oven and tiles heated up. They did float immediately upon hitting the malty water, so probably a bagel connoisseur would find them less dense than ideal, but I am just a dilettante and they seem fine to me. A little extra crusty and extra sour, but I like both those qualities.

I won't be doing super long first rises in the future (on purpose, anyway), but I do think I will proof in the oven before overnighting in the fridge next time.

Box o' Produce arrived yesterday afternoon. For once, my fridge was basically empty and ready for it, so that's awesome. I will spare you the details, but I have been feeling like going back on the clear liquids for a while might be a good idea, so I almost postponed delivery. When I went to see about that possibility, though, I also saw that this week's box includes beets, and I couldn't take a chance that I wouldn't get beets later if I did postpone. Eating lots of vegetables might be just as therapeutic as eating not much of anything, right?

Anyway, in this week's box:

• Green leaf lettuce
• Braeburn apples
• Tangelos
• Tangerines
• Beets (red) (with attached greens)
• Carrots (Nantes, I think?)
• Green onions
• Red onion
• Dino kale
• Collard greens
• Cauliflower

That's a lot of nom. I'll be cooking up a mess of greens at some point today, and I've got a pound of chicken liver thawing for tomorrow; either I'll carmelize some onions in the crock pot to add to sauted liver, or I'll try the chicken liver pate in the crockpot recipe I just stumbled across in one of the cookbooks I forgot I had. The beets and cauliflower are destined to be roasted, I think, but they'll keep better than the greens so they have to wait their turn.

Also arriving yesterday was worm bin #1, and also worms, so that is all set up in the garage. This happened to be the green one (I mean it is the color green, not that is more eco-friendly than the other), the red one (terra cotta according to the web site) will go out in the old dovecote which I suppose I can then refer to as the worm shed to distinguish it from the shed shed. I put all the mail-order worms into this one, because I didn't think they'd stay alive any other way, so I'll have to get some more once the other comes. I'd be surprised if I can successfully separate a half pound of worms from a just started bin. Anyway, they have some well-aged chard and cilantro to munch on, and they all were moving around after a couple of hours under the damp newspapers yesterday, so I think they will be happy enough. Green = kitchen scraps and Red = dog waste, btw, so I can easily remember which worm castings to not put on food crops when I get to that point.

Oh, almost forgot, Farm Fresh To You, my source for delivered vegetables, is going to start offering eggs for delivery with the box! I put in a request for a dozen with my next box, which'll be before Soul Food has pick-up available again (and delivery is nicer than pick up, anyway, though I will keep picking up chickens and eggs from Soul Food, just possibly not quite as frequently)