A New Skillet, A New Website

There is this cast-iron skillet I cannot bring myself to use. 

It just sits on my counter!

And I keep on using my old annoying frying pan, which goes back centuries. The picture above proves it. Velazquez painted my old skillet! That is it in the picture, I am sure of it.

Because of the book "The Artist's Way," I am starting to question my behavior and try to figure out why. And so I am taking a trip down this rabbit hole.

Why do I not season my skillet?

I am exploring this question today on Substack. Click here to find it there. I would be so grateful.

My Substack is free!

Substack is nice and organized and it is helping me to get on a better writing schedule. I do not plan on doing paid subscriptions, in part because I do not want a job -- I want this to be for fun.

Please follow me there. Please take out a free subscription -- I would love that! One reason I am doing this is, I plan on shortly publishing my book about Leonard Pennario, and this would help pave the way.

If you are reading this I appreciate you being here. Thank you -- and if you want to be in touch, great

Roasting Sardines: A Fishy Adventure

I have taken a plunge into unknown waters. I have roasted sardines!

These are not sardines out of a can, much as I enjoy those. These are sardines that came frozen in a bag from Price-Rite.

Yikes, they have eyes! Once I encountered a fish with eyes in Toronto, at Honest Ed's. I am afraid I threw the eye across the room. That is a story for another day. My friends were kidding me about it just yesterday, how about that? 

What about Fish Eye wine?

I actually find that brand rather off-putting!

It is difficult to find any recipes involving sardines because the world being dumb, most people are put off by them. They do not like the name or something, who knows. 

The same can be said for anchovies. I order Caesar salads a lot when I am out, and 100 percent of the time now, they arrive without anchovies. Nobody even asks you if you want them. You have to remember to ask and then they look at you as if you are crazy.

Back to my sardine adventure. I think I just arranged them on a baking sheet with garlic and lemon. I put them in a neat row, packing them in like, well, like sardines. I roasted them at 400 degrees for something like 10 minutes.

These are humble little fish and I figured they would be ideal for Lent. I think when Christ multiplied the loaves and the fishes, the fishes must have looked something like these sardines.

They did look mighty pretty on the plate. Eyes and all. I am sorry, sometimes you just have to serve the whole fish.

 That is the rewarding and artistic part of my story. However, I have to say my experiment was not a success and I will not be roasting sardines again.

They tasted good. That was not the problem. It was just difficult to get a mouthful. There were too many bones and the bones were not soft and chewable as I had been led to understood they would be. 

In addition, when you subtracted the head and the tail, there was not a lot to eat. And there were parts of the fish which, when you bit into them, you would taste something bitter. I think these sardines should have been more prepped. When you shop at Price-Rite anything is possible.

It is good to explore options like sardines because in general the price of fish is through the roof. Even catfish is something like $8 a pound. That is unacceptable, I am sorry. I mean, why don't I just buy steak?

Something smells fishy! Oh, that reminds me of another big point.

These sardines, they really did smell fishy!

I am not squeamish in this department. I love cooking fish and that worry that it will make your house smell fishy, that has not been true in my long experience.

However these sardines smelled fishy. And the leftovers continued to smell fishy in the fridge.

The moral of the story: Some things are just better in the can.

Sardines are one!

 

 

My Keto journey and the great Bert Greene

Being on the Keto diet, I have been revisiting cookbooks that I had previously cast aside on account of I thought the recipes were too fattening. Butter, oh no! Heavy cream! No!

One cookbook I resurrected was "Greene on Greens and Grains." It is by Bert Greene, a chef now, alas, long gone. I love Bert Greene for his storytelling, and it must be because of that that my book is falling apart. It is not falling apart because I have cooked too much out of it. I remember looking at the recipes and just thinking, I could never make that. No one, not even Martha Stewart, calls for butter and heavy cream as much as Bert Greene does. No one.

Now that I am living the keto lifestyle (a retro word I love, by the way), heavy cream is no longer the enemy. It is my friend!

And so I thought of "Greene on Greens and Grains" and all its butter and heavy cream. And yesterday I had a cauliflower and so I looked in the cauliflower chapter. As I told you, the book is falling apart. All my cookbooks are falling apart. When they print them and bind them they never expect that anyone will actually use them.

However. The cauliflower chapter yielded a wealth of high-fat Keto possibilities! 

Parma Style Fried Cauliflower. Gratin of Cauliflower with Gingered Crumbs. You can substitute Parmesan for bread crumbs. Baked Cauliflower Cream -- that calls for sour cream, fine by me. Austro-Hungarian Green Topped Cauliflower. That calls for Greene's signature heavy cream. 

