I'll Have the Salad

“Don’t you have a blog to tend to?” Wink asked in a recent thread on the OT. I forget what exactly I had done to annoy her, but I find that sometimes simply posting while elderly is enough to clue my juniors into the fact that they are not going to be young forever, either. At any rate, she is right, of course, but I have been facing blogger’s block, if there is such a thing.

A few days later, in that day’s lunch thread*, a new poster responded to someone’s mulling over whether to have a salad with the words, “No good story ever started with ‘I’ll have the salad’.”

“Has any good story ever started with, “I’ll have the steak?” I asked. Back in my day, calling someone a “meat and potatoes man” (and it was never a “meat and potatoes woman”, because she was having the salad) was a way of describing him as manly but unadventurous. A man’s man, but in the sense that he drank and cussed and knew how to fix the plumbing, not in the sense that he could make his way through a new country and blend in with the inhabitants while eluding spies. “Plenty of them,” our new poster (whose name abbreviates to SOS) maintained. So being the literal minded soul I am, I asked for titles and authors.

Of the ensuing spat let me just say that it turned out that SOS meant that no adventures start with safe choices, and that he backed down graciously when another poster told him that I have a blog about salad, so that I didn’t like to see salad disrespected. I bumped into SOS a little later on a thread about the upcoming New Orleans Jazz fest, and had to tease him that one year we had gone both weekends with a Danish foreign exchange student, “who (and I am not making this up) loved to make salads.” At this point SOS decided that maybe it was better to say, “No good story ever started with ‘I’ll have the soup’.”

But this led to my asking myself, if by story we mean someone’s personal narrative and not a written story, then how do we decide where the story started? Since my last post was penguin pictures taken in Antarctica, let’s take that story as an example. I first came to the realization I could go to Antarctica when I got a brochure for an Antarctic cruise from my alumni association, but my interest in the White Continent was piqued years earlier, when I read the book, Mind Over Matter: The Epic Crossing of the Antarctic Continent, by Sir Ranulph Fiennes. I subsequently read a few other books by Sir Ranulph and think I can safely say that he probably never started an adventure with the words, “I’ll have the salad.” Perhaps the words, “That explosion was a little more powerful than I intended,” but not, “I’ll have the salad.”

However, reading the book did not leave me with a concrete plan for getting myself to Antarctica, and I had pretty much forgotten it by time the cruise brochure arrived in the mail, a few months before our fifth and last foreign exchange student, Laura, arrived at our door. I looked it over, wondering how I could convince my husband to go, and how I could convince Laura’s parents to let us take her along. Laura solved the latter problem by asking to go to another host family, but before she moved on, we took her out to dinner at a nearby restaurant. We had to sit and wait for a table, and the person waiting opposite me was holding a menu, with the desserts prominently displayed on the back. I must have been on a diet back then, because I grumped about being confronted with pictures of gooey desserts. Laura promptly placed her hand between me and the pictures, saying, “So” with her usual Gallic charm.

It took three years, but I date that dinner as the beginning of my story of how we went to Antarctica. That means, that yes, my adventure began with the words, “I’ll have the salad.”

Remains of our salad at La Nazarenas, Buenos Aires

*There are three daily threads that are referred to as IM threads: the Good Morning Thread, the Lunch Thread, and the LNST (Late Night Snack Thread). That’s why I find myself drawn to the OT. It is the hangout for bigots, MRA’s, would-be PUA’s, fat-shamers, slut-shamers, and assorted types who are different from me, but this ongoing habit of checking in with each other every morning, noon, and night is kind of, well, there is no other word for it, sweet.

The Cake, Finally

So how hard could it be, I ask myself. The first day of the big Opera Cake Project went well, with even the buttercream frosting that started out looking like a disaster turning out well in the end. All I needed to do was make the sponge cake, make the glaze, which was just melting chocolate and adding in the butter I had already clarified, and assembling the cake. So what could go wrong?

Where to start, where to start. Let’s start with the jelly roll pans. I needed two the same size, 10 by 15 inches. I have two of different sizes, with the smaller one being close in size to what I needed. This meant I had to bake the first layer, turn it out to cool, clean the pan, bake the second layer. Not a big problem, but I elected to eyeball the division of batter in half rather than measuring exactly how much I had. I chose poorly. The first layer was thicker than the second. Since the middle layer is actually the two ends left over when you cut a 10 by 10 inch square from the two layers you bake, that difference in thickness is not trivial. Oh, well, I had lots of ganache to balance out any unevenness.

An even bigger problem was that I forgot to add the three tablespoons of melted butter to the batter, and didn’t realize it until layer one was in the oven. I pulled it out, stirred half of the butter into the batter in the bowl and the other half into the still liquid batter in the pan. The only problem is, the batter wasn’t really half and half.

But the ganache and the filling were perfect, and then there was the espresso syrup, so there would be lots of flavor, right? As the cake cooled, I kept saying to myself, “Remember to brush the espresso syrup on each layer before you put on the filling.” 

So guess what I saw on the counter as I got ready to put the top layer on the cake? The unused the espresso syrup. At least the top layer got some. A lot.

Okay, so with the cake assembled, except for the glaze, it needed to chill for an hour (and so did I). That should have given the top layer of buttercream a chance to harden up so it wouldn’t blend with the chocolate glaze. Should have. Didn’t quite. The top of the cake looks like chocolate peanut butter.

I still have hopes for it tasting okay. The buttercream, ganche and glaze all taste delicious. They should, that’s where the almost pound of butter and almost pound of chocolate all went.

By lunchtime today, I should know.

Next time anyone hears me say, “How hard could it be,” please just shoot me.

ETA: despite all my best efforts to mess it up, the cake tasted great, kind of like tiramisu. Everyone loved it. Still not sure I'd make it again.

I need to trim the cake and move to a serving platter before I take it to the luncheon.

Trimmed up, ready to go

Not the Aria, Yet

Remember my post about opera cake? The one in which I reminded myself that people go to school to learn to make cakes like that and then decided to bake one, anyway? I finally have an occasion to make one, coming up on Saturday. We are having our UMW general meeting and annual membership meeting, and Day’s End Circle (me and my posse) have to bring desserts.

I have already been heavily involved in the upcoming meeting in that I volunteered myself to find a speaker. I found a historical interpreter who has worked on bus tours for the riverboats that come down the Mississippi and who is charging us what I consider a modest sum to speak to us in character and demonstrate how women dressed in the 1800’s. Nonetheless, as there aren’t too many of us in circle, I felt like I needed to contribute a dessert as well, and what better time to tackle the opera cake? (Other than after I finish cooking school, the pastry division.)

