So I made a pot of Sgt Mom’s Brown Rice/Lentil Soup today. Used Green Lentils. I add a pound of HOT Italian Sausage to it. It’s simmering now and the house smells soooooooo good.
Won’t eat much today because I know it will be better tomorrow. But there’s nothing wrong with it freshly made either.
Another signing event, last night at Berkman Books in Fredericksburg, for the Adeslverein Trilogy. Berkman’s is one of those nice little independent bookstores, holding its own specialized little niche against the overwhelming tide of big-box-bookstores and internet sales; Texiana, lots of events with local authors, curiosities, antique and used books. The clientele is a mix of adventurous tourists and local residents who don’t care to drive to San Antonio or New Braunfels in search of their reading matter. And they have two cats on the premises – I promised that I would frisk Blondie on departure, to ensure that neither of them had stowed away to come home with is. Berkman’s in a rambling old house on Main Street, a little removed from the main tourist blocks along Main Street… which, however, is slowly spreading along the side streets, and east and west from Marketplace Square. David, the owner, had ordered ten copies of each volume, and there has been considerable interest – even some notice in the Fredericksburg Standard. Kenn Knopp, the local historical expert who volunteered (kind of glumly, as he is the first to confess) to read the manuscript of the Trilogy, only to be astonished and thrilled as he got farther into it – was going to meet us an hour before the signing started. He had a friend, Annette Sultemeier, whom he wanted me to meet. Ms Sultemeier is also a local historical enthusiast, and still lives in her family’s house nearby. James P. Waldrip, the infamous leader of the pro-Confederate Hanging Band, who persecuted local Unionists during the Civil War was supposed to be buried in the back yard of her family home. Waldrip figures as the resident villain in the Trilogy, and his come-uppance under a tree at the edge of the old Nimitz hotel property was described in Book Three. Supposedly, he was buried in that unmarked grave, outside of the city cemetery, to escape desecration of his resting place. He was an especially bad hat, with many bitter local enemies.
There was a nice crowd at the signing. David had thought there would be many more people at the signing than there were, but I didn’t mind. This way, I had enough time to talk to people and answer questions. Enough of them were coming specifically for the Trilogy anyway, so I didn’t have that awful experience of spending two hours, watching customers come in the door and sidling around the desperate author, sitting at a little lonely table with a pile of books. Almost everyone bought all three books, many intended as Christmas presents. The last customer of the evening was almost the most rewarding to talk to. This was a young college student named Kevin, fascinated by local history and majoring in it, who read about the signing in the Standard, checked out my website and came straight over with his mother. He asked a great many questions about research, and bought Book One… and his mother bought Two and Three. Christmas present, I guess!
Afterwards, Kenn Knopp treated us to dinner at the Auslander Restaurant, which we had eaten at once before, and recalled as being pretty uninspired foodwise, and kind of scruffy on the inside. Apparently it has since been renovated, for now it was very comfortable, and the food was terrific; jagerschnitzel to die for, accompanied by little crispy potato pancakes about the size of a silver dollar. Blondie and I walked back to the car, admiring the Christmas lights, all along Main Street. There seem to be many nicer restaurants along Main Street now – it was quite lively on a Friday evening. Blondie noted there were many more wine-tasting rooms, too. The Hill Country is slowly becoming the new Provence, as I predicted a while ago, or at least the newest Napa-Sonoma-Mendocino, as far as wine production is concerned.
It was a great way to finish up the day – the interest in my books being almost as much of a satisfaction as the food. I have been warned, though; the event at the Pioneer Museum, on January 3rd will be even bigger, and the local history enthusiasts will come armed with even more searching questions.
One thing that I’ve always wanted to see is one place, one drive-through, one counter, where you could get all of your favorite fast-food in ONE spot.
For instance, a Jack-in-the-Box Sirloin Burger with Crinkle Cut Fries from Culvers, a Route 44 Limeade from Sonic and then a Dairy Queen something for desert.
Because quite honestly, I love fast food, I just don’t like one particular franchise’s selection across the board.
What would be your favorite fast food mash? If you could get something from all of your favorite in one spot?
Cross-posted at Temple of Suck.