Oh, look at this! Cauliflower and Shrimp in a Blanket of Mayonnaise! I will definitely have to make that one. 

Meanwhile yesterday I made Headed Cauliflower. You roast the cauliflower whole and serve it that way!

Here are the details: 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Take a cauliflower, trim the leaves, core it (I forgot to do that -- I just cut the stem off so it would stand up straight), and cook it in boiling water until just tender, 10 to 12 minutes.

Now comes the yummy part: "Very gently pry apart the cauliflower flowerets, but do not detach them from the head. Place 1/4 cup melted butter in a bowl large enough to hold the cauliflower. Place the cauliflower upside down in the butter. Let it stand 10 minutes."

And now here is the part I really enjoyed. You turn the cauliflower upright and place on a sheet of waxed paper. (I used Waxtex, I buy it because I love the name). Pour any leftover butter over the cauli. Take a half cup grated Swiss cheese and pat the cheese between the flowerets. Dust the whole head with 2/3 cup Parmesan. Sprinkle generously with pepper. Transfer the head to a shallow baking dish (I used a cast iron skillet) and bake 15 minutes. Place under a broiler to brown the top if desired. (I did not bother.)

What fun!

Butter, cheese, cauliflower, what's not to love? Here is my cauliflower in all its glory.

I could not get Howard to notice this dish, much less recognize its greatness. But I sure noticed it. I will be making this again. I might make it for Thanksgiving.

It is hard to find a cookbook not corrupted by all that low-fat nonsense. "Greene on Greens and Grains" fills the bill. The grains chapters are out, sure. But there is plenty to enjoy. 

Is Keto great or what? I could lose pounds faster if I cut out wine but as it is, it is just so pleasant. You eat things like Headed Cauliflower and drink heavy cream in your coffee and the weeks pass and every week you are down a little. I am down 17 pounds from when I started back in June or whenever that was.

As I proceed in my journey, I will have to cook my way through Bert Greene's cauliflower recipes.

I will report!

Roux-ing the day

It is funny considering how long I have been cooking, but today I made my first roux.


At least I think it was. I do not think I ever made a roux before. It is noux to me!

I was getting ready to make dinner, and I had a recipe planned out of the new Eating Well magazine. But all of a sudden I found this recipe for Gumbo Zeb in this vegetarian cookbook I had, by the hippie cookbook writer Crescent Dragonwagon. And I had to make it.

These things are unplanned, you know? It looked so onerous, this roux, and this spice blend, and this vegetable saute, and the rice, and what else? It seems there was one more thing. Oh, right, the pot of greens. There is that too. It was amazingly onerous and yet all of a sudden you are into it.

And it came together. I think it is coming together anyway.

It is still simmering on the stove. On three different burners.

I will have to report!

I am not exactly vegetarian so at the end of the recipe I am going to add shrimp. And maybe some sausage.I am not sure yet.

I do like trying different things. Last night I did an Eating Well recipe with roasted broccoli over pasta. I took liberties. I added roasted cauliflower to the broccoli because I did not have quite enough broccoli. I added anchovies because Howard and I both love them.

But at the end, I loved it. It reminded me of how I used to eat. Before I was married I made a lot of these slapdash vegetarian dishes. You get a husband, all of a sudden you have to add bacon to everything. Before that you do not.

Now, as long as all goes as planned, I will know how to make gumbo with roux. As opposed to gumbo with okra, the way I always made it.

It all made me remember fondly Bill Wharton, the Sauce Boss. That is a poster of him up above! He used to come to the Lafayette Tap Room and my friends and I would go.

The Sauce Boss would make a huge pot of gumbo on stage and at the end of the night you would eat it. Meanwhile you would assist in the preparation of it. It was a tremendous gimmick and my hope is that it is going on till this day.

You would get up on stage with your friends looking on and you would stir the gumbo with great pomp and circumstance, as the band played. Then you would hop down and resume drinking your beer.

Such fun!

The gumbo would be served at about 2 a.m. if memory serves me. And it was good!

I wonder if mine will be as good tonight.

I can only hope!!

The Bosch gets the kabosh

We put the kabosh on the Bosch, b'gosh.

The Bosch stove this is! Not the dishwasher. The Bosch dischwascher -- sorry, you just have to spell it that way, you know? -- is the light of my life. I treat it like gold and buy it expensive rinse aid because it is the one appliance that has not betrayed me.