To review: the cake consists of three layers of almond sponge cake, each brushed with espresso syrup, then filled with coffee buttercream alternating with chocolate ganache, and topped with more buttercream and a chocolate glaze. Altogether it uses almost a pound of butter and 14 ounces of bittersweet chocolate. 

So today I did the shopping and then made the items that can be made in advance: the espresso syrup, clarified butter for the chocolate glaze, the chocolate ganache, and the buttercream frosting.

The syrup, butter, and ganache were easy. I had never clarified butter before, but the ghee I buy at the Indian store is too salty for baking, and it wasn’t hard to do myself. Sugar syrup and ganache I have made before.

I’ve made buttercream frosting before, too, but this is not your standard cream-butter-and-confectioner’s-sugar-then-add-flavoring-and-milk frosting. No, this one starts out with boiling sugar, water and vanilla to 255 degrees Fahrenheit (the hard ball stage) then letting it cool slightly while beating one egg plus a yolk. However long slightly is, I seem to have exceeded it, because when it came time to pour the syrup in a slow stream into the beaten eggs, I soon found I was scraping up a powdery mixture and beating it into the eggs instead. Things didn’t look much more promising when I added the dissolved espresso powder. The next step was to beat in 14 tablespoons of room temperature butter, one tablespoon at a time. I think the room temperature they had in mind was a lot cooler than my house, because the butter was rapidly becoming soupy as I frantically cut and tossed.

I reminded myself of Backup Plan One: make a batch of ordinary vanilla buttercream frosting with espresso powder tossed in for flavoring. (Backup Plan Two was buying a can of some appropriate looking frosting at the Winn-Dixie.)

As I was watching the dismal failure congeal under the beaters something strange began to happen. Bits of pale, fluffy looking peaks began to appear in the unpromising mess. Pretty soon, half of the mess began looking like frosting, and then the whole thing looked glossy and held soft peaks.

It worked!

So tomorrow I need to grind two cups of blanched almonds, make two 15” x 10” sponge cakes (to be cut into two 10 x 10 inch squares plus two 5 by 10 inch squares which together become the middle layer), make the chocolate glaze, and assemble the whole thing.

Now, how hard can that be?

Baking

I seem to have developed an unexpected streak of energy in recent weeks. It’s been a little over two years since I retired, and I never followed through on my initial plans for what I was going to do in retirement. Oh, I did start an exercise program, which led to my broken foot. Having a broken foot sidetracked other plans, and then I managed to re-injure it last summer. Still, there are tasks like sorting through old photographs that can easily be done sitting down, so that is hardly an excuse.

Even though I didn’t make any resolutions this new year, however, I have been tackling tasks that I had previously declared a vague intention to do whenever I felt guilty about being a lazy slob. I have a housework schedule that I have been following weekly (although I have had a cooking and laundry schedule that I have followed for years, so it hasn’t been all sitting around eating bonbons.) I’ve also been tackling one big cleaning project a week. This week it was clearing off the kitchen counters and giving them a good scrubbing, and then putting back only the most necessary items.

I have joined a group from church in volunteering at a food pantry we support.

And then I have been doing odds and ends just for the fun of it, like baking. I used to love to bake, when I was younger and more energetic. Mostly I made bread, but I did make cakes and pies, too. I didn’t often make cookies, but while going through the pantry last week, I discovered some Ghirardelli white baking chips (the kind they used to call white chocolate chips), some chopped pecans, and brown sugar, and they just seemed to scream “cookies!” There was even a recipe on the back of the baking chips bag for white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies. I only had pecans, but what were the Ghirardelli folks going to do if I made a substitution, sue me?

Somewhere along the way I recalled why I rarely make cookies. (Christmas wasn’t that long ago. You would think I’d remember.) Mixing up cookie dough is easy, especially with my trusty stand mixer. Baking the stupid things is what takes forever. I had cut the recipe in half and still had to shuffle four baking pans in and out of my oven, since I wasn’t sure how far the dough was going to spread and I don’t trust the bottom rack of my oven not to burn anything. Even if I had a wider oven with better heat distribution, I hate repetitive tasks like dropping batter from a spoon. I’d much rather bake a pie. For instance, that night for dinner I made chicken pot pies with leftover roast chicken, but even easier is pecan pie.

Pecan pie is the easiest because you can buy the pecans already shelled and halved. Canned apples don’t have the same just-as-good-as fresh flavor as shelled pecans do. Pie dough takes a little more effort to whip up than batter, but not much, and all you need to do once it’s mixed is roll it out and fit it to the pan. The custard for the pie only takes measuring and stirring, except that you do have to melt butter, which is hardly a chore. Every time I bake pecan pie for my husband, whose favorite it is, I feel like the wife in the old Rice Krispies commercial who used to pretend it took hours to make her Rice Krispies Treats and then got taken out for dinner. I use a traditional old recipe followed by generations of southern women. It’s on the back of the Karo syrup bottle.

Since yesterday was Valentine’s Day and we had decided to put off dining out until next week, when the restaurants are less crowded, I decided to make us a special dinner, including the pecan pie. I actually got up early to bake the pie, making it seem extra virtuous. 

One thing I discovered a year ago that makes pie baking even easier is Crisco baking sticks. It’s the familiar shortening packaged in sticks, like butter but larger, with convenient measuring lines marked along the sides of the packaging. I first bought them when I found a recipe for Logan’s Roadhouse style rolls and it called for a small amount of butter flavored shortening. Not wanting to buy a large can for a few tablespoons, I bought the sticks instead.

And never made the rolls. The Crisco sticks sat until I needed some for baking and what was left in the old can we had smelled suspiciously rancid. Now I don’t think I will buy anything else. The sticks stay wrapped and away from the air, unlike a small amount of Crisco sitting in a can, and opened ones can be refrigerated, so they don’t go bad nearly as quickly. Even after making the pot pies and the pecan pie, I still have some left.

Enough left to maybe, finally, make the rolls. Since I'm on one, anyway.

The Pantry

It has been two years since I retired, and I am finally getting myself a schedule. Okay, it is true, I have been on an exercise schedule of sorts, one day at the Y and one day walking, but I have been meaning to develop a housework schedule so my poor husband doesn’t wind up doing most of it, and to find some volunteer work to do.

So for the past several weeks I have used Wednesday (which has long been my laundry day) for dusting, cleaning mirrors, and cleaning the bathrooms. Alternate Fridays continue to be used for changing and laundering the bedding, and Thursdays are now special projects day. Special projects so far have included dusting all the ceiling fans, decluttering (for the 95th time) my office space, and just this past week, cleaning and reorganizing my pantry.