Blondie stopped to make some cold-calls for her employer, the small company who installs permanent shade structures, on our way back from the bank this morning. She initially wanted to stop at a Dairy Queen on Thousand Oaks who had an outdoor patio without a shred of shade to it… really, why would someone want to sit on a hard metal or concrete bench and eat their burgers, fries and slurpee out in the broiling hot sun? And there were trees all around all the other shops in this particular little strip mall… so why wouldn’t they consider investing in a permanent metal structure holding a stout and colorful weather-proof canvas shade over the patio area.
The middle of this parking lot was like a pocket park in a European city; fenced off with that fancy metal fence, shaded with lots of trees and a little pavilion in the middle, which had one particularly Texas element to it. It had one of those misters all around the edge of the roof – it’s supposed to make it a little cooler, sitting underneath. I guess it’s just dry enough here to evaporate the mist and make it seem cooler. But it’s not really a park for humans – it’s for dogs. Actually, the place is a dog day-care center. And to judge by all the dogs who were romping in it, it seems to be pretty popular. Anything to keep a large pet from getting bored, neurotic and destructive, I guess. The Lesser Weevil wreaked a path of destruction during that time that I had to leave her to go out to a regular job. I guess taking them to doggie day care is still less expensive than having them shred the back yard and eat the porch furniture
But this place had another delight – a grocery/deli/meat market specializing in Middle Eastern foods. Blondie was ecstatic, and I was pretty impressed – here’s were I would go if I really wanted large quantities of Indian spices, and things like lavash bread and pickled garlic. They had huge bricks of Bulgarian feta cheese and all sorts of wonderful foods, breads and candies that we hadn’t seen in simply ages, imported from Greece, Bulgaria, Syria, India and Pakistan.
Like Kinder-Eggs. Blondie loved them, when her best friend in Spain – whose family had previously been stationed in Germany – fell on them in the little San Lamberto candy store with cries of happy delight. It was the only kind of chocolate that Blondie really liked. Kinder-Eggs are sort of the German version of Cracker-Jack, only the toys are a whole heck of a lot nicer and you aren’t picking out popcorn hulls from between your teeth. For those who have never encountered them, they are a foil-wrapped chocolate confection the size and shape of a jumbo hens’ egg – a thin milk chocolate layer with a very thin pseudo white-chocolate layer inside… and inside the hollow chocolate eggshell is a plastic capsule about an inch and a half long and an inch in diameter with a small toy of some kind inside – which usually has to be assembled. Blondie bought a pair, which we ate in the parking lot. She says they tasted as good as ever. Her toy was a little squid, which once assembled, squirts about a teaspoon of water. The store was deserted; we were the only shoppers. The owner says this is his slow time, when all of his customers go home to wherever for the summer. But he says things will pick up in the fall. I hope so – it’s a dandy specialty grocery store. It’s called the Taj Mahal. Can’t miss it, as it’s right behind the dog park.
Not a bad way to spend a Thursday morning, actually.
Owing to a particular circumstance – that of Blondie’s boss having a pair of sons who were very into 4-H activities this past year, both of whom raised prize-winning pigs – our freezer is filled with the most delectable assortment of pork products. It seems that part of the whole scheme for students of the agricultural arts in raising such animals … is to partake of the resulting bounty. (Er… they are being raised to provide that sort of thing; ham, chops, bacon, the rest. The kids who do this are perfectly clear on the concept, as was my Granny Jessie, raised on a Pennsylvania farm at the beginning of the last century. Charlotte’s Web aside, farm pigs weren’t intended to be pets, as clever and endearing as they tend to be.)
Anyway, Blondie’s bosses’ family freezer quite overflowed with their share of two pigs, so a portion has been passed on to us, and oh, my! Chops, sausage, thick-cut cured bacon, ham slices, back ribs and a roast which we have already cooked in the slow cooker with two cans of Rotel tomatoes and green chilis for burritos. All of it delectable, succulent, flavorful… the sausage has very little fat in it and the ham? The ham is perfectly divine, unlike anything else I’ve ever eaten, although Honey-Baked does come close in hammy perfection. Believe me, all this will be portioned out and used in recipes which will show it all off to best effect. Should the house catch fire, mine and Blondie’s first thoughts will be for rescuing the pets, my computer, the Yoshida prints… and the contents of the freezer.
