Sweetness.

I've spent an hour or so tonight updating this blog, removing old links, cleaning up posts and changing the template and style a little bit. Insomnia really helps one get meaningless tasks done.

I haven't blogged regularly in more than five years, mostly using my blog as a photo hosting site for various projects. Lately I've been feeling a desire to journal or write my thoughts down somewhere; I've looked at journals to buy and wondered if I was ready to actually write again. Coming here to my blog to get it ready for this year's Journal Your Christmas entries, it seems obvious that this is the place to do that once again.

The past three years have had a great many pains for me and for some of the people that I love. I've been wondering if this is the middle-aged turning point, where your friends begin to get ill, where you start going to more funerals, where your body makes creaks and pains it didn't before, where change seems to happen far more quickly than you're prepared for. I turned 46 a month ago. I was 34 when I started this blog. I've become a different person in many ways, sanded down at the edges, softer and more loving, and a little more hopeless sometimes, too.

I'm hoping that the thoughts will begin to flow again and that I can start capturing more moments that I want to remember. I have lost a lot to forgetfulness in the past couple of years and I can't afford to do that.

We spent Thanksgiving in Ohio with Todd's family, and did our Christmas celebrating at the same time. My niece Gianna mentioned that  she had never baked and decorated cutout sugar cookies before (despite being an eager baker), so we gave that a try on Friday night.

I didn't have my tried-and-true sugar cookie recipe with me; it only exists in a printout in my recipe binder, nowhere online. So we used a well-rated recipe from Allrecipes, which I can't find or I would link it. It was pretty good. We rolled the cookies out using powdered sugar instead of flour, since the dough was not very sweet. I think that helped the taste. Gianna made a big batch of royal icing, which I had never used before, and we made a bunch of colors and squeezed them out of ziploc bags. The icing was hard to control, but the end effect was pretty amazing. (I usually use a powdered sugar + milk frosting which doesn't give the polished look of royal icing.)

Gianna and Evelyn mastered it almost immediately and made really creative cookies, using toothpicks to create feathered and swirled effects. Anna, who is a bit of a perfectionist, got frustrated early on and went to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie with Grammy. I just love baking with these girls and seeing how their skills grow. When we were together for the Fourth of July we made our traditional Flag Cake, and I hardly had to help them at all--a far cry from the first year we did it, when they were young grade-schoolers, and I was running ragged trying to divide up the tasks evenly and help them each step of the way! That was in 2009. Gianna told me this weekend that Flag Cake is one of her great childhood memories (at the ripe old age of 15) and that made me happy.

Here's my tried-and-true sugar cookie recipe:

Eva's Sugar Cookies

2 cups unsalted butter, softened
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp almond extract
6 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs, vanilla and almond extract until light and fluffy. In another bowl, combine flour and baking soda and add gradually to butter and sugar mixture until combined, Bake in preheated 350-degree oven on parchment-lined sheets for 8-10 minutes until light brown at the edges.

This makes 12 dozen cookies, a ridiculous amount, so I usually halve the recipe. I use one extra-large egg as "half" of the three eggs. And I put a few drops of almond extract in the icing, too.

Betty book.

I had to run into the library this morning to pick up a book I'd requested, and I stopped to look at the Friends of the Library sale rack just inside the front door.

I never really noticed this rack before--it's in an awkward place between the door and the metal detectors--and I think if I ever did glance at it, it was just a cursory "James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, yeahyeahyeah" kind of glance.

A few weeks ago, I went in with my father-in-law and he stopped at the rack right away and found something he wanted. So now I'm noticing it more.

Today I found this for a buck:

I thought maybe there was a nice dust jacket under that paper bag cover, but alas no. So it's not an awesome find, but I am a sucker for old Betty Crocker books. I have a ring-bound Picture Cookbook (the edition before this one) and I have a hardback cookbook from the 60s that's the same edition my mom had in ring-bound when I was a kid. I used to love to pore over the pictures, and it has some excellent recipes for pound cake and oatmeal cookies, among other things. I have a Betty Crocker Cooky Book from the early 1970s, too. I just love the bright pictures in old cookbooks...they're too bright in a vaguely unappetizing way.

You know, you just don't see radish roses any more, and I think that's a darn shame.

These are the Betty Crocker test kitchens of the 1950's. They tested "new and glamorous" recipes in the Kitchen of Tomorrow...wonder what those would have been? Cheese fondue? Pizza rolls? Sushi?

This link shows the different Betty cookbooks over the ages (if you scroll down a tad.) The first red one is the one I have in ring-bound. The second one is the one I picked up today--that's what the jacket would have looked like. The third one is one I have salivated over on Ebay more than once. And the fourth one is the one my mom had in ring-bound and I have in hardcover.

Beyond those years, I think the editions are not as cute. I have a Better Homes and Gardens book to represent the 80s and beyond--it was a wedding present to me in 1992. Love that one, too--I always have to check it every time I make hard-boiled eggs, as I don't seem to be able to keep the procedure in my head. It's very useful, but it's not as charming as the old books with their ultra-bright pictures.

This book that I found today is in really nice shape, a few places where the spine is cleaved, but the pages are clean. I always hope for handwritten recipes tucked into these old cookbooks, but no such luck with this one. There's only one page that looks worn and has some liquid damage. It has recipes for cottage pudding with vanilla, lemon, chocolate or nutmeg sauce; cinnamon fluff; cherry carnival; and Iowa date pudding. I wonder which one was the family favorite? Upon reading, it looks like "cottage pudding" is just a plain white cake baked in a 9" pan. That sounds much more appetizing than "cottage pudding," which made me think of steamed cottage cheese.

