Karate Ann Hess


I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of this kick.  For the first four classes Carly and her Little Dragon comrades have been running circles around the floor mat and otherwise mostly following basic instructions to sharpen those fledgling karate instincts.  But this evening it was time to unleash.

The more I think about, though, I realize that this has likely been a coil in waiting for six some years – as the youngest of three sisters I suspect that it is the vision of Julia, Carly's nitpicking nemesis, that she is envisioning in the center of the punching bag here.  As dad, I'll take fantasy revenge over the real thing anytime, but be warned elder sisters, Karate Hess is on the up and coming.

Fraser Fir


I used the prospect of eating at Famous Dave's later in the night as bait and got Julia and Carly to come with me to pick out our Christmas tree sunday afternoon.  We get our tree from the Hertz family who has been selling trees in the back lot of the Midway BP for years.  They are friendly, offer great full trees, and tie up your new domesticated piece of the forest on your car without so much as a grimace.  Douglas and Balsam fir run as cheap as 15 dollars and Frasers all run at 40, not bad.  I wondered, why are Fraser's considered the choice tree? One of the main reasons, besides holding a nice triangular shape, is that their needles tend to retain their softness and don't prick the kids' hands as they set up ornaments.  Here is ours, undecorated, in our new fireplace living room, Quarry Lane:

The standing of trees for the sake of Christmas time celebrations goes back as far as 15th century Germany in guild halls to be "enjoyed by the apprentices and children." In the beginning there were no personalized plastic discs and or lit orbs but instead trees were often lined with "apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers."  Hmmmm, an edible XMas tree.  Now we're talking.

Finished tree pics to come – Famous Dave's stay on call....

Broadway Stanley


November off season at the cabin Rock Dam and you find yourself and four young women on highway 29 heading west to the megalopolis of Stanley where you've heard there is the cutest little home store on this side of the Clark County forest line. You don't know what to expect. Stanley has a deer to human ratio of around 36 to 1, and the front page of the Stanley Republican headlines "Big Bucks!" but you get there and Broadway Home turns out to be glamspankin.  At first glance, the store looks to be chick-ville central (and it is that), but then you find right inside the door a fart igniter, a beer barrel Christmas ornament, and a woman walks up to Janet and I doling out hot chocolate laced with vodka, and it turns out this two story classic brick has a little something for even the family token male.  Nice clothes.  Jan found a funky gray and bergundy top, and Abby eventually tracked down a pair of shin high black boots. Carly some kind of stuffed kitten carrier and I that beer barrel ornament.  Julia didn't find her style here at Broadway but later did at the Stanley Shopko – a blaze orange hoody to wear when we got back to the cabin, appropriate to the season. Here's Abby, with entourage, picking out her birthday boots from dad:

  

Two Day Stuffing, Two Minute Meal


The quote of Thanksgiving Day was by Derek who, as he was looking at the cornbread stuffing fresh out of the oven and finally ready to serve, keenly detected that there was pieces of sausage links mixed in abundance among the rest of the ingredients, and said something to the effect "how can you go wrong with sausage in there?" So true.  The sausage in the stuffing reminds me of cooking from any of Tyler Florence's recipes whose special little friend in the kitchen is bacon, and who might very well  add salty pork to oatmeal if he thought he could get away with it.  Back to the stuffing.  If you have nothing better to do with the better part of two days, I'd highly recommend the Bon Appetite recipe, but know that you might be knowingly wrapping yourself in your own little culinary bubble T-day as you dedicate your efforts to this dish, and that your wife, three kids, guests and the spring-like day outside might all have to take the back burner, so to speak, to the RECIPE.  The day before you can make the cornbread, which will eventually get cut into your croutons, cut in small 2 X 2 squares and baked at 250 to harden.  Cornbread is a very crumbly structure to begin with, so beware when eventually mixing everything together that those perfect squares will break down and turn mushy with too much handling.  The next day will include some simple toasting of pecans, a bunch of chopped onions, celery, chopped rosemary, sage, thyme (allot at least three hours to de-leaf thyme off the stems!), rosemary and eggs.  And oh yeah, the part that jumps out at the taste buds: one pound of Johnsonville Maple Brown Sugar Breakfast Sausage Links, broken down into pieces and folded into the mix.  Bake at 350 for 40 minutes to get that browned crisp on the moistened cornbread, and you have yourself a two day dish that will you hope, but also ironically, be devoured in like two minutes by appetites that have been saved since Halloween for the big meal.

Deviled Eggs


I'm always curious how certain kinds of food we eat today were originally discovered.  The cooked steak and the corn on the cob are no brainers – one is as easy as fire and meat, the other as easy as picking and biting, but what about intricately processed foods like deviled eggs?  Some ancient Roman– credited as the founding culture – must have tinkered mightily with all of the various stages of an egg's development in order to turn the chicken's gift into a 'spicy side dish.'  The ancient Roman would have to first decide to boil the eggs long enough so the insides stayed firm when eventually cracking.  He or she then would have cut it in half and realized that the yolk liked to conveniently peel away from the surrounding whites and that those yolks, when further mashed, became crumbly but creamy and hey, maybe they should be re-packed into the now open sockets of the remaining half egg?  This is where the 'deviled' part must have come into play over the years, for although the half-filled eggs would have served as a sturdy protein, the taste might have been a bit dull, so now it's time to spice them up a little bit. The "use of spices or spicy sauces with eggs, goes as far back as...the cookbook of Apicus, in which he reports that 'boiled eggs can be seasoned with pepper.'" Mustard, sour cream, tomatoes, capers, mayo, and paprika, are all now common spices used to 'devil' an egg.  The batch shown below, which I made for T-day the day before, and appropriately called Bella Tuscany Deviled Eggs, harkening back to its ancient Italian roots, included sun dried tomatoes, chopped capers, sour cream, salt and pepper for its body.  The two strands of sun dried tomatoes tented at the top add the lasting potent bite to these deviled eggs:

