racheld

Lovely. Simply lovely. Beautifully photographed, WELL coordinated, etc. A couple of questions, when you get a minute: Having transported and set up quite a few little amateur efforts back in my younger days, what is the process---LOFT to me connotes up a LOT of stairs. Did someone have to lug all the parts UPUPUP, assemble the cakes, photograph, and WILL THEY BE DISMANTLED for the trip DOWN, into the vans, off to the station, to be reassembled on site? How does this mesh with frosting applications for the photographs? I just have visions of two people struggling down flights of steps 50 times with an enormous, delicate creation at the mercy of their steady hands and feet. Also---are the pink "boxes" in one photo the tiers of a square cake? Looked too pretty to be just wrapping. Kudos to all for the beautiful cakes and all the logistical work it takes to put on a display of this magnitude. Looking forward to more photos!!! One of each!!! rachel

Back when we lived in Alabama, my husband's grandparents were in their 80's, and neither was up to much housecleaning, etc. He did what little cooking there was, as he had for most of their married life, except when he was off in the woods cooking for a "logging crew" in the 40's---gigantic meals of meat and gravy and enough biscuits to sink the Bismarck. I had every Wednesday off, and would usually go and spend part of the morning with them, as they were alone most of the time. I would make pastries at home, or at least pop into the grocery bakery for donuts---something for a little coffee snack. Then, I would cook them a nice lunch, with plenty of leftovers for their supper. This was not a little salad lunch, or a sandwich; this was a big old Southern noon DINNER, with peas and cornbread and coleslaw and perhaps fried chicken or ham. This is the meal they were accustomed to, and this is what I cooked. The reason Granddaddy did all the cooking for their family of nine was that Grandma was a Churchworker. Capital C. She lived and breathed her Mission work, and her Stewardship, and her visitation and five church services per week. She took her Service To The Lord seriously, ahead of family, friends, and any other little extras like that. I never saw her in anything other than a church dress, with nice shoes and her stockings rolled below her knees. She stood ready for any call to come be of SERVICE, able to grab her hat and Bible and be out that door in two minutes flat. So, about the second time I was to go see them, she called and asked what I was going to cook---she thought she'd just ask the Preacher and his family, since there would be all that food, anyway. So she did. All seven of them. It was summer, so the whole family, teenagers and all, arrived for noon dinner. They passed the time of day in the living room, while I manned the oven and the stovetop in a strange, very hot, no A/C kitchen with no prep tools (learned to take my own knives, whisks and aprons) and got hotter and more resentful with each burst of laughter emanating from the tallhair take-their-ease crowd awaiting their dinner. And that's the way it went...I'd go visit, and the Organist and HER family showed up right on time for a meal...Or another family, down on their luck, needing a good feed and some cheering up. This went on for several weeks, spending my day off repaying all their social or spiritual obligations. They were such dear people, and all so thankful and sweet, I was ashamed to be so resentful of the time, and it did become a family joke---we'd laugh about it at home. But soon, somehow my boss mysteriously changed my day off to Saturday, which I needed to spend at home to be with my own family. No more Church Lunches.

There's a lovely passage about swamp cabbage in "Cross Creek" by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (author of The Yearling and other works). She was a stranger to the Florida swamps when she moved there for seclusion to work on her books. She was an ardent cook, and presumably a great one, considering the level of her kitchen provisions and tools. And anyone who makes up a making of rolls to rise, puts them into a big old black dutch oven, carries them in her lap in a boat down an alligator-infested river, then alights to build a fire and nestle them in to bake for supper---THAT'S a dedicated cook. She speaks of the swamp cabbage as a delicious, wonderful thing, but unattainable by her until she was counseled by a lifelong swamp dweller to "be ruthless" with trimming all the tougher layers away from the tender heart. It was so tempting to leave on too many layers, keeping quantity ahead of quality, but the toughness of the few remaining outer ones would spoil the whole pot, until she learned to seek the best part and discard the rest. She would go out back with a machete, hack one down with several swipes of the blade, then spend a long time peeling back and chopping off layers, like seeking the crisp tenderness at the heart of a tough old onion. I've always wanted to try it...we all buy those tinny cans of hearts of palm, and they're nice enough and a bit elegant on a salade composee' with a nice vinaigrette, and even have their place in that Southern everything-from-a-can combination of corn and English peas and French green beans, all Del Monte sealed and delivered into a syrupy sugar/vinegar sauce which renders them to a candied, toothaching "salad" recipe passed down through word of Hairdryer. So go find some; go out in high boots and fell that tree into the mire--order it from off if you have to. Just trim it ruthlessly, letting the chips fall away, and cook it up into a dish to savor. You'll be cooking a memory of your own and passing on a tradition. And write of your search and the finding. It's good to see another generation taking up the torch.

