Norm Matthews

I saw this Hot Fudge, Brownie, Cheesecake on the internet yesterday and made it. It was breakfast this morning!

We had take out fried chicken for NYE dinner. New Years Day is usually traditional Southern dinner that includes ham hocks but the two stores that I used to rely on for big, meaty hocks now has pork hocks. That is what the call them anyway. They are not cured ham and barely have any pork. They are mostly bone, fat and skin. You could say it has a couple bites of pork if you take small bites. I may find better hocks somewhere else, but this year, I made a ham, sausage and bean soup with collards added in. Charlie is not a fan of black eyed peas but once when I made a dip with them, he liked it so I did that in order to include all the traditional foods that we usually have. We also had cornbread.

Tomorrow is a pot luck dinner at my sister's house with turkey and ham. Today Charlie and I had Christmas eve dinner with a rib roast, potato pancakes, coleslaw and mac & cheese.

Forgive me if this has been addressed here before. I didn't read all of the previous 19 years of posts. I was reading a Fine Cooking recipe for latkes today and have a question. It says to soak the grated potatoes in a bowl of water to save the starch and let it settle to the bottom. After removing the potatoes and drying them, the recipe says "Transfer the potatoes to a medium bowl and using your hands, mix in the onion, egg, 1 tsp. salt, and 1/4 tsp. pepper. Carefully pour off the reserved potato soaking water to get to the white gluey starch on the bottom of the bowl. Transfer the starch to the potato mixture and mix it in with your hands." My question is: Why go to the effort of removing the starch and then putting it back? Why not dry the potatoes without removing the starch, or if there is a good reason for soaking, why not just use potato flour instead of using the wet starch at the bottom of a bowl of water?

@heidih That's the same brand I ended up getting. I also got one of marzipan while I was there. It was in the baking aisle.

@Smithy click on the link at the bottom of this post and it will take you to the recipe.

@jedovaty Well it was either find the almond paste or find "finely ground blanched almond meal" and if I found that, I'd still have to make the paste. The recipe also provided an alternative filling of butter, cinnamon and sugar and I almost used that. I am glad that I found the paste though because it tasted a lot better than the marzipan that Charlie's ex used on her cakes.

The black one has been stored in the basement since I got the other one a little while ago. I got it out today to make cookies while the bread was rising in the other bowl. It has a smaller bowl and is pretty noisy compared to the red one.

I grew up in a Croatian neighborhood in Kansas City (Strawberry Hill) and they have the same holiday bread but call it povitica. PS I once lived in a rental house that had black walnut trees and I decided to make some povitica since the nuts were "free". It took months for those black walnut husks to dry out enough. They have to be removed before you can crack open the shells and that is a messy messy chore. I put them in a gunny sack and whacked then up side the tree and ran over them with my car. Just trying to do it by hand will turn your skin walnut brown until it decides to wear off. I finally got enough nuts meat to make the bread and ugh. I found out I didn't like black walnuts. They have quite a different taste than English walnuts. Another time, my uncle gave me a big bag of pecans and I made some povitica with those and that was wonderful.

Long ago before the internet, I occasionally made a German Christmas dessert called Stollen but stopped when I could not get cardamom any more. I was thinking about making it again and wondered if I could find all the stuff I needed to make it now that I am back in Kansas City. I looked all over for the almond paste. Cassie used to get marzipan somewhere but I could not find it anywhere. Finally I went to a cake and candy bakers supply store way out on the old Santa Fe trail road. The parking lot was full when I got there and it was busy inside. When I finally got to the cash register, the lady told me she didn't have any but Hen House grocery did. That is a place I shop often and it's close. So yesterday I got everything I needed and today it has been snowing since before dawn and will still be snowing by dark so it's a good day for baking. The recipe was for one big or two smaller loaves. I made one big one and that was a mistake. By the time the inside was done, the edges were crunchy but it was still good. Charlie had seconds and it was better than I remembered. Another thing I was thinking about was a cookie jar that got broken a long time ago and so I looked for it on ebay and found it.... so i had to make some cookies to fill it. The jar is full and those are the cookies that won't fit. We will have to eat those right away, I guess. For dinner Charlie called Grub Hub and ordered from an Hawaiian restaurant. We had some pork and chicken plus some Spam grilled with teriyaki and wrapped with rice in some seaweed.

My son brought this home yesterday. He said this isn't a joke but it is still funny. Cereal with no cereal in the box.

More leftovers. Today ham and bean soup with challah bread. Charlie had his with a turkey sandwich. I was at the dentist today and soup was all I was up for...a little ice cream too.

