Xmas Cookies!

Fifty-Five Dozen Xmas Cookies

What can you say when you bake Xmas cookies for 15 hours? Your brain is so numb that you really have nothing to say, unless it is something that you can say WITH COOKIES.

Every year for at least the last 12 or so, I have baked a ridiculous amount of cookies to give away for Xmas. I mean truly ridiculous. But I always wish I had MORE because I can think of like TEN more people I would like to give cookies to. Oh well, they are SOL, for this year at least!

My main and basic cookies that I always make are in what my husband calls “The Boring Cookie” category; I think of them more as classics: Sugar Cookies and GInger Cookies. I use recipes that are from my mother’s WW2-era cookbook. (The Woman’s Home Companion Cookbook). I also usually make a recipe of Coconut-Orange Rolled cookies, and Oatmeal Raisin, and Chocolate Chip, and M&M cookies. This year I decided to try a few new recipes as well: Sand Tarts, Lemon Poppyseed Crisps, Chocolate Pistachio Crackletops, and Peanut Butter No-Bake Cookies (Mr. T’s request)

I am so sleepy that I think I have to just post the gorgeous pictures of the cookies, and then REVIEW the new recipes one at a time for you.

Really Good Ginger Cookies, cut in the shape of Maple Leaves

The First Batch: AND SO IT BEGINS... Chocolate Chip Cookies

Oatmeal Raisin

Chocolate Pistachio Crackletops

That’s enough pictures for one post; I will save the rest for the COOKIE RECIPE REVIEWS!

Tortilla Soup: Your Post-Thanksgiving Reward

A Rainy, Damp, Chilly Day. Perfect for MAKING SOUP!

There is not a home cook among us who doesn’t use the turkey carcass to make stock, so this is less about, “Hey! You can make stock out of your Turkey Bones!!” than, “Here is an awesome soup to make with your stock!”

I don’t know what it is about living in Texas, but you get to a point where food just isn’t satisfying unless it has Jalapeno peppers (or some kind of hot peppers) in it. If it’s not spicy, it’s not quite….satisfying. Because of this phenomenon, regular old turkey soup, while perfectly nice, just isn’t as requested as Tortilla Soup.

To make the stock, I submerged my Turkey carcass in water in my biggest stockpot, and added a quartered huge white onion, all the celery trimmings I saved from making cream cheese stuffed celery on Thanksgiving (okay, it was Jalapeno Cream Cheese stuffed Celery!), all the carrots in my fridge that were still left from the May harvest (yes they last that long, and the ones you are buying in the store very well MIGHT be that old too) and let’s see….what else? Oh I threw in a bunch of parsley because I have a lot in the garden right now. Then I simmered the stock for four hours or so, let it cool, strained it with one of those kitchen implements that looks like a dunce cap, and stored it in the icebox for a few days. I seldom make soup on the same day as stock, because making stock in enough of an effort for one day. Also, fat removal is much easier with cold stock.

While the Stock simmers, the house fills up with the rich aroma and the kitchen windows steam up

The Stock simmers on the Stove

To make the soup:

Now, soup is kinda like PIE. You really don’t have to actually MEASURE anything. As usual, all my measurements are rough and your soup will not be RUINED if you use two onions instead of one, or if you think it might be fun to add some beans. (If you add BLACK beans though, drain and rinse them first!)

You will need:

Stock

Some Turkey Meat you cut off the carcass before making the stock. If there was NO meat left on your turkey carcass, you can use a boneless chicken breast or two; cook them in a pan and set aside, reserving the fond. (To put in the soup!)

Frozen Organic Corn (any corn that you buy in a supermarket, unless marked organic (and they NEVER sell that around here, and sweet corn will not grow here either) COULD BE that new scary SCARY GE corn that has PESTICIDE in it’s DNA: that’s right, it is engineered to Make it’s Own Pesticide. Which should concern you, because Pesticide is one of the things that really DOES cause breast cancer. Monsanto SUX! THX for RUINING fresh corn for me.)

A big White Organic Onion

Hot peppers! I used Poblanos from the garden I picked before the first freeze. I used four. If you don’t like your food spicy, only use one. Or you could use one jalapeno, or one serrano. Whatever’s handy!