Indoors or out? Open House drop in, or come at 2 & stay? How many?

Check out this thread. ← I checked it out again---had read it last week; Post #15 was mine. In this gathering of grand cooks and talented chefs and outright genii of the kitchen, I wondered if their friends and acquaintances shied away from "performing" in their arenas. Just wondered if that was a REAL excusable excuse.

I have that recipe. From Home Ec class in high school. It's one of my blushing memories, in that I made lemon chiffon (cue Knox theme music here) and my best friend made a two-crust beauty, filled with the above Ritz and lemon juice and cream of tartar, if I remember correctly. Mine was pretty, with nice swoops of the spatula across the top, and little paper-thin twisties of lemon slices arranged JUST SO. Hers was a gorgeous creation, a perfectly crimped, stunningly burnished golden brown, cooling in all its crusty perfection. She had made it from the skin in, cutting flour and Crisco, carefully rolling and lifting and cutting and doing those difficult finger-crimps. It was a marvel of piedom, remembered as the paragon of pies, partly because of its great beauty and tantalizing fragrance, and mainly because I practically destroyed it with one touch. The crust was just the crispest, tenderest, flakiest of all time, with little separations evident just from the crimped edges. But there was one little thinner-than-paper, almost-transparent bubble of air trapped between two of the layers, and my finger just reached OUT, for the most gossamer touch, and there appeared a hole the size and importance of a moon crater. I must have been alone, or at least not the center of attention when it happened, but I reached out to that one little irresistible poof of air, secluded under its phyllo-thin roof, and I had RUINED HER PIE. I slunk away, joined several other groups in admiring their efforts, received kudos for my own, and did not return to that fatal pie zone til it had been cut and was being enjoyed by quite a large crowd. I tried to blend in, and must have, because I mentioned it for the first time last year, and she did not remember a thing about it. That's a GOOD friend. I've never made one since, nor have I wanted to...I just have the notebook, with its Jello salads and caramel apples and my lemon chiffon, but I cannot bear to look at that page for Mock Apple Pie. I was such a wuss.

In spite of all due humility and the raves or justified praise you give someone else's cooking, does anyone feel that invitations have decreased specifically because of your name or your prowess in the kitchen? Does anyone ever say they're afraid/shy/timid about cooking for any occasion where you'll be present? Or that your talent is intimidating? And do you care? edited because my punctuation wanders even more than my feeble mind

Taking advantage of this extended cool weather to have one last Chicken Pot Pie of the season: Tenders poached in chicken stock from the freezer---stock used to make a standard "white sauce" as my Southern Mom would have said. Tiniest baby carrots simmered separately, baby red potatoes, ditto. A handful of frozen peas, uncooked, along with a tiny snip of fresh chives and a wee curl of last-year's sage from the freezer. A lattice of yeast-risen top crust, brush of egg white and cream. Delicious smells and enticing ploops of rich sauce between the strips, a tawnier gold than the crust. Very lovely pie, served with a plebeian "five-cup" salad, my husband's childhood favorite from his own Grandmother's repertoire. Five cups of anything from a fruit can--crushed pineapple, mandarins, gooseberries--as long as one of the cups is tiny marshmallows. Dusting of coconut flakes. He loves this stuff. I make it, and the marshmallows swell in the fruit juice to the size of jumbo olives, little cushy clumps of sweetness, almost too childhood and cloying to swallow. No matter. It's what you serve with chicken pie. And now the season's over.

