Soldiering On with the details

Well, I went home and had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday. Food, feasting, family, and fun. And frolicking too.
But now I'm back at work, it is definitely winter, and my heat is definitely wimping out on me. No matter. I am going to stay out here and post! Maybe thinking about that black bean chile will warm me up... although it's not likely, since it was MY kind of chile, and not the kind to blow your top off in the least.
I found this warm, flavorful recipe base in Daily Soup, the very same cookbook that delivered me up to the horrors of the Mushroom Barley Soup only the week before. Well, I'm glad I gave it another try. And notice I said recipe base; as you will see, I departed from it quite liberally, being in a 'make-do' situation.
It is called Chicken Black Bean Chili, and it is categorized under "Meat," "Spicy," and "Lowfat" in the cookbook. Well, I'll try to collapse all my substitutions into a list so you can get an idea:

• Halved the recipe
• Used pre-roasted chicken from Giant rather than "1 whole chicken, cut up" (although I did make my own broth)
  

From this:

...to this!

• Used 3/4 c kalamata olives rather than 2 red bell peppers
• Used olive oil rather than peanut oil
• Used spices (chili powder, cumin, coriander, bay leaves, and regular oregano, not Mexican) very approximately

• Used sea salt rather than kosher salt
• Used a mango Jamaican sauce rather than habanero pepper sauce
• Used parsley rather than cilantro (and this was the bad parsley decision, not the earlier one with the mushroom soup; I got them confused)

And I didn't use pickled jalapenos or a habanero chile pepper. I know, it was really sacrilege. But anyway, it smelled very good simmering, but it was a little watery for what I thought of as chili. It did better as a stew. Oh, and it did a whole lot better after a day or two in the fridge. Great leftovers!

Happily At Home

Hey all, how was your Big Thursday?
Mine was great.
I made 2 kinds of stuffing, Cathy made 2 pumpkin pies and the cranberry sauce, Michelle mashed the potatoes, and Heather even helped stuff the bird! But Mom was still the anchor- cooking the turkey, coaxing the gravy, throwing together the salad. And Dad too- he carved and then got through the lengthy task of deboning afterwards. So many tasks, so much food, so much cheerfulness! No wonder we can only do this a few times a year!
Oh, and I am taking a break from the regularly scheduled updating of cooking processes to fool around with Google Wave- a bit confusing, but I really want to have some fun with it. :-)

Happy Thanksgiving Holiday

And let us remember to give thanks for people who put aside differences of race, culture, and history to come together. Hope for the human race.

Another Argh

(My oh-so-proper cookbookstand)

So, quite a while ago now, I went to the home of some friends for dinner, and they served this amazing mushroom soup. I think it has since starred in some of my dreams. It was delicious, rich, simmery, tasting full of flavor while not being chunky. So I thought I'd try my hand at a mushroom soup.
I knew I wasn't following following a similar recipe, but I thought I'd break myself in easy to the mushroom: start stew-style, with a combination chicken-barley-mushroom, and get a feel for the ingredient. Well.
I had bought a large container of dried mushrooms a few days before from Costco, while the plan was already simmering in my head, and thought I had just to follow the directions to rehydrate them and incorporate them into the Daily Soup recipe I had (also the first time I'd used one from their book). Unfortunately, I needed to dash to the Giant across the street to get the parsley (an inconsequential and unwanted flavor here anyway, it turned out), and due to the less-than-fabulous service there, the mushrooms ended up sitting in the water for 30 minutes instead of 20. Perhaps that was the fatal flaw. Or maybe they were just bad mushrooms. Or maybe, as my mother confessed to me when I told her of the ordeal, the cooks in my family just can't do dried mushrooms.

(doesn't it look good?? ah, the agony!)

Whatever the problem, I didn't realize it until I got to the very end and sat down with a chunk of warm, crusty bread on top of the stew, and took the first shocking bite, which lasted longer than it should, needing as I did to chew, and chew, and chew. So before the next bite, I picked out all the mushrooms from my mushroom-chicken-barley soup. Argh.

