All posts by Annette

Playing catch up

Where does the time go?

A blurry picture of dinner from a few nights ago. Boneless pork loin chops in a mustard-tarragon cream sauce, roasted red potatoes, and baked zucchini and tomatoes.

The tomatoes and zucchini were layered in a dish. This is before any water, salt, pepper, and basil were added. Naked veggies, if you will.

I’m getting rather bummed out about pork, and I’ll tell you why, in the odd event you were wondering: the pork is too lean. Without massive amounts of additions, it doesn’t taste like anything at all these days. I suppose we’ll have to find an alternate source for certain pork products.

The other night, we also ate broccoli from our very own garden.

It was fabulous, steamed simply with a touch of lemon. The only problem? There wasn’t enough of it. We definitely need to grow more broccoli next time around.

And finally, I made marshmallows. The first batch didn’t turn out well at all, so I scrapped it and made a second batch. These turned out quite well indeed, and are infinitely better than store-bought. They’re also almost gone, since yours truly has been dunking them into mugs of hot chocolate.

These were kind of thin, since I wanted them to cure fairly quickly for taste-testing purposes. I’d like to make another batch or two – vanilla and chocolate – and make them thicker now that I know the recipe works.

What else is in the works? To be continued.

The art of waiting

If you are a baker of breads, you know the art of waiting. If there is a preferment, you wait for that. First rise? Wait for that. Second rise? Wait. Proof? Wait. Bake? Wait.

This is not to say that all the waiting time is filled with a zen-like nothingness. There is cleanup after each step, generally, or the next step to prepare for, or something else to get started.

But there is something a bit different about the no-knead bread. Throw the dough together, and then let it go for hours and hours.

Over 24 hours, in my case.

When I finally got around to rescuing the dough from the first (long) rise and then set it out for the second (shorter) rise, over 24 hours had passed since I’d put the dough together. After that short rise, it went into the oven for about an hour, and when removed to a cooling rack, the finished bread began crackling as it cooled, singing like garlic being sauteed in a pan and promising certain delicious things to come.

The crust absolutely cracked when I cut the first slice off the boule after it had cooled sufficiently. The crumb? Wide and airy.

The taste? Somewhere between a traditional loaf and sourdough: not as tangy as a traditional sourdough, but moving in that direction given the long ferment.

Will I make it again? Maybe. There is something to be said for leaving things alone from time to time.

The bread, as it happens, is perfect for soup. While Friday’s menu has been set (and more on that in a bit), Thursday was for soup: cream of butternut squash and apple soup.

It is – as most soups are – simple to prepare. This particular soup has a very short list of ingredients.

I think, though, that I’m not entirely satisfied with this one. The taste is good, but it could use a more defined squash flavor. The next experimental batch will be with roasted squash instead, perhaps drizzled with a touch of maple syrup.

We still ate it, of course. Even the not-as-good-as-I-want stuff is not terribly bad.

Here’s a gratuitous dog picture: Newton has a habit of sleeping while leaning up against things. It doesn’t seem to matter what those things are. Tables, pots, people. Anything will do.

Friday’s menu:

Boneless pork loin chops with a mustard-tarragon cream sauce
Roasted red potatoes with garlic
Baked tomatoes and zucchini

My mom likes the entire thing. My brother thinks tarragon is not good, but will eat whatever I make – and he asked me if I could duplicate Campbell’s chicken corn chowder. My sister, of course, is a vegetarian and will only eat the last two items – and she asked me to duplicate the sauce used by a restaurant on a particular dish so she could use it on her tofu.

It’s like working in a restaurant sometimes. Fussy diners.

Can you dig it?

For years, I would never eat any mollusk. No oysters, no clams, no mussels, not in chowders, none of them fried. It may have been due to the way they looked, or perhaps because their only function seemed to be to filter nasty things through themselves and thus be icky and mucky on the inside.

I got over that, for the most part, and have quite a fondness for clam chowder. Not the tomatoey Manhattan style. No, for me, it can only the calorie-laden, creamy new England style. I still won’t eat oysters, but I do have to try the clam chowder anywhere I go if it’s on the menu.

Over the years, I’ve made clam chowder from scratch several times. Some batches have been rather good. At least one was dreadful, no doubt because the clams themselves were not altogether good.

