I'm Slow Cookin' Darling!

Pulled Pork Sandwich photo credit goes to the Food Network 

Mrs. G let me mess up the kitchen over at Derfwad Manor- home to a grand group of soul sisters and Gary. Care for a pulled pork sandwich with some savory sides of mancake, moi, and poetry? Of course you do!

Valley of the Dutch Babies and Mountains for Cowboys

I've been away. Caretaking. Driving up and down between 5800 ft and 8000 ft in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado where my father lived until he rolled his car and changed his circumstances.

One day, driving home from the hospital I saw this scene at the local Denny's. We are not in Portland any more.

I can't sort out all the emotions, ideas, revelations, and resignations of this trip just yet. Still in the midst of figuring out the fine points.

When I drove home down that mighty and magnificent Columbia river  gorge and rounded a bend to find the tip top of  my sweet Willamette Valley I could finally breathe. I tasted the moisture in the air. I drove down an everyday street in this beautiful place and saw every sort of person in every sort of dress. No cow ponies or cows at Denny's. But I did see a goat mowing a lawn and my own fine dogs dancing with joy. And, best of all, the people that I love who make this place home.

In honor of the fullness of that I made a dutch baby that my baby and I just devoured.

 

Moan at the cliche if you will, there is no denying that, for me, there is no place like home. And home is a green, wet, fertile valley that terminates at its northern border in a confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers and lies just a low, misty mountain pass away from the Pacific ocean.

To make a dutch baby:

Heat oven to 400 degrees f

Grab your cast iron skillet and cut up an entire stick of butter to toss into pan

Place skillet with butter in hot oven and melt

Meanwhile:

In blender or with a whisk and large mixing bowl beat 6 eggs, then add 1 1/2 cups milk, then slowly whisk in 1 1/2 cups flour and whisk/blend for a minute.

Quickly pour egg mix into melted butter in skillet. Place back in oven and cook for 20 to 25 minute. Dutch baby will puff up and become golden.

Top this golden goodness with a squeeze of lemon and powdered sugar or jam or maple syrup.

If you are wildly inspired, during the intial butter melt, toss in a couple handfuls of thinly sliced apples and a handful of brown sugar and let this cook for a few minutes in the oven before pouring over your dutch baby mix. My oh my! how your mama doing?

In other news, this is lovely and again, not news to anyone, but such a wonderful reminder. Also, via the ever lovely, often poignant Miss Whistle our beloved Stephen Fry on Kindness something my glorious mother with her generous wisdom suggested as my mantra for the trip.

Here was the view driving back to Ouray every night for the past couple of months. Spectacular.

 

Granny's Cookies

It's my birthday! So far so good. Start as you mean to go forward, so I took a long shower. Washed all the worries I am not carrying forward away. Now I am all shiny and new and ready for adventure.

Just before it struck midnight (and became MY BIRTHDAY!!!) I was making three batches of Granny Kelly's cookie dough. My mother's mother-Granny Kelly- must have learned the recipe from her mama. All my life, every Christmas my family gathers and we make Granny's cookies. We roll them out. Pick out our favorite cookie cutters (I am partial to the scotty dog and the bunny). Cut them out. Bake them. Sneak a few while they are warm. And when they have cooled, we whip up some butter cream frosting (never royal icing) and tint it whatever colors we want. Cover the table with waxed paper. Put out every sort of sprinkle, colored icing sugar, silver dragees, cinnamon red hots, bowls of frosting and get down to business. It can take hours. The youngest decorators sometime lose interest and wander off only to be drawn back to the table because it is covered in delicious sweet stuff.

Tomorrow after school my nieces will come and we will start the process. Then their parents, my little brother and sister-in-law, will show up, followed by my daughter and her sweetheart.  My son will be working but he will be home in time to eat many a cookie. And a birthday party of my favorite sort will ensue.

Down in Reno my littlest brother and his family will be making Granny's cookies this weekend too. I suspect my mother, who is spending the winter warming up in her desert home, will make a batch to give to holiday visitors.

We will all be together in spirit,gathered around the kitchen table, feeling lucky, remembering our Granny and Poppa and all the love that flows through us generation after generation.