The pantry is actually the half of the laundry room opposite the washer and dryer. When I bought the house, half of that wall contained a closet and next to it was a niche that I suspect was meant for an upright freezer. I find closets inconvenient as pantries because the space to the sides of the door is hard to reach. So when we remodeled the kitchen, John tore out the closet and refinished the wall and ceiling. We had a base cabinet made to match the new kitchen cabinets, and topped it with a stock formica counter from the Home Depot. Above the base cabinet, which has two cabinets with pull-out trays and four drawers, are three stainless steel restaurant style shelves. Hanging from some sections of shelving are three wire baskets. 

My husband and I have different ideas about organization. My ideal pantry (freezer, refrigerator, desk drawer) contains enough empty space to allow me to see what I’m looking for and reach for it without knocking 6 other cans or jars to the floor. My husband sees empty space as a sign that something is missing. A large chunk of the history of our married life consists of my donating old books, knickknacks and clutter, admiring the now decluttered and decorative looking shelves for about ten minutes, and then finding my husband unpacking a box of books he had somewhere onto the newly freed up space. What can I say? He lives here, too.

Besides, it’s not as if I am a naturally neat person. While I can arrange my pantry or bookcase or desk to conform somewhat with my ideal, I have a bad habit of putting things down rather than away “until I get around to it”, and then having to do another major decluttering down the road. So it would be hypocritical of me to treat my husband as if he is the one responsible for all the clutter in our lives.

At any rate, since last Thursday was taken up with some other appointments, I tackled the pantry on Friday. I expected it to take me an hour. It took two and a half. On the other hand, I made more of an impact than I expected. For one thing, I went through the old cooking equipment and other unused cookware (like a fish mold I had been given for a gift) that had lived unmolested on the top shelf for a decade and either found new locations for it or put it in a donate pile. That freed up space for things we are willing to climb on the stepladder (conveniently located next to the dryer) to get: my Cephalon Dutch oven which I mostly use for soups and spaghetti sauce, large unopened jars of things like mayonnaise and ketchup, and extra cans of whatever we bought packed 12 cans at a time at Sam’s Club. I also put an unopened bottle of fish sauce and some cans of coconut milk, remnants of John’s days of Thai cooking, up there as well.

So now the countertop, which had been completely covered with bags, boxes, and my Dutch oven, is maybe only half covered. The cans of food are organized like with like. The pasta is all in one wire basket and the tea and Jello in another. I spent a lot of Friday afternoon standing in there, gazing.

My much used Dutch oven is the paprika colored thing at the top. Next to it is a spare box of coffee K-cups. On the second shelf down, the pancake syrups are on a large plate to catch drips.

Small jars go in the basket on the left, so they don't get lost behind large jars.

The wire basket holds snacks. The covered plastic containers hold crackers (top) and  the remaining Christmas snack items a nephew sent us (bottom). To the right of them, the bottles of oil and corn syrup are now on a tray to catch drips.

I'd be happier if that whole counter was clear, but at least there is now some space to drop groceries needing unpacking, to pack goods to donate, or to use that knife sharpener.

Yesterday I woke up with DOMS. The first time I saw that term I googled it and finally figured out that Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness was the meaning I wanted, but I learned a lot about . . . other things. I expected all the climbing up and down the step ladder to empty, scrub, and restock the shelves to make my legs sore, but I didn’t expect the scrubbing to leave me with a dull pain between my shoulder blades, which is still there today.

This is how you know you are out of shape: when less than three hours of housework leaves you feeling like you have done extended sets of overhead presses.

I think next week I’m just going to quietly sort through the linens. Sitting down.

Starts with "C"

One of the things that makes traveling in Britain so tricky for the US visitor is the language difference. One quickly gets used to calling an elevator a lift, but recognizing that what they call the first floor is what we would call the second floor is a bit trickier. Saying “pants” for “trousers” is mildly embarrassing, but don’t, no matter what else you do, call that purse that straps around your waist a “fanny pack”. Thank you, LL Bean, for the term “lumbar pack”.

Then there are biscuits. The English do not have what we in the US call biscuits. They have scones, much better than the scones we can get here in the US even before you slather them with clotted cream, and scones go quite well with tea, but I can’t see serving scones with ham and red eye gravy along with the breakfast eggs. In fact, I tried to explain to our traveling companions of last year what a US biscuit is, by describing it as a scone made without the sugar and egg. Put that way, however, it doesn’t sound delicious, it sounds nasty.

No, what the English mean by “biscuit” is what we here call cookies. We do use the word for one kind of cookie, called a tea biscuit, but that’s about it. English cookies strike me as all being a lot like our tea biscuits: small, less sweet than US cookies, and kind of crispy.

What I discovered on my recent trip, however, is that the British have discovered cookies, those big (4” in diameter or more), sweet, soft, chocolate chip or white chocolate and macadamia or cranberry and oatmeal cookies that are the staple of every US shopping mall food court, and what’s more, they call them cookies.  They still have their biscuits, of course, but the cookies are showing up in coffee shops, tea shops and restaurants, especially the restaurants you can find at tourist attractions like the Tower of London or Buckingham Palace.

I hate that we USians are exporting our worst food habits. Our better food habits (in my opinion), like crushed ice in drinks or the McIlhenny Company’s many tasty Tabasco seasonings, don’t seem to have made a dent in the old country, but our 1200 calorie meals and soup plate sized snacks have. Lord help us all.

On the other hand, if US cookies have made their way across the pond, can US biscuits be far behind? Not that they are any healthier, but I miss them when I’m over there. No matter how tasty the English scone is, you need a real biscuit to sop up gravy, like the gravy they serve with Sunday roast. There is a place for the US biscuit in England, I know there is.

But what will they call it?

Frittata

We've been trying to use up all the leftovers in the refrigerator this week. John made a cake over the weekend, so among the leftovers were three egg yolks, the whites having been used in the cake. We also had half a can of mushrooms, leftover from my making a mushroom gravy for the flank steak over the weekend, some crumbled bits of cheddar cheese, and some salsa saved from a trip to a Mexican restaurant last week.

The mushroom gravy was my variation on a recipe that my old microwave cookbook calls Bordelaise sauce. I finally looked up a recipe for Bordelaise sauce online and discovered that my microwave cookbook has been lying to me. Real Bordelaise sauce is made with bone marrow and shallots and sauce demi-glace. My microwave version is made with beef broth, butter , flour, red wine and a drop or two of Worcestershire. When I want to, I throw in mushrooms. I could make real Bordelaise sauce, if I ever found a marrow bone somewhere, but then I’d be too busy to cook the beef to go with it.