How did Bosch make such a great dischwascher but blow it with the stove?

Anyway. The saga of the Bosch has been chronicled extensively on this Weblog. It kicked two years after I first bought it, and then, well, it just kept kicking.

Finally I kicked it!

The other day it began leaking gas and that was the last straw. Up until then Howard had been fixing it whenever it broke, which was often. We kept ordering parts. But a gas leak is no joke and so as of today the Bosch was out the door. While I was waiting for the new stove I gave the Bosch the ceremonial kick.

Not long after that the phone rang and it was my Aunt Marce. I told her about the Bosch and how it was finally outta here.

She said, "Well, I hope you gave it a ceremonial burial."

I said: "I did. I kicked it."

Aunt Marce is a wonderful cook and that conversation was a pleasure because I knew that she understood me on a visceral level.

The thing was, that Bosch, it would desert me without a moment's notice. I do my church coffee hour and I could not go on like this, the thing dying on  Friday or a Saturday right when I was prepping for it. It had gotten to the point where it kicked several times a year. What if it kicked on Thanksgiving? Fie on it! Fie!!

So the Bosch got the kabosh.

Because of bad experiences I had had with Orville's over this Bosch, I went with Lowe's this time. Burned by this luxury stove that did me dirt, I am now going with a bare-bones model. It is a no-frilled General Electric with not so much as a clock. Something like this ...

It is just this big blank white stove. No controls. Not only that, it has a broiler drawer. Down at the bottom! I could not believe that.The last time I had a broiler drawer down at the bottom of the stove, I think I was in college.

When I realized that what I thought was the warming drawer was actually the broiler, I could not stop smiling. It is like memory lane! In my college apartments, we had these ancient Laurel and Hardy appliances, and the stove always had the broiler in this bottom drawer. I had forgotten all about that.

Well, you must excuse me now, but I have an Italian pork loin braising slowly on the front burner of my new stove.

A new day dawns!

Back to the Clinton Bailey Market

For a few years now, certain of my friends and I have had our eye on this recipe from The Joy of Cooking. It is Tutti Frutti!

It is also known as Brandied Fruit as this article states. And its real name is Rumtopf which in German means "Rum Pot."

"The Joy of Cooking" is a great go-to German cookbook. It is loaded with German recipes because the Rombauers who wrote it were German. Another thing I like about the Rombauers was Erma Rombauer was friends with the conductor George Szell. You have to figure that being into classical music on that level she knew who Leonard Pennario was. I like that in a person.

The Rombauers named their Rumtopf recipe Tutti Frutti Cockaigne, named for their summer home. They would attach that name "Cockaigne" to their favorite recipes.

That is something I hope is not being lost. In those formal old Gourmet magazines people would write in letters with their family recipes, or recipes they had come up with and loved and they would attach their last name to the recipe. For instance if I came up with a Rumtopf recipe of my own it would be Rumtopf Goldman.

That has a ring to it!

Anyway.

Today I went to the Clinton Bailey Market to shop for our Rumtopf.

I took a break in my shopping to sketch the fire station across the way. That is a picture of it up above! Other than that I shopped diligently.

I bought strawberries and raspberries and cherries and apricots. You are supposed to start with your liquor -- rum or brancy -- and then add these fruits one at a time as they come into season. It will be ready by Christmas. Although traditionally you are allowed to take a nip here and there starting on the first Sunday of Advent.

And so it begins.

Our friend Zach has come up with a crock for it so that is our green light. Zach found the crock at Clarence Antiques. He paid $40 for it. He is investing in Tutti Frutti!

The crock is with Zach and it is big and heavy and hard to move so I will have to get him the fruit. Meanwhile I tossed the strawberries with sugar and stored them gently in the fridge. The cherries can wait a day or two. They are stored carefully. They do not need to be pitted. That is what I read.

It is funny reading anything about how to make something like this because online recipes are all full of warnings. No one wants to trust in old science. They are always throwing in this or that complication and finally I said, you know what? People have been making this for centuries. It works. It is not rocket science. You do not have to be Wernher von Braun to make Rumtopf!

The one important thing is the fruit has to be perfect. That is what The Joy of Cooking said.

"Use only perfect fruit." We were all laughing about that.

I have a feeling the Rumtopf will be fine no matter what!

Hamming it up with Betty Crocker

Yesterday I made my first Chiffon Cake, for church coffee hour. It was the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake out of the classic Betty Crocker Guide to Easy Entertaining!

It is a rule I have for coffee hour: Every week I make at least one thing that is new. It keeps things exciting.