This is what the farm-raised stuff must have tasted like, and what the expensive, organic specialty ordered meats must be like, the stuff that I cannot afford, at least until “Adelsverein” and “Truckee’s Trail” are way, way farther up in the Amazon sales ranking than they are at present. In the early 19th century, pork was the meat of American choice, rather than beef – and now I know why. Food of the gods, people, food of the gods!
And if I thought the snails at NIOSA were dubious eats, I hadn’t had a chance to grok the full horror of the guacamole bird – it’s the third one down, here Found this through neo-neocon, here who was running a two-part Jello retrospective. Some of the recipes which Neo’s commenters recollected fondly don’t seem too bad at all – the salmon mousse here was especially savory
You see, there is Jello and there is just plain gelatin mixed with a variety of sweet or savory liquids and poured into an appropriate mold. There is the stuff whipped up by the staff of women’s home magazines trying to catch the eyeballs and not coincidently sell more Jello… and of late there is the parody stuff (like the famous brain mold), and a lot of bizarre things put together for contests; I have heard of Jello aquariums with lettuce for seaweed and Goldfish crackers as… er, gold fish swimming in the pale green lime depths.
And then there is stuff like my mother’s favorite – the wine-orange gelatin dessert, and my own yoghurt cream mold – I posted the recipe in January.
From Joy of Cooking, p. 745 “Wine Gelatin”
Soak 2 TBsp gelatin in ¼ cup cold water. Dissolve it in ¾ cup boiling water and stir in until dissolved, ½ cup sugar. Allow to cool and add 1 ¾ cup orange juice, 6 TBsp lemon juice and 1 cup well-flavored wine. Sugar amount may be adjusted if the orange juice and/or wine are sweet . Pour into sherbet glasses and chill until firm. Serve with cream, whipped cream or custard sauce. (It strikes me that this might be very nice with blood-orange juice and a nice rose wine)
Gelatin molds – not just for Lutheran church suppers!
On Friday night, Blondie and I daringly ventured into one of San Antonio’s most popular and certainly one of the most tasty – in the culinary sense – Fiesta events. Oh, dear, now I shall have to explain San Antonio’s yearly Fiesta to those who have not heard the legend; you may think of it as our peculiar version of Mardi Gras, but it has grown into something considerably more. My some-time employer, a San Antonio native, describes it as a city-wide, week-long block party, but it is a great deal more than that. One upon a time, in the 1890s, it started as a parade to commemorate the victory of the Battle of San Jacinto, where people rode around in carriages and threw flowers at each other. That was the humble beginning with the Battle of Flowers Parade. But everybody wanted to get into the act, and now Fiesta covers ten days, beginning to end and takes in just about every part of town and just about every socio-economic element.
There is a grand debutante coronation, where the two-dozen daughters of local elite wear gowns and trains crusted with about fifty pounds of rhinestones, sequins and metal-thread-embroidery (look, I am not making this up!), a raunchy variety show that sends up the whole concept (not making up that part, either!) , half a dozen elaborate parades – one of which is an evening torch-light parade, and anther is on flat-boats along the San Antonio River – an open-air oyster-bake on the grounds of a local private university and exhibitions, parties, open houses, athletic contests, pageants, shows and concerts all over the city, (schedule for this years’ events is here – one more day to party hearty, people!). It’s an excuse for people to dress up in strange costumes, eat, drink, party hearty and bash total strangers over the head with confetti-filled eggs. Like New Orleans Mardi Gras but on the whole, we like to think it is a bit more cooth. The crowds along the parade routes don’t yell at the girls on the floats to show their tits; they ask them to show their shoes. Under their ornate and gorgeous gowns, they are usually wearing running shoes, or crocs. One year, when rain threatened, one of the debutants was wearing swim fins, which earned her quite a lot of laugher and applause.
The culinary crown-jewel just might be NIOSA, or Night in Old San Antonio, a sprawling food-fest in La Villita, the old ‘Little Village’. It’s sponsored by the San Antonio Conservation Society and runs for four nights. My some-time employer has worked on the set-up for years, and knows practically everyone. He asked if Blondie and I would like to go, as his significant other had volunteered to dress up like a gypsy and work in the fortune-telling booth. I have to admit, Blondie was keener on this than I was. It was hot and sticky last night, thunderstorms threatened, and there would be dire traffic downtown, both coming and going. (Which there was – getting out of the parking garage afterwards was a lengthy agony; 45 minutes to get from where we parked to the exit!)