Granny's Cookies

from the kitchen of Florence Kelly to the kitchen of her daughter and grandchildren, and now her great grandchildren

1 Cup Shortening
4 Cups Flour
1/2 t Salt
2 Eggs beaten
1 Cup Sugar
1/4 Cup Milk
1 t Vanilla
1 t Baking Soda

Sift flour and salt together. Cut in shortening (I use my cuisinart sometimes, sometimes a fork or pastry cutter). In a separate bowl combine the eggs, sugar, milk, vanilla, and baking soda. Add in flour/shortening mixture until just combined. Don't beat up the dough. Cover and chill overnight in the fridge. When it is time to bake, preheat your oven to 400 degrees F. Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to about 1/4 inch thickness and cut out with cookie cutters befitting the holiday (I make them sometimes for Valentine's Day and Keenan's Day too!).  Bake until golden, about 8 minutes. Cool on wire racks.

When cookies are cooled (after you've had pizza and salad and sung a round of happy birthday to me) frost and decorate. We make the frosting with varying amounts of butter, powdered sugar, milk or cream, vanilla, and a pinch of salt. Use a recipe you love and don't make it too thin because that is just mean.

As I will be making these later today (after I sleep) I don't have a picture to show you. Wait! I think I have an example from my son's birthday party 2 years ago. He decided he would rather have Granny's cookies than a birthday cake. Let me look.........





There they are. His auntie made a portrait of him being grumpy. His cousins have always called him "deeda". He isn't always grumpy. You can see we are very fond of sprinkles.

My Sweet Tooth To The Rescue

So, this week is all about change. Change and English Toffee. I find that toffee assists in the many small discomforts that accompany change.

I've never been a skilled candy maker despite my excellence as a candy consumer. My friend Jessie spent a good amount of time trying to teach me the delicate art of toffee making. This elaborate ritual involved candy thermometers and a marble slab. I never seemed to be able to achieve success. My best effort resulted in something very like a soft praline, but never the crisp, rich snap of toffee.

One day I was cruising through a variety of pages at Instructables when I saw a link to The Infamous Benson Family Sinful Almond Roca recipe.

Intrigued by the idea that an infamous family was sharing such a recipe, I clicked through and discovered that I was a master confectioner.

The recipe is fool-proof. I have added some twists on occasion (malden salt, mixed nuts, chili powder) and each and every batch has turned out beautifully.

I note this here solely because in my rash decision to reduce my consumption of sweet things I had neglected the recipe for months. When I tried to recall it from memory it had vanished. This worries me as it takes just 5 simple ingredients to make a perfect batch. Here's the list:

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1.5 tsp water
almonds about a cup
chocolate pieces

Melt butter, sugar, and water in a heavy pan over medium high heat.
When mixture begins to boil stir constantly with a wooden spoon for 5 minutes or until bubbling gooeyness is a caramel color..
Pour over nuts placed on a parchment lined baking tray.
Cover with chocolate (I use chocolate chips most of the time-about 12 ounces).
As chocolate melts spread evenly over toffee.
Cool in fridge.
Snap into pieces and eat-or like the infamous Benson's give as holiday gifts or party favors

I Miss My Thumb - A Sucker's Lament

When I was a little girl I was a relentless thumbsucker. I like to blame my beloved Mother who nursed me mere months when compared to nursing babiest brother 'til just prior to grad school. Well Mama, it seemed that way to me!

Then I grew up, had a son, and experienced the knife in the heart that is the self-weaning (at 14 months!) babe. My best beloved, my wee boy had given up all but his last night time feeding and one day, as I coaxed him to latch on, he looked up at me and very patiently said, "No Mama." Like a little, ever so patient god. Crappage. As you can see dear reader Red Tara, I have yet to let it go...much like that now grown baby boy.

We have discussed my hanging on problem before. So, here I will impart my tried and true methods of self-comfort for those times when life pokes you in the eye and says "boogerface" or "gobshite". These simple, good things have replaced my much maligned thumb (my parents insist it was the reason for my expensive orthodontia-I say that was dodgey genes) with their magical powers to infuse my soul with the calm. They are relatively free of vice and whilst somewhat addictive, not controlled substances by any stretch of your highly elastic imagination.

This month has been especially hellacious for me and for many people I love. I hit the wall a week or so ago and have been in a fugue state for many days- hence, I have no memory of how I have passed the time. From the red and puffy eyes, I assume crying was involved.

What finally brought me to my senses was a day of laundry (the disorganized person's quick fix), reading, sugar n' cream cotton yarn in the "Playtime" combo, and Ina's Lemon Cake recipe...throw in a few gallons of Stumptown coffee and I am almost restored to my former glory.