Above is a picture of the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake going into the oven. And here it is coming out:

Beautiful as the cake is, I could not help laughing about the chapter the recipe came from. It was going piously to church, yet it came from the chapter titled Stag Parties.

How many cookbooks these days will you find with a chapter called Stag Parties?

It is funny because sex is everywhere, much more than it was several decades ago, but oh, you cannot mention stag parties. But anyway.

"Most men have a weakness for chocolate cake," Betty Crocker writes in this cookbook.

And sure enough!

The guys at St. Anthony's, they loved this cake! Well, the ladies did, too. And the children. But I am not about to contradict Betty Crocker. She was right!

You know me, I am always behind, and I was making the frosting at literally the last minute -- i.e., this morning before church. So I made a frosting that Betty recommended called Chocolate Fluff. You took two cups of heavy cream and whipped it up with a cup of powdered sugar and a half cup of cocoa. The result was amazing. Like ice cream. Addictive. Amazing.

You had to sit the cake in the fridge until it was time to serve it. And so during Mass the cake sat in the fridge in the St. Anthony's social hall. It tastes good cold, I discovered. There is something very satisfying about this sweet, chilled cake.

But next time I will make the other icing Betty recommended.

It is White Mountain Icing!

My Facebook friend Janice is a professional pastry chef and she was urging me to try it. She said it was old school but it will be so worth it! Plus, what I love about it is you get to use -- shhhhh -- corn syrup.

It is just a little more complicated than I had time for this morning. In addition I should get a candy thermometer. Why does someone like me not have a candy thermometer? Yet I do not.

The cake shared the buffet with another St. Anthony's novelty -- ham.

We got a couple of hams at Albrecht Discount and heated them up in the oven! This was another first for me. We were doing this because it was the Octave of Easter. Lou, one of the gentlemen of St. Anthony's, had to help me.

We hit a snag when I realized there were no roasting pans in the kitchen. What to do? What to do??? But miraculously in a cupboard we found a beat-up cookie sheet. Wait, it was my cookie sheet! I had been wondering what had happened to it. Here it was. And right when and where I needed it!

And so we roasted the hams -- in foil pans, set on the cookie sheet. Lou said they would be done by the time we got out of Mass and sure enough.

Lou being a prince among men also made the glaze in a saucepan he found God knows where.

I slipped out during the sermon to apply the glaze to the ham.

End result, as we say here in Buffalo, there was much rejoicing.

Ham. Is there anything better?

And 99 cents a pound at Aldi.

We will be doing this again!

The incredible edible egg

This morning, a miracle!

I opened the fridge to get out an egg, and it was kind of early and I was really sleepy so I dropped the egg.

Oh no! That is one messy task. I am preparing myself for this messy clean-up but then ...

The egg did not break!

It was sitting on the floor whole!

I picked it up, gingerly, astonished. What had happened was, the shell had chipped away just a bit on one end. But the membrane underneath somehow held the egg together.

I've never seen anything like it in my life!

My one regret is that I did not take a picture. If you do not take a picture nothing has really happened. You would think I would have learned this lesson by now. But I was sleepy and so I did not take a picture. I picked the egg up and marveled at it and then I think I was afraid it would break more and so I cracked it into the skillet and cooked it and brought it to Howard with his oatmeal.

He ate the magic egg!

Maybe the egg was a sign because the rest of the cooking and coffee hour baking went magically.  The folks at coffee hour tomorrow will be happy! I made Cranberry Buckle and Jewish Apple Cake and a creation of my own, Chocolate Strawberry Coffee Cake. I made cinnamon buns. Everything went really fast.

One thing that was funny, there was a stick of butter I worked on all day. Besides other sticks of butter I was throwing into baking creations, there was a stick that sat on the counter and I chipped away at, tablespoon by tablespoon. One went into this, two into that. Finally in addition to everything else I was making dinner and that, too, called for a tablespoon, and then another tablespoon.

It was like a clock, that stick of butter. I could mark time with it.

Anyway, a productive day, in and out of the kitchen.

Vegan before 6

My sister was on Mark Bittman's Vegan Before 6 diet and so of course I had to do it too. There are these 10 pounds I want to lose. I have lost 10 and I need to lose 10 more.

I had heard of VB6 before. Except when I last heard of it I was working pretty much 9 to 5 and it is difficult to be vegan before 6 o'clock under those circumstances. You do not have time to plan perfectly and if you get hungry you are in trouble. You cannot just go to the kitchen to chow down a few more cubes of tofu.

