As part of our continuing series on “How I spent the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving”, we present: fresh cranberry compote in three easy steps.
Step 1. Sort berries and combine with apple, orange zest, orange juice, sugar, and spices.
Step 2. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer until everything is nice and warm and the cranberries have (mostly) burst open.
Step 3. Try to keep people from burning their lips and mouths on hot sugar and syrup when they are too impatient to let the compote cool a bit and insist on eating it right out of the steaming pot because geez, that smells good and when will it be ready, already?
There is something about baking that is tremendously satisfying. I’m not talking necessarily about the eating of whatever has been made – since that whole cancer thing, I can’t eat half of what I make for everyone else anyway – but rather taking disparate ingredients and turning them into something greater than the sum of their parts. When you cook, say, a chicken, in the end it’s still a chicken. Delicious though it may be, or prettied up for those people who complain that chicken tastes like chicken, it’s still fairly recognizable as it once was even though it is what it is now.
But baking, oh baking: a pile of flour, some ripe bananas, chopped nuts, and a few other things (including, I might add, that homemade vanilla extract that is ready after some months) turn into something else entirely. Like this.
I figured we would freeze some of the mini loaves, so made a double batch.
Six loaves later, there was still batter left. Muffins it was. Big ones, as there was slightly too much batter for the six-cup pan.
What does it look like, with a dab of organic butter? This.
Mom also got in the kitchen and made some peanut butter cookies. Another wonderful combination of ingredients. The only regret I have is that it’s yet another instance of something quite difficult for me to eat.
I managed one, though.
In the past, I’d have eaten a handful. Now I leave that to others.
For months now, we’ve been talking about heading south a bit to a real, live farm where they raise real, live grassfed beef, organically. There always seemed to be something interfering, but last week, after dithering on it, we finally said enough: we’re going, on Thursday, to Citra, which is about an hour south of here in the midst of horse and farm country. Which means that it’s really in the midst of a whole lot of nothing.
After driving through various small towns…
…we wound up at Rosa’s.
Off to the right is the start of the actual farm, which is also where they live, so no pictures of that. I can say that it was a perfect, crisp day, the fields were green, and there were cows moooving around on the fields.
There was also hay for sale, and we picked up a couple of bales to put around the plants that are sitting in the raised beds here (more about that later).
The office is guarded by a rather amusing cowboy and his chicken.
Inside a small office, the only case without a lock on it was the refrigeration case: cage free organic eggs, and organic butter, both of which we picked up in addition to everything else.
What everything else? Ah, you’ll have to wait. After packing everything into the coolers we’d brought, and having one of the guys load the hay, we set off back toward the homestead. We tried to stop in Cross Creek at a restaurant called the Yearling Restaurant – based as it is in the hometown of a rather famous author – to have some cracker food, but were a tad early, as they don’t open for business until dinner on Thursdays. It’s on the list for a return visit.
Instead, we stopped by a place called Cracker Boys, which apparently has not yet been sued by a rather large chain of restaurants.
The boy was hungry.
So were we, and we opted for the buffet while the kid had a burger.
It was passable. The only gripe I have about buffet-style food (and quite a lot of other restaurant food that isn’t a buffet) is that it’s so very bland.
We hit the road for home, catching up with and passing a train on the way. I love trains.
We also stopped by Norman’s on the way back to pick up some fresh veggies.
We needed those things to stock the fridge but also to go with the dinner we’d decided on, which was selected from the assortment we’d picked up at Rosas – this assortment, to be exact.
The winner: rib eyes, grilled outside. We also decided to stoke up the firepit.
Every sport has its own series of trials. Car racing, biking, running – all have time trials. Other sports have playoff trials to determine who is the ultimate champion of their specific endeavor.Even individuals have their own trials: mine, most recently, was of course getting through cancer and the aftermath, although my ongoing trials are dealing with users who can’t quite grasp rather simple concepts (yes, substitute your actual domain name for “yourdomain.com” in the link we just gave you).