You could use a tomato if you want

Corn Tortillas, two per person (For the above mentioned reason, I use organic corn tortillas. THE BEST KIND are the SPROUTED ORGANIC CORN tortillas. OMG! They have like three times the amazing flavor of regular corn tortillas! I buy them at Whole Foods, and I always have a few packages in the freezer, so that I always have them on hand.

a heat-tolerant cooking oil like Canola, enough to cover the bottom of your cast-iron skillet

ripe avocado (at least 1/2 an avocado per person)

A bunch of CILANTRO

Some cloves of Garlic

A Lime

The Soup in the Pot

Chop up the onion and the hot peppers. Skim some of the fat off of your cold, gelatinous stock, and put it in the bottom of your soup pot. Put the heat on Medium high. When the fat melts, add the onion and peppers and sautee in the turkey fat. When they look done and are soft, add the frozen corn, as much as you would like. I think I used the whole bag, but I had a LOT of STOCK! Add  the stock.

Cook until the corn is no longer frozen. Add the tomato or beans if you are using them. While everything in the pot is coming up to temperature, pick the leaves off of the cilantro. Cilantro from the garden is always clean and doesn’t need washing, but if you bought it at the store, be sure and wash the cilantro to get the dirt off. Peel the garlic, slice finely and add. Add the leftover turkey (or the chicken and fond) cut into appropriately sized pieces. When the soup has come to a boil, turn it off, and add all but a handful of the cilantro. Cover the soup.

In your cast iron skillet, heat up the oil. When it is hot, fry up 2 tortillas per person (one at a time). When you remove each fried tortilla to a paper towel, salt it heavily. When all are fried, turn off the heat and direct your attention to the avocado.

Peel and slice the avocado. Since I was eating my soup alone, I used THE WHOLE AVOCADO in my bowl of soup. If there are others around, you will need to divide the avocado evenly among the bowls.

Here you see the Tortillas and the Avocado sitting in the bowl, awaiting the soup to be ladled over them

Into each soup bowl, place one torn up fried tortilla and one portion of avocado. Ladle the soup over them, then add the other torn-up tortilla and some fresh cilantro leaves. Then, at the very last, squeeze a little lime into the bowl.

Although it is hard to say what EXACTLY is the Best Soup Ever, Tortilla Soup is one of the HEAVYWEIGHT CONTENDERS! I would also nominate: Portuguese Kale Soup, French Onion Soup, Tom Kha Ki (Thai Coconut Soup), Really good Clam Chowder that you make yourself, Gumbo, and possibly Minestone.

TORTILLA SOUP!

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Will the Eggplant Excitement Never Stop?! or, Indian Potato and Brinjal Curry

Cubed potato, quartered Brinjals, and finely diced tomato all await MY PLEASURE

One of the first cookbooks I ever owned (in fact it might be THE first one I ever owned, that wasn’t really my Mom’s) is a book called A FAMILY HARVEST, that I bought (I believe) at a St-Lukes-On-the-Lake book sale when I was in High School. It is so totally old and out-of-print that nothing even comes up on Google for it; I could find it on my bookcase right now except I WOULD HAVE TO STAND UP.

In A FAMILY HARVEST, one of the dishes is a curry, the kind of curry made by British people in the 1880′s, then passed down in an American’s family for a few generations. I never made the dish, and who knows? it might have been good. But the thing that interested me about the recipe is that the curry is supposed to be accompanied by something called “boys” (not cooked young male humans though) which sound like a bunch of different condiments and dried fruits, and one of the “boys” is chopped up hard-boiled eggs.

The author writes about this curry as though everybody’s family eats Curry with Boys, like it is a perfectly normal thing on the family menu. It is a really nice cookbook.

Fresh cilantro, picked before COVERING THE GARDEN again

So, tonight, as I was contemplating what kind of Eggplant dish I should make with the NEXT ten Brinjals (is that even the right word?), I ran across a recipe that showed an Indian eggplant and potato curry served up with a hard-boiled egg!! Like in the Cookbook!

Sauteeing onions, mustard seed and cumin seed in coconut oil.

So I made it. First of all, it came out G*R*E*A*T and I highly recommend this curry to anyone who would like to try it. Because it is someone else’s recipe, I think the thing to do is to LINK to the website I found the recipe on, and drive traffic there. HERE is the recipe (and the photo with the egg.)