I do the no-meat-on-Friday thing year-round and I was never able to plan well as far as packing my Friday lunch for work. And on Fridays when my stomach was growling, that was when my mind would go to Mark Bittman and VB6.

"Yeah, right," I would say to myself. That is a condescending phrase I picked up from Leonard Pennario.

However, now things are different!

My schedule is more flexible and so this diet is no big deal. It actually reminds me of how I used to eat a long time ago, before I got married and there was this other person in my house who insists on meat. May I add I weighed less then, too. I know it is very possible to eat meat responsibly but still.

Vegan Before 6 is also very similar to this traditional Catholic fast I did during Lent a few years ago. I did get through that OK, now that I think about it, despite office hours.

However as I discovered then, you do have to plan.

I enjoy a game, and I do spend too much time thinking about this because there is nothing like a new diet, so full of promise. I made veggie burgers out of pinto beans from a Moosewood recipe. Ah, here it is!

These beanie burgers are golden. Add some ketchup and ballpark mustard and your mind accepts them as the real thing. It is like what I have read about Mock Apple Pie. I have not had that but I guess what happens is, you use zucchini instead of apples and as long as you add the appropriate spices, nobody knows the difference.

Well, at church they would probably know the difference. At our after-Mass coffee hour I announced I was on the diet.

"Vegan before 6," I said brightly.

And these smart-mouth guys in our congregation are laughing at me.

""So you can eat meat now," one of them told me. "Vegan before 6 a.m."

Hahahahaa!

Why didn't I think of that?

Farewell to Cooking Light

The magazine Cooking Light is folding and I seem to be the last person in the world to know. This despite my longtime subscription which I have reported on at great length over the time I have been keeping this, ahem, chronicle.

Our subscriptions are being replaced with subscriptions to Eating Well. I already subscribe to Eating Well so we will have to see how this sorts out. Oh (Eating) well....

I suspected many times that Cooking Light was circling the drain.

There was the issue in 2010 that, all it did was yell at you.

There was the Thanksgiving of the "cooked plants."

And my suspicion that the magazine was trying to get me addicted to breadsticks.

I get the idea they repeat and recycle a lot of recipes. Just now I opened the Farewell Issue at random and it opened to "Shrimp and Grits." I know I have seen versions of that before.

The magazine irritated me to the last. There is that word "gut" unattractively used literally, as in the illustration above.

Gut ist nicht gut! When that word first surfaced maybe five years ago I knew right away it was here to stay, and sure enough.

Yet as I have written before, the price kept dropping, and I kept capitulating, and I do look forward to the monthly thump of the magazine in the mailbox.

I like pretending I am organized and crossing off the recipes as I make them.

I like the food photography. I liked this one editor, Ann Taylor Pittman. And the magazine's most recent makeover -- the last of dozens -- looked good.

Plus, I just like the excuse to consume.

I'll have to find another!

'That old-fashioned fruit that is so hard to find'

Today at church before we went in for Mass in honor of the Feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, also known as Our Lady of Victory, my friend Joe presented me with a little paper bag. Inside was something I had never tasted.

Quince!

"I have a flowering quince tree," Joe explained, almost apologetically.

He said he was not quite sure what could be done with quince other than jam, because you hear of quince jam or jelly but nothing else.

You cannot eat quince raw! That was what Joe told me.

But I was hardly listening. All I could picture was a flowering quince tree, as in the picture above. Joe is always bringing us treasures from his gardens and now there was this too.

"Joe," I said. "It sounds as if you live in paradise."

Which he emphatically told me was not true, but I do not believe him.

Now there is the matter of what to do with the quince. There is not that much of it, maybe a couple of pounds. I would like to make some manner of jam and present Joe with a jar of it. Or make something with it to bring to our coffee hour. Perhaps a 16th Century Quince Pie.

Oh, look! Kitchn calls it "that old-fashioned fruit that is so hard to find."

Me, all I can think of is Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat."

After the owl and the pussy-cat got married, they "dined on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon."

When I bring my quince pie to coffee hour, I will have to remember a runcible spoon.

You have to do these things by the book!

Working squid

All day today I was working on a story about St. Joseph's Day. I will link to it when it runs in the paper!

I have strong feelings for St. Joseph. Maybe it goes back to when I bought that statue at that estate sale in Amherst. That statue is still here in my home. St. Joseph has been making new friends as you can see from this picture.

When I got home today I just had to have Italian food. I went and got out one of my old coffee table Italian cookbooks. I loved these cookbooks. There was a series of them and I would get them at Barnes & Noble. You could find them in the discount section, probably because I was the only person in the world who would actually cook out of them. 