Meatball soup.

We are having some very nice late summer weather, what I guess one would call Indian summer. I just now looked up "Indian summer" on Wikipedia since I have no idea where the term comes from, and it says, among other things that "traditionally, Indian summer can only be a true Indian summer after the first frost, generally a killing frost, of the season."

We are still far from frost weather, so I guess we're not in Indian summer here. Just lovely September weather, still warm-to-hot in the day-times, but mostly cool and breezy at night.

I made up a big pot of soup on the weekend--it was too warm for soup, but in my mind, which is still tuned to the weather of Ohio and probably always will be, soup weather happens long before the weatherman here in Virginia reacts accordingly. And besides, with a raging case of fall allergies, soup seemed indicated and was in fact very soothing to my nose and throat.

This soup is from a cookbook I picked up in May at the Fresh Market, which is a small chain of grocery stores in the Midwest and Southeast that specializes in organic and imported foods, hormone-free chicken, fancy condiments, and bulk nuts and spices. They released a cookbook for their 25th anniversary, and it was on sale, so I grabbed it on a whim.

Well! I have never experienced a cookbook like this one before. Every single thing I've cooked from it has been not just good, but delicious. It's very impressive. So here's the soup I cooked from it this weekend:

Italian Turkey and Spinach Meatball Soup

1 pound ground turkey
1 (10 oz.) package frozen spinach, thawed and drained
1 cup Italian style dry breadcrumbs

2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cups carrots, diced
2 cups celery, diced
1 cup onion, diced
1 cup green pepper, diced
8 ounces mushrooms, sliced
2 tablespoons Italian seasoning***
3 (32 oz.) cartons chicken broth
2 bay leaves
8 ounces pasta shells
croutons and Parmesan cheese for garnish

In mixing bowl, combine turkey, spinach and breadcrumbs. Roll mixture into small meatballs (1") and set aside.

In large Dutch oven, melt butter and olive oil over medium-high heat. Add carrots and cook for five minutes. Add celery and cook for five more minutes. Add onions and green peppers and cook until slightly tender. Add mushrooms and Italian seasoning, and cook until mushrooms are browned. Add chicken broth and bay leaves. Allow soup to come to a simmer, add meatballs, and cook over low heat for 2 hours.

Add pasta to soup and cook for another 20 minutes. Remove bay leaves. Garnish bowls of soup with croutons and Parmesan cheese, if desired. Serves 12-14.

***I have a packet of Italian seasoning that I don't think I've ever used before, but when I pulled it down and took a whiff, it smelled too much like thyme, which I only like in small doses, and sage, which I don't think belongs in Italian seasoning at all. So I made my own:

1 tsp. dried basil
1 tsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. dried marjoram
1/2 tsp. dried thyme
1/2 tsp. crushed fennel seeds

I know that doesn't come to 2 tablespoons, quite, but I thought it was plenty of spice.

We ate some of the leftovers for dinner tonight, and I think I can make it stretch to lunch tomorrow, too.

Salad and sniffles.

I stirred up a really nice fall salad last night. Here's a photo of my empty salad bowl, because we gobbled up most of it last night and I ate the rest of it for lunch just now.

Fresh Fall Salad

2 medium heads green leaf lettuce, chopped
1 medium head radicchio, chopped
1 bulb fennel, thinly sliced
1 large red apple, thinly sliced (I used a Jazz apple)
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup sliced almonds
1/2 cup feta cheese, crumbled
Annie's Naturals balsamic dressing

I think it's the fennel that pulls this together so nicely. I just love fennel. I could have made my own dressing, but I was feeling lazy last night, and Annie's is very, very good.

In fact, I have been feeling lazy for almost a week now. My fall allergies are usually just a passing sniffle and a few weeks of itchy eyes, but this year has just been terrible. Headache, sore throat, achy face, sneezes, runny nose, the whole gamut.

Todd's parents were here for five days and I missed out on most of the fun running around they did with Todd because I was feeling too punk. I just stayed home, cooked dinners, did a little baking and some tomato freezing, and that was about it. Today I've run a few errands, but I still feel lousy.

I did run around the corner to the thrift store for the first time in ages, and that was a productive trip. I found a nice long-sleeved shirt for Todd, and four old Mary Englebreit magazines, which are hard to come by now that the magazine's out of print. I also got a few woolens on sale, to felt. I want to try to make some fall birds, like ravens, in grays and blacks, and I found a perfect wool sweater for 96 cents and a pair of gray wool pants for $1.96. They're spinning in the (hot) washer right now.

Whassup with me.

Todd is downstairs watching a DVD of "How I Met Your Mother," and I am up here surfing around and actually feeling like writing, which I have not in several weeks.

I can't remember if I ever mentioned it before, but spring is hard for me, for some reason. I just do not like most things about spring, especially the capri pants. This is what I look like in capri pants:


The left image is me, the right image is my reflection in the mirror at the clothing store, and I am shouting that I do not like capri pants and wagging my finger to emphasize the point.

My brain slows down when spring arrives. I don't know if it's the pollen phlegm or what, but I always go into a mental coma. I feel like I'm coming out of it today, hence the ability to blog-write.

In spring, the neighbors and their kids and their dogs come out of winter hibernation at the exact same time when I start to feel the need to open windows and let in some fresh air. But opening windows also lets in the neighbors/kids/dogs noise, too. Winter is so nice and quiet!