La Villita was crammed with food booths – and the extraordinary thing is, all of it was pretty good, and not that expensive, even if Some-Time Employer basically comped stuff for us, from booths where his friends and buddies were in charge. It was all organized roughly by ethnic neighborhoods; Mexican foods all clustered together, regular American (mostly barbeque of various animal parts) a hugely popular booth with egg rolls and other orientalia, a French-Cajun section offering jambalaya and delicacies like…umm, snails, and the German neighborhood, who had cannily set up inside the biggest building, the assembly hall where they could benefit from the air conditioning. (Sausages, pretzels and cream-horns, but we were all pretty filled by then). The thing about the food is that many of the food booths have been run by the same set of volunteers for years, and they have done a lot of tinkering with the recipes, besides cooking it all from scratch. (One variant of meat-onna-stick is famous locally – this is one recipe for it, but apparently the original was done with beef hearts. It’s a Peruvian specialty; one of the volunteers adapted the recipe for American palates years ago with considerable success.)
And every third or fourth booth offered soft drinks, water and tasty adult beverages – sangria, wine and beer. We even dared to try escargot; snails to you. Having had a couple of cups of beer first helped. Three dark little wads of gelatinacous phlegm drenched in melted butter and garlic, served on a slice of baguette; which only goes to prove that if you throw enough melted butter and fresh garlic on anything, you have a chance of rendering it edible. Not appetizing, but at least edible. You could have done a whole fifteen-course dinner, just walking from booth to booth, grazing; appetizers, fish course, vegetable, entrée, salad, dessert- eating out of hand as you walked.
In the German area, Blondie and I talked to a re-enactor and local history fan all dressed up like a member of the 19th century Bavarian royal regiment. Blondie refrained from asking him earnestly why he had a feather-duster stuck on top of his hat – since he did have a sword, too. I passed out my ‘books and writers’ business card to a couple of people; I mean, why turn down a chance to network. Got home at nearly midnight, in the middle of a thunderstorm, which mercifully had held off until well after NIOSA closed for the evening. Good times – and I just may do it again, but I think I’ll pass on the snails, next time.
“You have curious things to eat…but I am fed on proper meat” – From R.L Stevensons’ Child’s Garden of Verses
My mother had a fairly open-minded attitude about what exactly constituted edible animal protein; if Dad’s paycheck could afford it, and it was available from any of the places providing our edibles in the 1960s, she would damn well have a go at making something tasty out of it. Beef-heart casserole and fried rabbit made appearances often; so did ground beef in any of a hundred different guises, as well as liver and onions – basically, if it didn’t look too awful and smelled good, we were prepared to be adventurous. Except where liver and onions were concerned, which smelled good but tasted revolting; and which Mom insisted we eat because it was A) cheap and B) good for us.
Generally, that attitude served me well ever since; overseas on Japan and Korea, in Greenland and across Europe. Roast chestnuts – good to go. Unidentified bits of chicken flesh on a skewer, brushed with some kind of soy-based sauce and grilled over a little charcoal brazier – excellent! Stir-fried noodles and strange vegetables – oh, yeah! Strange meaty stews with lots of potatoes, served up in a French youth hostel in the summer of 1970? My traveling friend, Esther Tutwyler and I cheerfully agreed that it probably was horse-meat and ate it anyway. We were hungry and on a budget – and when in Rome, or in this case, Paris – do as the Romans. We were generally baffled by the bread rolls, though – they went hard and inedible after a day or so, and every time we had had a bag-luncheon from whatever youth hostel kitchen was supplying our nutritional needs, there were at least two of them. What to do with the uneaten extras? Seemed kind of ungracious and wasteful to throw them away, but we had to eventually. There was that time we did have a game of kick-football with one, in the corridor of a subterranean hostel in Vienna’s Esterhazy Park, – until the roll skidded underneath the door of someone’s room. We always wondered what the occupant of that room thought the next day, finding a stale bread roll in the middle of the floor.
