Laurabelle’s Blog

Several years ago Jeff's mother gave us a pasta maker. I think we used it once, though I don't actually remember doing so. (I do remember trying to roll pasta dough by hand, which didn't work terribly well.) The machine has sat in the closet for at least as long as we have been in California.

So why I suddenly decided to make fresh pasta on Sunday for my mother, who is visiting for the weekend, I don't know, but it was an awesome idea.

Making fresh pasta is a little weird. You start out by making a pile of flour on your work surface (or if you're a pansy, you can use a bowl). Make a well in the center of your flour and crack some eggs into it, then whisk the eggs and start mixing them with the flour. Knead the dough until it becomes smooth and elastic, then divide it in four and let it rest for a little while under plastic wrap or a bowl.

Now comes the rolling. A pasta machine makes this a lot easier; it has rollers that squeeze the dough thin and even. The rollers are adjustable, so you start out on the widest setting. Put the dough through, fold it, roll it through again, fold, and repeat about 6 times. Tick the rollers to the next setting and put the dough through a few times; repeat until the dough is smooth, satiny, and as thin as you want it.

Jeff's father takes a trip to Ohio every December, and this year Jeff and I went with him. We spent a couple of days in Cincinnati with Jeff's aunt, then drove down to rural Kentucky for a few days with his uncle's family, then back to the city for the last couple of days.

Jeff's aunt (not his father's sister but the one married to his uncle) is involved in a documentary of a small hydroelectric station, called the Mother Ann Lee because it is located on old Shaker land. It's an old station, very small and out-of-date, and to boot it can only be accessed by water or by a narrow trail. For all these reasons, the power company wanted to get rid of it; it just wasn't worth it for them. Enter a small band of crazy engineers who are restoring and modernizing the station in order to get it back on line and providing power again.

It's not a large station (I think I was told it could power 2,000 homes), but every little bit counts. Kentucky is a coal-heavy region; this plant is the only one in the area that can provide clean-energy credits. For these local-energy activists, the idea is to put small, distributed, green power stations all over, so that there is less dependence on huge monolithic plants.

(I put green in quotation marks because there are many arguments on all sides about what actually constitutes green energy and what is the most environmentally friendly ... but I don't want to get into that here.)

So Jeff's aunt asked us if we would be interested in seeing the Mother Ann Lee, and of course we were. She led us along the base of a cliff, above a steep hill that led directly into the river. We had to step carefully on the damp leaves, but we didn't fall.

If you're wondering how my barbecue brisket turned out, take a look at this:

The meat was falling apart; I used an electric knife so it wouldn't disintegrate completely under the blade. The Bone Suckin' Sauce I used is to the left of the meat; you can just see Jeff's cole slaw behind the jar of sauce.

The cole slaw was just a stroke of luck. I hadn't thought about sides, and we just happened to have an Eatwell cabbage to make into slaw. Jeff used a little bit of sour cream for some of the mayonnaise, cider vinegar, a handful of raisins, and some crumbled bacon. It went very well with the brisket.

For a few weeks Jeff and I have been thinking about making pemmican. Last week I rendered beef fat, which I got from our regular butcher (you want to buy beef fat? we'll give it to you for free!), and yesterday we started drying beef.

The recipe I have calls for brisket, so I bought one. Note that I didn't say some brisket; I bought quantity one (1) brisket, 10.38 lb. That's the only way the butcher would sell it to me; they didn't want to cut into it at all.

The pemmican wanted three pounds (now drying in the oven), and Jeff trimmed off a little over a pound of fat (which we also rendered). That leaves six pounds of meat, which I marinated last night and set in the slow cooker this morning to turn into barbecue brisket.

Since we needed to eat last night as well, we made chile verde (with Eatwell tomatillos, though I had to supplement with some storebought). Mmm, that stuff is good, and surprisingly easy to make.

