A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Happy (Early) St. Pat's: Corned Beef, Colcannon, & Green Bread

Happy St. Pat's Day  a little early! I'm working most of the weekend including Monday but I wanted to share this meal with you.  Yum! St. Pat's food is one of my favorite go to for celebratory meals. Don't know why I don't prepare it more often.  Actually, the Reuben is my all time favorite sandwich and corned beef hash and eggs is my favorite breakfast. Can't go wrong with corned beef and cabbage in any form!

By the way, the green bread is a joke. It's simply my standard white bread everyday recipe that I added green food paste coloring to for some St. Pat's silliness.

As for the holiday itself, St. Patrick is credited with both driving the snakes and the pagans out of Ireland. As Ireland's patron saint, Patrick is attributed with using the abundant shamrock as a teaching tool to explain the three-in-one nature of the Trinity.

This is my entry for this weeks'  Weekend Herb Blogging, originally created by the lovely Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen.  This week, WHB is hosted by Kel of the fabulously photographed Green Olive Tree.  Check out all the other entries after Sunday evening.

Cardamom is a spice, not technically an herb, but Kalyn's focus is on all herbs, spices, or plants.  Cardamom, my favorite spice, is used quite a bit in northern European and Middle Eastern cuisines.

Fudge and Fruit Bread: Another look at Christmas Desserts

I've already told you about the cream cheese cookie press cookies and the cranberry bread on the dessert table that was such a hit this year but one of the biggest surprise hits was the fudge.  Our family tradition is all about the peanut butter fudge. No one in my family even gives a flying flip about chocolate fudge, weird as that makes us, just peanut butter.  However, I was feeling a little lonely for MY favorite flavor and decided to make a go at it:  white chocolate maple.  Yum.

Thought I'd share a couple more pics from Christmas:

This is the kids all cracking up but I couldn't figure out why until Sydney signed to me that Suzanne (my sister) was making finger signs behind my head.  Duh.  I'm so slow on the uptake!

January 2nd, Already?

Where did New Year's Eve and New Year's Day go?  Oh yeah. I was at work!  Which wasn't too bad, by the way.  We had a full staff that night and threw together an impromptu party.  Of course we didn't think the night before to actually PLAN a party but I got up early that afternoon and made spinach dip and pulled some chips and salsa out of the pantry. Then when we got to work Steve found a couple of leftover 2 liter sodas and ordered pizza. The best part was having time to eat and relax for a few minutes around midnight. Yay!

So now we're up to Jan 2nd and guess what? I haven't already blown my diet yet this year. That's sort of a record for me but it didn't haven't much to do with self-control. Since I slept all day yesterday I didn't have time to stuff my face!  (There's always today since I don't work tonight.)

Back to the photo above. That is a little cherry pastry that I've been making for Gene for Christmas or New Year's mornings for several years. Out of all the holiday baking, it's one of the easiest and one of my favorites.  Plus I love watching Gene pick up the plate and fork and tuck into it even though he doesn't eat the whole thing at one time. It just tickles me the way he does it and how much he enjoys home-made sweets for breakfast with a cup of coffee.

Merry Christmas: Buche de Noel

This will be a new Muse tradition.  I just love this cake: the way it looks, the way it tastes, and the tradition.

The Buche de Noel, or Yule Log, was this month's Daring Baker challenge.  The rest of the group and their links can be found by clicking here: Daring Bakers.  Be warned, though.  Like I said yesterday, I didn't exactly follow all the rules.  The two I stuck with were using the swiss meringue recipe given and making marzipan mushrooms.  After the click I've posted the recipe I used for the pumpkin genoise from Paula Deen and noted the alterations I made to the swiss buttercream for maple flavored and how I came up with cardamom buttercream for filling.

I do have to tell one Gene story. I had the roll cut and laid out and was frosting it when Gene came into the kitchen and deadpanned "Are you going to be baking that again or cooking it in some way?"  I said "Uh. No, of course not.  I'm frosting it now."  He said, "Then you need to have gloves on because that's a health code violation to handle any food barehanded that won't be cooked afterwards."  Smartass bas***d.  :-)  I knew I taught him too much about the food business when I was in it.

The whole family loved it although next year I might try for a different filling. The buttercream on the outside was so rich that it made the buttercream on the inside overkill. One small piece will do you and with a table full of other desserts, including fudge, it was almost too much, too rich.  As a stand alone dessert it would have been perfect but as one of many, next year I'll change the filling but I haven't quite decided to what yet.

You know, really this is an easy cake.  It looks very impressive, is a wonderful holiday dessert table centerpiece, and makes people ooh and ahh, but in reality, it's not nearly as hard as it looks.  That's a winner in my book.

Here's a close up of the mushrooms and poinsettia.