On the bright side, my tulips and daffodils have nice green shoots poking up, which the bunnies are already sampling. My chives and parsley are looking very promising, too. One thing I do love about spring is the GREEN of it all.

I cooked a recipe from a book tonight. Not a cookbook, but one of those novels with recipes included, which I have found can be pretty hit-or-miss. The book was American Cookery by Laura Kalpakian, which I really enjoyed, and the recipe was a simple pork chop thing, which would have been better if I hadn't overcooked them. I do that a lot with chops and steaks, it's frustrating.

All you do is season the chops with salt, pepper and cumin, brown them and cook them with garlic and orange marmalade. I added a tiny slurry of red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard and cornstarch, shaken up in the empty marmalade jar. It definitely had promise.

I bought some Skechers Shape-Ups on Sunday, since I needed new walking shoes anyway, and these are supposed to tone your legs and butt, improve your posture, increase your IQ and make you ten years younger. Lots of promises on that shoebox!

They came with an information booklet and a DVD to show you how to walk in them, which seemed like overkill to me. I think I must walk pretty well already because I haven't had any problems with them so far. They have a rounded sole that replicates the feel of walking on a soft surface like sand, which is supposedly more of a workout for your legs. I find them very comfortable so far, but I don't look any younger. Darn.

That's it for now.

Clara's Kitchen.

A year or two ago, a couple of Youtube videos were making the rounds on all the forums and e-mail lists--a 90-something-year-old woman named Clara Cannucciari, filmed in her kitchen by her grandson, cooking some of the meals that her family ate during the Depression years.

Here you can see her making Egg Drop Soup...here she cooks a concoction called Poor Man's Meal...here's the first "episode" where she makes Pasta with Peas. There are quite a few short Clara segments on Youtube now, and they're all charming and fascinating.

Armed with some birthday money, a coupon and some Borders Bucks, I went to Borders in search of something great the other night and found that Clara has a small book out called Clara's Kitchen, with recipes for some of the simple foods her family lived on in the Thirties, as well as some matter-of-fact memories of her life in those days.

I just couldn't resist this book. It makes me wish I had taken more time to talk to my grandmothers about their lives during those years. The stories and the pictures are so simple and yet so powerful. She writes about picking dandelion greens in the yard and mushrooms in vacant lots for dinner, eating eggplant burgers since meat was so scarce, and waiting for her dad to bring home half of his lunchtime ham sandwich for her and her brother to devour. She also writes about having to drop out of high school in her sophomore year because her family could not afford to support a child who could be out working and bringing in money.

Clara's cheerfulness and pragmatism come through on every page. This is a strong woman. You might not want to make every recipe in the book (I wrinkled up my nose at Panecotto--stale bread in milk) but you'll want to read every story. Loved it!

Pumpkin scones.

We've had a nice Labor Day weekend. Todd's done some fishing and some working on our new mantel. I had a yard sale and did laundry and went on an excursion with my friend Beverly. And today was cool and rainy, which was kind of nice. It felt cozy, even though we still had the air conditioning on to keep the damp out.

A friend gave me a recipe for pumpkin scones last week, and today felt like a good day to make them. Talk about delicious!

Starbucks Pumpkin Scones

Scones:

* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 7 tablespoons sugar
* 1 tablespoon baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
* 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
* 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
* 6 tablespoons cold butter
* 1/2 cup canned pumpkin
* 3 tablespoons half-and-half
* 1 large egg

Powdered Sugar Glaze:

* 1 cup powdered sugar
* 1 tablespoon powdered sugar
* 2 tablespoons whole milk

Spiced Glaze:

* 1 cup powdered sugar
* 3 tablespoons powdered sugar
* 2 tablespoons whole milk
* 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
* 1 pinch ginger
* 1 pinch ground cloves

1. To make the scones:

2. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Lightly oil a baking sheet or line with parchment paper.

3. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices in a large bowl. Using a pastry knife, fork, or food processor, cut butter into the dry ingredients until mixture is crumbly and no chunks of butter are obvious. Set aside.

4. In a separate bowl, whisk together pumpkin, half and half, and egg. Fold wet ingredients into dry ingredients. Form the dough into a ball. (Lizzie's notes: I refrigerated the ball of dough for thirty minutes before patting out and cutting)

5. Pat out dough onto a lightly floured surface and form it into a 1-inch thick rectangle (about 9 inches long and 3 inches wide). Use a large knife or a pizza cutter to slice the dough twice through the width, making three equal portions. Cut those three slices diagonally so that you have 6 triangular slices of dough. Place on prepared baking sheet.

6. Bake for 14–16 minutes. Scones should begin to turn light brown. Place on wire rack to cool.

7. To make the plain glaze:

8. Mix the powdered sugar and 2 tbsp milk together until smooth.

9. When scones are cool, use a brush to paint plain glaze over the top of each scone.

10. As the plain glaze firms up, make the spiced icing:

11. Combine the ingredient for the spiced icing together. Drizzle this thicker icing over each scone and allow the icing to dry before serving (at least 1 hour). A squirt bottle works great for this, or you can drizzle with a whisk.

I used my largest round biscuit cutter and got ten scones from the recipe, so the amount varies depending on how you cut them.

These would be good with some Pumpkin Ginger Tea from Republic of Tea. Or some milk. Or coffee, Starbucks or not. Or you could just not wait for any beverages at all.

Quite, quite good.

Boeuf et fleurs.

(Sounds fancier in French.)