Gingered Sweet Potato Pie

I can happily say that I am returning home to California for Thanksgiving, which will be awesome. In view of this, and my status now as an actual adult in the family, I volunteered to take care of stuffing/ vegetable for the day. I very clearly said No Gizzards, because I am a No Gizzards type of gal, at least for now.
So I was gleefully planning to test some of Bon Appetit's cornucopia of stuffings, but instead got completely sidetracked, and wonderfully so, by this Gingered Sweet Potato Pie recipe by Rachel over at Coconut & Lime. I was helped in this also by finally having tasted the sweet potato pie of my neighborhood baker, Ms. Debra Chatman. I think it won the Best Of DC award in 2007, and I had never made it to the bakery while they still had it in the case until a few weeks ago- it went fast, I guess!
So I made one myself, albeit in a storebought crust, so I could concentrate on the filling: boiling the sweet potatoes, then skinning, then mashing. It's a nice, productive, yet not too taxing pastime. Kind of like all the preparations that go into butternut squash sauce (post to come). If you want to experiment and taste what the recipes are talking about, you have to cut, slice, peel, roast or boil, cool, chop, &c, &c. And you just accept it and keep going, instead of railing against "Why, oh why me???" as we are sometimes wont to do in other cases. It is refreshing.

(Rachel did her pecans in the shape of the mathematical symbol of pi, so I had to do something similarly creative- Behold, 'Tree':-)

Picturesque Newark, NJ

October 27, I traveled to Newark, NJ by train at another ungodly early hour for work. But this time, I traveled by train. I liked it better. As a whole however, I wouldn't consider the trip a success, since it rained, I became sick during the course of the meeting, my coworker and I had to wait over an hour for our train because the meeting ended early, and I didn't go out to see anything in Newark, but stayed in the mini-mall above and below the train station platforms, which seemed to have been designed to offer as little seating as possible in covered areas.

So it seems as though with New Jersey is living up to its reputation.

(Top Left: View from the state government building where the meeting was held, to the train station where we arrived; Right: Old-style, Quaker-like Meetin' Seatin')

Like fuschia?

Well, that's the color that red cabbage turns when you cook it like this! I felt like reaching for my heretofore-usually-silent German roots for some cabbage and sausage a few weeks back- something sauerkraut-y without the canned shortcut. So I bought the red cabbage at the farmers' market and set out to create. I added a tart apple, onions of course, rice vinegar (since this wasn't an excuse to get yet another type of vinegar; I was trying to make do), and cloves- a little dab'll do ya (I only used 2, as per the recipe, but man did they add some verve!).













It came out nice and sweet-tart, and very homey-tasting. I made mine the first couple times with a cut-up beer bratwurst sausage from Trader Joe's and a dollup of dijon mustard, since my French roots were most likely from the east close to Germany anyway... ok, ok, I'm twisting it up a bit. It suffices to say that it paired well. However, it didn't keep very long, which surprised me, so: ye are forewarned-- scarf it down!

Second Beautiful Fall Walk

Near the Tidal Basin, beautiful colors everywhere

Red light, green light!



Juvel...

House of Usher trees???

Memoriam...

She discovers okra

Much as I am loathe to post about things that I didn't like or that didn't go well (after all, I'm so POSITIVE!), I promised to put up my effort with okra. I tangled with it, and lost. After passing it up many times at the farmers' market, I decided to just give it a whirl and fry it up. However, I only learned afterward that okra secretes a mucilaginous fluid when broken down; in other words, it made everything look and feel ('mouth-feel') a snotty mess. Flavor was ok, but I will have to try again with more and better advice in hand. But at least I did try! :-) I combined it with some peppers and spices, thinking that might be its natural habitat, but it didn't help
**Note the wholesome evening activity background: a puzzle! Ah, recessions.

There's no living up to that last trip...

So my second in-recent-memory trip to Boston was quick, in-n-out without the burger and fries. I flew in early, and flew out at a normal hour. It was a hectic, not very enjoyable trip. This is where I was (see right). Or rather, I think it is. I was in a windowless conference room in the Federal Reserve Bank across the way for the whole 8 hours... until next time, Boston.