And for the final touch on the evening, Jeff whizzed up the hot sauce he was planning with whatever was around: smoked peppers from Eatwell (sitting in our fridge since the med fly crisis last September but still good), leftover onion, and I don't know what else. I'm not sure I'll dare to touch the stuff, but Jeff is looking forward to trying it.

Yesterday Jeff and I made a rice-and-beans dish called Moors and Christians. I chose it by letting the cookbook (How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman) fall open to a random page; that method seems to have worked out excellently in this case.

Moors and Christians is basically a stew of black beans, bell pepper, onion, and garlic (and optional tomatoes) served with rice pilaf. The recipe doesn't call for any spices, but we added some -- which I now have to write down so I don't forget the next time we make this! We put a bit of saffron in the rice; the beans got cumin, turmeric, and a smidgen of habanero powder for just a little heat. (We actually have measuring spoons labeled smidgen, pinch, and dash, in that order from small to large. The dash is about a quarter of a teaspoon, and the smidgen looks like less than a sixteenth of a teaspoon.) I think next time I will put turmeric and cumin in the rice instead of saffron, and I may cut down on the habanero powder as well. It was not too much this time, but I don't think I would want the beans any hotter.

Thanksgiving, like most of my fall, was marked by food — as well it should be. It was just Jeff and myself for for our little celebration, since we have no family nearby and friends already had plans. But we put together our own little dinner, with Cornish game hens instead of turkey, because one only needs so much leftovers.

The menu:

• Creamy sweet potato soup
• Glazed, stuffed, roasted rock Cornish hens
• Wild rice and porcini stuffing
• Broccoli gratin
• Bread (store-bought, but from an independent bakery)

Most of the recipes are from the Joy of Cooking, 1990's revision. However, I must recommend the sweet potato soup, which was not from the Joy of Cooking. It's like liquid sweet potato pie.

I am thankful for my husband. I am thankful that we both have good jobs that we enjoy and that let us live comfortably. I am thankful that I have a home to stay and be comfortable in; I am thankful that I am not driving or flying this week.

I didn't take any pictures of our Thanksgiving dinner, unfortunately (the hens did turn out fairly nice-looking), but I do have photos of some of our other gustatory adventures.

At the end of October, I made beef stock and canned it in a new pressure canner. The impetus for the canner was Eatwell Farm's "Tomato Party," an event spurred by a medfly quarantine preventing the farm from distributing its tomatoes and much of their other produce. The tomatoes could not leave the farm while raw, but they were safe if cooked for at least thirty minutes, so they let members come and cook their own tomato sauce on-site. Jeff and I canned ours in boiling water, and it seems to have worked well enough, but our equipment was less than satisfactory.

Then it turned out that the farm's current laying hens are about to stop laying enough to pay for their feed, so the farm is going to get rid of them. Jeff and I are buying five hens, four for stock and one for cooking. We used to freeze chicken stock, but that is inconvenient both because it takes up freezer space and because it has to be melted before use. So I bought a pressure canner, and its first run was with a few jars of beef stock.

If you're wondering what a pressure canner looks like, imagine a big burly aluminum pot with screws to hold the lid down and a pressure gauge on top. It's more or less a very large pressure cooker.

We used the first jar of our very own beef stock earlier this week in French onion soup. Needless to say, it was excellent and much more satisfying than the "beef-flavored stock" I have been buying out of laziness. Honestly, stock isn't very hard. It does take a bit of initial time investment, but it pays off in laziness at the end.

Speaking of Eatwell Farm, I made an amazing omelet a few weeks ago. Well, it probably wasn't as good as a gourmet chef could make, but it was both tasty and beautiful. I generally achieve tastiness to at least some degree, but beauty in my cooking is due more to luck than craft.

All of the major ingredients in this breakfast came from Eatwell Farm (eggs, onion, bell pepper, and potatoes). Technically I think the peppers were grown on another farm due to the quarantine, but they came in our CSA box.