Although we did just get the rotisserie kit that goes with our big barbecue grill. I could probably get my husband to roast a haunch of beef on a spit while I make the sauce.

The big grill, which now has a rotisserie kit

Today, however, I’m trying to use up leftovers, not make more. So what do you do with egg yolks, mushrooms, cheese crumbles and salsa? Add three more whole eggs and make a frittata. 

My mom used to make potato and egg frittata when there was too much month left at the end of our money. She was a genius at being able to flip the frittata in the pan to cook the top. I have to use the broiler. Mom had several low cost recipes for the end of the month. Some of them I loved, like the potatoes and eggs and her homemade macaroni. Some of them were so-so, like spaghetti with broccoli. And some I dreaded, like pasta e fagioli, or as you may have heard it pronounced, pasta fazzool. 

I once tried making  pasta e fagioli as an adult. I had learned to like eggplant parmesan by making my own, so I thought maybe I’d like pasta e fagioli better if I made it myself. I spent hours cooking the beans, but when it came to making the pasta, I thought the better of it. I cooked up some rice and we had white beans and rice instead. They were delicious.

The frittata was easy. I whipped up the egg yolks, the whole eggs, some salt and pepper, and put them into a sizzling cast iron skillet in which I had melted some butter. Then I spread the mushrooms in and lifted the edges of the eggs as they cooked to let the liquid from the top run down to the pan. When it was almost cooked I sprinkled the cheese crumbles on top and slipped it into the broiler. I added the salsa when the top was almost set and put the pan back into the broiler to heat the salsa. John ate two helpings, so I guess it came out okay.

Chicken the Way My Mama Made It

John and I recently had the chance to shop at one of those big warehouse grocery stores that usually require you to be a member before they let you in the door. While there, we bought a giant pack of chicken wings because he loves to make hot wings. The wings are funny, however. They have a strange texture and don’t cook suitably for hot wings.

Since we still have a dozen left, I decided to use them for Chicken the Way My Mama Made It. That’s my name for it, I’m not sure mom called it anything.

I rarely make Chicken the Way My Mama Made It, because it is completely heart unhealthy. I tried one time making it with only chicken breasts, and it just doesn’t work. It needs the dark meat to make the pan juices that cook the chicken and give it flavor. So if you need a nice healthy recipe for the boneless, skinless chicken breasts in your freezer, this is not it. 

Ideally, what you need is the whole chicken, cut into serving pieces, but just thighs and legs would work nicely, too. You need a big, heavy pot with a lid and a stove with a low heat setting. I have one of those pricey Le Creuset Dutch ovens that was a Christmas gift, but a cheaper cast iron chicken fryer works just as well.*

You can flour the chicken lightly before browning, but you don’t need to. Season well with salt, pepper, and maybe a little paprika. 

Now, brown the chicken in enough olive oil to cover the pan bottom by about 1/8 inch or less. You need just enough to brown the chicken well and keep it from sticking until it starts producing its own juice, so you may have to eyeball it. In the last minute of browning, add a few cloves of garlic. I’d say 3 or 4, depending on size, but you might like more. (I have an online friend who substitutes a head of garlic for each clove called for in a recipe.) You can leave whole, cut it half, or sliver, so that you can remove it when the chicken is done cooking, but don’t chop unless you are okay with having the chopped garlic in the pan juices when you are done.

Add a bay leaf (two if they’re small), salt and pepper one more time, reduce the heat to as low as possible, cover the pan and cook until the meat begins to fall off the bones (an hour and a half, two hours maybe) and the skin is lightly caramelized.

It is important that the oil be olive oil. It doesn’t have to be the fancy extra virgin stuff. It’s actually better if it’s the heavy, fruity (cheap) kind, but it needs to be olive. It is also important that you use fresh garlic, but if you only have garlic salt or garlic powder in the house, I’m not going to call the garlic police on you. The oil is important, though.

Once it’s done, the way you serve it is you throw out the chicken and soak a loaf of bread with the pan juices. No, seriously, of course you eat the chicken, but you do need a nice crusty bread to sop up the juices. Unless, of course, you are gluten sensitive, in which case, just serve the chicken with some sort of starch to slop the juices over: mashed potatoes, rice, maybe quinoa? 

You can brown some onions in with the chicken, and add some mushrooms during the latter portion of the cooking, but the juices may toughen the chicken. Better IMO to take the cooked chicken out of the pan and keep warm somewhere while you brown the mushrooms and onions and then add them to the pan juices and cook for a few minutes. 

Serve with a green salad, a favorite vegetable, and, of course, the bread.

*You can find instructions online for restoring grubby cast iron pots that you find at flea markets and estate sales. One you clean them up and season them, they will outlast you just like they did the previous owner.

Baking for Jesus

I’m waiting for some butter that was in the freezer to soften so that I can bake Root Beer Float Cookies for the St. Anonymous UMW spring bake sale. I have never tried these cookies before and have no idea if they will be any good or not, but the person who posted the recipe to Pinterest loved them and they look a lot faster and easier to make than the Logan’s Roadhouse style yeast rolls I was going to make.

Yesterday I got an email with a suggested price list for our products. The suggested price for a dozen cookies is $3.00. The root beer concentrate and buttermilk that I had to buy for the cookies cost just under $6.00. That doesn’t count the cost of the other ingredients that I already have around the house. Every year at this time, and again in the fall, I debate whether to just donate ten bucks to the United Methodist Women and save myself some baking. When I was younger, I used to love to bake, and once stayed up most of the night baking Danish pastries so they would be fresh and hot for a similar UMW bake sale. Now I look back and wonder who was that woman, and why was she using my name and my face? 

The money we make from selling baked goods is supposed to go to missions. “Missions” always sounds vaguely like the money is going to exotic foreign lands but a lot of the missions we support are here at home: programs for children and youth, women in prison, and for a church run food bank.

I think the idea of bake sales dates back to the days when most women did not have an income, but did have time to spend baking, canning, or making small crafts. (Our "bake sale" actually sells a variety of items, not just baked goods, but the baked goods are most prominent.) I've heard stories of women bringing store bought items to donate, some still in the box. Having a "no-bake sale" in which everyone just chips in ten or fifteen dollars might make sense, but I think most of us would miss the bake sale.

So as soon as the butter softens, I will be baking cookies. This time, I will be sure to protect them from ants.  If they are actually any good, I'll let y'all know.