I'm loving this thread---conjures up decades of pots aboil. I, too, relate things to food prices, especially seafood ones, and can "justify" right along with you, though books, any kind, need no more justification than do sunbeams or laughter. One of my friends down South related all her jewelry to "college educations." She could jangle a diamond bracelet, and tell you how many years it would send Donna Sue to Ole Miss, or shake her pretty head, making her earrings dance, and calculate to the day how many Sorority dues for Elizabeth Ann could be financed per ear. Somehow, I cannot recall seeing any of her baubles disappear over the years, a good sign that none of them fell prey to the black holes of tuition and housing in our University system. She's probably wearing at this moment enough gewgaws to send all five grandchildren to Harvard.

In my hurry to skim through, I just now took another look at that glorious pate'. Is that aspic I see on top? Homemade? Wow. A hundred years of garden clubs and WMU meetings bow down and call you blessed. And tell about how you got it to silky perfection---hand blender, sieve, what? Seasonings?---nutmeg? Mace? It's just a marvel of itself. Nicest one I've seen in years. Lovely silky velvety stuff. Hard to make and perfectly done. And how on earth did you turn it out without getting little snicks in the sides? That's not a smoothover I see, that's one gentle plok onto the lettuce, with no imperfections. Perfect. Just perfect. And the brisket ain't bad, either...Wow again. Get rested up and send out those recipes.

I ain't no such of a thing. I made a three-acre garden, had a chickenhouse, raised watermelons and pumpkins and cantaloupes, put up pickles and preserves and home-canned stuff to the tune of 400+ jars a year---why, we had to stick cartons under the BEDS!! I've been to hog-killins, goat-ropins (My brother-in-law has his own RODEO, for landsakes, right there in his YARD), and barn raisings and even a quilting bee or two. The first house we moved into had a little pulley-rigged rack in the ceiling of the spare bedroom, for rolling down over the laps of several keen-eyed quilters. Now our life is a little quieter, a little more serene, a little less of the land and more of the library and strolls in a lovely little park than across 2000 acres. But I can still whistle a crew in for supper from the South 100, and cook it for 'em too. I still have my big old Franklin stove, and can turn out eight pies before you can say Pillsbury, with a big pot of pintos a-simmering the while. And I could have had that pile of shrimp peeled for the jambalaya before you could say Jack Rabbit. Lord, I sound like Granny Clampett--but I could put a meal on that table that she and Jed and Jethro would sit right down to, and have cooked for Captain Kirk, besides. Haven't thought of that one in years. I LOVE the country, still speak in all the phrases of my raising, and will be a GRITS girl til they are bringing in the piminna cheese and devilled eggs to comfort my family at my funeral. So you take that back. rachel

I'd almost forgotten Miss Lucy---she comes on here on RFD-TV on Saturdays. An Arkansas friend suggested that I try watching, and I did. I promise I did. It was just too painful, and I swore off after the third or fourth show and the twelfth pound of cream cheese. I could probably have chosen a better episode for my first watching experience, but I tuned in and was bombarded (very S L O W L Y, like being stoned to death with popcorn) with every Southern cooking cliche since BJ--before Justin--and he did it much better and tastier and more interestingly. By a mile. The first recipe was for Crawfish Corn Soup. Two sticks of butter and a clump of Trinity into a Teflon-lined pan. Much scraping with a big metal spoon, as the dialogue oozed like molasses. Scraping and stirring, then a clop of cream cheese, to melt into goo in the pot. She SAID a block, but the recipe onscreen said a pound. So much for measurements. And it HAD to be a pound...the pot was filling with an oozy, gray-green mixture that was frightening to behold. More SCRAAAAAAPE and scratch inside that black-lined pot, as two cans of mushroom soup joined the glop---I'm of the Campbell's generation, and there's a magic below the M/D line that can turn the stuff into bechamel, veloute' or Mornay at the stir of a whisk, but that pot was getting gloppier and gooier by the minute. Not to mention the imaginary flecks of Teflon my brain was conjuring with every scritch of that spoon. Then went a couple of cans of whole kernel corn, and my brain has blocked out whatever other cholesterol entered that pot, but last was a couple of pounds of lovely, pinkly clean crawfish tails. Just the thought of those lovely sweet morsels entering that mass of bubbling goo would make any Cajun cringe, but she just kept scraping that pot and throwing in stuff. I think that was it. Soup in a pot. I hope she served it hot---fifteen minutes off the heat and it would have congealed into one of those stepping stones seen in the concrete section of garden centers: Here Lies Spot, Gone But Not Forgotten. Why not just leave out the lumpy crawfish and MAINLINE the cholesterol.