I do have one great family party story.  Auntie Miranda made the suggestion at Thanksgiving that we draw names, a children's group and an adult group, for Christmas, set a limit of $5.00 and make it "a fun gift" however each person interpretted it.  Some of the gifts were fun, some funny, and some nice.  My brother Kenneth is the "fun gift" high master.  He had drawn our sister, Suzanne's, name and bought her a box of chocolates.   Except that the box of chocolates he bought totalled more than $5.00...hmmm..what to do?  So he calculated the cost per chocolate, by hand and showed his math work on the front of the box, and then proceeded to eat chocolates until he was down to a gift worth $5.00.  Oh, okay, there was one more little thing. Every time he bit into one he didn't care for or didn't want to finish, he left that half in the box, subtracted the half from the total and moved on.  So not only were there empty chocolate holes, there was half a turtle, half a caramel, half a peanut butter cup, etc.

We all bow to your greatness, Sir Joke-A-Lot.

Merry Christmas Eve!

Happy Christmas Eve and I'm just barely started!  I was a big slug yesterday and laid around most of the day watching Stephen King's The Stand, okay well I've read the book so I watched and napped while Gene watched--all four parts in one afternoon!  Felt good to slug out especially since my knees have been killing me.  Whine whine.

But today I will bake in earnest and post all weeks about the things I've learned and succeeded and failed at.  Hee hee.

I did have great luck with a new cranberry bread recipe from "The New Best Recipe" cookbook from Cook's Illustrated.  We had a smaller party of just my brothers and sister and their kids on Saturday night and that was a huge hit with requests for more for the big family Christmas evening party. I think it's the combination of the orange zest with the cranberries that really swings that recipe into something special.

Since our Mom died many years ago, it's a big thing with us kids when i make the old-fashioned cookies and dishes we grew up with--it's the memories that help make our holidays special so in the depths of the closet I finally found the cookie press I bought years ago and reworked Mom's recipe for cream cheese almond star cookies like we grew up with.  Our mom would make dozens of a dozen kind of cookies every year but but I'm not quite that motivated! They'll take what they get and they'll like it. :-)

I'm also a day late and a dollar short so I will be making the Daring Bakers Yule Log but not until today and, unfortunately, not in accordance with the directions.  I told my family about it and they were all excited except they didn't like the flavors in the challenge and whined and cried until I promised to make the yule log as a pumpkin roll, something my sister used to do every year until she lost her favorite recipe, and they want the pumpkin to be topped with maple instead of cappuccino buttercream.  Nothing like the folks who are going to be eating it making their desires known, eh?  :-)  But in the meantime (I'll be baking today) check out all the lovely yule logs already having been constructed by Daring Bakers all over the world:  Daring Bakers Blogroll

And now for those recipes for today...

Baking Makes Me Happy

I don't have anything to show yet but today is my big Christmas baking day and I'm very excited.  There is something about baking that soothes my spirit in a way nothing else can. 

This is one of my favorite Christmas cakes from years ago. I made it for the family party and I remember my Uncle Andy hugging me and saying "Sis, it's almost too pretty to eat."  Ahhh.  It's a chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream smoothed down as smooth as I could get it and then the poinsettias are outlined in black buttercream and filled in with colored decorating gel.

Do Not Feed the Animals

But do feed the fruitcake.

To all the Brits who have inspired this little foray into the holiday culinary unknown, thank you.  I'm still mid-journey but enjoying it immensely.  I unwrapped the cake this morning and was surprised to find that the rich, spicy, fruity aroma immediately drifted nose-ward and that the cake looks and smells beautifully moist.  I would never have guessed that for a week old cake. To be honest, I expected to find a dry pile of mold, even though I know that's sort of a mismatch in concepts.

My report to you is this: so far so good.  It still smells good enough to eat, it looks very moist, and it has now quaffed in two more tablespoons of my finest Southern Comfort.

Long live the Christmas cake!

...and the Spirit of Christmas Upchucked All Over My House

There's something about ice storms that creates a frenzy of nesting.  Sure, maybe it's because last year at Christmastime we had the every 20 year ice storm from hell where Gene and I personally were without power for a whole eight hours but we had friends without power for up to THREE WEEKS.  There's an ice storm warning out for the whole area for the next...oh...three DAYS so the good news is the pantry is mostly full, the gas tanks topped off, I don't have to work until tomorrow night and only that one night for several days. Hmmm...that leaves me with cold, dreary freezing rain outside the windows which always gives me the itch to clean the house or, in this case, decorate the house with every Christmas doodad I've collected over the last 25 years.

Yes, of course I'll show photos and you'll feel sorry for Gene for having to wake up dreaming he's been camping out in the The Christmas Store.

Living room tree with Gene's Grinches and Christmas Bugs lined up. (Substitutes for children--the children in us.)

And here's the tree skirt that I absolutely love:

The side table in the kitchen with obviously the Nativity in the center. Flanked on each side are "Baking Santa" with cookies and gingerbread adornments

and if you look closely, the Christmas tree has mini baking tool ornaments on it.