Easter Dinner

When my husband and I first married, we either spent Easter with his mother or she came to our house for Easter. My mother-in-law’s favorite thing to cook for Easter, believe it or not, was rabbit. “You eat the Easter bunny on Easter?” I whispered to my husband the first time I was confronted with this dish. He had never made the connection before.

When we hosted, we usually made leg of lamb, although MIL would also take hubby shopping for rabbit and cook it herself.

For the last decade or so, we’ve been traveling at Easter, since I always had a week and a day off. Thus it was that I found myself last week trying to remember what we usually make for Easter dinner.

Boiled bunny was out. Lamb was a possibility, but I decided what I really wanted was a ham steak. I found a great recipe, too, Country Ham Steak with Glazed Apples. There was just one little problem. My husband does not like to eat ham hot. He only likes it cold.

After 24 years of never cooking ham for dinner, I decided “too bad”. If he didn’t like it, he could fix himself a peanut butter sandwich. With the ham, I planned Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries, summer squash casserole, iceberg lettuce wedges, and crescent rolls. John was put in charge of salad dressing and dessert. 

I didn’t hear any loud screams as I picked out the ham steak at the store, or when I ran the whole menu by him.

From the point of prep work, this turned out to be an easy Sunday/company dinner. I was able to do several things in advance: core and slice the apples (and refrigerate them in lemon water so they wouldn't brown), peel and slice the potatoes, and put the squash casserole together ready for baking.  The potatoes take the longest to cook, and while they were cooking I had time to set the table, assemble the salads, put the rolls on a baking pan, then after I flipped the potatoes, cook the ham and apples. They take about fifteen minutes cook time. I used a mix of cinnamon, cloves, allspice and nutmeg on the sweet potatoes. I also only used one teaspoon of salt, not the recommended tablespoon.

With the oven door open, the oven cooled down pretty quickly from the high temperature required by the potatoes to the lower temp needed for the rolls. I cooked the rolls while we ate the salads. If you have two ovens, the rolls and the squash casserole (which I cooked in the microwave) can cook at the same heat in one while the potatoes cook in the other. Or you can just do a stove top vegetable. The ham recipe and the potatoes made a great combo but a variety of vegetables would work.

And there were no peanut butter sandwiches. John ate the ham with no complaints. One might almost say, like a lamb.

Or Maybe Not

A recipe for hard “boiled” eggs, which are actually baked in the oven, is making the rounds of Pinterest these days. With Easter coming up, it sounds like a great way to cook a large batch of eggs for dyeing without the struggle to keep them from cracking in the pan. I decided to try it, using only two eggs before committing myself to more.

I preheated the oven to 325º, as the recipe suggested (although it does say you can go as high as 350) and baked the eggs for the recommended 30 minutes. I then put them in a bowl of ice water for ten minutes, again, strictly following the recipe.

My results were disappointing. The eggs were not completely cooked, with a small section of the white of each being runny and a small part of the yolk not being completely firm. The brown spots that appeared on the shells did not completely disappear when the eggs were cooled, although the recipe said they would. There were also some brown spots on the egg whites themselves, although those parts tasted okay. Finally, the eggs were not easy to peel, as promised.

I could try again, either raising the temperature or increasing the baking time, but I suspect that while the eggs would be firmer, the brown spots would be more extensive. I don’t see the benefit of using this method over my regular method of boiling eggs. I’m sure people have had success with this recipe (maybe my old oven is just wonky), but if you plan to cook your Easter eggs this way, I’d make a small trial run first, especially if you plan to dye them. The brown spots could be a problem for dyed eggs.

You Turkey

For the last half dozen years or so, we’ve been eating Thanksgiving dinner at the house of a friend. Christmas we spend at John’s sister’s house every three years or so. When we’re home, we are more likely to cook roast beef or pork than turkey.  So it has been several years since we’ve had a roast turkey in the house. Last week I woke up craving turkey, and since it was my turn to grocery shop anyway, I added turkey breast to the list.

I was actually able to find a fresh one (or possibly a previously frozen and then thawed one), which meant I was able to cook it for dinner. It was small, just under 6 pounds, but a 6 pound turkey breast is still a lot of turkey for two people.

Half of it I froze to use later in making chili blanco. A friend of mine substitutes turkey for the chicken and I’ve been wanting to try it. (Usually I substitute pork tenderloin for the chicken.) The ribs and breastbone of course went to make soup, one-third of which we had for a lunch, one-third of which is in the refrigerator for later this week, and  the last third of which is in the freezer for another time when we are not sick of turkey.

I made turkey hash for lunch today, and half of that is in the freezer. There is still a large chunk of turkey left.

So I’m thinking of turning it into a turkey pot pie casserole to donate to St. Anonymous, which keeps a freezer of casseroles to donate to those who are sick, just had babies, or are facing other family emergencies which interfere with cooking. I can find a disposable baking pan. What I can’t find is a recipe I like. The classic turkey pot pie recipes I find are made to cook in a ten inch pie pan with crust on top and bottom. The casserole recipes I can find either call for prepared biscuit mix toppings or seem extremely complex. I want to make something that tastes good, which rules out the recipes that are essentially “toss diced turkey together with one can of soup and two cans of mixed vegetables and top with biscuit mix.” The recipients are already under stress; they don’t need bad food on top of it all. On the other hand, my main criterion for a good recipe is that after one or two go-rounds, I should have it memorized. (IOW, the only thing written by Julia Child I have around my house is My Life in France).

I would just improvise, but I need to include instructions for baking time and temperature with the casserole and while I’m perfectly happy to improvise those when I cook for myself, I want to make sure I give other people reliable information.

Maybe I should just make some more turkey soup.

So Maybe It Was a Little Excessive

Sunday morning I went to the emergency room. It wasn’t anything life or death. I had sliced my finger the day before while making lunch. (My husband’s first question was, “Was it one of our new knives?” They aren’t really new; we had simply sent them back to the factory to be sharpened, but I was able to reassure him that yes, they are really, really sharp.) It took some time and many, many paper towels before I was able to get two bandaids on it. I decided if it was still bleeding in half an hour, I’d go to the urgent care clinic, but half an hour later the bandages were clean. I had an appointment for a checkup  on Monday (actually today), so I figured I’d be okay letting it wait. 