On the whole, youth hostel food was pretty much like my mothers – fairly edible and usually recognizable; cheap cuts of meat figured fairly highly, and always good sturdy bread. The breakfasts in Scandinavia were especially tasty, for the hostels generally set up a buffet table, with bins of different sliced bread, and every sort of condiment and bread topping imaginable. Kind of strange, we agreed, having salami for breakfast, but when in Rome, et cetera.
There was only one meal that left us completely baffled – coincidently, it was the evening meal in a Scandinavian hostel: Bergen, Norway, if memory serves. The main course at dinner was… well, we couldn’t tell exactly what it was. It appeared on our plates as opaque white gelatinous circles about three inches across and about half an inch thick, obviously sliced from a canned or extruded mass. It had a very faintly fibrous texture and feel in the mouth, but otherwise had no discernable taste at all, offering no clue as to its origin, animal, fish or vegetable. I mean, it tasted and smelt of precisely nothing. It was served with a dollop of almost equally tasteless béchamel sauce (milk gravy to Southerners) and formed a symphony of unappetizing white on each plate. At least we recognized béchamel sauce, but the stuff that it was on? It appeared almost as if the kitchen staff had just opened generic cans labeled “food” and gorped out a neat and faintly rubbery slice on each plate. I had never seen the like – and after fifteen years of Lutheran pot-luck lunches and dinners, and Mom’s cooking, I thought I had seen everything. We ate it – no one opting for seconds. By luck, none of the kitchen staff that evening seemed to understand English, so the mystery food remained a mystery.
Two or three years later, my high school had a Norwegian exchange student. I described the mysterious rubbery, tasteless white stuff to him, and he said it was fish pudding. A Norwegian national dish, apparently. Kind of like lutefisk, but without the rat poison.
With the very last insurance payment for the late lamented Mitsubishi coupe (totaled last spring in a collision at the I-35/Division off-ramp) which was not received until after we returned home, don’t ask for the long and involved explanation of how this came to pass – Blondie went straight to Lowes’ and bought a gas barbeque grill. Then she hied herself to the local Humongously-Enormous Big-Ass Grocery store for all the grill impedimenta to go with it – including one of those little stands for doing beer-can chicken, which I would swear was invented by one of the clients from the inventions-consultant that I was working at when I began blogging, yeah on many years ago. (five and half, if you want to get really technical – not quite the dark ages, but nearly there.) The beer-can chicken came out well, BTW, but last night we did something else, entirely.
To celebrate Blondie’s birthday, we had a sort of garden-party dinner; catching the weather at just the right moment. Yesterday was mild and only tenuously cloudy, and Blondie cleaned up the garden and adorned it with candles, lanterns and tea-lights from her vast collection gleaned at various yard-sales and the Extremely Marked Down shelves at various retail outlets. She invited her co-workers and I invited mine; making a nice mixed crowd, since some of them knew each other. Dave the Computer Genius has sorted out the computers at Blondie’s place of employment on a couple of occasions. There didn’t seem to be any of those awkward pauses, and there was very little leftover food. Always reassuring, that – even better, no one had to go to the emergency room for treatment of food poisoning. Look, that is always a worry, when you have people over and feed them. Projectile vomiting – not a memory to hold on to, although I seem to have retained mine for all those AFRTS food-safety spots.
Anyway, we did a very nice pasta salad, from one of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, and a splendid barbequed chicken – also from the same source. My sister, Pippy is a fan, pointing out that the beauty of Ina Gartons’ cookbooks are that just about everything can be done in advance. All we had to do for the chicken was throw it on the grill. This is the recipe, and it was splendid! We have enough that we will do “pulled chicken BBQ” sandwiches tonight.
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So, we went to the radio station’s annual staff Christmas party last night; generously catered with comestibles supplied by some of San Antonio’s finest. There were also, as Blondie described it, a fine assortment of tasty adult beverages, but no – this is public radio, so the drunken revelry was at a fairly well-controlled level. I bored the socks off a couple of hapless spouses by telling them more than they possibly ever wanted to know about Republic-era Texas and the entrepreneurial scheme and the perils of POD publishing and book-marketing. Blondie renewed acquaintance with that handful of staff members who recalled her as a high-school student volunteer working in the phone room during pledge drives.