The "Italy" cookbook in this series was by Lorenza di Medici, a cookbook author I loved because I had another book she wrote, another coffee table book I must point out, on Italian cooking. Again I could not imagine anyone else cooking out of this book. I would have it propped up on the counter behind plastic so I wouldn't spill anything on it. Howard laughed at me once when he came home and there I was with this insane beautiful book, trying to cook out of it.

Anyway tonight I made di Medici's recipe for Seppie in Zimino. It is Squid With Vegetables! "In Zimino" means "with vegetables." You learn something new every day!

Being German I had to sub in a little green cabbage, I admit, because I did not have the spinach that was called for. Otherwise I think I am in the ballpark.

I would like to get back to cooking more out of these cookbooks. I was 10 pounds skinnier back when I did. This kind of food is good for you.

One other thing happened today that I must note. At one point I was in the home of these two Italian sisters, and with a friend from church who is also Italian, Sicilian. And I began talking about Leonard Pennario.

And I Could. Not. Stop.

It is amazing this still happens to me. I have been on this project for so long. I am kind of embarrassed about it because the world at large does not know that things like this sometimes take so long to complete, especially when you have this all-consuming full time job. I do not mention him every day on the Web log on account of that. But it still happens. There is something beautiful in that, you know?

And there is something beautiful about this Seppie in Zimino.

Mangia!

Weber wondering

So I get a big tray of spareribs from Tops. They are all spiced up and ready to barbecue. I scanned the ingredients and it all looks nice and natural. I've got all my ducks in a row, right?

Well.

What do you do when ...

... the package says to grill for 7 minutes a side, and ....

.... every cookbook and online recipe says to grill for about two hours?

What do you do??

Whom do you trust???

Do you start them in the oven and then finish them on the Weber?

What about Constanze Weber, Mozart's wife, pictured up above?

She was the first soprano soloist in Mozart's "Great" Mass in C Minor which is challenging, but I do not think she ever had the challenge of grilling spareribs!

Constanze Weber did not have a Weber!

I do. With which, I like to cook and I like to think I have gotten good at it. However, I have a confession. Meat confuses the daylight out of me.

Every cookbook I see tells me that this or that cut of beef could be called this or could be called that. There is no consistency. Every book tells me --

Oh, wait, the husband is home. The ribs will be cooked, one way or another. I do not need to point out that this impossible situation came about thanks to Eve being created from Adam's rib, you know? The rib situation is complicated from the word go.

I will report on how this goes.

Wish me luck!

A lotta ricotta

You know me, I cannot resist a bargain, which is how I wound up with a gigantic tub of ricotta cheese. We are talking five pounds! That is it up above. That is it! And it was just as large as it looks.

The five pounds were $5.99 which is pretty good, I think. Plus, it is fun to do something like this. You have a huge amount of something and then you get the adventure and challenge of using it up.

One morning this week I made a ricotta omelet. You mix eggs and ricotta and cook it on the stove in a skillet until it is set and then broil it until it is brown.

Yum! That came from Deborah Madison's "Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone" and it was so good I made it another morning, too.

I also did a pasta with broccoli and ricotta. That was good, too!

Then it was time for church coffee hour.

I made a ricotta zucchini tart I found on Pinterest.

That is it to the left, pictured on one of the prized funky vintage tablecloths our church coffee hour boasts. It was supposed to be a galette but I fit it into a pie tin and called it a tart. That was a hit at coffee hour! Gone in 60 seconds. Next time I will make two because it really is easy to make.

May I interest you in my fine Church Coffee Hour Pinterest board? The recipe is there in case you want it.

Finally I made Lemon Ricotta Muffins, from a recipe I found I forget where. They were a success! And they have olive oil in them and not a ton of sugar so they are healthy.

Oh wait! That was not finally. I still had some ricotta left. I made Ricotta Bread. It is a yeast bread with ricotta in it. It is good!

And may I say that Msgr. Sicari at St. Anthony's ...

... complimented me most kindly on my ricotta dishes. That made my day! Coming from an Italian that meant something.

This is Leonard Pennario's birthday. If he were alive he would be 93. He also would not mind me writing about ricotta cheese on his birthday, I will tell you that. Pennario loved his food and he loved his Italian food in particular, God love him.

I will be the Leonard Pennario of ricotta.

Where can I find another tub?

Sugar and jazz

We had Office Cooking Club downtown at Big Blue. It was the first barbecue of the season! Above is my friend Melinda's husband, Mike, tending the grill on the front lawn.