Ritz crackers are the third food group---after piminna cheese and Wonder Bread. And a Fourth, by the time you get all that butter mixed in for casserole toppings and crusts.

Yep---a flat of strawberries cooked off into little jewelly-jars of jam. Oh, my. Wouldn't Lewis Carroll love some of that? And I WISH someone had the clone recipe for that almost-fresh, almost-frozen strawberry stuff that is on Shoney's breakfast bar. We stop at one everytime we go to the coast---none left up here. On a fresh fluffy biscuit, that cold, essence-of-Summer, halfway between jam and fresh fruit---how I'd love to duplicate that. Seems like just sugar and crushed berries, lots of juice, but not watery juice. Perfectly thickened, perfectly sweetened---just wonderful. Hubby always hits the hot bar, all those sausages and eggs and grits. I have a bowl with a strawberry-covered biscuit. Maybe two. It's a long time between trips.

I'll second that. I keep a container of caramel sauce in the fridge (with cream), and just stir some of that into my standard French buttercream when I need caramel buttercream. The bonus is that there's always caramel sauce in the fridge in case a rogue bowl of ice cream comes a-knocking. ← I'm glad this thread surfaced again; one more look at that glorious cake and all its sweet jewelry---oh, my. I keep several sauces in the fridge, as well, just because. And those rogue bowls of ice cream---we take in all comers---rogues and fugitives and ladylike simpering ones selling cosmetics, as well as big old bowls of homemade, big as hubcaps, crank-turned in the Summer shade. They're the ones which look around warily, finally stepping in. We are the veritable Underground Railroad for traveling ice creams, offering a night's rest and a kind word. We're sure there's a mark on the house somewhere, like the hobo graffiti of decades past, ensuring a haven with no questions asked. Perhaps someday we'll be internationally recognized as a sweets hostel, taking in the weary; until then, we'll just keep on welcoming all flavors and creeds, one bowl at a time.

Holly----Did you go yet and where? Speak to me of BBQ.

And with that scrumptious chicken right in front of his nose, he's looking wistfully at the salad. Vegemaraner? Bichon frisee? Pea-kingese? I need more coffee.

We did this for YEARS, in the Mississippi Delta Heat and HUME. I'd step back from that pit, (and I wasn't even the pitman), wipe brow, go stir some potato salad, and say "Never Again." Now I'm to the NA stage, I guess, except for a shrimp boil for maybe 30 in our backyard, now that I'm a Hoosier. I've had all today free, the temp is nice, I'm just tooking around in eGullet, while you're sweating your socks off, and all I can say is, "I WISHT I WAS THERRRRRR!"

I put an Amaretto/Kahlua/Chocolate cake in the oven about page April 24th, and I'm now up to DuckDuck's pics. That does it!! The cake's been out of the oven for about 5 minutes. I'm gonna go cut it. Now. Hot. Before my family gets home. rachel

I'm only up to May 1, 2004, but I have to say: Wildest dreams, Girl. Wildest dreams.

What shold it han avayled to werreye........ Ah, the days of a 110 degree classroom at Ole Miss, translating Chaucer and trying to IMAGINE a chilblain. Thanks for the deja vu.

I am Southland, born and bred, lived on a huge farm for part of that time, with all the homegrowns and homecanneds. I've left my money on a dusty table in exchange for a bag of juice-full tomatoes, picked up the dozen heavy brown eggs from a neighbor's porch, shucked and cooked three hundred ears of corn at a time. I am THOROUGHLY enjoying seeing this wonderful unrolling of your life and cooking and daily living, from the other end of the country. Thanks and looking forward to each day's adventures!!! rachel

BTDT to EVERYTHING above, I think. Grateful guests, greedy slobs, lovely evenings, CHAOS personified, marvelous gifts of food and wine and flowers, painstaking creation of a perfect meal, pizza from the box, being charming and entertaining and helpful and oh, so, glad to be present, acceptance of hospitality as a RIGHT rather than an honor conferred and accepted, "guests" who continue to invite themselves and make free with your home and its comforts without reciprocation, recompense, or gratitude. But still we press on. Recompense is in the doing, the creating, the chatting across the table, leaning in for one more pour of that glorious wine, laughing with friends whose voices are music. Like the bumpersticker says: I'll stop entertaining when they pry the spatula from my cold dead hand. And WHT: Where might one purchase a bag of snaky puffs?

We have our very best friends over all the time, and I COOK. She's a vegetarian, cannot stand to cook meat or be too near the prep. But she is glad to come over and let him enjoy whatever bloody sacrifice we're serving at the moment. Sitting at the table with us three carnivores doesn't faze her...she just tucks into the salad and vegetables and homemade bread, enjoying it all. And he's so sweetly grateful, somehow...I've never heard so many "UmUmUm..." and soft, appreciative moans at the table before. We love their company, and we get together often. Their hosting consists of taking us two to whatever new restaurant they've discovered and recommend. Last weekend it was a nice Greek place, complete with bellydancer, lovely salads and spanikopita, and the galactoboureko was the BEST dessert I have ever eaten in any restaurant. I have the semolina and phyllo, and am going to take advantage of this cool day (And Abra's recipe) to try my hand at it. I grew up in the rigid reciprocation era, and people kept count, tallying their ours and yours and they-didn't-yets into infinity, sometimes severing friendships over a lapse in return time. Seemed quite silly to me; I just like cooking for a crowd, or just for another couple. I love preparing the food and setting a lovely table and sitting long over coffee after dessert, laughing and talking with friends. I just get in the mood to "make something pretty" and call friends to share it. And going out to a nice restaurant is a lovely bonus, as is another evening with people whose company and conversation you enjoy. Keeping tabs on who owes you a dinner smacks of counting coup in the tackiest, mingiest way. It's like harboring a grudge about something that happened in fourth grade. (But there was that couple several years ago who accepted every invitation, never ever even spoke to us between times, and liked to pack up the leftovers for "tomorrow's lunch." I wrote them off when she got out about the fourth Glad-box and tucked in a stick of butter from the fridge door). Though this is getting to be the era of pulling out all the stops, in acquiring just the right barware and decor and cooking paraphernalia, there are still good easy ways of sharing hospitality, from four courses in the chandelier-lit dining room to sitting down when the pizza box hits the coffeetable. If you like entertaining, choose your method---there's little enough time in this busy world, and we should not miss any chance to enjoy the company of friends.

The jar of "cheater pickles" I made this afternoon. They are the kind our neighbor made when I was growing up---my Mother was a pickle-maker of the first echelon, with Grace Church, Lime, Dill, Dill Vegetables, Four-Day, Kosher Dill, and Sweet Gherkins all in her repertoire. Mother looked down on all pretend-picklers with a distaste reserved for people who lived above their means and put on airs in church. But I LOVED those little pickle slices from the store-bought jar, dished out by the kind woman next door. She bought a big jar of dill slices, drained the juice into another jar for making salad dressing, and filled the jar with cup after cup of dry sugar, as much as the jar would hold. She threw in a few cloves and a couple of dried allspice berries, shook the jar within an inch of its life, and stuck it in the fridge for ten days. That was the exact recipe: "Ten days and it's ready t'eat." A shake from time to time to redistribute the juices and above-water slices was all it needed to turn into the most delicious, crispiest, clear little slices in all pickledom. I crunched every slice she parted with, sticky juices running down toward my grubby elbows, and sought her help in getting my telltale face clean. I thought about them last night when I was making another crave: super-sharp pimiento cheese. So today, I went and bought a jar of cheap dill slices, poured in way too much sugar and rattled in a couple of spices. I shook it, upended it a few times, snugged it away in the cool. Can't wait for next weekend, though I suspect I'll be sneaking a few cheat-bites before bedtime.