racheld

You've got three of Kinsey Milhone's favorite ingredients, right there. Throw on a sliced boiled egg, and you'll be able to send away for your P.I. license.

I had not a clue, but the picture was certainly a tease---I first viewed it without my glasses, on a quick sign-on to see if the new blogger could be seen. The bridge rose imposing in its graceful symmetry, and the line of little modern compacts distance-morphed into what seemed to be small roadsters and Model-T's of the early era. I squinted, hoping to see a telltale small black speck climbing the Empire State Building in the distance. Alas, no Fay Wray, no angst-ridden apes, but a bright, happy prospect of good times, friendly gatherings, and some good cooking in a kitchen brought from dowdy to dashing, from its century-ago beginnings to a shining future full of lovely aromas and delicious dishes. We haven't met yet, but I thank you for the invitation into your kitchen and your week.

Thank you for the wonderful sparkly-eyed, lake-viewing, chocolate week!! It's been fun and informative and full of beautiful scenery and happy scenes. I don't know how much longer you'll be there, but waking to that sunrise would be one of the Coffee Moments of my life---please stand there once more before you leave, and drink in the glory for me as you sip.

Memories of a thousand summer days, the scent of vinegar and dill, salt-rimed counters, scatter of mustard seeds, celery seeds and lime, and the "tunck" as the jars seal. Just beautiful, CC, and they'll be the best tastes of Winter. But south of the M/D, you'd have to include about a dozen little disks of carrot to fancy up the jalapenos---it's the LAW.

What a great lesson in how-to!! It was pink and pretty as usual, and the broiler will never come into play again, so you know how gorgeous it will be next time. And that seafood mousse sounds like a winner, as well. I just can't resist prinking with a Wellington, and when you said leftover dough!!! That would have called out every shape-cutter of the appropriate size in my considerable arsenal---the kids say I'm Cher in that Mermaid thing---I do love my cookie-cutters, though I've never had any success with picking up a rolled-out, cut-out cookie in my life. And the egg wash is never a bad idea, especially if you stick lots of little leaves or fishies on with it, then give them a coat as well. More garniture, that's the ticket!!! It's like that adage: God does not subtract from the days of a life the time spent fishing. Egg wash does not add to the egg count---it's just cosmetic, and therefore not part of the calories.

Old boyfriends fade away; coffee stains are forever. What a great story!

I was going to say pudding---great minds and all that. Or maybe just great sweet teeth.

I know we're talking 3 a.m. and all its attendant drunken revels, but Chappie, please tell me that was an exclamation, not an ingredient.

Not long ago I cooked for an 80th birthday party, so all ages and tastes had to be allowed for. As part of an apps table of perhaps thirty dishes, one really beautiful plate was a large round clear platter of pale endive, stuffed with a mixture of chevre and dried cherries, topped with tammylc's port-glazed walnut halves. At the last minute, I drizzled a drop or two of the glaze reduction over the stuffing. We laid the endive like spokes, and centered the platter with the tiny center buds, too small for stuffing, standing like little pale shrubs. Beautiful tray.

I LOVE molded chocolates!!! And the shine---I've never understood the tempering, how to know when and what to do. And the research it must have taken, getting the temps and times just right. It's an art AND a science. The scenery is really lovely, and I'm imagining I'm getting the scent of that woodsy, northern air. We got one of those pink peppermint pigs as a Christmas gift a couple of years ago. It was a fun thing to do after Christmas Eve dinner, passing it around on a little wooden platter, each one tapping off a small minty shard for tasting. Chris still carries the little hammer in his toolkit; when a stubborn machine just WON'T co-operate, he gets out the little hammer, gives the machine a tiny tap, then tells it about the BIG hammer out in the car.

I once did a lawn party for 300 entirely to whichever Lyle Lovett CD featured that Pony/Boat thing. Ladies were to wear hats, gentlemen morning dress, dress uniforms, or failing either, dark suit and tie. I STILL did those teaparty goodies (two days prep in my home kitchen, with a little jaunt into the vacant house next door to stash overflow in their fridge) to kickin' tunes entirely by and from the Heart of Texas. White-glove service to strings the next morning set the tone for a more refined partaking of the dainties than the preparation had exhibited. Wow to your list---as a lady of a certain age, I'm totally ignorant of and oblivious to the greater percentage of your choices, but I DO love some rowdy music in the kitchen. And wow to your exposition of it; the telling resounds, as well. And is anodyne dreck the cause for feelin' no pain? It's usually the activity WITH the music which brings that result, but I've been bored into a coma by an etude or two, myself.