I cooked up a whole bunch of things the week before my surgery, and we're still digging down to the bottom of the freezer and enjoying some of them. This is one of the things I cooked...I got the recipe from a Pea at Two Peas, and it is unbelievably good. While it's cooking, it smells like my great-aunt Helen's house when we used to go over there for Sunday dinner when I was very little. Pure essence of pot roast, only better.

Italian Beef Sandwiches

1 envelope dry onion soup mix
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
1 tsp. basil
1 tsp. dried parsley
1 large garlic clove, minced
3/4 cup water
3-lb. rump or chuck roast

You just plop the roast in a crockpot, pour the water and spices over it, and let it cook all day on high, or till the meat's tender. Then you shred it up with a fork and let it simmer for a few more minutes, then eat it on a nice soft steak roll.

I like horseradish sauce on mine, but Todd prefers steak sauce. Apparently some people like to put banana peppers on the sandwiches...personally, I think a pile of grilled onions and peppers would be delicious on top. You can add provolone cheese or not--we didn't.

Todd thinks the meat is too spicy, so next time I make it I'll probably just use a half-teaspoon of red pepper flakes, but I think the heat is just right. And if I can find a reduced-sodium onion soup mix, I'll use that in the future, again for the hubby's sake. But boy, is it good.

I'm feeling slightly more energetic today. My body has rebelled and refuses to sleep on its back any longer, so I've had to contrive a way of sleeping on my side with lots of pillows under and all around me. I don't think it's the greatest thing for my incisions, but I'm compelled to do it. I've never had my body wake up in the middle of the night before and force itself into a position--it's like being demon-possessed. Very weird feeling.

I have a few randomly-connected pictures to share...my aunts put together the most beautiful bouquets for the church windows at my grandpa's funeral last week. They pulled together garden flowers and wildflowers and added cattails at the last minute, and it looked like something we could have picked on a random summer stroll around my grandparents' property 20 years ago.


Speaking of my grandparents' property, one of the items my aunt Molly salvaged from there was quite a bit larger than the odd chair or table. She took the summerhouse that stood right outside the front door and had it moved to her own yard a mile or two away.

Molly lives in an old brick schoolhouse, where my grandma and her siblings attended school, incidentally, and the summerhouse fits into her yard as though it had always been there.

She's having it painted and refurbished a little, and her neighbor gave her a wonderful old door with etched glass panels that will replace the original door. It's going to look great. But I think it looks nice, now, too. Here's how it was at my grandparents' house, painted blue to match their house:

Grandma had wildflowers and mint growing around it in the back, and rosebushes and other things in the front of it. I can't wait to see what Molly does with it!

Todd and I dropped in at an estate sale on Saturday that reminded me a lot of the sale we had at my grandparents' place last September. It was an old house with a barn where the parents had lived for 55 years, it was their large family of descendants holding the sale, it was piles and piles of very old junk that no one had thrown away for decades. And the family was Mennonite.

I had a very nice chat with the daughters, who are the same ages as my mom and her sisters, and picked up a few odds and ends. I got these three cream bottles from a whole huge box of saved bottles and decided to throw some garden flowers in them for my kitchen windowsill.

Can you see the price molded into the top of the bottle? Those were the days.

Home Cooking.

One of the unfortunate things about starting your blog way back in the ancient days of Blogger is that all the nifty new features are inapplicable to your old template. For instance, I love the feature on newer blogs where you can attach identifiers and categories to each post, thereby making it easy for you and your readers to find topics related to home, or thrifting, or cooking, or whatever you write about. But I have not been able to find the courage to try to do a template change on four years' worth of writing, lest something dreadful happen.

So for that reason, I can't remember, and don't feel like sorting through four years of posts to find out, whether I have ever mentioned Laurie Colwin here before.

I have a very pleasant memory of discovering Laurie Colwin...it was my junior year of college and I was at the mall at home on a break, browsing through the bargain rack in front of Waldenbooks.

[I have a pleasant memory of the Waldenbooks, too, as it was the first bookstore I ever visited, thanks to my aunt Charlotte,who gave me a gift certificate for my 8th birthday--an event that looms very large in my life.]

So in the bargain rack was a hardback copy of Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, which is a collection of columns Colwin, a novelist, wrote for Gourmet magazine. A couple weeks ago, I wrote about E.B. White and his wife and their writing style, and I think Colwin's style falls into the same category: erudite, straightforward, deceptively simple, gently opinionated.

I'll never forget reading Colwin's description of cooking in her first New York apartment which was the size of a box of animal crackers, as I believe she described it, while sitting in my dorm room, which had roughly the same dimensions (plus a sheet strung on a rope across the middle to divide my roommate's half from my half--this was our third year rooming together and the thrill was gone.) Whenever I picture her apartment, I see my dorm room. I read and re-read that book, just for the enjoyment of her voice and the images she evoked.

A few years later, Todd and I were living in Idaho Falls, Idaho, which at that time had no real bookstore. (It was a great day indeed when the Barnes and Noble finally went in on the edge of town.) We would drive down to Salt Lake City, four hours away, every now and then, to shop and to hit a few excellent independent bookstores. At one of these bookstores, I was completely surprised and delighted to find a paperback copy of More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen. This was in the dark ages B.I. (Before Internet) when it was a lot harder to find out about new releases and what a writer was up to, so I had no idea the book was out there.

I got a bad feeling when I opened up the book and the copyright page said "the Estate of Laurie Colwin." I flipped to the back and saw that she had passed away the year before, in her late forties, of a heart attack.