I didn’t have all the ingredients, so instead of using coconut powder, I used coconut milk; instead of using garlic ginger cilantro paste, I used fresh ginger and cilantro. What else? Oh, I used prepared red curry paste instead of red chile powder.

I used my coffee grinder to grind the poppyseeds. It was interesting, it made a kind of seed paste, like a black peanut butter. I learned in MARTHA STEWARTS COOKIE BOOK, that poppyseeds are very fast to go stale and taste rancid, so always buy small amounts when you are planning to use poppyseeds, and then use them all up.

My Dinner, served with a Hard-Boiled Egg. Then I ate a bowl of Waxed Gourds.

Book Review: Sweety Pies

Here is a Cookbook review I did in the Chronicle for a cookbook with great pie recipes. You know, it is usual that I haven’t written about pies that much. I am THE PIE LADY. Probably because I have no wish to reveal all my recipes,  but after all I could just SHOW THE PICTURE, I don’t have to TELL YOU HOW I MADE IT!  A few of the recipes I make are from this book though!

Note the PROFESSIONALISM of my writing when I am doing it for COLD HARD CASH.

Sweety Pies

By Patty Pinner

The Taunton Press (2007) 171 Pages

There is nothing else on Earth like the pink glaze of a Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie clinging to the last shard of flaky, fluted crust, or the piles of breathtaking meringue crowning a tart Key Lime Pie.  A home baked pie is one of the things that actually make people happy, yet eating one is an experience that grows increasingly rare for most Americans. The art of pie-baking is in danger of being lost; how many times have you heard someone lament that they “just can’t make piecrust”?

In the small, Mayberry-like town of Saginaw Michigan, before the Second World War, pie baking was considered an essential womanly art: one of the many “strings to a woman’s bow”. The pillbox-hat-wearing, church-going, soul-food-cooking ladies of Patty Pinner’s childhood took their pie-making very seriously, and Ruth Pinner made sure that her daughter mastered the art. She passed along to her daughter not only her own skills and recipes, but also the best recipes of her friends and relations, which Ruth had diligently collected over the years.

In this captivating book, Patty Pinner remembers these mothers, aunts, neighbor-ladies and friends in colorful vignettes, and gives each woman’s premier pie recipe. Along with each recipe are truly inspiring photographs of each pie: no cookbook I have ever come across has managed to catalog so many varieties. Buttermilk Pie, Fresh Raspberry Pie, Peanut Butter Cream Pie, Rice Pie, Pumpkin-Coconut Pie, Tangerine Meringue Pie, and 64 other kinds, each one a particular woman’s tour de force.

The recipes are clear, simple, and easy to use. Pinner also gives her mother’s excellent, extraordinarily rich and flaky pie-crust recipe, as well as useful instructions on the shaping and decorating of pies. If your life suffers from inadequate amounts of home-baked pie, this book is the remedy.

We are going to be trying a Lot of Eggplant Recipes Around Here

Chopped up eggplants, red and orange Thai chiles, garlic, fish sauce and sugar, and holy basil

How many Green Thai Eggplants are in that last photo? There were TWENTY-FIVE. Because there are so many of them, I used the internet to look up recipes specifically for this variety of eggplant (usually termed “Brinjal”). I discovered that when I tried them this summer, when they first fruited, I was using over-ripe ones. When the seeds within are black and huge, the eggplants are bitter and SUCK. You are supposed to use them when the seeds are STILL WHITE!

So perhaps I will plant them again, because when you use them under-ripe, they are very , VERY good. They hold their shape under the duress of cooking better than other eggplants, and they have a softer, more melting quality (as opposed to “sorta slimy”.) Since I picked all of these small and because of the SNOW AND FREEZE, I am pretty sure they are ALL under-ripe; i.e.  Usable.

Tonight I went to the art show and private party/opening of local artist Valerie Fowler, and due to a variety of circumstances, I hadn’t eaten from 11AM til 10 PM (I MEANT to cook this eggplant dish for myself for Lunch, or early dinner! But I never had time. AND, I REFUSED to eat anything ELSE, because, did I mention I NEED TO USE UP TWENTY-FIVE EGGPLANTS?

Leaves of Sacred Basil

That just doesn’t happen if you give in to the temptation to grab a burger in the midst of your errands. It takes RESOLVE.

