Dream with Our Eyes Open

It was La Fermière brand, and it was rather nice.

I see on their site that they also have lavender flavored, hibiscus raspberry, yuzu ginger, and other potentially great flavors, but I've never seen them in the stores around here.

La Ferme comes in little re-usable oven-safe ceramic pots, which is very cool, but I think I have like a dozen of them by now. Also, I keep forgetting them when I get in the mood to make baked custard.

I had on the right jacket for the weather but the weather report didn't say anything about the effin' rain.

So I didn't buy much because of wanting to get home and dry:

Eggs
Kalettes
A small winter squash (kubota type)
Chocolate-drizzled macaroons (for a wheat-free sweet for me)
Chicken thighs

I still have lots of apples at home, so I didn't need to buy any.

Peaches
Jonamac apples
Green beans
Raspberries
Blackberries
Red and yellow cherry tomatoes (that is, two different types)
Different types of heirloom tomatoes
Sweet onions
Mixed-milk morbier cheese (with ash)

One of the tomatoes had split by the time I got them home, so I ate it for lunch with some shredded string cheese and basil left from last week.

I should have bought more basil because this batch is kaput.

So I was reheating some cold polenta (cornmeal mush - that is, maize meal) in the microwave. And a second or so after it started, there were HUGE bright flashes of light, burning smell, microwave making ominous sound ... !

I stopped it, of course. There were faint burn marks on some of the edges. (The polenta was very uneven in texture and thickness: it was home made, not one of those very compact, sausage-like commercial polenta logs.)

At my husband's request, I tried it again. Cue the fireworks and melodrama. The remaining polenta blob was pitched into the food waste pail (we have food waste recycling in our town).

The only thing we can figure out is that maybe this batch of stoneground cornmeal had a really good mineral content. One site notes that stoneground cornmeal can supply about 25% of your daily magnesium needs. And magnesium is very flammable. And other vegetable products can smoke and flame in the microwave, including fresh veggies that are thin, irregular, and contain lots of iron, such as spinach and kale (link to NPR article).

To end this on a fitting note: create plasma in your microwave with a grape!

1½ lbs apples (to make a little applesauce)
1 pint cider (ditto, although the Mr. might also drink some)
chicken thighs
bratwursts
red and yellow cherry tomatoes
green beans
broccoli
cauliflower
2 heads garlic
Bartlett pears
½ lb. farmhouse cheddar cheese

I also pulled a package of CSA lamb stew meat out of the freezer when I got home: not to make stew, but kebabs instead. It's still too hot to make stew. Ditto winter squash, although one of the booths had some lovely Red Kuri.

So grocery store run should only be non-food items, skim milk, Siggi's yogurts for me, some breakfast cereals, long pasta (spag, linguine), Flackers flax seed crackers, and parmesan cheese. Maybe a few oranges too.

ETA: And berries! how can I forget those? They're in the icon ... .

So the Mr. stopped by Snyder's (quirky local non-chain grocery) on the way home to lay in a supply of cottage cheese (he's picky—he only wants Axelrod's and Snyder's is the only place that has it). This is also where he gets me my vanilla Silk soymilk because Whole Paycheck has decided they only need to stock their own yucky chalky soymilk.

He usually gets his frozen treats there too: Haagen Dazs dark chocolate ice cream bars and perhaps a pint of local Moorenko's bittersweet chocolate ice cream. But this time he came home with a new Moorenko's flavor, so new that it's not on their website: Oh Snap!

It's very tasty: a strong baked-ginger flavor, strong enough to tingle a spot on my tongue where a pepper from some leftover palak paneer had already sensitized things.

Have you had an interesting ice cream flavor recently? Tell me all about it.

We have had beautiful weather this weekend, but I haven't taken that much advantage of it. We did walk out for gelato (the Mr.: dark chocolate and hazelnut) and sorbet (me: grapefruit) yesterday afternoon at the neighborhood place (Dolci Gelati), and today we walked to Busboys & Poets for brunch (which has become a near-weekly habit).

I have just finished making 6 quarts of chicken stock. I think this is the best I've made. I used more or less this recipe, which I have bookmarked for later. The main difference between this and what I have made previously is far more carrots (6 instead of 2 or 3) and peppercorns (2 teaspoons); also, leaving the skin on the halved onion, which has an effect on the color. And darn I should have known that (it's one of the common natural fabric dye ingredients, for a golden yellow), and in fact, I remember my late mother doing the same.

The chicken stock is for matzoh ball soup for second seder at my sister's place this coming Saturday. I am the official Matzoh Ball Maker on our side of the family. The first seder will be at our friends Michael and Sharon's. They have asked me to bring a fruit platter, which should be easy, except that I will be working most of Friday. I will try to pick up fresh fruit the night before, I think.

And the Mr. is upstairs doing the taxes, because yes, it's spring. *sigh*

Brunch and a matinee at the Kennedy Center:

After blowing off our accustomed gourmet New Year's Eve experience (for very good reason, I might add), the Mr. felt well enough to go to Kat & Andrew's New Year's Day brunch, another two-decades+ fixture in our lives.

I wanted to make something to bring, and the main thing we had in the house besides pantry staples was apples. Several different kinds of apples. I found this recipe on Epicurious, which recommends using at least 4 different types of apples, so I made it. But it was intended for an 8-inch springform pan, and we have only a 10-inch one.

In a moment of rare mathematical thought, I realized that this is a volume problem, and that the shape involved is a (short, squat) cylinder. I found a handy calculator via Google and discovered that the volume ratios were 1 to 1.5. Well! The original recipe calls for 2 eggs, so this was easy-peasy. I did find some additional adjustments needed (our eggs were likely extra large rather than just large, so I needed to add more flour, and I had to extend the baking time, which I did in 10-minute increments, checking the cake for done-ness each cycle), and I also added a bit of cinnamon, because I like cinnamon.

The apples I used were a mixture of Granny Smith, Pink Lady, Gold Rush, and Gala.

The cake had competition at the brunch: this was a big year for homemade cakes. Those I could identify include a chocolate swiss cake roll as a buche de Noel, my late mother's sour cream coffee cake (made by my sister, in this case), what appeared to be a pumpkin bread with currants, and our hosts' daughter's blueberry tea cake. We left about 1/3 of our cake when we departed the party, but there was still a group of 10 college- and grad-school-age party-goers playing Cards Against Humanity in the front parlor, so we may never see the remaining cake again!

Various surpluses in the fridge and elsewhere in the kitchen – milk (a couple of small skim milks past pull date and part of an open carton of shelf-stable lowfat milk), 16 eggs, leftover mashed potatoes, bananas becoming over-ripe – got me to cooking this morning.

We've already eaten the mashed potato pancakes (I added chopped fresh parsley and scallion, then fried them in a bit of the bacon fat left over from the Mr.'s bacon and eggs). The banana bran muffins (I used part whole wheat flour) are just done, and cooling, and the maple cup custards (I messed with this a bit .. I usually make cup custard just from memory) are baking.