This is just priceless!!! Mom, Doctor, Chef---it encompasses all your hats at once. Very concise, very Mom-at-the-end-of-a-party, VERY funny. Lovely party.

Yes, that plate of food is a winner. It is exceedingly repugnant. In cataloging the many nasty elements, we note: The sawed-off bit of sausage “thumb” with moldering gray areas. The bile-like green-gray sauce on a piece of rubbery-looking prosciutto. The yellow chicken-artichoke-egg substance smeared with green mucous sauce. The broken slice of cappicola studded with bits of fat and gristle. The dreary brown rice in which a stream of bilious gray sauce has run and collected into a mucosal gob. The unattractive dusting of rust-brown spice. Overall, an artless presentation compounded by the unappealing character of each particular foodstuff. A truly revolting collection. Now, the question is, did you eat it? ← I was going to say it looks like the time the kids microwaved some weenies in the plastic package, but after this genius prose, I'm just Charlie Brown cloud-gazing.

From sandy, rosy mountains to blue shiny sea overnight---this is just the most amazing site on all the 'Net! What an exciting, busy life you lead, and with time to make chocolate as well. This is gonna be wonderful. And I'm already lost in those gorgeous brown eyes.

Young is as young plays. Welcome to eG---you'll fit right in.

I'm really thinking about that roux---my LEAST favorite part of any gumbo. I'm gonna try it---the cool is coming fast, and it will be time to get out all the big pots and roux skillets---maybe I'll sneak a Pyrex one on the family vs. the old black skillet variety, but true to any Southern cook prinking with tradition, I won't tell til they taste it. It's been a lovely tour; I've especially enjoyed the scenery---all those purple mountain majesties, etc., and the petroglyphs are beyond price. Is that notch a carved-out standing platform for the artists? And far off to the right, I swore I saw someone wheeling a baby carriage. And the elktoes!!! You go have a quiet one in your beautiful cozy home, and enjoy your incomparable view. The vistas are breathtaking. Thanks for sharing the wonder.

Wow. Nuke roux. I don't know whether to rejoice at the breakthrough or cry at the sacrilege. Gotta think on this one, but it sure looks GOOD. I was gonna mention stirring with a wooden flat-paddle thing---I use them for anything that might stick to the bottom and would need constant stirring. That old "Make the creme anglaise/ice cream custard/roux with Grandma's silver tablespoon--that's the secret" is a crock. It just leaves a scraped spot the size of a thread on the panbottom. It's a good clear FLAT scrape you need, with a complete clean of the pan bottom every few scrapes. Off the soapbox. On to muse about the newfangled method. If it works for you. . .

Chocklit roux

Two espressos to bring some semblance of humanity and civility to my morning self. Three over-easy for Chris, with a puddle of soft buttered grits for stirring in. He trims off the whites for me, stirs up the rest, and eats it with skillet toast and homemade pear preserves. I had another cuppa with my salted whites, a slice of toast and some Dickinson's strawberry preserves. Handful of vitamins and an Advil. Sunday's breakfast will be broccoli/tomato quiche, chicken sausages filled with smoked mozz and artichokes, and maybe some quick cinnamon rolls. And the last of the Decker.

The pepper might have just been asleep, all that unaccustomed protein and carbs. But they are all notoriously passive-agressive, plus they all want to be the SHOE. They just sit there and pout til you figure it out on your own.