So I came home from the party, which R*O*CK*E*D and it is the best party of my entire year (okay, it is usually the ONLY party of my year) because I pretty much know at least HALF of the people who go to it and THEY ARE ALL MY FRIENDS! Plus Valerie sold a lot of her art (she usually does) so it was Very Festive!

ANYWAY, then I came home and made Pud Makua Yow: Basil Eggplant. I made it really really fast, too, because I was about ready to eat my own ARM off by that point! As Thai dishes (that I have made) go, this is THE FASTEST!

(While I was making it, I thought: “GoshDarnIt, I always use just the smallest drop of fish sauce because Dave thinks it smells so terrible. But I am starving and I want to use the full amount, and I am GOING TO! I mean, maybe he won’t even notice and I am being overly cautious…”

The second I added the fish sauce/sugar mixture, Dave came careening into the kitchen going, “WHAT IS THAT SMELL?!?!? OMIGOD     IT SMELLS LIKE DIRTY WHORE CROTCH!!      WHORE CROTCH!! WHORE CROTCH!!    How can you EAT that?!?!?!?”

["How can you eat that?!?"  being a not-uncommon remark from my vegetarian husband who hates food so much that he wishes "they just made a pill" so he would never have to eat again. Because the very idea of most foods is so revolting! "Mushrooms are a FUNGUS! Like athlete's foot! How could you eat a FUNGUS?"]

Later in the evening he respectfully requested that I NOT cook with fish sauce when he is home. So, heh, I guess I was right to be cautious in the past. Oh, and warning: fish sauce, it DOES smell kinda bad when you add it to the pan! And speaking of which, How does HE know what dirty whore crotch smells like?)

This dish is very easy and I make it a LOT, because I  have sacred basil and hot chiles (and eggplant) in my garden about 6 months of the year, if not more.

See it Simmer in the Pan

Here is the recipe:

BASIL EGGPLANT ( PUD MAKUA YOW)

1	tablespoon	vegetable oil
1	bunch	Thai basil, leaves picked from the stem
1	tablespoon	sugar
2	cloves	garlic, chopped
2	tablespoons	fish sauce
2		eggplants
2		chili peppers

Slice the eggplants into irregular shapes for easy turning in the pan. When it is sliced into a small disk, it tends to stick to the bottom of the pan and makes it difficult to flip or turn.

Chop garlic and slice chili peppers. Pick the leaves from the stem of the Thai basil.

Heat a pan or wok over high or medium high. Add oil, chili peppers and garlic. Stir until the garlic turn golden brown. Add eggplant and stir. Add a cup of water and cover the pan or wok with a lid. Keep the lid close until the eggplant is cooked. It should take about 5-7 minutes before the eggplant is done. The eggplant turns from white to translucent when it is done. Almost all of the water should have been evaporated at this point. If the eggplant is still not cooked, add a little bit more water and keep lid closed until the eggplant is ready. Add fish sauce and sugar and stir. Add Thai basil and quickly stir to heat the basil, so that it retains it color. Turn off heat immediately.

Serve hot with rice.

Don't the red peppers and bright green basil make it look pretty? It was EXTRAORDINARILY delicious, too.

Snow and Thai Green Eggplants and Purple Basil and Thai Chiles and Snow

Mostly Green Thai Eggplants, called Brinjals

IT IS SUPPOSED TO SNOW TONIGHT.

For the Non-Texan among you, this is REALLY UNHEARD OF. Texas is very, very large and it DOES regularly snow in North Texas, but I am in Central Texas where you plant citrus trees in the GROUND. Of course the snow will melt when it hits the ground, because it was 70˚ here 2 days ago; but STILL:  SNOW!

Strangely  (in my limited SNOW! experience anyway), there is not supposed to be a Freeze tonight. The low is supposed to be 35˚. So I don’t have to cover the garden tonight. Tomorrow night though: they are predicting 22˚, meaning, I will be spending hours covering the garden TOMORROW and putting a heater into the $25 greenhouse.

I did, however, run around and pick the few remaining nightshades. In this really lovely photo you see: Purple Basil, Green Thai Eggplants, Poblanos, Thai Chiles, 3 Tangerines, and a Meyer lemon. I didn’t realize I had so MANY Green eggplants! They have huge seeds and I won’t be planting them again, I have found them too hard to cook with compared to the Japanese ones. But now I have to try to cook SOMETHING out of them, because, look, they are so pretty and I have so MANY!