Monday, the day of my hours-long trip to the dentist to address a couple of cavities – one filled easily, the other not quite so, since it was both a replacement for a cracked filling and deep in the back of my mouth, which, as we all know, I can’t open even two fingers’ width – I decided that since it was turning a little cooler and because it’s been gray and rainy, chowder would be good.

Like most soups, clam chowder is fairly simple to prepare. I knew my sister wouldn’t eat any, and I wasn’t quite sure about The Boy, but I knew that both my mom and I would eat it and picked up three dozen littleneck clams for our batch. They were pretty clean, and after scrubbing went into some sauteed garlic, water, and dry white wine.

The thing to remember about shellfish – and anything else, really – is to avoid overcooking. Shellfish get rubbery and chewy and just aren’t all that much fun to eat if they’re overcooked.

Ours went about seven minutes before they opened. I strained them, reserving the cooking liquid.

Thye were content to hang out while I rinsed out the pot and started the rest of the soup.

I love leeks, but don’t get a chance to cook with them as often as I’d like. I should change that. After all, they’re good in more things than soups, and good with more things than bacon that’s been browned off in a touch of butter.

But what’s a clam chowder without that reserved liquid, cream, some thyme, a dash of salt and pepper, and some small cubed red potatoes? And those clams, of course, pulled from their shells and chopped.

To go with our simple meal, we had bread and some cherry tomatoes, sauteed in a bit of olive oil, and seasoned only with salt and pepper.

After letting the clams warm up again in the chowder, pulling apart some fresh mozz and picking a few leaves of fresh basil from the plant outside, it was time to put it together and call it dinner.

Just in time to watch the Ohio State – Florida game, too.

Delicious. Simple. Two of the finest words that can be put together about a meal.

Dinner for 10…8…7…5…ok, just dinner

“Know what we should have?” I asked. “Spaghetti, with some good meatballs and fresh bread.”

And those around me were in agreement, mostly (I think) because it meant that I was shaking off a bit of the funk in which I had found myself and actually thinking about cooking something.

My sister picked the day: Saturday. This family being what it is, casual invitations went out to other family members and friends, and suddenly there were ten plates to visualize sitting on the table, awaiting whatever came out of the kitchen.

I’d been making bread this week – cinnamon-raisin bread that while quite tasty according to those actually eating it, wasn’t very pretty to look at, in my opinion. Because my sister had requested a loaf for someone else, and because the bread simply doesn’t last very long, I decided to double up and make four instead of the usual two. The flour may be the problem, since it’s almost acting like bread flour instead of the usual all-purpose flour, but I soldiered on, fiddling with the proportions and trying to figure out just why things were not turning out as prettily as they could be. I made all the dough and took it through the first rises on Friday, then stowed it all away in the fridges, as we had to head to the NOC to set up seven servers that had arrived. I planned to roll out the dough on Saturday, put on the cinnamon and raisins, and then give it the final rise before baking it off in the morning. That turned out to be a workable plan.

For the most part, they turned out much better.

Beyond the flour issue, part of the problem may be that it’s been fairly warm here – as I type this, it’s 82 degrees outside. Since the dough has a fair bit of butter in it, and because it’s a moist dough to start, even the short handling time from the fridge to the loaf pan after it’s been rolled out and rolled up leaves me with tacky dough, and this may contribute to the issue. Unfortunately, I have no way to keep the dough chilled during the rolling process. The loaf at the bottom of the photo was the worst of it, with the dough separating terribly during baking. The others were not quite as bad (looking) this time around. The mini loaf, made from the trimmings of the larger loaves, is mine: no raisins in there. There is something about warm raisins that is unappetizing to me.

While that round of baking was going on, I put together the biga for the Italian loaves that would go with our spaghetti. While you can refrigerate the biga overnight to help build the flavor, the bread can also be made with a much shorter fermentation period. In our case, I let the biga go for about four hours before putting the entire dough together and letting it rise. For this bread, because of the problems I’ve been having with the cinnamon bread, the biga was made with the all-purpose flour, but the rest of the dough was made with bread flour (Kind Arthur unbleached). This dough isn’t quite as moist as the cinnamon bread, of course, but it does have some olive oil in it, and after rising, punching down, forming into batards, rising, slashing, and baking, it turned out to be a very well-behaved dough after all. It is also delicious.

