kitchen
I swear this has nothing to do with Valentine’s Day. If you love someone you will NOT make them these killer cookies, a frighteningly addictive combo of all four basic food groups: sugar, salt, fat and crunch. Plus chocolate.
half candy, half cookie - all good
I got the recipe from my friend Carol (no, not the Wine Colored Dahlia and Barbecued Shrimp Carol, another Carol), who calls them Aunt Emma Lee’s Heath Bar Cookies “The exhaltation of lowly saltine.”
Not sure if that’s Aunt Emma talking or Carol herself, but either way the description is accurate. Only mystery is why the title doesn’t mention “easy” and/or “quick.”
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That would be Lafayette, Louisiana, not Lafayette, Indiana. The style would be that of the city’s Junior League, circa1967, and Talk About Good! would be the title of said Junior League’s classic fundraising cookbook, a spiral bound journey to the South that was popular long before the food of New Orleans achieved nationwide cult status.
At this point T.A.G is more of a cultural artifact than a source of great recipe ideas, but there are a few gems that still shine with undiminished luster. A “Congealed Avocado and Chicken salad,” for instance, contributed by Mrs. Jacque Puken, of Eunice, LA, doesn’t sound all that promising, but in fact it’s absolutely delicious and a perfect make-ahead for a crowd. It’s hearty enough to be a main dish, light enough to play well with all the chili, boudin and/or brats, easy to serve and easy to eat – with or without a fork.
Molded and served like pate; no fork needed
Molded into a loaf and sliced; fork needed. Also chips. (Crunch must not be overlooked.)
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One thing I love about plants is the way they tie the world together, stitching continents and time in an ever-changing tapestry of free association. Eric puts up a post on Cyathea cooperi, a tropical tree fern so unfriendly its keepers need hazmat suits to move it, and next thing you know, in comes a question from Louisa about fiddleheads, the delicious baby fronds of the circumboreal ostrich fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris.
This foragers’ favorite doesn’t appear until mid-spring, roughly in synch with the morels, but it’s never too early to get ready for collecting.
Pasta with fiddleheads, morels and garlic chives
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It is a truth well-known that commercial chicken bouillon cubes are useless for making bouillon – or anything else you might want to eventually eat. But the concept itself is great: put a cube in a cup, add boiling water and presto! chicken broth, curer of colds, foundation of soups – I’m thinking good thoughts about egg drop at the moment – and sauces too numerous to contemplate.
That’s why our freezer is always stocked with the homemade version. They aren’t as tiny as the salt bombs but they do squeeze a gallon of broth into a pile of little squares about the size of a yogurt tub (which is a very convenient thing to keep them in.)
The chunk in front is about 1 1/2 cubes' worth. I cut it big to show off what it looks like ( admittedly not much; but that's more or less the whole point). The one in the cup is bulked up by the wrapper.
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Winter is orange city around here. Quantities of peel get candied. The zest adds flavor to stews, enhances the stuffing of roast fowl, perfumes custards and cheesecakes and lends its zing to pastries from pound cake to gingerbread. Result: the fridge is frequently full of naked oranges needing to be used up.
Orange and Avocado salad, one way to use up the oranges.
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Visiting Ilana yesterday, bringing a little box of belated pepparkakor chickens and some apples, not expecting anything in return but there was a carton of beautiful eggs. (Spring is supposed to mark the resumption of egg season – see Easter – but Ilana says her hens are already cranking up.)
Mentioned in thanking that I was going to a New Year’s party and might be asked to bring appetizers, in which case I’d make my gift into tea leaf eggs.
Tea Leaf Eggs, photographed (rather pinkly, for some reason; they aren't really) last fall. They were large eggs, better with wasabi dip than as deviled eggs with wasabi
Turned out that this caterer’s warhorse, deliciously smoky, beautifully marbled and remarkably easy to make was news to her, so I promised the recipe and here it is:
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Sorta – These velvety sweet chestnuts in a crunchy sugar shell aren’t quite as light-textured as the real deal, but they’re good enough to be a variation instead of simply an earnest attempt, and now that the candied chestnuts of my childhood have hit about $5.00 each they’re a variant well worth making. (Assuming, of course, that marrons glacés are on your list of “wish I could afford more.”)
Left: Marrons glaces en chemise. Right: Glazed candied chestnuts
Although fresh chestnuts can be used, it’s far easier to start out with IQF peeled chestnuts (see below). The processing that delivers them whole, absolutely skinless and in a neither-cooked-nor-raw state is probably something we don’t want to know too much about;* but whatever it is has the happy side-effect of making them much more receptive to candying and much less likely to break.
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Also an Eek of the Week: Fake Bakers, about the – many, according to story – people who bring purchased pastry to bake sales and cookie swaps and pass it off as home made. To enhance verisimilitude, they doctor the store-bought by roughing it up so it doesn’t look too perfect. Directions are provided. I am still trying to digest this.
And in the meantime of course baking cookies, including vanilla almond Moth Cookies and The Spritz Bill Really Likes. Links to more never-fail all-timers after the jump, but first:
Our favorite Pepparkakkor, crisp, spicy, better-than-gingerbread. The quintessential Christmas Cookie and if the Christmas part gives you trouble just use a bird cutter and call ‘em doves of peace.
The recipe makes approximately a zillion. The dough is easy to mix, easy to handle and perfectly happy to stay in the icebox for weeks while you slice off chunks of it to roll and cut and decorate. Or not; a lot of people like them best plain.
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On right, fresh chestnuts. On left, one of the all-time convenience ingredients: peeled, skinned and ready to go, as easy to cook as dried beans.
Admittedly, dried chestnuts don’t have the mashed potato fluffiness of the fresh article. Somewhere between mealy and creamy is about the best they can do. But other than that they’re just shortcut chestnuts: great in soups and stews and stuffings, great with winter vegetables and great in holiday sweets and why they aren’t more widely adored is a mystery to me.
Sweet Snowballs (chestnut and white chocolate candy) recipe at the end of the post.
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December 1st, 6:00 PM: The candied grapefruit rind is bubbling in the syrup, almost done, so I’m sort of stuck in the kitchen when I notice it’s cold outside in the clear still night under the fat moon. So of course I get nervous about the lettuce and my pet baby radicchios.
The radicchios are still making progress toward heading up; I continue to have hope
Decide to put covers back on even though plants are already at that frozen stage where you shouldn’t touch them if you want them to thaw unharmed. Wilted tips better than wilted everything being my thinking on that.
Turn off the grapefruit (recipe follows)
Home candied citrus rind is worlds better than store-bought. Also extremely easy to make and very nearly free.
Put on the headlamp, recruit Bill, who puts on his headlamp, and down we go to cover most but not all of what’s left.
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