Since then, I've read several other people's descriptions of finding out about her death, and it made me feel perversely better to know I wasn't the only reader out there feeling bereft. So this book, although also a joy to read, was tinged with melancholy, reading Colwin's loving descriptions of her small daughter, and knowing how little time she had with her.

Ever since I found that first book, I have been trying to find a food essayist who hits the same notes as Colwin, and I have yet to find one. The last couple of years have seen an explosion of food- and cooking-related memoirs, and I was looking through a few at the bookstore today, and I had my usual thought--they're just not as good as Laurie. I can't describe what it is I love about her writing. I wonder if part of the pleasure I find is just remembering the places and times where I read her books for the first time: on the bed in my tiny dorm room in Ohio, in the front seat of my Nissan Pathfinder in Utah.

Anyway, if you're drawn to any sort of foodie writing, Colwin is the momma of it all, and you should check her out.

Afternoon mumblings.

Do you get grumpy in the afternoons? From about 3:00 till about 6:00, I just feel dreadful most days. I know part of it is a blood sugar problem, but even with a snack, I still feel so out-of-sorts. Even when I start out the day in a fabulous mood, by 3:00 life looks ever so bleak.

I LOVE the picture on this blog today. I wish I could go back in time and take a road trip in a big old car and stay in little tourist camps and get an ice-cold Coke at a gas station like that. The photo makes me think of a fave childhood book called Judy's Journey by Lois Lenski, written in that same era. Judy's family were migrant farm workers that traveled all over the southern U.S.--not a luxury road trip, but it was fun to read about all the different places they stayed. I love books and movies that deal with road trips..."National Lampoon's Vacation," "Harold and Kumar," Blue Highways...I know I'm forgetting lots.

I baked my first successful loaves of wheat bread yesterday and I'm still basking in the glow of achievement. I am so sick of nasty store-bought bread that tastes like chemicals. I tried a recipe from my King Arthur Flour baking book last week, but I think the yeast was too old--it rose, but not a lot. It was also sweetened with molasses, which was too overpowering. And it weighed about ten pounds.

I will try that recipe again with fresher yeast and maybe some honey instead of molasses, but for my second attempt I tried this recipe: Kid-Friendly Wheat Bread. That worked much better. I'm mostly looking for a bread that will serve as a good delivery vehicle for homemade lemon curd, and this fits the bill admirably.

Next I think I'll take on my mom's wheat crescent/cinnamon roll recipe--you can use the dough for either crescents or cinnamons, and it tastes awesome either way. Can't wait to try!

I'm starting to think the sun has gone away forever. It's absolutely bizarre to have so many cloudy days here. I went out to clean out the car this afternoon and ran the battery down listening to the radio while I cleaned. I thought a car battery had more juice than that--I barely got started! And oh, is it a sty. I am embarrassed to have people travel in it with me. So I'll tackle the rest tomorrow and maybe (fingers crossed) there will be a little sunlight to clean by?

Whatcha got cooking?

I got up this morning and cleaned up the kitchen and then proceeded to trash it again by making a big pan of lasagna and a big pot of soup with some turkey sausage and some ground turkey that both needed to be cooked ASAP.

I am not a lasagna lover...I used to be as a kid, but now it just tastes...eh. Todd, however, ranks it among his favorite foods. He came home from work the other night and I told him dinner was in the oven. He inquired hopefully, "Lasagna?" You should have seen his face fall when he peeked inside and saw it was tuna-noodle casserole.

So I took pity on the guy and made lasagna. I found a recipe in one of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks for lasagna made with mild turkey sausage, and it's pretty good. I think part of my distaste for lasagna comes from ricotta cheese, which is one of the few foods that really grosses me out. So I used small-curd cottage cheese instead, and Asiago instead of Parmesan. And dried herbs instead of fresh (adjust amounts way down) because the garden herbs are dead and the grocery store herbs are craaaazzzy expensive, along with everything else in the grocery store. (The sticker shock is just killing me lately!)

The soup recipe comes from Simply in Season, which I may have mentioned here before. It's published by Herald Press, which is a Mennonite publishing house. It's very much in the same spirit as the More-With-Less Cookbook, only this one has a list of veggies and fruits that are available in each season, and then a list of good things to cook with them. For people who are trying to eat locally and in season, it can be a big help. Plus there are lots of fun facts on diminished farmland, pesticides, and impoverished people of other lands, just in case you can't enjoy your food without a heaping helping of Mennonite guilt.

(I truly do believe in the principles of good stewardship, helping others, and being mindful of what you consume. But sometimes the Menno-guilt gets to me, I'll confess. Makes me want to run out and buy a bunch of blood diamonds, fur coats and off-season kiwi fruits, which is a weird way to rebel no matter how you look at it.)

Anyway, the soup:

Turkey Barley Soup

4 cups water
4 cups chicken or turkey broth
1 1/2 cups diced carrots
1 cup diced celery
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. each poultry seasoning and pepper

Combine in large soup pot. Cover and simmer 1 hour.

1 pound ground turkey
2 T. ketchup
1 T. soy sauce
1/8 tsp. each ground nutmeg, dried sage, dried thyme

Brown together in a skillet. Add to soup and serve.

I did the slow cooker option, where you add the first group of ingredients to the cooker, brown the turkey and seasonings as directed, and then add them to the cooker and cook on Low for 6-7 hours, although mine was done in 4-5.

When I make it again, I'll brown the turkey by itself, give it a quick drain/rinse, and then add the seasonings. It had just a little too much grease left on it.

Since I can't just leave a recipe alone, toward the end of the cooking time I also added about 2 cups of chopped roasted vegetables (fingerling potatoes, carrots, sweet potato, butternut squash) from a previous supper, which needed to be used up. This made for a very orange soup, but it was good!

I take my soupmaking mantra from my dad: "What else would be good in this?" He used to go down to the basement on Saturdays and come up with an armload of home-canned and home-frozen vegetables from the garden, toss in whatever meats and veggies were lurking in the fridge, and come up with a terrific pot of soup for supper. I don't think it was ever quite the same twice. This is the way I like to make soup, too.

Wait till I show y'all what Todd is making in the garage today! To be continued...

A chicken in every crockpot.

Was it Herbert Hoover that promised a chicken in every pot when he was running for President? Maybe it was Coolidge...

Anyway, maybe that's something today's candidates should get behind. Or maybe not. Because chickens are gross.

I don't cook a whole bird very often, but I just wrestled one out of its skin-tight plastic and into the crockpot. And it was soooo grooooosss! Jamming my hand down in to get the little gizzard packet (shudder) and rinsing its slippery little body off and then cramming lemons, onions and celery up its butt, and then dusting it with spices. It's like handling a dead baby. (shudder again.)

I feel bad about being ooked out by poultry, since I am merely one hop on the family tree away from people who butchered, scalded, plucked and cleaned their own poultry routinely--my mom and her parents, my dad and his parents. Seems like I'm not far away enough, genetically, to have developed the aversion so soon.

But come to think of it, my dad avoided eating chicken for years and years because he claimed he could smell the chicken yard stink even on a cooked bird, so maybe my aversion isn't that irrational.

Todd says that a dead chicken carcass is nowhere near as disgusting as a freshly killed rabbit carcass, and that when the intestines are pulled out of a dead rabbit, you can see all the little rabbit poop pellets inside them. Ulp. That sort of makes the unlaid eggs I once saw inside a freshly butchered chicken seem almost sweet and wholesome.

I know there's a lot to be said for knowing where your meat comes from, especially in light of all these tainted meat scares and nasty corporate farming practices. But there's a lot to be said for neat, cut-up bits of meat from the grocery store, too.

Anyway, we're having chicken tonight--want to come over??? There should be plenty, because I think I lost my appetite!!

Lots o' stuff.

We had a nice Valentine's evening...the shrimp scampi and crab cakes both came out quite nicely, and then we had sugar-snap peas on the side, and chocolate-chip cookies for dessert.

The crab cake recipe is from a book called Lean Beach Cuisine that I picked up on a trip to the Outer Banks five or six years ago. The recipe called for coriander, which I didn't have on hand, so I put in a sprinkle of Old Bay instead. I made half the recipe, and that made 4 ample-sized cakes, of which we only managed to eat 1 1/2. Since even medium-quality crabmeat is pricey, it's nice to know you don't have to use a whole pound, unless you're feeding a real crowd.

Chesapeake Coconut Crab Cakes

1 pound fresh lump crabmeat
1/4 cup egg substitute or egg whites (I just tossed in a whole egg)
1/2 cup finely crushed fat-free potato chips
2 tablespoons shredded coconut, toasted
2 tablespoons finely chopped green onion
2 tablespoons light mayonnaise
1 tablespoon fresh chopped parsley
1/2 teaspoon dried coriander

Pick over the crab meat to make sure all the shell fragments have been removed. Gently combine all the ingredients in a medium bowl, and shape into 8 patties about 1/2" thick. Place crab cakes on a baking sheet sprayed with non-stick cooking spray. (I just used Reynolds Release foil, and they came right off.) Broil about 6 inches under the heat until the top browns. (This took five minutes for me.) Turn and brown the other side. (Another five minutes.) Serve immediately.

It wasn't till I started typing this in that I noticed the coconut needed to be toasted. This may have been why I couldn't taste it at all in the crab cakes! Other than that, they were good. I especially liked that you could broil them and completely remove the need for frying in oil.

I'm home today doing laundry and getting some things ready for a short trip to my brother's house tomorrow, so I have a few minutes to post some more pictures.

So in mid-December, Todd had to go do some work at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, and I went along so that we could leave from there to do our holiday traveling. We were in Aberdeen for five days.

Now, Aberdeen is a tiny town with not a lot to recommend it, so I spent my days about five minutes down the road at a slightly larger town called Havre de Grace.

From my one year of high school French, I assumed the town's name was pronounced "Hahv d' Grah." But knowing that we Americans usually butcher our foreign-language-named towns (Cairo, IL = "Cay-ro"; Versaillles, MO = "Ver-sayles"), I asked at the visitors center how to say the name. Sure enough, round those parts, it's pronounced "Hav-er de Grace."

And Americans wonder why the French look down their noses at us!

Lafayette himself named the town, which sits at the spot where the Susquehanna River flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The settlement grew up around the ferry service that took travelers from Virginia and Maryland up to Philadelphia and New York, which means that every Colonial and Revolutionary War bigwig came through there. He stopped in and mentioned that the spot reminded him of Le Havre in France, so when the townspeople incorporated the town several years later, they named it Havre de Grace, or "harbor of grace."

I really enjoyed exploring this little town. It reminded me so much of several other small old river towns I've known in my life--specifically, Marietta, Ohio, where I went to college, and Hannibal, Missouri, where I was born and where my dad's family still lives. A little shabby, its days of glory and importance long since past, but still clinging to its history and community.