Connecting Some Food Dots

So if this blog is to be dedicated – at least in the beginning – to foody stuff, then once in awhile, when I find a cute set of photos of kid happenings, some food dots will have to be connected to make sense out of it.  To say that the picture above is all about M&M caramel apples might seem like a stretch without a bit of backstory: the week before Halloween I decided it was time to try our own batch of caramel apples at home, an easy enough task – melt some of those 16 oz containers of caramel in a small sauce pan, push the stick through the core of the Granny Smiths, dip, place on a plastic sheet, sprinkle on some fine crumbs of graham cracker just for fun, cool, and voila, bright little sweet but healthy treats.

Good enough.  But then it dawns on you that you would like to be able to see if your apple marvels are close in quality to how some old reliable pros do them.  Despite the summer draught, it is apple harvest season, so why not check out Ferguson's Apple Orchard 

and test one of their creations which we know was likely recently plucked from the orchard vine?  When we got there, on a bright late October early afternoon, the display case was full of all kinds of combinations, including M-e-M's caramel apples, and what had been two fighting sibling faces quickly turned to smiles and a newfound spirit of adventure, like thirty-seven trips through the haunted house (picture at top), corn maze cruising, 

queen of the hay mound (Carly ran the joint), and some quality kid / farm animal conversation.

  

In the end, whose caramel apple 'reigned supreme'?  Because I'm making up the criteria for evaluation as I write this, I'll just have to say that even though the homemade versions didn't come with farm entertainment, they also didn't cause any of the tummy aches mentioned after a few too many M-e-M's.

Monster Cookies

There's been a good batch; there's been a flat batch.  I couldn't say what the difference has been between the two, but this is an odd little recipe for cookies because it doesn't ask for any flour, so even though the texture is thick at the ball-making stage, you can only hope that the four and a half cups of oats you put in holds up and keeps its form under heat.  The first time Carly and I made these we did all kinds of substituting – no peanuts and no raisins, and instead of chocolate candies, the first time anyway, we put in M&M pretzel candies, which were killer good. So, the overall recipe calls for a bunch of oats, white and brown sugar, a cup of peanut butter, baking soda, some chocolate candies (couldn't find the pretzel kind this time around so substituted, again, with M&M's peanut butter), and a cup of chocolate chips (we used mini semi-sweets to fill in all those cracks).  This batch, with high hopes and nice looking batter (below), for some reason flattened and was a bit sticky and rough textured.  We try to make a batch at least every other week, and will try these Monsters again pleads Carly, who likes to sample through just about every stage of baking.

Beef Stew

I've told Jan many times in the past that when a day at home is open and nice, all I want to do is cook. Digging through some new recipe book or mag, coming up with the ingredients list, heading off to old reliable Festival one more time (becoming a daily shopper), then coming home, unloading the groceries, and diving into the fine type of the chosen recipe with my suburban dad's version of reckless abandon is The Joy of Cooking that I think is all part of what the famous book is referring to and my kind of fun.  (Any guys reading: maybe it's time to finally take up deer hunting?!) Today it was Classic Beef Stew out of the Williams-Sonoma Slow Cooker Cookbook – the kind of recipe for anyone like myself who comes from the childhood Dinty Moore camp of canned, thick sauced, not runny, beef stew.  The key, I found, was to dredge the pre-cut and well salted stew meat with flour and brown in a pan before pouring into the slow cooker.  Over time the flour and beef broth, along with other juices, (red wine or vinegar both options) form something close to the kind of sauce that is velvety, not pasty.  Along with the carrots, potatoes and other standard ingredients, the recipe also calls for additional cremini mushrooms and pearl onions to be put in the cooker about an hour before the stew is to be served.  Since they're tossed in late, they keep their crisp structure and distinct taste against the more subtle soft meat and sauce.  Mine didn't look look like below, and probably didn't taste as good, but it had some thing on Dinty.

The Perfect Omelet

I've learned over many years of weekend morning practice that making the perfect omelet is in the mouth of the forkholder.  For as long as I can remember, Janet will wake up on either saturday or sunday morning and ask me whether I'm making her an omelet yet, or not.  My cooking synapses fire up and with a cup of coffee I start looking through the fridge for ham and cheese type ingredients, no funky spices or veggies thank you, just straight up...but there is THE catch: the omelet must be thin, must be soft on the outside, and damn it, it better not be browned!  For all of us who have tried this little folded eggy blanket trick, we know that sometimes the cooktop and pan don't always see eye to eye, and browning can occur.  When this happens, no matter that the inside might be a Mona Lisa of muenster and high grade ham – the fork has to punch through that tough wall of a skin!  Due to operator error, I've done the brown skin thing far too many times to want to remember – it amazes me to this day that I can't make the perfect omelet every time, no matter the culinary challenges.  Now, though, with the new Quarry Lane gas top stove at my disposal, the consistency is getting there.  This morning, a two egg portabella and onion shell with cubed muenster and sliced ham interior, soft to the touch and smooth to the fork.  Evidence, exhibit A