With all that rising was going on, we needed something else to do. So we made sauce. We, in this sense, means my sister, who decided she wanted to make the sauce, but didn’t know how. So we told her: simplicity itself. A few cans of whole, peeled tomatoes, squished, with the liquid. A couple cans of tomato paste. Fresh basil. Salt, pepper, some finely diced onion, a dash of baking soda, a pinch of sugar, a bit of oregano, some parsley. After reducing for about three hours, it was ready.

Since I had suggested meatballs, I got to make them. My sister had called me from the store Friday afternoon, balking at having to buy veal.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to buy veal,” she said.

Now, I knew this was not because they had none at the store. In fact, I’m often amazed that in this area, they carry it at all, but they do. Rather, it was because of late she has been eating no meat at all – although she had no issues picking up the ground beef and ground pork that would also be in the meatballs – and got to thinking about the cute little calves.

I told her to forget about it, and that I’d pick it up, but not only did she bring some to me, she also had to request that they grind some, as they had no ground veal out. Victory for me, progress for her.

Beef, pork, veal, spices + formed and chilled + fried = meatballs.

I generally ask other people to taste test things, because my own sense of taste is rather suspect these days. My brother, whom I asked to taste test a small bit fried up before the final shaping and chilling of the meatballs, said, “it tastes like meat fried in oil.” I had also tried a small bit, and could taste, at the very edges, a hint of basil and black pepper. I adjusted the seasonings, fried a small bit again, and had him taste again. “It tastes the same,” he said. Even with my issues, I could tell that it was not the same. The flavors of the meat blended with garlic, basil, pepper, a pinch of oregano, a touch of onion powder, and a sprinkle of salt? A perfect complement to the sauce.

My sister, not wanting to be left out, wanted tofu “meatballs” as I had made on a previous dinner night. “How do you make them?” she asked. Well, it’s almost the same way you make the real thing, except in the tofu version, I add some parm, too, as this helps keep the things together. She wanted paprika, too, so that went in as well. the last little spoonful of the tofu made the perfect mini-meatball.

These only needed to be warmed through, of course, and we didn’t make as many of these as we did the real thing because most of us are carnivores around here.

With everything done, it was time to make some garlic bread using the loaves I’d made.

Sliced.

Before going under the broiler: butter, garlic, paprika, parm.

After coming out. The butter had soaked its way into each slice, the parm had melted/hardened off nicely, and the garlic was not terribly overpowering. The crust, already fairly crisp from the baking, had a wonderful, crisp snap, and when broken, a small shower of crumbs fell to the plate.

The boys like bread. A lot. They happily eat the cinnamon bread, the italian loaf, the garlic bread.

My sister can’t mix her foods.

After all was said and done, we wound up with three for dinner: myself, my mom, and my sister. We packed some leftovers off to my other (sick) sister and her boyfriend. The rest? Into the fridge or freezer, to be savored on another day.

Football haze

There is no better way – in my humble opinion – to start off the year than to have an entire day full of football bowl games, even if you are like me and have no particular favorite college team. Work is fairly slow (unless a server’s hard drive is in imminent danger of death, as one is today), and it’s usually a good day to do a little of this or that. For me, between working and moving accounts around, that means baking some bread for the carb fiends around this place. It also means making another batch of the maple-cornmeal biscuits to go with the traditional southern new year’s meal of black-eyed peas this evening.

My sister, lucky girl that she is, had the opportunity to go to the Gator Bowl in person, sit in one of the terrace suites, and be waited on while watching what turned out to be an exciting game. The rest of us had to be content with watching on television, which worked out well: we all got a lot of work done, watched a bunch of different football games, played with the dogs, packed some more holiday stuff to be stowed away until later this year, and in general had a day that wasn’t particularly frenetic but wasn’t so slow as to put you in a coma. And my mom made small meatloaves.

My mom loves hamburger: extra-lean, lean, chuck, round, whatever. If it’s from a cow and can be formed into a patty, fried, perhaps with some sauteed mushrooms and onions on the side, and maybe a pan gravy by yours truly, she’s happy as – well, happy as a pig in poop, I suppose, or as happy as one of those cows in the California cheese ads.

She has a recipe she sort of follows to make meatloaf these days, that is more meat than loaf, if you get what I mean. Make a few extra, toss them in the freezer, and it’s an instant fix for the beef-addicted.

We had meatloaf tonight, along with rice (with shallots and parm), black-eyed peas, maple-cornbread biscuits, and corn on the cob.