So every day that week I would head into Havre de Grace and stroll the streets. I quickly found my daily lunch spot and my afternoon coffee spot.

This is where I sat and ate lunch every day that week. The restaurant is called MacGregor's Restaurant and Tavern, and it sits on a bluff looking over the railroad bridge across the Susquehanna. I can't begin to describe how oddly relaxing it was to sit there and watch the tiny commuter trains go back and forth over the bridge. The food was good, too. I didn't intend to eat there every single day, but there was just something about the place.


The town has a couple of used bookstores--Todd and I like to sniff out the used bookstores first thing when we go somewhere new. This one was fantastic, the Courtyard Bookshop.

It was this little nest of rooms crammed with books. Not so crammed that you couldn't browse, but the shelves were full. And I had just the best conversation with the owner, an older gentleman who's a real booklover (of course), a Vietnam veteran, a Democrat (we sniffed out each other's political leanings first thing), and just a terrifically articulate, smart gentleman.

We chatted for a while, and then I headed back into the nest of rooms, and just lost myself for a good hour and a half. When I surfaced with an armload of books to buy, it felt like I was coming up from a deep sea-dive or a very long nap. I had to try to remember where I was, what day it was, I'd been so lost in books. What a great feeling.

Here's me on a street corner:

Havre de Grace's downtown proper is about five blocks long and two blocks deep, so I came past this corner quite a few times as I tramped around over four days' time. I had this feeling that all the locals in the restaurants and coffee shops were saying, "Who's that woman in the red coat and how did she just suddenly appear here? And why am I seeing her everywhere I look?"

Because the locals all know each other quite well. Every store and shop I entered, there was a little knot of people chatting and gossiping and laughing. I've never lived in a small town, but that made me wish I did.

The town has built a wonderful boardwalk that runs from the marina to the lighthouse. Here's the spot where the river meets the bay:

This was the one sunny day we had that week, and it was so pretty by the river.



Looking back at the marina, where I was parked:


The walkway to the lighthouse:

Same spot, but looking right, toward the river:

Such a pretty, pretty day. I love that winter sunshine.

The Concord Point lighthouse is the absolute cutest thing I ever did see. I sent a postcard of it to my niece Kylie, and told her that if Santa had a lighthouse at the North Pole, this would be it, and the elves would be the lighthouse keepers.

The lighthouse is only 36 feet tall, and it was built in 1827. The man who became the first lighthouse keeper was John O'Neill, an Irish immigrant who was a hero of the War of 1812. He helped defend the town from British warships out in the bay until he was captured. His 15-year-old daughter rowed a boat out to the prisoner ship and pleaded with the captain to release her father. The captain did, and gave the daughter a gold snuffbox because he was so impressed with her bravery.

Hard to imagine this quiet little town full of booming artillery and flying cannonballs! Here are a few more pics I snapped just walking around.

I always tell myself that I'm going to start collecting pictures of those "ghost signs" on old brick buildings...they're just so neat.

So it was a relaxing way to start our holiday traveling, a real luxury to be able to take a few days and just explore. The last day, Todd was done with his work, and I was able to take him around and show him all the places I'd found, which was doubly enjoyable!

Happy V Day!

Here's Todd's Valentine's Day present...I think he'll be pleased. Chocolate-chip cookies are his all-time fave, and he's had several sub-par versions at various restaurants in the past few months. I don't know why I don't bake them more, but I did, just for him, today, because he's my sweetie-pie!

We got a little snow here last night, but it's mostly melted now. Just the stuff on the north side of the house where the sun never shines is still there. So pretty.

I'm still walking around looking like I'm half-zombie, with my one bloody eye. Call me Mrs. Sweeney Todd. [Neat movie, great music, but--um...rivers of blood just don't do it for me.] I keep forgetting about it, and then I look at someone and they do this little double-take at me, and then I remember and feel dumb. I am so not the kind of person who worries a lot about what I look like, but this thing is making me really self-conscious. I ran a couple of cookies out to the mail lady just now, and she did the double-take thing...I'm sure she was thinking, "Do I really want to take food from this person?" I'm kidding, of course, but I will be so happy when the red goes away!

In fact, I'm cooking dinner at home tonight partly so I don't have to go expose my freak eye to half of Newport News. I'm going to make shrimp scampi and crabcakes. People always say, "Oooh, shrimp scampi!" like it's this really complicated thing, but it's about the fastest, easiest thing you could ever cook. Way easier than, say, meatloaf!

Here's the recipe; I may have shared this here before. It takes longer to peel the shrimp than it does to cook them:

Monterey Shrimp Scampi

1 T. butter
1 T. olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 pound large shrimp, peeled and cleaned
1/4 cup white wine
1 T. fresh lemon juice
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper
1 T. flavored bread crumbs
2 T. Parmesan cheese

Heat a large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. Add butter and olive oil. When butter melts and sizzles, add garlic and cook for one minute. Add shrimp and cook for two minutes; shrimp should only be partially cooked. Add wine, lemon juice, salt and pepper; cook about two minutes more until the shrimp are cooked through. (They will turn pink and the tails will curl.) Remove from heat and top with bread crumbs and chopped parsley. Place shrimp on serving plates, sprinkle with Parmesan cheese, and serve immediately.

I serve this over linguine, by the way. Now, the crabcakes will be a new recipe for me, so if they're successful, I'll share it later. It's hard to tell how they'll come out; the recipe is a little...different.