I really enjoyed the book So Late, So Soon by D'Arcy Fallon. I read it all in one quick bash. All my life I have had wicked bad dreams about musty beach houses and fanatical Christians. I think we can attribute this to, in no small part, my 2 years of OMSI sleep away Marine Biology camp in North Bend where every other group passing the rainy summer days was made up of "Christian Youth". We OMSI types were the unwashed, hippie element their parents had warned them about. They were vocal in their superiority, fear, and loathing of us. I heard no less than 3 adult counselors tell groups of roving christian young'uns to "Stay away from those kids. They're from OMSI!"

My parents neglected to read the fine details of the camp (this happened frequently in my youth and when I bring up the inevitable, ensuing traumatic experience-because I have a hard time "letting go" not having been a raging stoner or free love advocate- I am constantly reminded by both of them, "Hey! It was the 70's!Let it go!") and thus I was a very innocent 9 and 10 year old hanging out in the back of the bus with real live, non-innocent early 1970's teenagers! I've never recovered. I couldn't smoke a joint until I had graduated from college-and people, I lived in Eugene Oregon! In the 70! I graduated from the U of O in the 80's! I went to Grateful Dead shows, the Oregon Country fair, and a theater cast party with Ken Kesey-well, not with Ken Kesey, but he was there!!!

As the youngest in the group at Camp Arago, I was in charge of feigning illness or hysterical homesickness anytime one of the counselors started investigating the wild giggling in our cabin a little too closely. I was often laughed right out of the drippy, mildewy cabin for suggesting that we actually go down to the slough and investigate the collison of the fresh/saltwater ecosystems that were, at that very moment, colliding! Or that we hang out at low tide and count sea anemones.


I feel lucky to have survived. It was a trial and a feat I do not completely understand, for I had no easily accessible comfort. My thumb had long since lost its magic. I had finished my 45th reading of my beloved Misty of Chincoteague.


The commissary served fruit for dessert. Every. Freakin'. Night. I had yet to discover the comforts of tea and coffee and drink. And, saddest of all, I had no yarn, no needles! When you are a maker, e-h.s. (empty-hand syndrome) is a dread state.

In retrospect the only thing that actually saved my poor little soul was a scheduled laundry trip to the Pony Village Shopping Mall.I knew it lay just ahead of me, so near. Just two more days. Now just one more.

There, I was able to restore some brief but blissful freshness to my clothes, which smelled just as D'Arcy Fallon describes the just washed cotton sheets fresh from the dryers at her Northern Californian Christian commune - Moldy and Damp. I could buy some pens and a sketch book with which to draw. And it was there, at the majestic Pony Village Mall, that I discovered MASCARA, specifically Brown Tussy mascara. OMG! Make up! The thrill of it took my mind off of the disturbing sight of my fellow splotch-afflicted campers french kissing indiscriminately, every where I looked.

I spent the rest of that summer at camp practicing my mascara technique, drawing pictures of holothurians, and hiding from the uncool boys who were confused and hormonal enough to mistake a prepubescent girl for a potential summer lover. I remained chaste. With MASSIVE lashes...truly endless. Poor boys. It must have been such a painful, unrequited kind of desire what with my groovy, raccoon-like mascaraed eyes and all.

However, now as a truly growed-up woman, mascara, like my beloved thumb, has lost most of it's magical powers to soothe. So, in any existential crise, I now rely on the baking of things (with butter), obsessive, indiscriminate reading (which I refer to as literary prozac), and knitting bias cloths out of cotton yarn. Bliss. And, also, more productive most days than sleeping, which has always been my go-to, get outta your head method of self-care.

First, you must bake something wonderful like Ina's Triple Lemon Drizzle Cake.

Here's the drizzle part that you drench the cake with before it cools: Sugary, lemony, and warm...sometimes I drizzle a little in my tea too. See the little lemon peels?No? Ah well, once I learn to use my new camera all will become clear-er.

Then, while the cake cools you whip out your trusty number 7's

Hey RT I want these for Christmas!!!

and some cotton yarn ( I prefer the natural color for face cloths, but sometimes a girl needs a serious jolt of color), and follow this age-old pattern known by many names such as the Eyelet Wash Cloth, Bias Knit Cloth, and Granny's Favorite Dishcloth:

Cast on 4
Knit 4
Knit 2 Yarn Over Knit to end
Repeat until you have the width of the cloth you desire (between 40 and 48ish)
Decrease - Knit 1 Knit 2 Together Yarn Over Knit 2 Together Knit to end
Keep going until you are down to four stitches on your needle
Bind off

If you want to make a loop for hanging, crochet a short chain with the yarn tail.