But as the day went on, any pressure on it made it bleed and hurt. Ochsner’s urgent care clinic hours were over by then. I finally found their website’s guide to when to seek emergency care, and realized I didn’t know when I’d last had a tetanus shot (one of the indicators to seek care under “Lacerations”) and hadn’t been able to bring myself to look at the cut so I had no idea how deep it was. That night I had a hard time sleeping with the pain and felt some nausea, not to mention throbbing, signs of possible infection. So at the crack of dawn, I told hubby I was going to the ER. He offered to drive me.

As it turned out, the cut wasn’t as bad as I feared. I had missed the six hour window for getting stitches, although Dr. B wasn’t sure I would have needed them anyway. There was no infection, but she prescribed an antibiotic just in case. They dabbed on some ointment and slapped on a regular bandaid, except it was 1” wide instead of 3/4”. They wrapped it looser than I had with my bandaids, eliminating most of the throbbing. I left with instructions for wound care, the rest of the ointment, and prescriptions for the antibiotics and some pain pills. I was only given those after I paid my $100 copay.

Note to self: next time you slice an appendage, do it on a weekday.

Since I was apparently not dying, I was able to go ahead with my plans for the day, making cornbread for the Chili Cook-Off. I made chili for the Chili Cook-Off one year, and won third place, with my version of Chili Blanco. I replaced the chicken with pork tenderloin, slathered with cumin and slow cooked the day before. The recipe requires a lot of slicing and dicing however, not to mention the one-day head start, and I am feeling a little off that sort of thing right now.

So instead I decided to tackle a nice, simple recipe: Yeast Raised Corn Bread. The only cutting it required was snipping the 2/3 cup of chives. Most of the kneading is done by a stand mixer with a dough hook (which I just happen to have.) We also had a box of vinyl gloves which my husband uses when he’s staining wood projects, so I could protect my hand while not risking the lives of people with latex allergies.

The recipe calls for fresh chives and fresh or frozen corn. I had actually picked the recipe out two days before, and since John was going to the store anyway, had him buy frozen corn and chives (otherwise I had planned to use canned corn and freeze dried chives, which we had on hand).

The first snag I ran into was with the chives. By the time they were all snipped, what looked like 2/3 cup turned into more like 1/3. Then there was the corn. The only frozen corn my husband could find was corn in butter sauce. I wasn’t sure how the butter sauce would affect the recipe, so I decided to use the canned corn after all. Once drained, the 14 ounce can was closer to 1.5 cups instead of two, but I decided that was close enough.

The recipe is really easy, although time consuming as yeast recipes are. Almost all the work is done by the mixer. I ran into yet a third snag, however. I added the flour/salt mixture until the dough left the sides, but not the bottom, of the bowl, just as the recipe said. Then I turned the speed up to medium, just as the recipe said. At that point, the dough, which had been behaving perfectly, began sticking to the sides of the bowl again. All I can think of is that the higher speed caused the canned corn to begin secreting liquid. I added a little more flour. When it was time to turn the mix out on a board and knead it a few times, I covered the board about 1/8” thick with more flour. By time I kneaded it a few times, it was perfect: easy to form into a ball and put aside to rise. I use a trick I learned from the Farm Journal Book of Breads: put the bowl with the dough into a cold oven and put a pan of hot water on the lower rack. Dough rises perfectly every time.

When it came time to shape the dough into balls and put them into muffin tins, I ran into my final snag. I have old muffin/cupcake tins, dating back to the 1960’s and 70’s. I don’t know if the recipe’s inventor uses larger muffin tins or if the extra moisture/flour caused a problem, but there was just too much dough for 18 muffin cups, something I did not realize until I had cut the dough into 18 pieces. So I grabbed two cookie sheets, rolled the pieces into balls and placed them on the cookie sheets to bake.

They wound up flattening out a little and looking like hamburger buns, but they tasted great. There were enough chives to give a nice sprinkling of green, but not enough to give a true chive flavor, so they really needed the 2/3 cup, but the amount of corn seemed sufficient.  Most of the rolls disappeared at the chili supper, but I managed to snag two of them to bring home and we used them tonight to make pulled pork sandwiches with leftover pulled pork I found in the freezer. Toasting brought out the corn flavor even more.

If I make them again (which I probably will because hubby loves them), I’ll either make 24 rolls in the muffin tins or make 15 hamburger buns-sized rolls on the cookie sheet. Then I can freeze them and pull out as needed for pulled pork, beef, or chicken sandwiches. 

So maybe my trip to the ER was a little excessive. Maybe making a yeast version of cornbread which takes four hours instead of the Jiffy Mix version was a little excessive. It’s a great recipe, though. My recommendations would be to use the full amount of chives and use either fresh or frozen corn, not canned. Also, don’t slice your hand while chopping celery the day before, but you probably figured that one out already.

Anadama

I used to love to bake. I learned to bake bread when I was in graduate school, and home-baked bread was often the only bread I could afford. I tried all kinds of breads. I bought The Farm Journal Book of Homemade Bread, which I still have and which has all kinds of short-cut recipes, such as CoolRise French bread and brioche.

One of the cliches that puzzles me about baking is that baking recipes, unlike other recipes, must be followed precisely and don’t allow for innovation. It seems to me that if that were true, there would only be one recipe in the world for banana bread, or whole wheat bread, or ordinary white bread. I’ve even run across more than one recipe for croissants, which are all kinds of fussy to make. Somebody must have been playing around with these recipes.

So I am perfectly happy to mess with baking recipes. By swapping out cottage cheese, instant minced onion and dill seeds in Dilly Casserole Bread for Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese soup, chives and parsley, I made a batter cheese bread that got honorable mention in a local contest. 

My favorite bread recipe to mess with is Anadama Bread. My Farm Journal book gives the history of Anadama Bread as follows:

A Massachusetts fisherman, tired of the cornmeal mush his wife, Anna, spooned up for meals, added molasses and yeast to it and baked the first loaf of this bread while muttering “Anna-dam’er, Anna-dam’er” (or so the legend goes).

A batter bread with the addition of something thick and mushy allows for a lot of messing around with. The Book of Homemade Bread even offers one such variation, with oatmeal substituted for cornmeal. My own variation is made with a can of sweet potatoes, blended to a mush. It gives the taste of potato bread but is a lot faster and easier to cook.

I had promised to bake pumpkin bread for the UMW fall bake sale, and had actually been planning to use my trusty Anadama recipe with a can of pumpkin in place of the cornmeal, when I saw that Libby makes a pumpkin bread kit, with all the ingredients for two 9x5 loaves or three 8x4 loaves (or one 9x13 pan or cupcakes). Recalling that quick breads seem to sell faster than yeast breads anyway, I  opted for the easy path. The kit even came with a glaze to put on top. What could be easier?

