Mince Pie! Mince Pie!

I’m addicted to “The Hope Chest,” a blog showcasing “Bad news from the Past.”  One of the reasons I love it is that Mr. Parallel, curator of The Hope Chest, is a serious scholar of the mince pie, its connotations and denotations.  If you don’t believe me, follow the tag Hot Mince Pie.
I have an historic mincemeat recipe, one [...]

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Orderly Transition of Power Salad–with homemade chutney!

Despite the scorching heat (we were really pleased when it only got up to 82 F in the upstairs today!), I stood over the stove stirring a pot of boiling fruit, because I had a mad craving for Coronation Salad, or my determinedly Paleo-Fabian version thereof, and the price of store-bought chutney is a scandal.
Coronation [...]

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Sweetness

These are Arnheim biscuits.  I found the recipe in a book called Pot on the Fire, by John and Matt Thorne.  It’s an idiosyncratic book, and it rubbed me the wrong way–I’m definitely not what Havi Brooks would call its Right Person.  On the other hand, this recipe made it all worthwhile.  No less a [...]

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Turning Over a New Leaf

After the spicy, sweet, buttery, spongy, syrupy, creamy abundance of the last two weeks, farewell, vacation!  It’s time for a change.  A new leaf, if you will.  (Sorry.)  The kids start school tomorrow.  Joan and I go back to work.  The year starts in earnest.  No more lolling on the couch knitting all afternoon.  No more [...]

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Breakfast for Supper is the Best

We love breakfast for supper at our house.  Sometimes it’s pancakes, sometimes it’s French toast, and just lately it’s been aebleskivers in Little Sunshine’s special cast iron pan.  I’m still an aebleskiver novice, as you can see from the messy pan.  They’re hard to turn smoothly, and require a lot of watching and fussing. 
But they [...]

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Iron Cupcake: Earth. Battle Chili.

If memory serves . . . sorry.  Couldn’t resist doing my Chairman Kaga imitation (which only reminds me that Joan totally thought that Chairman Kaga was a real person.  Like Santa.).
So, Iron Cupcake: World!  It’s the international cupcake version of Iron Chef, of course.  This month’s ingredient is chili, and we’re competing for fabulous prizes, including [...]

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Lemon Bars Redux

This was meant to be a picture of a beautiful pan of lemon bars.  As you can see, it didn’t work out quite the way I’d planned.
 But it’s not the end of the world, because they are so good that this is what my lemon bars really look like.  Gone.
It will doubtless surprise you to [...]

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A Much Better Use for Saltines

 
I’ve felt bad about the way I abused saltines, back in the Retro Recipe Challenge.  Poor things, they have a hard enough row to hoe just being themselves.  They’re the first food people turn to after a bad case of flu, for example.  They get wrapped up in manky little cellophane packets and crushed into [...]

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Some Things No Kitchen Should Be Without

1.  Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning  (aka “red salt”).  The sine qua non of nearly every kind of meat, cheese, or egg dish, and the ingredient that apotheosizes potato salad.
2.  Yellow popcorn.
3.  A bottle of Chartreuse.  The green kind.  It should be several hundred years old, with crystallized sugar all around the threads of the screw-on [...]

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Bronze Chrysanthemums Mean Fall

It’s fall here on the Palouse, for sure.  Cold, damp, muddy–but with occasional  bursts of brilliant sunshine, some amazing last-ditch blooming and fruiting.
We’re being initiated into the world of athletic participation:  Little Sunshine has joined the junior high cross-country team.  After 43 years of avoiding even the most ancillary whisker of an athletic event, I’ve [...]

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