Poke Sallet and wild garlic, ramps and sessly (cicely), fiddleheads, 'sang and mushrooms. Wild thyme and lavender and mint and a sagepatch older than many trees. Spring and Summer bounty for the taking, but the Autumn brings the sweetest tastes of all. A Summerlong spyout of the best blackberry bramble, the red-studded raspberry thicket, all stripped of their jewels, the brightness thudding into buckets. I miss metal buckets---plastic ones dilute the pleasure, somehow. They just don't have those good old rattly bottoms as the berries and grapes and plums fall in. We have a little galvanized "foot-tub" which has never washed feet, though it has received and carried every fruit we've picked for years. Scuppernong and catawba arbors, winding down creeks and over brushtops, clusters hanging heavy as their kin on Roman hillsides. Their meat is sweet, with the distinctive grapey flavor coming from their leathery, squeaky-chew skins. They do not taste like supermarket grapes; they have the true purplegrape taste, like a sip from a Welch's bottle. Wild fig trees with their sweet parcels of juicy pulp; blueberries big as marbles, with their pointy little coronet, and the ping of pleasure at the sight of hundreds of tiny red wild strawberries in the grass at your feet. Pinon nuts like kernels of tan corn, spicy with resinous sap. The golden-plum thicket of my childhood, where we picked ripe softness small as olives, the plums themselves the size of the pits of today's big purples. The little fellows were tart and tangy, giving the golden jelly a flavor not reached by any other fruit. Persimmons in the woods, fallen for the wasps' pleasure, with drunken buzzes hailing their presence from afar. A few sweet enough to eat, but most still in that puckergreen stage. Pecans and hickory nuts and black walnuts, rattling down through the sparse leaves, covering the ground like rocks. Every child knows how to grasp two pecans side by side in one hand, give a hearty squeeze, and pick out the rich meat for munching as they stroll the woods. Only the littlest have to use both hands or whack the nuts between rocks. You could always tell at church on fall Sundays who had been nutgathering on Saturday---brown thumbs and fingers, hands stained up to the wrists for those who harvested and husked black walnuts. And many a boy has shown up for church with pictures and writing tattooed on his face, tanny-brown snakes twining round his wiry arms, either by choice or by the bigger kids, and indelible to the most vigorous washcloth wielded by his embarrassed, outraged mother. And the one persimmon tree in my yard down South---widespread and imposing, with gnarled, dark limbs like a steroid-pumped bonsai. The leaves would fall during the first cold days, leaving the ripening fruit. The persimmons resemble big green tomatoes hanging amongst the foliage; then as the tree gets barer and barer, the green shades into gold, then into peachy hues, with the fruit getting softer and softer. Finally, the heavy globes turn an indescribable peachy-goldy-pumpkin shade, shining and smooth, almost translucent in the sun. A leaf-bare persimmon tree at sunset has a glory not given to many flowers. The stark outline of the craggy branches dangling little golden lanterns is a memorable sight, and a bowlful of the fruit brings the sun onto the table. Persimmons weren't given a distinctive flavor, like an orange or a lemon; biting into one is much like a mouthful of sweet, flavorless Jello. They say that they make a lovely pudding, but I've never tried. Pretty is enough.

How Rebecca and I would love to have coffee with you!!! There, with all your new-found delights of taste and sight, or here, for a stroll out by the lavender bed, cups in hand, and murmurs of conversation to match the soft clang of the windchimes. And Rebecca tells wonderful fortunes.

AWWW---I was expecting a little round one, with a cute beak and everything. I just never catch on to crafty stuff, like napkins and paper, but that owl/dove call thing---I can do that. And I can make a turkey call with just a straw and the lid from a McDonald's coke. This thread sounds like that one about the dishwashers wheeling each other around the parking lot in the BIG bread-mixing bowl.

I think you should get this one printed on a T-shirt! ← I catered a party years ago in a house with a little stuffed cow sitting atop a very slanty rangehood. I was nervous that she'd leap into a sauce or bounce onto a flame. And I always wondered how the woman FRIED anything for her family and still had such an immaculate stuffed animal as her kitchen mascot.

Breathtaking canyons, Dawn-of-our-Time drawings, a charming handmade house with murals outside and in, sculptured walls (SPIDER ), and a do-it-all kitchen with a green counter I'm coveting clear over here. I've seen construction of a "tossed" adobe, but bagged? Add me to the Tell All list. And if you stare gently at the leftmost notch, the one shaped like a giant staple, you'll see the shadow of the Viking ship passing silently to port, the Maidenly figurehead leading the way.