The nearest we all came to a riotously party-hearty atmosphere was during the gift exchange, which was the white-elephant gift “Bad Santa” exchange. Everyone brought something of small value and occasionally dubious taste, suitably gift-wrapped. At the height of the evening revels, we each took a turn and drew a gift from the pile. The hope is that you go home with something a little more desirable, or at least, not as hideous and/or useless as what you brought, but this is a chancy preposition.
The rules of Bad Santa are open to negotiation, but the general custom is that someone drawing a gift can exchange it, unopened, for something that someone already has opened. Sometimes there is a limit on how often a desirable gift can bounce from person to person – and there are occasionally rather desirable items salted in among the white-elephants, which can make for a very lively exchange. At one unit I belonged to which did this, a set of lottery tickets, and a pair of hearts and teddy-bear printed boxer shorts proved to be in demand… whereas an awful plant container of hand-painted cast plaster in the shape of a tree stump with a squirrel on it had been around the Christmas exchange block for five or six years in a row. The unlucky soul who got stuck with it, returned it for subsequent Bad Santa exchanges; for all I know, it may still be in circulation, unless someone struck a blow for good taste in decorating and smashed it into little tiny bits..
The most popular items last night was a game of Texas Monopoly, a pair of Lord of the Rings bookends and a universal remote in the shape of a calculator the size of a roofing shingle – yes sir, try and misplace that puppy sometime. Least popular? I’d guess that was the 2005 road atlas. Well, the rules do say ‘white elephant’… I lost two boxes of gourmet dog treats and came home with a metal bowl trimmed with antlered deer heads. Not the least sure what I will do with it, although it might make a jazzy pet dish for Weevil or Spike.
Blondie and I are heading out to California tomorrow to spend Christmas with Mom and Dad and the rest of the family. We’re taking Blondie’s laptop, but Mom and Dad are not anywhere near being in tune with the internet age. I may be able to check in from a wifi spot alleged to be located in the public library in Valley Center… or I may not. Have a Merry Christmas, happy New Year and all that. We’ll be back after New Years, at the Same Old, Same Old.
(In the meantime, could someone occasionally approve comments and empty out the spam queue? Thanks – Sgt Mom)
We watched “V for Vendetta” again a couple of weeks ago. Two of the characters in the movie make “eggs (eggies) in a basket” for Evey.
I think I’ve had that for breakfast about four times since then.
It’s simple, heat a fry pan with butter or butter flavored low fat spray, tear a hole in the middle of a piece of bread, put the bread in the hot butter/spray, crack an egg and put it in the hole. Fry until you can see the bottom of the egg get solid white. Flip. I add a piece of swiss cheese to the top and let it melt because there’s not enough in there that’s bad for your heart.
Simple, plain, good food. Ya can’t buy this anywhere and I wouldn’t want to.
This is a recipe Beautiful Wife has been using for about 10 years. I know the holidays are coming when I start to smell this throughout the house.
Beautiful Wife’s Cranberry Chutney (Adopted from Father Pat’s Recipe and it may be exactly the same, but after 10 years, God only knows.)
4 Cups whole cranberries
1 2/3 Cup Sugar (Splenda works great for anyone cooking for a diabetic)
1 Tsp Fresh Ginger
½ Cup (1 Med) Chopped Onion
½ Cup Thinly Sliced Celery
½ Cup (1 Med) Apple (Peeled, Cored, Chopped)
1 Cup Seedless Raisins
1 Tblspn Ground Cloves
1 Cup Water
Combine cranberries, raisins, sugar, ginger, cloves and water in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Stir frequently. This is a good time to prep/chop the onion, celery and apple. When cranberries start to pop/split, stir in onion, apple and celery. Bring back to a boil, then lower to a simmer for 15 minutes.
If canned in sterilized jars and properly sealed can be stored on pantry shelf for quite a long time. Otherwise, refrigerate. Serve as you would with cranberry sauce, use as jelly, or as a marinade. Good with any meat, not just turkey. Great as a topping for oatmeal or on crackers with cream cheese.
Venomous Kate posted her stuffing recipe too.
Here’s a question…why do southerners think that their stuffing is the “authentic” kind? Didn’t yankees start the whole Thanksgiving thing?
Other recipes welcome.