Saturday evening I baked the three 8x4 loaves in disposable pans. After cooling the breads according to directions, I put them back in the pans and glazed the tops. I wrapped them each in plastic wrap, not too tightly so as not to mess up the glaze. I thought about putting them in the refrigerator, but I had read somewhere that putting baked goods in the refrigerator dries them out faster, and it was a cool night. I thought about moving them across the room to the baking center, but I’d have to clear it off. So I left them on the counter near the window.

When I next looked at them Sunday morning, little black specks were moving across the glaze: sugar ants. I said a quick “Anadama!” or at least one syllable thereof and thought frantically for a moment of just scraping off the glaze before realizing the ants were all over the pans and the bread had to be tossed out. If I had made the yeast bread, this wouldn’t have happened. If I had just moved the bread across the room to the baking center, it wouldn’t have happened. I donated the amount the breads would have sold for to the bake sale and made a note to call the exterminator the next day.

I’m still going to try the Anadama pumpkin bread just for fun. I’m not going to leave it anywhere near the window.

My House Smells Like Lemon Pledge

Well, it did this morning, anyway. Now it smells more like the lentil soup I’ve been cooking, but when I woke up this morning around eight or so, my husband was wandering around with a dust cloth and spray can in his hand, dusting. Dusting is nominally my job, but I only get around to it every three months or so, because I hate it. I hate all forms of housework except cooking and laundry. I don’t exactly like laundry, but I find it inoffensive.

John is the kind of person who has to be busy. I’m the kind of person who thinks sloth is a hobby. Since he retired, John has repaired everything in the house he could find that needs repairing, repainted the living room, after swearing for years that he couldn’t move the armoire to paint behind it, repainted the bathroom and the mudroom, changed out several light fixtures, cleaned out the storage shed next to the carport, practically rebuilt the pergola, and polished the headlights on my car with a kit he got from Auto Zone. He also does all the yard work (frequently at 6:30 in the morning) and almost all of the housework.

What I’ve done since I’ve retired is played a bunch of computer games and bought a bunch of clothes.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I started a regular exercise program, which led to my breaking my foot and not being able to do much of anything for months thereafter. I decluttered 4 bags and 4 boxes of stuff for a fundraising drive back in February and have since gotten rid of 4 more boxes, including a skirt I could now fit into again and wish I had back. I’ve been writing blog posts several times a week. And I do batch cooking of soup, chili, and spaghetti sauce a few times a month so we have easy fix meals in the freezer.

Just yesterday I did our first big grocery shopping in over a month. After recovering from sticker shock at the check out counter, I came home to find John mopping floors.  Grocery shopping wasn’t the end of it. I made a marinade for the chicken breasts. I marinated them overnight and then wrapped them and put them in the freezer. I did the same with some skirt steak and store bought marinade. I was feeling very virtuous until I woke up to the smell of make-believe lemon.

I had planned to make the lentil soup anyway, but not first thing in the morning. I found it hard to sit around reading the paper with John spraying his way through the house, so instead of having the soup for dinner, we had it for lunch. Dinner is going to be the steak sandwiches that I originally planned for lunch, dressed up with Gorgonzola butter and roasted red peppers. And maybe onion rings.

Hubby is getting a lot of mileage out of one can of Lemon Pledge.

Things to Do with Leftovers that Create More Leftovers

As I have written before, I hate to serve leftovers by just heating them up and putting them on a plate. I know, that's the time saving way to do it, but I figure, they were left over because no one was too crazy about them in their original state. Of course, the fact that my husband cooks as if he were cooking for six people instead of two is a factor also, but one I prefer to ignore in the quest to make life harder for myself.

The problem is, re-imagining leftovers always seems to involve  a few fresh ingredients, thereby increasing the volume of the original leftovers, and creating - more leftovers.

Take hash, for instance. The basic ingredients, meat and potatoes, are usually already cooked because whenever hubby makes a steak or a roast, he bakes potatoes. He doesn't just bake two potatoes, he bakes four or five. So I have meat and potatoes on hand for the basics, but I have to add chopped, sauteed onions, celery, and bell peppers and then mushrooms if we have some that are looking peaked. Finally, I add Hungarian paprika cream for some color and flavor, and just before the final browning, a little sour cream. By this time, I have enough hash to feed four to six people easily.

Then there's my faux risotto. I make real risotto on occasion, but when we have leftover rice, I make my faux version. That involves dicing up onion and browning it, chopping and adding whatever leftover vegetables we have on hand, adding the cooked rice and enough chicken stock to cover the ingredients by half an inch or so. If I have white wine I use it for some of the liquid. Then I cook it down until it's still a little soupy and stir in Parmesan cheese to thicken it all up. By then, I've at least doubled the volume of the rice, but it tastes better than plain rice that's been drying out in the refrigerator for a week. Besides, this is the only way hubby will eat brown rice.

Of course, making soup is a wonderful way to make sure leftovers for two turn into leftovers for half a dozen. Whenever we have a chicken carcass, I try to get to it before hubby does, because I prefer my soup making methods to his. Hubby throws the carcass, skin and all in with onions, celery, carrots and bouillon, and when it's done, he removes the skin and bones and serves the rest, mushy celery and onions, chicken fat, and all. 

I remove as much of the skin as possible to keep the fat content down, and cook the chicken in canned broth with onions, celery, and whatever fresh herbs are around (and salt and pepper to taste). The last twenty minutes or so I squeeze in two small lemons ( a trick I learned from Anne Burrell's cooking show) and throw in the rinds. Twenty minutes later I strain the broth into a bowl, and pick the meat off the bones. I keep the chicken meat and broth, but everything else, celery, onion, herbs, bones etc, gets tossed out. I allow the broth to stand in the refrigerator until the fat rises and solidifies enough to be skimmed off. Then I cook some carrots in the broth, and add any leftover cooked vegetables that are appropriate when I add the chicken. If we have frozen peas I put them in, but if not I add canned garbanzo beans. I cook noodles or pasta separately to add to the individual soup bowls, so the broth doesn't get all starchy and the pasta doesn't get soggy and slimy.

My final recipe for wasting your time with leftovers is Sloppy Joes. Usually I make Sloppy Joes by taking my leftover homemade pasta sauce (which contains ground beef and bulk sausage), adding a little brown sugar and cider vinegar and cooking the sauce (which is already very meaty) down to Sloppy Joe consistency. Today, however, I used leftover meat loaf, which had become very crumbly, plus  the chopped up remains of a hamburger John brought back from a restaurant. To the sauteed onion and garlic, I added the last quarter cup of  Italian dressing John had made with tomato soup (great recipe), a small can of tomato sauce and the sauce can full of water, then let it cook down slowly while I dealt with the soup. The bread crumbs in the meat loaf thickened the sauce as the water evaporated, and the salad dressing gave it the appropriate tang. I froze the inevitable leftovers.