Because Thanksgiving dinner was moved up sooner than I wanted, I was still finishing up at the last minute. I was still making gravy and slicing bread when people started arriving. That is why I did not have time to take any pictures. I brought ham back to the Thanksgiving table after many years absence. My uncle never ate any kind of fowl so we always had some ham along with the turkey. I started serving Heritage ham along with turkey because it is so good. People have started looking forward to it as much as the turkey. This is a "Leftover Ham and Egg Salad" that is Charlie's favorite. I added some ham slices to my sandwich. The following is a description of one of the farms that raises pigs for Heritage Foods. Healthy Heritage Hogs Unlike the overcrowded inhumane conditions of industrially farmed pigs, which makes up 97% of the dry, tasteless pork sold today, White Oak Pastures’ pigs forage on lush pastures and pecan groves, while also enjoying farm fresh eggs, nuts and grains. These accommodations coupled with the mixed heritage breed of Tamworth, Berkshire, and Gloucester Old Spot result in the most astonishingly healthy, full-flavored ham you will ever enjoy. Ham n Egg Salad Ingredients 2 c. Left over baked ham, diced very small 4 hard boiled eggs, chopped 1 c. mayonnaise 1/2 c. chopped celery 1/4 c. chopped sweet onion 1/4 c chopped dried apricots Have used dried apples and or golden raisins. Salt and Pepper to taste

My recipe used to be a lot longer and more complicated too.

I used to marinate it for two or three days but I just serve the hens with sauce poured over it now.

Here is the recipe. Hoisin sauce is optional. Cornish Hens with orange sauce 2 Cornish hens 3/4 cup fresh orange juice 1/2 cup honey 1/4 cup soy sauce 2 tablespoons hoisin sauce 2 tablespoons minced orange rind 3 cloves garlic minced 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger root 2 teaspoons oriental sesame oil Mix marinade ingredients. Simmer on stove to reduce by at least half. Bake hens according to package directions. Before putting in oven, place slice or onion and slice or orange inside and rub outside with oil. salt and pepper. Reserve some sauce for basting. Bake, basting with sauce every 15 or 20 minutes, Serve with remaining sauce. Spinach: Blanch the spinach in salted boiling water only until wilted, 30 - 40 seconds. Drain quickly and shock in cold water. Squeeze out water. Cut into 3-inch lengths. Toss with 1 tablespoon of chopped scallion, 1 teaspoon minced garlic, 1 teaspoon of sesame oil, 1/2 teaspoon of sesame seeds and salt and pepper to taste.

Charlie requested this. It has been a favorite of his since he was about six or so. It is Cornish hens with an Asian flavored orange sauce. We had Korean style spinach to go with it.

Hen House grocery had big packages of "Smoked Hocks" so I got some. They used to have big honking ham hocks and these looked like they might be some like before, but they turned out to be mostly bone and skin with a bite or two of meat and it was smoked pork not ham. They were good anyway. They didn't have any collard greens so I went to two other stores before I found some. At the other store that didn't have any, they said it was because of the season, weather and the ones they got in were not good enough to put out. Those were bogus excuses. This is just the season and weather for collards. I used navy beans because Charlie doesn't care much for black-eyed peas and besides, it isn't New Years.😋

I thought it would be difficult to use the smoker on a cold day but I got some ribs anyway. The smoker fired up and held for four hours just like it was a warm day. I added some beer brats during the last hour or so.

I have not been cooking very much lately. It really hit me how long it has been when I checked in and saw how much had been posted since I did. I made chili and corn cut off the cob and cooked with a little honey and milk.

I have only used it two or three times. I had plans to use it the other day but didn't. I used a butane grill instead.

I wish I had known that sooner.

Charlie had a request for dinner: Either strip or ribeye steak, mac & cheese and a vegetable, no potatoes. I added strawberries.

That reminds me of a Chinese restaurant where I used to live. They had two menus, one for regular people and one for Chinese customers. We always asked for the Chinese menu then had to have everything explained to us. Some of the food had a lot of those little red chilies. They were good but I had to take them in moderation.

Fifty years ago when the World Atlas of Wine , Hugh Johnson's other book - Wine, The Signet book of Wine, and Time Life's Wines and Spirits were all published, the world of wine was smaller. California wines were in their infancy and grape wine variety options were smaller. In other words it was easier to be 'knowledgeable" There were no mentionable wineries in the US outside of Northern California, there were too few to mention in South America , Asia, Africa, Australia, or Canada. Today the subject has really expanded to the point that it is difficult to write a comprehensive book about wine, at least not in a single volume. One would need several volumes just to have the wine labels pictured.