kitchen
Old Faithful got its name by being a never-fail. It always comes out delicious – even when it isn’t textbook perfect – and it’s very chocolate. I’ve been making it for years and was reminded to put up the recipe when Emma came for an overnight and wanted to do some cooking. Just made one the other day and was reminded again… this may not seem like baking weather but people continue to be fond of cake.
Emma learning the toothpick guide trick for splitting layer cakes
This person somehow became 16 when I wasn’t looking (or teaching her to cook), so we made roast chicken and chocolate cake, on my theory that armed with these two she would be ready for anything.
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By real deal I mean the cherries are fermented in the hooch, not simply given a quick bath.
Sweet cherries, before and after the full brandying treatment
Most popular recipes for brandied cherries require only combining the fruit with brandy and sugar. Couldn’t be easier, and it’s delicious after sitting around for only a couple of days. Then after you put it in pretty jars and age it a while the cherries turn leathery and the liquid tastes just like cough syrup.
I made a lot of this stuff myself before I discovered that if you take the longer route, using less brandy and letting the mixture ferment, you end up with two good things: a fortified spirit that resembles port and firm, slightly velvety cherries that taste like themselves except for being drunk.
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Did you keep cutting off the rhubarb flower buds, doing your best to extend the season by preventing
Rhubarb flowering instead of making pie material
If so, welcome to the club of “if only.”
Just about every rhubarb grower I know is convinced that removing the flower stalks will
a) keep the edible leaf stalks from growing tough and
b) encourage the plant to produce more of them,
and they are abetted in this belief by most of the published information on rhubarb growing, including that from reliable sources like universities and extension services.
Nevertheless, (a) is untrue and (b) applies mostly to the following season.
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Who knew? In my experience, most home made wine is awful and the stuff that’s good is only good in an everyday sort of way. But home made lilac wine – the only kind available, far’s I know – is terrific! (if you wait long enough).
Two very dusty bottles came with Bill when we set up housekeeping together back in 1991, and somehow instead of being cleaned off and consumed they got put in the cellar.
Until the end of January, when for reasons I no longer remember we decided to open one. Revelation. We kept looking at each other, not quite believing. Read More…
Also old-faithful walking onions, always the first to appear, and a handful of garlic chives, currently taking over the side bed that’s due for renewal and therefore has not been weeded at all.
Here in our part of the Hudson Valley, this year spring is on toast in more ways than one. I’m in the office with, I confess, the air conditioner on because none of the shade trees are leafed out yet and it’s 89 **!!@^%! Degrees. Same as yesterday and tomorrow and then on Tuesday it’s supposed to get hot.
The red tulips had one day! Truth. Buds cracked in the evening at bedtime on Friday, full open by noon Saturday, then exhausted by eveniing, just like the rest of us. The pink ones, admittedly, had been open for 2 days but I was rather enjoying them.
So. Looking at the forecast made this morning a nightmarish recap of fall, when you rush around picking all the flowers that will be blasted by frost. Read More…
Daffodils are close to the peak, we’re now enjoying daily bouquets. Small bouquets, it must be admitted, because I hate to cut any no matter how many there are, but still
it must be time to
Plant the second round of lettuce.
Find the bags of summer clothing.
Wish Wordsworth had kept his mouth shut, and
issue another Neat Old Tool Alert.
Yard sale season is upon us, and although they’re not common any more, there’s still a chance you’ll run into one of these pieces of
antique ironing equipment
Though it probably won’t say right on it what it was made for – Read More…
Any food lover who has eaten a genuine whoopie pie has got to be cracking up over the current rage for – what shall we call it? – the new whoop-de-do : small cakes sandwiched with lots of rich filling that resemble the genuine article the way a square of ground Kobe beef filled with foie gras resembles a White Castle hamburger.
You can read all about it in this New York Times whoopie pie story by Micheline Maynard, or just know that ever since she tapped me for an opinion about their origin, I’ve had them rattling around in my head.
I’ve also had a container of very nice ricotta rattling around in the refrigerator. Also half a batch of the dough for Chocolate Split Seconds.
ricotta whoopie pies
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Because sometimes people are quite suddenly coming for tea or whatever in less than an hour and there’s nothing nifty in the freezer and you deeply don’t want to go to the store and also must do something about the books and papers currently covering every flat surface in the house.
Aha, I thought, time for Lightening Cookies, aka Split Seconds, an American home cooking classic. The ingredients are always on hand; only 1 mixing bowl is needed, shaping is extremely swift and you can bake the whole batch at once.
Fifty two butter cookies - apple blackberry in back, apricot up front
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Start on the endless spring to-do list. Lawn and garden cleanup, shrub pruning, seed-starting, seed planting…
and (among yet other things)
* Consider the freezer
* Start on the bulb maps
* Figure out where the garlic is going to go
* Cut back and repot tired houseplants
* Scout for morel spots Read More…
Are they an Eek of the Week or are they too old hat? I just discovered them yesterday, in a flyer I was leafing though after lunch to avoid going back to work. THERE’S an eek, sez I, a little plastic cup in the landfill for every cup of home brewed coffee. So much for greener than takeout.
My George H.W. Oh boy is he ever out of it Bush moment. I did know disposable pods were part of the espresso boom, but until I went to Amazon to check how common these things might be…
OMG. Double eek. But there in the list was an oddity that almost defies imagination: ” The Java Wand is a portable, single serve, miniaturized French Press filter attached to a durable, hand blown, glass straw that brews and filters coffee and tea leaves in your cup.”
If any of you have ever used one of these things, please send us a review. I burn to know, I really do.