This is a club we have had going in various permutations over the years. In its current incarnation we have a handful of people from work, people interested in cooking, and we might have a celebrity guest, a person who has distinguished himself or herself in the culinary field.

Last night the theme was Mexican. I made caramel ice cream!

Here is the caramel under way.

Isn't that wild? You had to heat up sugar and water and then let it boil.

"I'll believe this when I see it," I said, out loud.

But it worked! First you had to boil it unattended. That is something I have a problem doing. I always want to attend to things. You wait until it turns brown around the edges and then you stir it until it is a deep amber.

All went according to plan!

Then, zut alors, I realized the heavy cream in the fridge had gone south, despite the expiration date being still two weeks away. Forbid it, Almighty God! I had to run to the store and get more heavy cream. By the time I came back my caramel had hardened into this disc. That was all right! The Joy of Cooking said just to heat it gently and soften it.

The Joy of Cooking's directions were not perfect and kept me guessing. But you know the slogan, stand facing the stove! That is what I did and the ice cream was a hit.

It is fun to have cooking adventures! Which is what I did over the weekend. Friday it was our friend Dan's birthday, hence this cake. Which, I was proud of it! Thank you again, '80s Betty Crocker! Plus, I love birthday sprinkles.

And then came church coffee hour Sunday morning, and cooking club was Sunday night.

Speaking of caramel and the Catholic Church, one thing that cracks me up is when people write "Carmel" instead of "caramel." It happens all the time!

Hence, Carmel Ice Cream.

If you love it you are a Carmelite!

Pie Academy

So... today, over a week after Easter, I finally find this cookbook "Pie."

I had been looking and looking for it!

Today I was not looking for it. Easter being behind me I was doing my other work. But while I was looking for certain documents I saw this big book. Even before I could see what it was, I thought: That is it!

That is "Pie"!

After I got through Easter without it!

"Pie" is by Ken Haedrich whom I have never heard of although I admire that German name. He has an, ahem, online community called The Pie Academy. It is dedicated to the idea that anyone can make a pie from scratch.

I like that!

As it is, it is just as well that this book stayed lost in my chaotic house until now. Who knows, had I had it, I might not have made Divine Lime Pie.

Cookbooks stay lost until you need them!

Now, let's see what's in this.

I want to make Fresh Plum and Port Pie. And Calvados-Apple Custard Pie. Yikes, Sweet Summer Corn Pie! Could that be in the offing this summer?

Golden Delicious Apple Pie with Oatmeal Crumb Topping. Honey Apple Currant Pie in a Whole Wheat Crust. Very Cranberry-Pear Pie. I will have to remember these come fall.

Perhaps by then I will be a student of the Pie Academy. Oh, wait! It is free! Where do I sign? I just signed up using that link up above.

I am still waiting for my email confirmation. Oh look! It is here! It begins, "Hello, fellow pie lover!"

It promises me recipes and insider information regarding the pie community.

I will report!

Herb Gerard and me

The crop of bishop's weed is coming in. I think it is going to be a good year!

One goal of mine, among many, is to become a good bishop's weed cook. Looking back on my efforts a couple of years ago I am impressed by the idea of red lentil soup with bishop's weed. See, this is why I keep a Web log. Otherwise such details might be forgotten.

This evening bishop's weed stands in for spinach in Deborah Madison's mushroom and spinach stew. This is just a simple dish you throw together with a lot of butter, which of course is the secret to its deliciousness. Piously, this being Holy Week, I cut back on the butter somewhat. But it is still yummy.

To my shock, the latest issue of Eating Well sings the praises of the bishop's weed. It says to discard stems. When they are this small though it does not seem to matter. The tiny stems add a kind of texture. Harvesting the bishop's weed is very easy otherwise. You just wade into the field and grab huge handfuls! Then next day you have a fresh crop of young tender bishop's weed leaves. And the problem with this is what?

I am sort of collecting different names for bishop's weed such as Giersch (the German name), snow on the mountain, ground elder, and goutweed (because it is good for many ailments including gout). Today I found one I do not recall seeing before, Herb Gerard.

That is like a name! "Hi, I'm Herb Gerard, and you're sure looking good this evening."

Merriam-Webster offers the loveliest explanation.

translation of Medieval Latin or New Latin herba (Sancti) Gerardi, after Gerardus (St. Gerard) †1120 founder of the Knights of St. John

I was married at beautiful St. Gerard's Church.

I should start calling this beautiful plant Herb Gerard.