So there you have it. Why save yourself time with leftovers, a plate, and a microwave when with a little time and effort (okay, a lot of time and effort), you can make yourself even more leftovers?

The

This morning I  ran errands. On my way home from the two major errands I remembered I needed bay leaves and chicken stock for tonight's dinner. Oddly enough, the US highway that I was driving along has only one grocery on a five mile stretch, one that used to be Albertsons and is now known as something else, and which is not one I'd shop in given a choice. So I consulted my internal map of the area and decided my two choices were Walmart and Target, which meant traversing acres of parking lot and store to find what I needed, not something I wanted to do for two items. Alas, Walmart and Target have pretty much driven out the smaller stores that were so handy for quick errands.

But wait, I thought to myself, isn't there a Winn-Dixie along the way? I'll go to the Winn-Dixie. At the Winn-Dixie I was able to park a few slots from the door, cruise down one aisle, and find what I needed all in the time it would have taken to find a parking spot at Walmart.

Which left me with time to ponder, why on earth do I call it "the Winn-Dixie"? I don't say "the Target" or "the Walmart", unless I'm saying "the Walmart over on Perkins". We used to have an A&P within walking distance of us that changed its name to Superfresh. I used to shop at "the A&P", but then I shopped at Superfresh, not "the Superfresh". It's closed now, because Walmart opened across the street, a big busy street that no one out of their teens crosses on foot. I miss that store, because you don't run into Walmart for a few quick items. It's more like a forced march.

So some groceries are "the": the Winn-Dixie, the A&P, the Piggly Wiggly, and some are not, and there is no rhyme or reason as far as I can tell. I wonder if maybe those stores started in small towns where they were the only grocery in town, but at the moment there are 10 Winn-Dixies that I know of  in our city and only 2 Targets. I used to wonder why I said "the Home Depot" and not "the Lowe's" until one day I looked at the sign outside the Home Depot and realized that's what it says, "The Home Depot". So there's one accounted for, but the rest? I've heard other people say "the Winn-Dixie", "the A&P", "the Piggly Wiggly" as opposed to "Albertsons", "Walmart" and "Target", so it's not just me.

All this musing got me home, where I realized I had forgotten the crimini mushrooms I also needed. I decided  to replace them with plain old canned mushrooms. I didn't want to run out to Walmart, and by time I got home, I was too far from the Winn-Dixie to go back.

Follow-up: Secrets of an Indifferent Home Chef

Yesterday I actually cooked the beef brisket that I blogged about last week. After a moment of sticker shock at the grocery store, I found a brisket (only 2 pounds, but then, there are only two of us), but no slab bacon. That was okay, the regular bacon I used worked just fine. Prep time took almost twice as long as I thought: I had planned half an hour but it took fifty minutes. I sliced the onions and celery before I started browning the meat, which turned out to be good planning. I sliced the mushrooms, bundled up the thyme and chopped the garlic while the onions and celery were cooking, and measured out the balsamic vinegar and found the bay leaves while the mushrooms and garlic were cooking. That all worked out smoothly.


It tasted great. It did not taste too vinegary, just a pleasant sweet-sour taste with more sour than sweet. With it I served an orzo salad (orzo, chopped red bell pepper, niblets corn, minced shallots, Dijon vinaigrette) because I wanted a contrasting texture but mostly because it was easier than Anne Burrell's potato pancakes. "Contrasting texture" just sounds better.


I notice from the reviews on the Food Network website that several people cooked this recipe in a crockpot with good results. Next time I might try using a chuck roast and cooking it in the crockpot. That sounds like Clue: Ms. Coleslaw, with the chuck roast, in the crockpot. I hope it doesn't turn out to be a crime.

Secrets of an Indifferent Home Chef

One of the cooking shows I love to watch is Chef Anne Burrell's Secrets of a Restaurant Chef.  I love watching it because of Anne Burrell's interesting personality, not because of any cooking tips I intend to pick up from it. My impression is that the secret to cooking like a restaurant chef is to be a restaurant chef, i.e., to have a staff of sous chefs that do prep work for you, to have a supplier that you can order the exact cuts of meat you want from, and to have a kitchen with several ovens and a six burner gas stove. I realize that there are some people who are not restaurant chefs who have double ovens and six burner stoves, but I'm not one of them.


Besides, I don't have recipes so much as procedures. There's the making hash out of anything procedure, the whatever parmesan procedure, the fried food procedure, the steamed veggies procedure, the braising procedure, the soup/stew/ sauce procedure, and the dice it up with onions, potatoes, bell pepper and garlic and cook it in the oven procedure. If I use an actual recipe, I will only use it once unless I can memorize it.


On one of her recent shows, though, Anne (may I call her Anne?) was cooking a beef brisket and it actually looked easier to cook than my standard pot roast recipe. First of all, she started off by salting and peppering the meat and throwing it into a pan to brown. When I make pot roast, I start off by marinating it in olive oil, red wine, lemon juice, shallots and bay leaf. Then I have to wipe it dry, then I put slits in it and insert slivers of garlic, and then it's ready to brown. So if I make Anne's recipe I've already saved 3 or 4 steps. 


Then she removes the roast from the pan and adds chopped slab bacon. That's where we run into that pesky supplier thing. I'm not sure Walmart carries slab bacon, but then, I don't see why regular old bacon wouldn't do; just stack a few slices and slice them crosswise. After that, she throws sliced onions and celery into the bacon fat to cook. I use chopped onions, celery, and carrots - slicing is much easier. Then add finely chopped garlic, not much harder than the slivering I do, especially since you can use the smash and peel method before chopping, which you can't do if you want to put slivers into slits in your beef. So so far, other than the bacon, she hasn't done anything I don't already do, plus she's left out a few steps. Easy.


Then add some sliced mushrooms, then add the liquid and aromatics. My liquid is beef stock, red wine, and coffee (yes, coffee). Hers is chicken stock (huh?) and balsamic vinegar. We both use thyme and bay leaves. Cover and put in the oven. I cook mine on the top of the stove, but my Le Creuset pot, a Christmas present from a bewildered husband ("It costs how much?") is ovenproof up to 500 degrees. 


Shorter version - I can make this. Heck, after one viewing I practically had the recipe memorized.