And coffee. Lots and lots of coffee for me today. Mom also fed the dogs Cheetos, because she’s a sucker for a cute face.

Right now, the cinnamon-raisin loaves have just gone into the oven. I’m not pleased with the feel the dough had as I rolled it, and I would not be at all surprised if there were gaps in the bread, because for some reason the dough just felt extra sticky and wet. Wet = steam = bad oven spring = gaps. Still, it will taste fine, and the fam will down it even if it isn’t perfect, but this tells me I need to work on this recipe a bit. I’m also going to try my hand at this no-knead bread that apparently everyone in the world knew about but me until today. Instead of kneading the bread, the gluten develops through an extra long rising period of about 18 hours. It would be rather handy to toss everything together and forget about it, instead of fussing with dough every couple hours – although that is part of the fun. Some days are meant for a hands-off approach.

Holi-daze

So, we survived the penultimate holiday without too much trouble. Although I always responded “Nothing.” to the questions my family posed to me about what I wanted for the holiday, they ignored me and gave me some gifts that are not-so-subtle reminders to get myself back in the kitchen and get cooking. As the lack of pictures show very well, I have not been cooking much of late, and the people around me are complaining that they’re getting fat because of that, since takeout is usually the order of the day. Yet another failure to mark on my board, alas.

Both of my sisters, when they were younger, went through a vegetarian phase. They both broke out of it eventually – not that I have anything against vegetarians, mind you – and returned to their meat-eating ways. One sister, however, has decided to revert to being a quasi-vegetarian, and has been eating seafood but not meat. Last night, she also decided to forego eating seafood, which made the fish I cooked last night offlimits for her, something I did not know when I picked up the filets at the store, buying them because I knew – or thought I knew – that she would eat fish. That’ll teach me.

The fish was unremarkable, and simply prepared, with a bit of butter, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and dill. I also put on some brown rice, the remainder of which will be turned into arancini as a weird experiment, and made some maple-cornmeal biscuits (the drop kind, not the cut kind). The biscuits were quite good, I must say, especially if you like cornbread.

What else is going on?

The tomatoes, which had sprouted nicely, are going nowhere. I think I need a better heating situation for them, ditto for the zucchini, and I’ll be restarting both. The carrots, lettuce, and herbs are doing very well, and the broccoli, collards, and peas are going nuts – we have some pods appearing on the pea vines, and a couple of heads of broccoli forming in addition to all the leaves of the collards. I’m trying to get back into the mood for cooking, but since very little tastes as it should for some reason, eating and cooking are difficult. That’s even more complicated by the fact that everyone around here has varying schedules, particular food tastes, all want to lose weight, and one is a vegetarian. If I could convince them to let me take measurements, weights, and pictures of them, then devise menus and exercise routines, that would probably be a good project to occupy my time (and turn into a book!), but I doubt that will be happening. And I’ll finally be getting the tube removed in late January or early February, as well as probably continuing with PET scans every three months since the activity around the tumor site just will not go away.

Ramblings

It’s the annual mega hunting and gathering fest otherwise known as Christmas. I’m not really feeling the mood. Still, there are things that need to be done for the holiday, and my aunt has requested that I make some of my cranberry-apple compote for the dinner she’s having Monday (noon, for those interested in joining in). Off we went to Costco to find a huge bag of cranberries. We didn’t find any. Instead, we found something else, which we brought home and steamed to warm.

King crab, at ten bucks a pound, is a great deal if you can find it. Some of the legs were almost as long as my arm. I still wonder just who had the bright idea that these ugly creatures (and lobsters) were suitable for noshing. I’m glad they did, though I couldn’t really taste the crab at all. That’s a bummer, because I always did love it. Everyone else enjoyed it, and there were leftovers that will be turned into something – salad, fritters, cakes, something.

Newton says hello.

Water, please!

My protectors.

Mickey better hope Newton doesn’t let one loose. These dogs and their gas can bring a tear to your eye.

It’s a blast

Anyone who has to travel through Jacksonville at some point can tell you about the bridges. Usually, those tales are peppered throughout with a great deal of cursing, as getting from point A to point B in this town can sometimes be a mammoth undertaking.