Freezer queen

Yesterday talking about the first Sunday of Advent, I mentioned briefly that I was in the meal train for the priests at our church.

The meal train! That is a term I just picked up today. Someone was setting up a meal train for someone on Facebook. You bring meals to that person. I signed right up, I will tell you that. Because now that I am in the, ahem, meal train for St. Anthony's, I am realizing I need more practice.

I have been learning how to freeze things with the help of this 1960s booklet I picked up at Amvets, "Facts About Food Freezing." That is it pictured below! Still it is strange how your cooking mojo can desert you.

Normally I cook pretty well -- that is, when I am under no pressure. The minute I am under pressure things change.

Remember the time I keep alluding to when I did pot roast for Leonard Pennario? It was good. But not as good as it would have been had I been making it just for myself.

Thanksgiving also does not bring out the best in me. A recipe I've done a million times will take a different direction.

And so this meal train.

Piously I froze one soup. The lid of the container, which was new may I add, somehow got loose in the freezer.

"No!" I said. "No!" But it was so. Then there was the matter of this other soup. I put in some lemon pepper and it became too lemony. This never happens to me! I was so mad I threw out the lemon pepper. I froze the soup and hoped it wasn't too bad. With Thanksgiving I was running out of time.

Later I got on Google and looked up: "Too much lemon." Someone suggested baking soda. "Not too much or it will taste soapy." I tried a little bit, a half teaspoon or so, on my remaining soup and... it worked! So there, I have learned a kitchen hack. I got the other container of soup out of the freezer and poured it out and heated it up and added baking soda and as I stirred it I thought:

What in the world???

Son of a sea cook, all these extra steps!

Bad things come in threes and the third was the chocolate chip cookies. This was a Marc Bittman recipe, the same recipe that is everywhere, but somehow I managed to goof it. Five-year-olds can make chocolate chip cookies. Mine spread too much and stuck to the pan.

Zut, zut, zut alors!

It all ended pretty well, considering.

But again, what in the world?? I cook all the time and suddenly this.

The meal train ran me over!

What possessed me?

That is the question I wailed to myself the other day as I was making chili sauce.

I had all these plum tomatoes from Bailey Clinton and they needed to be used up. So I had scalded all these tomatoes and skinned them. Then I chopped up about six huge bell peppers and six small ones. Now it was 90 degrees and I was stirring this brimful, boiling pot to which I had added three chopped up onions. There were three onions still to be chopped, and ...

What possessed me?

That is a good question.

I like that quaint phrasing. It is fun to take a phrase you hear kicked around a lot, and really think about it. In this case all you can picture is the devil.

Remember how the devil made that phone call?

That picture up above is of the devil making chili sauce!

This particular story ends happily. I did get the onions chopped. The sauce exactly filled nine pints and all the lids went "pop." I then went off to work on my book.

Which, that is a whole other story. On the one hand, I am seeing the end of the tunnel. On the other, I often still think...

What possessed me?

Just a Spritz

I am noticing that I am writing only about every 10 days, and that about something fattening. That must change! But meanwhile ...

There is this cookie press.

I bought this vintage Mirro cookie press for $4 at this wonderful estate sale that Lizzie and I went to on Saturday. I bought a few other things at that sale too that were, ahem, a little bit bigger. But first things first! This is a Mirro press with all these disks that let you shape a whole bunch of fancy little cookies.

This press comes with 20 little discs! They fit into a wooden holder like the discs up above.

If I want to hold a bridge party such as the ones Leonard Pennario went to, I can do cookies in spades, not to mention hearts, clubs, and diamonds.

For Christmas cookies I can make stars, Christmas trees, wreaths, and camels. I love how they include camels. I'd walk a mile for a camel!

It's funny, most people associate these cookies with Christmas. I do not, necessarily. We made Spritz cookies a few times but they were not an immovable part of our Christmas so I do not see why you cannot make these little darlings all year.

Especially the flower cookies! They would be in season right about now.

Haha... Up above where I got that picture, I found this Web log. This woman had the same troubles I am anticipating having which is why I am holding off on trying this press until the time is right. Wouldn't you know she zeroed in on the same shape I was thinking of trying, too: the pinwheel/flower shape. She concluded that others are easier.

It will take time to master this thing! I will probably start off a Spritz ditz. But heck, if I can play Chopin on the piano, I can do this. Perhaps I will try some for next coffee hour. I was going to soar like an eagle and attempt a Bundt cake. But now perhaps I will try Spritzies.

The power of the press!