Then about 7pm tonight it suddenly hit me. I MUST bake Christmas cake. I must.  I have no idea why it hit me so hard except for the challenge, the mystery, the sense of missing out on something.  You see, I have a google alert set up for "cake" just so I don't miss any great recipes or the occasional geek wedding cake designed to look like Yoda (I'm not kidding) or whatever. For the last several weeks the Brits have been going Christmas cake apeshit and...well...as a small child I never liked anyone to get anything I didn't.  Apparently it's still true as an adult so I decided that not another day could go by without me putting a Christmas cake, aka fruit cake, into the oven for most of the evening.

But there's an ice storm, remember?  I wasn't sure I had all the ingredients but I was determined and where there is a will there will be a way found or I get very cranky with myself.

Thanksgiving, At Last

The Family.

By the way, I'm on a new quest to break the fingers of every teenager who does that finger sign thing in photos. I don't know what it means and I don't care.  I hope in 20 years they're embarrassed they ruined family pictures with that crap.

The turkey.

Need I say more?  Well maybe not but you know me. I will.

So....before we get to the food...is everyone's family hysterically dysfunctional or is it just mine?  I have to wax philosophic for a moment. For the last 20 years my crazy family has driven me...well...crazy but I've finally found the "lighten up" button and while I don't always find the family antics hilarious, I have learned to not ruin my own good time wondering about the crazy levels of those around me.  I've finally learned to chant "It's not my life. It's not my responsibility" non-stop and loudly in my head to drown out my own screams of "What the F*** are you thinking?"  I've now developed and am in the process of developing a highly refined sense of mentally conjuring up my own imaginary narcotics to dull the family pain in my brain.

I'm speaking, of course, of the brother who was told the party was at 5pm even though it was at 6pm but still arrived at 8pm because apparently he didn't leave his home 45 minutes away until after 6pm and then decided he needed to do some miscellaneous shopping and get a haircut before arriving...what planet does that even make sense on?  I'm also speaking of the same brother's new girlfriend who, after trying to make a stink with him saying that I didn't properly invite her, sat in the living room all alone all evening watching TV instead of joining the family in the kitchen, dining room, and sunroom.  A couple of people did try to go talk her out of the cocoon. I wasn't one of them. That's just silly and smacks of drama queen.  I don't have time for that noise. I was busy laughing with my other brother and sister and cousins about "the good ole' bad ole days" when we used to be forced to sit at the "children's" table together at family holidays, and yet, when the dust from filled plates settled, we found ourselves with the auntie, uncle, Gene, and James (old people :-) ) in the dining room and all of us same cousins in the sunroom together laughing about stupid shit. For the rest of the night, it was officially the "Children's table" room.

So, you know, the moral of the story is that a little family whack never gets you down, it just makes for great stories later.

On to the play by play:

Daring Bakers: Milk Chocolate & Caramel Tart

I found this challenge to be just that: challenging.  While I have an extensive background in baking cakes, tarts I'm not as familiar with so this was fun in a slightly stressful way, let me put it that way. I've never before made my own mousse or caramel. I've always wanted to do both but yesterday was a first for both. I learned a lot, mostly from my mistakes. But that's the whole point of being in the Daring Bakers group. I wanted the challenge of exploring new baking territory.

For a list of all the challengers, click on Daring Bakers for links.

Not to continue complaining about my knees but I'm going to anyway. Still having problems with them. Still miserable at work (from my knees only) and had a doc appt yesterday about them.  We're going to try a new painkiller that's non-narcotic, thank God, and maybe some joint fluid therapy.

In the meantime, I admit, even though cooking is still relaxing for me, I have to be careful on my days off not to spend too much time standing or it makes it worse for work.  This little project was four hours in the kitchen!  I'd put off making the tart until right at deadline time so there was no doing one little thing a day crap. It was a straight on onslaught with putting things that needed cooling into the freezer and cutting out all the middle man of time I could.

Let me walk you through my experience with this little recipe.  For one, the first thing it says is that the shortbread pastry will make three tarts. Well, I didn't need bulk, I needed ONE.  But instead of dividing everything by three, since dividing two eggs into three parts, gets dicey, I divided everything in half and went from there. I think I ended up with a little too thick of shortbread crust but it's good and we'll survive the trauma of having a thicker crust, you know?

I did make two alterations to the recipe. We're supposed to run the recipe as is but I had a couple of problems. For one, this really was a hit and run this time so it was one trip to one grocery store and one afternoon. So when I couldn't fine the hazelnuts on my pass through the grocery store, I chose to read "hazelnuts" as "almonds".  And I left the cinnamon out of the crust completely.  My husband, Gene, hates cinnamon and since I'm counting on him to eat a goodly portion of this thing, it made no sense to alienate my audience from the beginning.