You may have noticed that the menu did not include dessert. This was mostly because we were too tired to make a pie last night, but it was just as well; we got pretty full. Besides, Jeff made me a pumpkin pie for my birthday earlier this month, and we both enjoyed that mightily. Especially Jeff.

Morning: Got up, took a shower. Thought about cooking eggs, but no time. Shuffled groggily out the door to work.

Day: Hacked lots of sticky stuff on a command line, lunch, hacked some more until I ran out of functioning brain cells. Managed to keep myself busy until the end of the day and finish on a high note (promise of a quick-fix problem for a very sweet lady who is effusive with her thank-yous). Am looking forward to the actual thank-yous tomorrow.

Evening: Came home, husband reheated excellent dinner I made yesterday (chili verde and Spanish rice). Didn’t bother heating corn tortillas; they cool off too quickly anyway. Made crust for quiche tomorrow; left mess for husband to clean up with dishes. Compiled 2.6.22 kernel with new nVidia modules; updated software until X started and kdm could actually log me in.

Now, time for bed, maybe a little reading. Norton Critical Edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray came today, though I doubt I am much up to reading it tonight.

Last Thursday Jeff and I got our first box of vegetables from our organic CSA, Eatwell Farm (check out their farm news blog too). It's great so far, and I'm hoping this will work out well for us in the long run. You see, I don't like vegetables very much.

You might be forgiven for saying huh at this juncture. If I don't like veggies, why is more of them a good thing? Well, the fact of the matter is that I like them okay; I just don't tend to buy them. I'll go to the grocery store and kind of hem and haw and end up buying some salad greens that we sometimes don't even finish before they wilt. In terms of variety of diet, this is not a good thing.

The way the CSA works is pretty simple. I pre-pay for a certain number of boxes. On about Tuesday they pick what's ripe that week, and on Thursday I pick up my box of veggies at a pickup location on my way home from work. The farmer gets a steady source of income, and I get very fresh veggies.

Also, my vegetables are pre-selected for me, which for me is a positive feature. There are a lot of vegetables that I'll actually eat if they're presented to me but that I wouldn't usually choose on my own. Also, I tend to spend a lot of mental energy on figuring out what I'm going to cook for the next week. The CSA limits my decision space to finding ways to use what's in my box, so the decision is much simpler.

The first thing to go from last Thursday's box was the strawberries, perfectly red, ripe, and luscious. The zucchini was steamed that night and tossed with chiocciole (funny sort of macaroni-ish pasta) and pesto. Three carrots and half the spinach went into minestrone last night; the rest of the spinach, the arugula, and all of the lettuce (which is just slightly bitter) will be salad. The garlic is hanging up for storage, and the parsley is in the freezer.

So far, the vegetables have been excellent. Jeff was impressed by the zucchini, so much more flavorful than ordinary store-bought squash (I grew up on my mother's garden zucchini, so I was not as blown away). I don't like bitter greens very much, but I have been enjoying snacking on the carrots. The carrots are a bit more flexible than I expected, which weirded me out a bit because I associate flexibility in carrots with old age, but these have been very flavorful, juicy, and much easier to chop than the rock-hard stuff. (And what do I know? I've never grown carrots.)

Speaking of carrots, I think I'll have one now.

Dinner tonight:

• Chicken Kiev
• Roasted asparagus
• Potato pancakes garnished with either applesauce or sour cream and chives
• Fresh baguette with garlic and herb butter

Dinner last Saturday was chicken with potatoes and mushrooms, spinach (creamed or raw, according to preference), and fresh bread (store-bought, unfortunately). It was quite picturesque.

The reason I didn’t post this picture earlier was that I was waiting until I figured out how to make Linux work with my camera. I had tried a few weeks ago, expecting it to be relatively easy, and it wasn’t. This afternoon I took another crack at it, expecting it to be complicated, and found it to be fairly straightforward (even though kernel compilation errors temporarily sidetracked the process). I’m feeling pretty nifty.