Over the years, though, bridge work has been done, to expand capacity and to do away with drawbridges that interrupt the flow of humanity hither and yon. One of the main bridges, which carries traffic on I-95 over the St. John’s River, was rebuilt at a higher level and with more lanes, parallel to the original bridge. The question then became: what do we do with the old Fuller Warren bridge? Some people wanted to leave the bridge up as a fishing pier, with the drawbridge permanently raised. Some people wanted it destroyed, and quickly.

Since the new bridge has been in place, the old bridge has been undergoing disassembly. This week, after some lengthy discussions about the cleanup of debris, a section of pilings was blown. We took ourselves down to the river, cameras in hand, to watch.

Before:

During:

After:

We also captured some video of the process. The raw, unedited, 50 meg file is here. If you go frame by frame in the video, you can see the flashes of the blasting caps on each set of pilings.

Over the next several months, there are supposed to be more dates for blasting the remaining groups of pilings. We’re hoping to be there for at least some of them.

O sleep, O gentle sleep

My last “day” has been one of Those Days.

All was right with the world when it started, though. It was a beautiful day Sunday, clear blue skies, nice fall-like temperatures, and not a ton of support requests. This not only allowed me to get some maintenance-type things done within the network and on some servers, but let me go out with the fam to get a tree. Mom and The Boy put it up. Crooked, I said. Nah, they said, you’re just looking at it from an angle. Pictures don’t lie, though.

They straightened it and we left it naked for the day, as we had to haul out the lights, ornaments, and other assorted knickknacks that make up the season. Mickey went with us to pick out a tree and for a stop at Publix for some steaks. After we returned, we ran him around the yard a bit, then came back in to get the steaks in a marinade. This dog can be really flat when he has a mind to be.

Gandalf is still working on showing everyone just who is boss around here (me, but she has rule of the animals). She is still not very happy, but she has already shown Mickey just who ranks higher on the food chain.

Very late Sunday evening, one of the oldest servers in the network decided that it had had about enough and gave in the start of death throes for the primary drive. After sending out a round of emergency notices about moves from this server to another, I began the quest to get everyone moved and keep the server running. Anyone who has worked in tech knows how difficult a prospect this can be, and the bulk of my time – except for a too-short nap – has been spent moving people and trying to keep the server up so we can move people. An unfortunate fact of life in this world of ours, and I wound up in rush hour traffic headed to the datacenter to get the damn thing back on the air this afternoon. This was done via a Frankenstein-like setup that I hope will last until the last of the accounts are moved off, and for the moment it seems to be working well.

On a brighter note, we went back for the other new member of the family. When we stopped into the pet supply store next to the adoption center, we ran into one of the volunteers from the center, who told us the poor guy whined much of Sunday, even though we’d told him we were coming back for him on Monday. He is a Lhaso Apso (or mix, with the Lhaso predominant), and is currently shaved because they picked him up as a stray and he was matted. This evening he had a bath and will be going in for more grooming as he still has a few knots here and there. The center estimates he’s about five, maybe five and a half years old. Mom and I had been calling him Goofy, because he is, but my sister has decided to name him Newton.

Wet dog!

He’ll be handsome when his hair grows back.

So far, things are going pretty well between the two dogs, and the little cat has gone nose to nose with Newton and sniffed Mickey. We’ll all be one big happy family before too long, I think.

I should also mention that Mickey tried to kill me tonight. I had gone to pick up The Boy from a catering gig, and Mickey went along for the ride. As we came back in the front door, Mickey, being a border collie, tried to herd me. To avoid stepping on him, I allowed it, and he managed to herd me into a stack of boxes containing decorations. This would not have been so bad had Mickey not suddenly changed course, going under my feet again, which resulted in me taking one of those exaggerated steps people take when they’re trying to avoid stepping on a child or small animal. Even this would not have been so bad had Mickey not pushed into my other leg at the same time. All of these together, though, caused me to fall, hard, flat in the foyer. As I was assessing the damage – both knees hit, and both will have spectacular bruising, my right elbow banged into one of the boxes before hitting the floor, my left shoulder jammed as there’s not enough strength on that side to catch my bodyweight, and my right shoulder took a hit as the weight rolled to that side – Mickey was very contrite and came over to lie down next to me and rest his head on my shin. What a smart dog. Except for the part where he then tried to lay over both of my legs, just below my knees. And the part where he peed on the carpet after we’d stayed out front for a few minutes after the car ride home in case he had to go.