A more pleasant series of trials, for everyone involved, is the kitchen experimentation. The banana bread mini loaves I made as a test? Gone, devoured by those who float in and out of the house. And no pictures, unfortunately, of the first batch. That will be rectified in the next, larger batch, as I have a bunch of bananas aging gracefully in preparation for their time to shine.
Apple-cheddar-potato soup, adapted a bit from a recipe my sister found in a magazine and thought looked interesting. Didn’t last long, but I managed to get a picture of one bowl, garnished with a bit more cheese and bacon (because everything is better with bacon!).
More crabcake testing. The mixture.
Still too crabby, according to the testers. Yet another round will be done to see if this can’t be fixed.
Do you kiss your dog on the mouth?
The mushroom turnovers turned out very well. These are based on a recipe my mom had, although me being me, I couldn’t follow it exactly as written. Where’s the fun in that?
A cream cheese and butter dough, rolled out and cut into circles, is filled with a mixture of minced mushroom and onion, sour cream, and a few spices.
The edge is sealed with an egg wash and a crimp, then a couple of steam holes are poked into each.
These, according to the notes my mom made, can be frozen before they are baked, and that is where those above are destined. As with any trial, though, there must be tasting. A few – the more ragged of the rolled out pieces of dough – were selected, brushed with egg wash, and put in the oven.
They browned nicely, tasted great, and the batch made just over 30. I can see already that more will be required for the feast.
So, say my handful of readers, faithful although I am not: where’s the food, already?
With a test run of a roasted butternut squash dip already deemed suitable for the feast that is to come, I had picked up another squash and was deciding what to do with it. Given the horrible tooth pain I’d been experiencing – I thought that it would simply be an issue of digging out the existing filling and replacing it, as it had been on the lower left (and how wrong I was about that) – and given that it’s finally feeling like fall around here, another soup.
There was no real recipe for this. I took stock of what was in the kitchen, what needed to be used in addition to the squash, which was sitting forlornly on the countertop, and started throwing things together.
But first, the onion harvest.
This is a mixture of mini reds and mini sweets that I finally pulled out of the ground completely. The onions, much to my surprise, managed to grow respectably in the poor soil conditions. And there’s nothing better than a fresh onion you’ve yanked out of the ground yourself after planting and coddling it. Especially when you combine it with a little carrot.
Add an apple, that squash, some garlic…
Everything in the pot before the broth and seasonings are added.
Simmer for a bit, then use that handy immersion blender and add a touch of cream.
Soup’s on.
I had some of this for lunch after my two hour visit with the dentist, when the novocaine was wearing off and the pain meds had to be taken. They were kind enough to work me in today and do a root canal – something I was not expecting but which both my mom and one of my employees tells me they knew would be happening. And neither of them bothered to share that guess with me.
After much discussion, calculation, and other assorted dithering around, it is finally completed.
Of course, I’m referring to a driveway. It looked like this before, and was akin to living in a perpetual construction zone.
With some grading and some dirt, it was made nice and smooth.
After looking at pavers for the drive – and the 100+ feet from the road to the drive, by about 10′ wide, plus the labor and the time that would take – we decided to go with slag: less than half the cost, can be done by one guy with a tractor and one guy with a few truckfuls of slag, and finished in one day.
Why, yes, that is our most beautiful barn in the background. I have pictures of that before and after and no no doubt will get those up at some point.
This is Wade, the quite pleasant, very nice guy with the lovely tractor.
Seriously: this is lovely.
OK, ok: the requisite other lovely shot for those of you who don’t find machinery as attractive.
Still, this is on my wish list.
Almost there, after just a few hours.
And then, like magic, ready for use.
The boy made cookies while all this was going on, and mom just had to have her buttermilk with a cookie or two.
She even gave a couple to Wade while we were between loads.
A view to the road, after, and a good image of just why we chose this over pavers for now.
That would have been a lot of damn pavers.
Now if we could just convince the UPS guy that he can, in fact, drive on the driveway without circling off into the dirt, where we will be putting down grass and landscaping.
