Gotta Knit!

Soup is on.

Also known as the "please pass the Kleenex" weekend.   The Man is sick with the cold/crud/flu thing that is going around.   He has been a bit down and out for the count since New Year's Eve morning.    Luckily for him,  I some how became a woman possessed with cooking soups this weekend.   Made a yummy corn soup on Friday from my cookbook "Around My French Table" by Dorie Greenspan.     If you like to cook I would strongly recommend this cookbook!   Everything I have made out of this book has been easy and amazingly tasty.   It is rapidly becoming my go to cookbook.

 

Started with cutting all the corn off of the cobs.

 

Slicing and dicing the usual suspects one adds to soups.  You know celery, carrots and garlic.

 

While slicing and dicing, I was also sauteing onions.

 

along with simmering the corn cobs of all things in the soup base of milk.   Now that was a new one for me.

 

Then sauteed all the veggies together which made me think of confetti since it was New Year's Day.

 

Braved the downpour of rain and nabbed some herbs from our garden, Rosemary and possibly some Thyme.

 

Then threw it all together for a bit of simmering.

 

The soup was divine!

 

The Night Before Thanksgiving.

I’ve got family in town for the holidays.   Last night we had the very nontraditional pre-holiday dinner of grilled ribeye steaks with roasted veggies.   They brought over this cute bottle of wine which was really good but I love it for the label.  Seriously, how cute is that frog!

 

 

The big holiday dinner will be way across town at a house that can handle 20+ people.   Part of my stash to bring is cranberry sauce.    Just can’t deal the plopped out of can and laid bare jiggling on a plate type cranberry sauce.  

 

Washed the largest bag of cranberries I have ever seen.

 

Threw them in a pot.

Add some water peered at it and added a wee bit more.   You can never be to sure about the water.    Listened to the popping sounds until they slowed down.   Dumped sugar in, swirled it about,   took a  taste and dumped a little bit more sugar in.     It is all a very scientific process to get it just right.    Simple but oh so good.

Inspired Cooking

It all started with an email from a friend.   In her email, she was describing what a wonderful meal she had made out of a tiny stuffed pumpkin from an interview she had heard on NPR while driving home.   I’ll be honest with you here a stuffed pumpkin really did not sound very exciting to me but this friend likes to cook and has served me many a wonderful meal.   When she told me it was fantastic and I "had to make it”,  I listened.   I forwarded her e-mail to my cousin who also likes to cook.  

 

My cousin the next morning excitedly replied back that she too had heard the same interview on NPR and had found the written version of the interview including the recipe and was making it that very day.   Now go check it out.

 

Isn’t the part about marking the pumpkins with their names and watching them grow just grand?   By the end of the article,  I was full of curiosity and went on a web hunt of Dorie Greenspan and found her blog.   Read through many posts and zipped here & there through Internet Land and came to the conclusion I not only needed to make the stuffed tiny Pumpkin but really had to make Apple Cake to go with it.   By then I realized I needed to get that cookbook in my hot little hands.

  
 

 

The stuffed pumpkin was so good I brought some to a friend at work and handed out the recipe to another friend at work.  

 

The Apple Cake was awesome and I brought a slice to another friend who is one of the best bakers I have ever known including professionals.   She loved it.   

  If you go to Amazon to read reviews about the book the Apple Cake recipe is listed there.

 

Now I am even a member of French Fridays with Dorie!

 

And to think it all started with an email from a friend.

Playing and Cooking

When I come home from work it is always time for play.  First I get tackled with love, then there is Annie's happy dance in what used to be grassy front lawn that is now crunchy grass dirt and then there is Poodle wrestle mania where I get tackled frequently.

 

One of the things I really enjoy in life is cooking.   The other day I had my full apron on!   Decided to make spaghetti sauce from almost scratch.   I say almost since I did not have enough tomatoes so had to use a large can of tomatoes.

 

 

After I threw in the mega can of tomatoes I moved on to trying to make room in our freezer.   Out came the turkey carcass.   Suddenly it came to me to make Turkey Vegetable Soup from the old fashion way.  

 

 

Threw the carcass, asparagus, fennel & celery stalks, onion, garlic, carrots in the crock pot.   Just added water this morning and let it do it's job while I was hard at work attempting to cure.   Came home got the meat of the bones, added more onions, carrots, garlic, green beans, corn, beans and seasonings.   

 

 

Simmered away, poured a glass of red wine,  toasted some fresh bread and dinner is on!

The Staff of Life

Life in general has been a little more stressful over the past few weeks.    If you don't live around here you wouldn't know that when I am stressed I cook.  

I cook a lot.  

Discovered the authors of "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes"  had a new book out for whole wheat bread.   Promptly jumped in my car and tore off to the closet bookstore 5 miles away.   Seriously I was a woman on a mission.

I love fresh bread.   The Man loves fresh bread.   We both love hearty and healthy fresh bread.

In the past aka single life, I used a bread machine to make my bread.   It tasted good but was lacking the overall experience and the actual loaf looking appeal of home made bread.   This book completely changed my little bread baking world.   No more occasionally lugging my bread machine up from the basement.   

Now I toss all the dry ingredients in a large (seriously it's very large) metal bowl, add warm water, stir till all the dry stuff is moist, cover, let rise and fall a little bit, throw in the 'frig.

It hasn't risen here yet.   I'd just add the warm water but it will more than double in two hours to filling almost 3/4ths of this bowl.    The catch is you make enough dough for 4 loaves at a time.

Once I'm ready for bread,  I pull out about a grapefruit sized chunk of dough, super quickly (30 seconds top) shape it and let it sit for 90 minutes.    

 

Then put a little water on top, slice cuts in the dough, sprinkle some seeds or whatnot's on top and slide it into the oven for 30 minutes.

What I get is an amazing smelling house and excellent fresh bread to boot.

 

Joining the Sleep Bandwagon

This weekend has been the weekend of just hanging out and doing whatever I feel like doing at the moment.   Yesterday was all about napping, surfing the Internet and finishing a book I'd started earlier in the week.            

                     

Today I got on a cooking and more surfing the Internet jag.   To bad you weren't here this morning!   Made a great old fashion oatmeal breakfast with bunch of nuts and fruit in our steel cut oats.   I was feeling all Martha Stewarty.  

                          

Part of my surfing has been catching up with all my blogs that I read.   Came across a puzzling post on Mason-Dixon Blog that was funny but I didn't quite get it.   So I quickly threw my reading in reverse and found Ann's post on sleeping.    That book sounds pretty interesting too so ordered it via Kindle magic waves.   So off I went reading articles about the benefits of getting enough sleep and who knew it can help lose weight!   

                         

I am so jumping on this 7 1/2 hours of sleep bandwagon.  

Rainy Sunday are the best Sundays

Woke up to a rather gray that became a rainy Sunday.    So what is a girl to do except

do some cooking

It's Italian Pork Stew.

Watching the song birds snack during the day.

 

Knit a bit on yet more secret knitting.

Of course did some reading.

                   

                                              

                                               

                                             

                                         

all that was while The Man and Poodles, Inc slept.   And no we do not normally let her nap on the couch like that but she was to darn cute to get mad at.

Later when the rest of the house woke up we got our Christmas Decorating on.

 

                     

                    

 

                                                        

                                                                   

         

                                 

We even ended up with a nice looking tree!

Peanuts Anyone?

Came home to find this the other day.

A not to subtle hint from The Man that he wanted some boiled peanuts.   Being the modern Southern housewife I have switched from the big pot of salted water with green peanuts simmering away for 8 or so hours to the oh so quick pressure cooker method.    Give um a try.   I brought some in to work and converted two people into boiled peanut lovers in no time flat.

Pass the Salt, please

Don't know about the rest of you but one of the things I love to do is cook when I am stressed.  Or actually getting over a stressful part of everyday living.   Nothing dramatic other than everyday living and the usual demands of work.   Taking the canning class has open a bit of a Pandora's box for me.  

It began with cookbooks.   

 

Decided to nab this cookbook when I happened to spy it at Cook's Warehouse.   The whole Crock pot thing reminded me of bad recipes from the 70's so I thought I'd give this one a whirl.   So far I have not been disappointed. 

Then of course after the canning class,  I had to get one of the Ball Blue Book guide to preserving 100th Anniversary Edition.

As I was researching and learning more about canning I ventured into the pressure cooker territory.   Thought long and hard since the only pressure cooker I'd ever been exposed to was my Mom's heavy, loudly rattling and hissing one that I always had to stay away from.  Turns out much has changed and now I've got me a sleek and sexy Mercedes Benz pressure cooker.

 

No rattling from this baby.

 

Which naturally meant another cookbook!

 

 

Something New

Just two weeks ago when I heard myself telling a friend that I would love to learn how to can.   Later that evening I went hunting for Canning classes and found a beginner's class that was coming up soon at a local gourmet cooking store.  

Suppose if you've been reading my blog for a little while by now you've figured out I like to cook.   I was four or five when my father taught me how to make scrambled eggs and it was down hill from there.   I became enamored with the magic of turning raw food into something wonderful to eat.  Hence my Christmas type excitement every Thursday when I rip open my CSA box from the Farmers.  So it seems natural I would eventually migrate into canning progress.   Who hasn't wanted a little bit of Summer's sunshine in the grey gloominess of Winter time?   For me that sunshine would be in having a dish from sun ripened fresh off the vine summer tomatoes!  Makes my mouth water just thinking about it. 

By the way if your local Chef David DiCorpo has another canning class coming up in Sept and I highly recommend him.  He made the class fun, easy to learn and didn't weigh it down with all of the boring scientific things about canning.   He got the point across that of course the jars have to be sterile, one has got to wipe the outside of the jar so the lid goes on tight but his approach was all common sense.    The Man immediately wanted to know all the Science behind the canning process when I got home but as in my life my approach is it works and I don't really care how it works.  Why bog down a fun thing with all that boring mumbo jumbo of chemical reactions?

Came home with treats.   Get to try the pickles in 21 days.  Just in time for company that is coming from Pittsburgh.

You do know there is a box of canning supplies making it's way to my doorstep as we speak!