Bwah-ha-ha!!!

 Well, I tried again to make French bread.

I used this Emeril Lagasse recipe, because I admired his fettucini alfredo and his enchilada sauce became the foundation for mine.

She shoots -- she scores!!

This time, when I gave Joan a taste of the bread, she didn't spit it out and walk away. She waved her arms and screeched for another bite.


The texture is divinely rich and delicate, the flavor outstanding, the crust just crunchy enough to make you want to sop up some of your marinara sauce.

With butter, and accompanying a lasagna casserole, the bread went over big with everyone.

Every Part of the Animal

That's one of my stainless steel mixing bowls, but that isn't the animal in question. The animal is cooking and waste.

An appalling amount of food is thrown away in this country. Real food. The stuff that can keep hungry people alive. Wintertime is one of those times that it is so very apparent: when oranges cost $1/pound at the store, and under almost every orange tree in town there are bushels of oranges the owners don't want, just lying on the ground, rotting.

We've been watching a show on the Travel Channel called "Bizarre Foods," in which a fellow travels to different countries and samples the weirdest foods he can find, or in the cases of poor countries, what people have to eat in order to survive. In those poor countries, nothing goes to waste.

We made enchiladas the other day, and Spanish rice and refried beans. We used beef that Bernie had canned earlier in the year, and of course he made his own beans. It was all delicious, but when I looked at the liquid left behind after the meat and the beans were drained, it bothered me that it might just go down the sink. We put the juice into the refrigerator, and I let my mind simmer on it.

Yesterday it came to me. Simmer indeed, a stew.

I sauteed some chopped onions (from my garden last summer) and some thin slices of celery in a tablespoon of Saffola margarine. When that was "sweated," I added potato and carrot slices, and the liquid from the beans. A bit later, the liquid from the canned beef. Suddenly the kitchen was full of a wonderful smell!

When the potatoes and carrots were cooked, I added zucchini and chopped mushrooms, and at the very end, just a minute or two before serving, I put in shredded chard.

It was great. It was healthy. It was a creation. It was ... not wasteful.

And then Bernie gathered up all my potato peelings and fried them in oil, as he'd heard a chef on TV explain about not wasting any food. They were great, and there weren't enough to go around to everyone's satisfaction.

Wow, Has It Been That Long?

Well, apparently it has.

So here we are in the improbably-numbered year 2014, and I'm not dead yet, and I'm still trying to kick myself into creativity. There are two problems with this: 1.) I'm a lazy procrastinator, and 2.) my scanner doesn't work with my everyday laptop, so I am at the mercy of my old laptop for scanning images, which has undergone some weird regeneration and now works just fine, but I still don't trust after it ate an entire chapter of a story I wrote just before I replaced it. (The laptop, not the story.)

The first day of the New Year, my creative burst was to defy my mother.

Mom believed that meat and potatoes belonged on the same dish, but never, ever, ever in the same pot while cooking. She said that it made the potatoes look unappetizing, although none of us would have dared declare a dish unappetizing when it was served as leftovers, all cooked together. Over the years I've thrown my turnips, potatoes, and beef into the pot all together, and my ham and potatoes and green beans all into the pot together -- and I can't taste a difference. Sorry, Mom.

New Year's Day we always have pork and sauerkraut, with mashed potatoes and dumplings. It's for luck, they used to say, so your new year goes smoothly. We love to eat it, so we go along with the superstition.

However, babies don't necessarily love sauerkraut, so I cut some bits of pork and potato to cook up separately for Joan, who is about 18 months old. I browned the pork bits, and threw some slices of potato in with them to sizzle in the fat, thinking about Mom turning over in her grave back in icy Pennsylvania. The potatoes browned up quickly and crisply -- maybe a little too crisp? -- but I threw in the tiny bit of water and put a lid on the pan for braising.

Five minutes later, I pulled it all off the heat. The pork was delicious and tender; the potatoes ... divine. They had softened and soaked in some of that yummy pork browny flavor. Bernie and I loved the flavor and texture, Joan not so much, but then her focus was entirely upon the pork bits, which she devoured like a piranha.

Happy New Year!

The Cold Food Day

[This is a cross-post from my regular blog. Both need attention; but this entry is really about creating something new for me. Foods!]

This morning I woke up hungry, not having eaten supper the night before.

I thought of taters and eggs, which I had promised Alex I'd make before she and John had to go to the Bay Area. I thought of the soft and scrumptious loaf of Dutch crust French bread I bought at the store the other day. I thought of what to make for lunch with things on hand.

There was a container of egg whites, left over from making pumpkin custard the day before yesterday, so the taters and eggs made use of that. Delicious. Perfect. Hearty breakfast accompanied by tomato juice. Good start to a freezin' ass cold day.

Around 10 am, I opened the freezer to see what was available for lunch. I spotted a small container of onions and ground beef that I intended to make into some variant of minestrone -- but I knew Bernie wouldn't eat that as it would have too much tomato flavor to it. Aha! A bag of pre-cooked prawns (50 % off sale at the grocers one weekend) and a package of chopped broccoli. Got it, lunch is on the way!

The minestrone fixins I pulled out as well, just because I couldn't stop thinking about them.

Baby portobella mushrooms ... a package of them needed to be used up, so I cut each one into halves or quarters and tossed them into a frying pan with Saffola Margarine (good taste for sizzling) and cut up half a yellow onion into 3/4 inch chunks and began to cook them in extra virgin olive oil. The pot of white basmati rice began to cook.

Prawns thawed in a solution of sea salt and lemon juice and water; some of the mushrooms went into a pot with the minestrone stuff on a back burner, along with a hefty amount of "Italian Seasoning" by McCormick.

A can of chicken broth was mixed with 2 tablespoons of corn starch, some salt, and a heavy shaking of garlic powder, and added to the onion pieces when they were done, to slowly come to a boil. When the rice was nearly done, I put the frozen broccoli on to steam. A few minutes later, most of the mushrooms went into the thickening chicken broth, along with the cut up prawns. (Some of the mushrooms went into the minestrone pot.) When the broccoli was done, so was the rice, and with that, lunch was served. Delicious, nutritious, and satisfying.

The minestrone-to-be slowly thawed on its low setting, seemingly forgotten, but not.

I walked to the school to collect Lillian. We checked the mail, and then, ambling up the street came a man with his Great Dane bitch. She was beautiful, black with a white spot on her chest, and a hint of whitish toes. Maybe a third again bigger than our dog Sebastian, but looking like his auntie. Lil and I stopped to talk with the owner, who assured us that she didn't bite, and we petted the large, lovely lady, comparing her loopy ears to Sebastian's, and the breadth between her eyes, and the gentle eyes themselves. Yeah, I think Sebastian has some Great Dane in his ancestry.

Return to the minestrone variation. I dumped some leftover fried cabbage (don't knock it until you've tried it, cooked with onions in bacon fryings) into the pot, and a cup of tomato sauce. A little later, I tossed in about a quarter cup of nopalitos (cactus strips) and a handful of sliced black olives. I added more oregano, more garlic powder, and a cup of asparagus, cut into half-inch pieces. Dumping in maybe a cup to a cup and a half of Wolfgang Puck's beef broth (no MSG) and about the same amount of the water from the broccoli steaming, and a cup of pasta ...

When the pasta was done, I cut a couple pieces of the French bread, and slathered them with cream cheese. Serving the minestrone in a bowl, I sprinkled it with Parmesan cheese and ooohhh, perfect soup, perfect meal for a cold, cold winter evening.