There is a lovely recipe for this pattern here.

You wind up with a beautiful square that has an eyelet border.



Which you can then employ to cover your delicious lemon cake whilst it cools.


Then you should make a big, hot pot of tea or a giant mug of coffee and you will have comfort at hand.


Throw in a good read, a warm dog draped across your feet, some sweet music and you have comfort. Almost as good as the memory of that old thumb....

Now that I am back in the saddle, it's on to fall yard clean-up, fixing the slippery stairs, and planting thousands of bulbs! But first, a weekend in Reno (the biggest little city in the world) with family to celebrate my obnoxious father's retirement and move to Ouray. Cheers!

P.S. I feel it is only fitting to close with the obvious comfort-ne joy! of being right (as in correct or just). Evidently Senator Wyden, on Tuesday (obviously after reading my blog), came out in support of a public option. I am now ready to re-evaluate our relationship. I feel the love people. I feel the love.

As those born in the wilds of the high Sierra and/or Cascadians are want to exclaim, "Yreka!"

This post is all about Cherry Clafoutis and me.Well, not so much me as the cherry clafoutis. What could be more delicious dear reader?

Once again, my magic new-old pinny makes an appearance- its super pinny powers intact.

Our adventure begins with your intrepid cook hand-pitting cherries...a couple pounds of cherries...with a pairing knife and her thumbnail. Thumb, new-old pinny, kitchen counter, and face all stained red.

Almost as red as my big red kitchen. It was so worth it.

Behold one of the many kitchen altars and icons:

I have never buttered and sugared a baking pan before. I highly recommend it. The effect is almost psychadelic. I will explain directly. But first, let us continue with the recipe at hand.

Did you know that the 2009 Pantone color of the year is Mimosa?I am loving yellow right now.

First live action KitchenAid shot ever.
You can not make it out at all.
You are welcome.

Perhaps if you click on the picture below to enlarge it, you will feel the whippy thrill that is my beloved KitcheAid's best feature.

No? Oh well. It is meant to depict the whipping of the 3 (I used 4 because my eggs were not XL just L, cage free) eggs and 1/2 cup sugar for 3 minutes. Followed by the gentle blending of the rest of the ingredients, which included a heaping tablespoon of this:

because I did not have any brandy - pear, cherry, or otherwise. I splashed in some vanilla too. Maybe a couple of teaspoons. Six tablespoons flour. A pinch of salt. And a cup and a half of cream. Have Mercy! I think everything from heavy whipping cream to 2% milk would work for those of you with healthy arteries playing at home. Then the grated rind of one lemon. Ah my kingdom for a microplane like Martha's!

Rested briefly.

Then poured joyfully into my buttered and sugared blue pyrex baking dish (that I did not lick, despite a horrible compulsion to do so) which I had filled with cherries (about 2 cups worth) and the mere sight of which had the power to send me back in time to Lisa Trumbo's Mom's kitchen where sandwiches were always either Miracle Whip on White or Butter and Sugar on White. If my health conscious Mother had known the illicit thrill I had with each bite knowing how horrified she would be!

But I digress...often.

Baked in a preheated oven at 375 degrees for 40 minutes.

Here it is ta da!

Wait!

I almost forgot the powdered sugar. That's caster sugar and/or icing sugar to my imaginary friends in the UK.

Viola! et Voila!

There's that lovely pinny again. Thanks Mama!

I dished up a plate of hot cherries and eggy, custardy goodness. Ah, so soothing, the creamy texture, the still slightly crisp, juicy cherries, the sweet sugar crustiness of it all.

Yreka!

I have discovered the perfect recipe for a cool fall- sleep in late, make brunch for someone you love, consume, no devour! with hot, creamy coffee- day. And sigh.

"Fall!?", you, dear reader, may say incredulously. "Certainly Bings are not available in the fall?"

To that I say, "Bah Humbug!" or better yet, as an honorary (read imaginary once again-because I picked horse 4-H instead) Girl Guide, "Be prepared."

I froze a passle o'bings for future use. The original recipe was for a Pear Clafoutis, so I will adapt seasonally once the cherries bag out.


As for today...

I ate 2 more plates. Now I have 3 new things:

1. My new/old Pinny from me mum.
2. A bad tummy ache from over-indulgence.
3. This delectable, new recipe thanks to Alicia and Ina.

So, dear reader, would you like the recipe? Yes you would? O.K. here you go: