Ktepi

I'll second saffron + white chocolate. Saffron + caramel (just steep some saffron in hot water and add it a batch of dulce de leche as it simmers) Saffron + creamy/sweet in general (saffron ice cream etc) Bourbon + lemon (Buffalo Trace makes a good bourbon lemon curd; it's one of those flavor combinations that seems to become a third thing unto itself) Campari + grapefruit Bourbon + tart cherry Peppermint + any melon

Coquito sounds excellent -- do you just substitute the coconut milk for the dairy (and eggs?), or use them half and half? When our apartment manager dropped off a "Christmas treat bag" the other day, I smelled the Wint-O-Green LifeSavers in it and they reminded me of York's Wintergreen Patties. Does anyone know if those were only made for the holidays? It's what I associate them with, but we didn't have candy very often when I was a kid, so I mostly associate it with holidays anyway.

Despite a fierce chest cold, I managed to put to use the fresh chaurice I got from Poche's Market today, rather than freeze it: I butterflied a chicken, stuffed chaurice under the skin, roasted it at a high heat (~ 500 degrees, ~ 45 minutes), and made a pan sauce from the drippings and a little more chaurice. Served it in quarters over grits. The pan sauce tasted a lot like the gravy Popeye's puts on their mashed potatoes, which took me a while to place -- this is a good thing, mind you.

I know very little about Korean cooking (something I'm trying to change), but FatMan Seoul's entry on Choon Chun Jip's dak galbi is one of my favorite bits of food blog writing. I've tried making similar things, but with no access to sesame leaves or the chili paste he talks about, I'm sure what I end up with is only an approximate relation.

This looks like a good thread to bump. I just got my order from Poche's about half an hour ago, so I can't report on the quality of any of it (not that I have any doubt, having eaten plenty of Poche's sausage in Louisiana), but the service was terrific. I ordered: 2 pounds boudin balls 1 pound boudin 1 pound andouille (it's huuuuge) 1 pound fresh chaurice 1 pound smoked chaurice 1 four-pound smoked chaudin (pig's stomach stuffed with sausage) Ten pounds of food, total cost with shipping $80-something. The idea was to get a variety of things while satisfying my curiosity about chaudin and incredible cravings for boudin. If you're wondering why I didn't order any tasso, I'll be honest: it's the holiday shopping season and I'm maxing things out to such an extent that I had to switch one pound of tasso to a pound of boudin balls (a dollar cheaper) in order to afford the ten pound minimum. ... I've had a lot of shopping to do. I placed the order over the weekend, and got a call Monday morning letting me know that they didn't have any fresh chaurice on hand but would be making some that afternoon and Tuesday, and that I could either wait or change the order. I waited, obviously; bam, here it is this morning. The chaurice arrived cold and only partially frozen (not because it had thawed, but because it's fresh), where it was nearest the frozen items and ice pack -- so we're having that tonight, and the rest went into the freezer to be portioned out over the holidays. .. man, I wish I hadn't had lunch already.

This sounds terrific. We're making a second fruitcake on New Year's Eve (the idea is to let it age a year and hopefully eat it next New Year's with the same friends who'll be here this year), and I think I'll borrow a lot from yours for it -- certainly the black sugar.

Tonight was the first variant of my chili cassoulet: For meat, I used 2 pounds chili-grind beef, 1 pound ground pork, 1 pound of "chorizo" (see below). Black beans instead of the pintos of last time. Instead of chiles, a spoonful of my habanero roasted tomato ketchup, which was by itself spicy enough to make this batch much spicier than last time. It's little enough tomato relative to the beans that I don't think the acidity mattered. Crushed blue corn tortilla chips instead of Fritos. We had it alongside seared duck breast -- I love duck with black beans, and make a black bean cassoulet with duck confit when friends visit, so this was sort of midway between that and the previous chili cassoulet. The black beans definitely make a big texture difference -- neither better nor worse, just different. The tortilla chips ... I think I like the Fritos better. The tortilla chips didn't really form their own layer the way the Fritos had, they just sat there, texturally no different after cooking than before -- I'm sure the fat in Fritos helps them to "recombine." (As for that "chorizo" ... well, my butcher, bless their hearts, has among their repertoire of house-made sausages a few that I think of as "inspired by" the sausages whose names they bear. Their chorizo is a moderately spiced beef-and-pork sausage seasoned with a touch of vinegar, and is useful largely for being a spicy fresh sausage that isn't Italian.)

Our fruitcake is already half-gone I like Starbucks' Peppermint Mocha a lot more than I expected I would. I miss Friendly's peppermint stick ice cream, and hope that Pepsi Holiday Spice is making a return appearance this year. My mother makes fudge every Christmas to give to everyone in the neighborhood -- I think it's the standard Fluff recipe. Gingerbread's something I crave every year but can never get to come out the way I see it in my mind's tastebuds: dark, dense, moist, gingery with maybe a little clove.

Just wanted to add that I got my copy of the book today; this thread is a great advertisement for it. (I love that he's such a fan of duck, too. Duck and pork. That's Christmas right there -- nuts to your frankincense.) I'm figuring on a mess of hash with the leftovers, maybe bolstered with some home-cured bacon, and probably some Filipino adobo with a bunch of kale tossed in. (It sounds like I'm making up for the lack of seasoning in the initial product by complicating the leftovers, but it's a 20 pound ham, after all!)

Technically this might not be mulled, since the spices aren't heated with the liquid -- I don't know what an exact definition of mull would be. But I've been calling this mulled cider, and have had it every night since Thanksgiving: One mug's worth of slightly hard apple cider. This is cider of the North American non-alcoholic sort, but not the junk they sell at supermarkets: real, robust, dark, opaque, unpasteurized. I grew up in apple orchards, I'll go without rather than drink the stuff that tastes like apple juice. "Slightly hard" in this case means it's been left to sit on the counter until it turned fizzy (overnight, roughly), and then spent another week in the fridge -- there's sometimes a sulphurous smell when you open the jug that goes away when it's heated. One shot of spiced rum that I infused in January: dried ginger root (like Penzey's sells), cloves, peppercorns, mace, in that order of proportion, steeped in rum for a week or two, mixed with a little blackstrap and sorghum, aged until last week. The dominant flavors are the clove and ginger with some bite from the peppercorn. Half a shot of Galliano. Heat until steaming, pour over a thin slice of lemon in your mug. The first mug was because I was looking for a way to use the Galliano -- I'm doing some cupboard cleaning -- but it's really addictive. I'm sure using a spiced rum and simmering the cider with cloves and ginger would be similar.

Most of my honey consumption is on biscuits or fresh-baked bread, on the rare occasions I make bread. The more "honey-tasting" honeys (Tupelo etc, as opposed to the forest honeys), I sometimes use for lemonade iced tea. It's a good topping for vanilla ice cream, too.

Oh, I want to walk this one through a lot more poses before taking a snapshot, if you see what I mean. But I have nine days of living-and-eating-alone between the Missus going to her parents' for the holidays and having that corned ham for Christmas, so I'm going to try at least one variation in that window, and maybe two small ones. I'm making duck confit during that time, too, and as much as I wanted to leave duck out of the first version of Chili Cassoulet, I might have to try it...

Leftovers all the way, today and tomorrow both -- for me, turkey is a container in which to cook stuffing, and I'll eat the leftovers until the stuffing is gone; for the Missus, sandwiches of turkey, cranberry, and a little stuffing are the highlight of the holiday, or at least share the spotlight with pumpkin pie. Once the stuffing's gone, we'll move on to turkey gumbo, "turkey frita" (like vaca frita with leftover turkey), and pasta carbonara with shredded leftover turkey tossed in with the bacon. I was thinking of trying turkey rendang, but I don't know how leftover turkey will fare being cooked that long. Monday or Tuesday I'm planning on something with beef to break up the poultry hegemony -- possibly the chili cassoulet from the Cook-Off. The second of three batches of turkey stock (I don't have a nice big gumbo pot, so I do it in batches) is simmering as we speak, for that gumbo.

I'll add to the praise for Airborne -- the only honey of theirs I've had is the Honeydew, but it's amazing (for those who aren't familiar with it, Honeydew is a class of honey -- like the honeys labeled forest honey, and I think pine honeys -- produced by bees who collect the nectar of other insects instead of taking the nectar directly from the plant). Airborne's comes from beech forests, if I remember right, and it has a deep, fruity, complex flavor that's not like anything else I've had.

The leftovers I froze from that huge cassoulet are almost all gone, having been drafted for lunches long after I thought I'd be sick of chili. I'm real close to picking up the ingredients for another batch, as something to break up the post-Thanksgiving turkey monopoly. But more chorizo this time -- maybe half chorizo, half beef -- and I think a fair bit of smoked paprika.

We decided to give up desserts except at holidays, because all the fresh fruit in the summer had led to a pie habit that needed breakin', and the mesquite meal and birch syrup I'd picked up to play with, and my fascination this year with saffron desserts, wasn't helping. There's just the two of us for Thanksgiving, so we couldn't rationalize more than one dessert ... So we're having a pumpkin pie spiked with bourbon ... ... with a flourless Mexican chocolate cake crust ... ... and a ribbon of saffron-ginger cheesecake ... ... and burnt caramel ice cream(1) which I'm pretending we'll have with the pie but which we'll actually eat separately, because that would just be nuts. (1) I realize burnt caramel is redundant, but the fact is that I burnt the caramel. I halved the ingredients in a cajeta recipe and substituted maple syrup for half the sugar, the combination of which meant that a third of the way into the cooking time, I smelled a hint of smoke, and found that the mixture had reduced to a thick (almost candy-like but not quite) caramel which I was able to mostly save by pouring off the part that hadn't stuck to the bottom. It tastes like caramel and like maple but a little burnt, too, in a woody and not completely unpleasant way. I may add a little bourbon, we'll see how it tastes.

I've only cooked softshells once before, and uh, I had just moved to New Orleans and had no clue what I was doing, so basically poached them in gumbo. It wasn't bad, but it's not something I've got planned to do again, either. I have two large softshells I'm thawing right now which I bought in the spring and keep putting off because I've wanted to "save them for when I'm really craving them," like the Pepsi Blue that sat in the closet until it lost its fizz. I'm a hoarder sometimes. At the start of the thread, someone mentioned a problem with frozen softshells being mushy -- is this something I need to worry about or can try to avoid? I don't expect them to be as good as fresh, but in Indiana I was just happy to find them at all. I'm leaning towards pan-frying them with a little flour, cayenne, and garlic salt, and having them alongside frog legs sauce piquante. (Yeah, I'm cleaning out the freezer this weekend.)

Well, nevermind that. I couldn't get anything that wasn't three to five times more expensive than the farm-raised Amish turkeys I usually get, which is just too much to spend for the two of us on a meal that's mostly gonna be eaten as leftovers. So, back to a scaled-down version of last year: Turkey brined in apple cider, sage, bay leaves, oranges, lemons; stuffed with apple-sage-rabbit stuffing (built on Pepperidge Farm) And the rest, as I said. Brussels sprouts, corn macque choux, pumpkin pie. I'm thinking of making another stuffing/dressing now, though, with cornbread and chorizo, maybe thyme and orange (zest? juice? segments?). We always, always run out of stuffing before turkey when eating the leftovers.

Oh, sure thing: Caligula (It's dark, it's decadent, it's a fruitcake.) 1 pound dried tart cherries. Not Bings, but Montmorencies or the like. Sometimes hard to find -- I ordered mine from Kokopelli's Kitchen, cheaper than other places I saw. You can use other fruit, and in fact I ordinarily would have used a small container of mixed glace fruit, or at least citron -- but it wasn't on sale here when I made the fruitcake. Currants could be good, too. 1 teaspoon lemon zest, chopped fine. 1 Tablespoon candied ginger, chopped fine. You can use more than this -- I was afraid of it coming out too gingerbready, but it isn't strong at all. About a cup of bourbon. 2 sticks butter 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup cocoa powder 3 eggs 2 cups flour, divided A triple shot of espresso. I'm not sure how much this is by volume; I just ordered it at Starbuck's. 1 pound Callebaut semi-sweet chocolate. If I'd been able to find it, I would have used something a little higher in cocoa content, towards the 70-80% range, but I'm a dark chocolate person. 2 cups chopped pecans. Special equipment -- parchment paper. Soak cherries in 1/4 cup bourbon in Zip-Loc bag; soak lemon zest and ginger in another 1/4 cup bourbon in separate container (to keep the cherries from becoming ginger-flavored). Soak overnight. The cherries will probably soak all the bourbon up. Preheat oven to 300. Butter two loaf pans or a medium-size casserole dish and line them with parchment paper. Chop the chocolate up pretty rough so you've got both big pieces and small, which is pretty much what happens on its own anyway. Cream the butter and add the following, beating to incorporate after each: the sugar; 2 eggs; 1 cup flour; remaining egg; cocoa remaining flour; espresso. Drain the bourbon off the soaked things and reserve it. Stir the fruit, ginger, chocolate, and pecans into the batter and pour into pan(s). Bake for 35 minutes, cover tightly with foil, and bake for another 50 minutes or so; cake will look slightly underdone. Sprinkle a little bourbon and let cool completely in the pan before inverting it onto a plate; brush with the rest of the bourbon you used for soaking (this leaves you with 1/2 cup as yet untouched) and pop into a Zip-Loc bag, keeping it in the fridge. Brush, spritz, or sprinkle with remaining bourbon once a week until you're ready to serve it -- I made mine about six weeks in advance. (Edited to insert a missing step.)

Cider, lots of sage, bay leaves, sliced oranges and sometimes lemons, simmered until I think it's flavorful enough (it's easier to make that call if I leave the salt until the end of the simmering; the sage and bay flavors need to be considerably stronger than I'd want them in a finished product). I find that the major factor in whether a brine ingredient contributes any flavor is simply whether or not it's been simmered in the brine first: if you can't taste it in the brine, you won't taste it in the turkey. Even then, the drippings and the skin -- and the smell when you open the oven -- are much more affected than the meat.

Oh Lord. Thank you for the update/pointer. There are so many things there that make me want to kick something -- but like you say, the situation's complicated. I'd run outta feet.

Oh, definitely duck. Gosh. For both meat and eggs -- I make eggs three or four times more often when I've got duck eggs around. This month's Gourmet -- I think; maybe it was Bon Appetit -- has a recipe that calls for heritage goose, something I know nothing about but sounded interesting. My one time cooking goose, I didn't think it was worth the extra expense and effort relative to duck -- but another breed might be another story. And roosters! I mean, they're not exotic or anything, but they're not easy to find either (I get them at an Asian market), and coq au vin without them is a different dish entirely. Are there other waterfowl that can be raised for food and/or eggs? I'd be curious about that too.

I'm glad they plan on getting running again at least, something I hadn't taken for granted -- I almost left Hubig's out of my list, because I had googled them out of curiosity and that lagniappe page was the first thing I found. Every time I've been back to New Orleans since moving -- except the first time, when I realized how foolish I had been for leaving without any olive salad -- a Hubig's fried pie has been the first thing I've looked for, especially coconut or cherry. (Oh wait, or banana or lemon. Or sweet potato.) I doubt there's any storebought item I associate more with the city -- which is hard to explain to people who haven't had 'em, because it doesn't SOUND distinctive.

Nabisco Cracker Meal (not a Southern brand exactly, I guess, but easier to find there) Those Ranch Style beans definitely, especially the Pintos with Jalapeno Savoie's tasso Hubig's pies, oh Lord. Central Grocery's olive salad Zatarain's Creole mustard. Hot dogs, egg salad, these things are incomplete without some Zatarain's. Louisiana hot sauce without a doubt. I have thirty, forty hot sauces in the cabinets and most of them will wind up well-aged while I go through a dozen bottles of Louisiana and handful of Tabasco. Steen's. Brer Rabbit Blackstrap. Crystal pickled peppers.

Honestly, the biggest problem I have with these is that they're diet -- just as Jones' ordinary sodas are too sweet for my liking, their diet sodas have really pronounced sugar-substitute tastes. The Cranberry soda -- the only one I've had so far from this year, but I stare down Brussels Sprouts every time I go into the kitchen, and sooner or later we'll tussle -- would be a decent soda if not for that; but between the diet taste and the lack of tartness, I only finished it because, y'know, it was wet and I was thirsty. (And I'm a diet soda drinker by default, so that's not the problem.)