Hope everyone's having a happy day today, love and hugs to you all. I appreciate everybody who drops in and reads my ramblings!

Snickerdoodles.

So let's say it's finally starting to feel...not like fall, exactly, but maybe late summer, at your house. And you're starting to think about spicy cinnamon baked goods. And you're trying to eat a little healthier, so you're looking for something non-gooey and non-overloaded with bad stuff.

Why not try Whole-Wheat Snickerdoodles II at Allrecipes? I made a batch earlier this week and we scarfed them down so fast, I decided to make a double batch today. The house smells great!

I added extra cinnamon to the batter, as well as a dash of cloves, just to make the cookie itself spicier before rolling it in the cinnamon/sugar mixture. I also substituted applesauce for a bit of the butter, say 1/4 of the amount called for. And I forgot to flatten the cookies both times, so they were puffier than the picture shows, but still yummy. They're a little dry and crumbly because of the whole-wheat flour, but good with a glass of milk or cup of tea. And they taste good warm out of the oven, but even better the next day.

And if you and a significant other scarf down ten or twelve cookies while watching TV, telling yourself all the while that it's okay because they're "healthy," well, that will be our little secret.

Rainy day.

Is there anything as wonderful as green leaves and grass in the spring? We're having a rainy day today--the first in ages--and the backyard is so green, it makes me catch my breath every time I walk into the kitchen or dining room and see it through the windows.

I tried to capture some of it through the kitchen window, but it doesn't really convey the GREENness of it all. It's gorgeous.

Yesterday we finished getting the front flower bed weeded and put down some landscape liner in the parts where we won't be planting, at least not anything small. This week I'm hoping we can get some mulch for the whole thing, and then I'll be ready to plant.

Our front bed is huge--it runs across the front of the house and down along the side of the yard, and last year was the "establishing" stage, where we made the rock wall border, filled it with dirt, and added some plants here and there: herbs by the front walkway, perennials here and there, annuals along the front. Nothing except the herbs really looked or did very well.

This year, I can see that we've created something. The perennials that turned up their toes for me last summer are coming back, and the perennial herbs have been in full leaf for at least a month. The pansies I put in last fall are blooming their hearts out, and there's definitely a plan in sight. I can see where to go from here. It's so satisfying, after mostly muddling around cluelessly last summer and ending up with not much of anything to show for it.

And now it's raining, and everything will be even better for it. And I can sort of see what needs to go into the bare spots. A fabulous feeling.

Today I'm washing towels, and putting away the last of the stuff we had to move out to have the carpets cleaned, and I also baked some oatmeal cookies from this recipe at Simply Recipes. I used dried cherries instead of raisins, almonds instead of walnuts, and added a little almond extract to the dough. They're delicious! Todd is working industriously in the garage, humming away with Barenaked Ladies. It's a good day to stay inside and be comfortable.

Happy birthday to my sweet sister-in-law, Tracy--it was great chatting with you today! I'm glad you were born and found your way into our family!

Chopping heads off chickens and other life skills.

Simply Recipes is one of my very favorite blogs--easy to look at, well-written, entertaining--and oh yes, excellent recipes to boot! Elise, the blog creator, was interviewed on her local NPR station the other day. Here's the link to her post about it, and from there, you can navigate to the broadcast and find her spot. It's about 1/3 of the way through.

It was so fun to hear her voice and find out a little bit about her, and she mentioned something that I think about a lot: how our parents and grandparents carry around so much knowledge and experience with them that we younger folk often don't pay attention to until at some point in our lives we wish to have it.

I commented on her blog that I have a very vivid memory of my grandpa and my dad butchering chickens in my grandparents' yard, and then wandering down to the basement and watching my grandma and my mom plucking the birds and taking out their guts and whatnot. I remember being amazed when they opened one of the birds, and there was an egg intact inside of her. Talk about fresh!

Anyway, I would have no clue, none, about how to butcher a bird. No desire, either. I get yicked out handling grocery store chicken with the skin still on it.

But there are other skills, less gross skills, that I just never got passed along to me. I guess because by the time the 70s and 80s rolled around, they weren't skills that people needed to get through life. But how convenient it would be to be able to sew, or crochet, or make yeast bread, or...any of the other myriads of things I don't know how to do. Seems like the older folks in my family know at least a million things that I don't.

Of course, I can blog. But that doesn't seem like a good skill trade-off!

C is for Cookie.

One more post for today--the challenge at Two Peas is to blog about your favorite Christmas cookie.

I love cut-out sugar cookies, but they have to taste GOOD, not cardboard-y.

For years I made my mom's stand-by Betty Crocker cookbook recipe, which is good and tastes like home...but then five or six years ago, a friend shared her tried-and-true recipe with me.

Eva's Sugar Cookies

2 cups butter or margarine, softened
2 cups granulated sugar
3 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
6 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs and vanilla and almond extracts until light and fluffy. In another large bowl, combine flour and baking soda. Gradually stir flour mixture into butter and sugar mixture until blended. Chill for one hour, then roll out on a floured board and cut into shapes. Bake at 350 degrees on lightly greased (or parchment-lined) baking sheets for 8-10 minutes, until light golden brown. Makes 12 dozen cookies.

It's the almond extract that makes the difference here--these are some delicious cookies. The last time I made them, they never made it to the frosting stage--Todd and I devoured them all plain! But when I do manage to get them frosted, I usually add a drop of almond extract to the frosting, too. I just use whatever generic white frosting recipe is in my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook.

Mmmm...now I'm craving some!