eG Foodblog: ms. victoria - Tea for three

[hathor]

I just went to your website...very nice!! Not to mention that I think deviled eggs are divine... wonder what the cliche/classic thread would have to say about deviled eggs! Embrace a cliche

[ms. victoria]

Thanks, hathor. I love deviled eggs, too. I think they have appeared at every family gathering since long before I was born. And as for the cliche v. classic thread, I am still mulling my response to that one.

[hathor]

I absolutely think its a classic! I also love quiche. So there!

[ms. victoria]

Quiche, done well, is a lovely thing and great for those yummy left over bits of cheese and veg when you're burnt out on cream of Frigidaire soup. (Though balmagowry's Kitchen Sink fried rice looks like it could give Mustgo Quiche a serious run for its money in the Leftovers with Flair department.)

[hathor]

Leftovers with flair should be a thread onto itself. I have a thing about leftovers...I just don't like them, unless I can turn them into something completely different. My family loves leftovers...its just me. Oh well.

[ms. victoria]

Your wish:

Leftovers with Flair

Leftovers are a fact of life at our house. That's usually what's for lunch. Which reminds me that I have a great deal of leftover baked beans from an experiment last week that need to be addressed. (Insert "Dear Baked Beans" corny joke here.)

[balmagowry]

Enjoying this blog, Ms. Victoria and Keifel! 

Mishap:  The temperature knob came off my slow cooker during my blog. 

But honestly I truly believe that the accidental spilling of sugar is not a mishap at all, it portends money arriving in large quantities.

Since you're on the topic of Rum, I like to make aperetif drinks made by macerating fruits and herbs of various kinds with sugar in an liquor / wine base over long periods of time.  Some of the best I've had have been the slow made Punch made at home from places that have a lot of rum.  It's done by caramelizing the sugar and then adding it and fruit to rum and letting it sit for a few months.  It's really wonderful stuff. 

Works well with brandy, too, though I've never tried months of maceration (don't know if I'd have the self-control). In fact, I believe this, on the "First Drunk" thread, was one of my very first eG posts....

[hathor]

Your wish:

Leftovers with Flair

Leftovers are a fact of life at our house. That's usually what's for lunch. Which reminds me that I have a great deal of leftover baked beans from an experiment last week that need to be addressed. (Insert "Dear Baked Beans" corny joke here.)

You are very quick, Ms. V!!

[balmagowry]

Quiche, done well, is a lovely thing and great for those yummy left over bits of cheese and veg when you're burnt out on cream of Frigidaire soup. (Though balmagowry's Kitchen Sink fried rice looks like it could give Mustgo Quiche a serious run for its money in the Leftovers with Flair department.)

Why, thankee. (And I too adore both deviled eggs - well, the devil part, that is; I can't stand the whites - and quiche.)

But don't knock Cream of Frigidaire. I was just thinking I'm about due for a batch, and it suddenly hit me that I've never before made chilled C of F. Bet it'll be wonderful! and appropriate, and entirely different in nature from the cold-weather comfort food that is hot C of F. Boy leaving today for a couple of days; depending on condition of fridge I will either experiment while he's away or make it for him when he gets back.

Thanks for the inspiration!

[keifel]

What are the fruits your grandmother normally includes in the Christmas Rum cake?  It sounds very interesting.  Better to start the macerating at once! 

the fruit list as i recall; we haven't made cake in almost 15 years, another long story; included finely minced prunes, sultanas, raisins, currants and cherries. my job was slice the fruit and put into a large steel grinder and grind until my arms were numb. then my grandmother would put the fruits to soak in white rum in new bottles and then take the fruits from the previous year and mix in the batter. thus ensuring a well cured batch of fruit for each cake making venture.

writing about it reminds me how much i've missed it.

however, i've been given leave by my beautiful and talented wife to apprise everyone of our dinner adventures. it was a pot luck event with everyone finding their own satisfaction with the contents of the fridge.

victoria addressed the baked beans by eating them, the boy chick had left over salmon patty and i had mashed potatoes and picked meat of what remained of the chicken; the carcass thereof is now residing in the freezer for use in making stock.

and with that we bid you a fond so long, farewell, auf weidersein, good night. we were watching the sound of music tonight, so it's stuck in our head.

[Pan]

Keifel has the bank card so I had to find somewhere that would take a check.

If you were in New York, you might have starved before finding such a place...

[JPW]

Pan, I am not from the Pittsburgh area, though it was not inappropriate to ask. I was born in Detroit and grew up in Tennessee. Lived in Slovenia for a bit in college and Washington State and British Columbia after grad school. I read a great deal and I think I pick up variant sentence constructions here and there. I'm glad you're enjoying the blog. We are too.

I've heard that construction from a surprising collection of different sources. Once in a while from The Boy, who is originally from Green Bay WI, though by way of many different places along the way. And I don't remember hearing it at all when I lived in Pittsburgh - in fact, the very first time I ever remember hearing it was from a roommate who was - get this - half Polish, half Scots! though the Scottish accent predominated.

So go figure!

Very nice blog. I've been somewhat swamped at work so I haven't been able to follow it as closely as I would like.

PS - I think the "needs mopped" is a very Polish construction (although I don't know why). I've heard it all over the midwest where there are lots of Poles. Being a Pittsburgher (aka yinzer) I use it myself without thinking. Pittsburgh has one of the largest Polish populations outside of Warsaw and the usage has travelled throughout the city. There's a neighborhood called Polish Hill built on a 45 degree hillside where you may still run across the occasional very old person who speaks nothing but Polish.

PPS - Man, my kitchen floor REALLY needs mopped! Yuck!

[johnnyd]

Vermont is like that; we all pay a premium (several, actually) and make sacrifices to be able to live in such a wonderful place. Would I trade? Not on your life.

Vermont was my home for 17yrs. The best bumper sticker I saw in all that time was:

"MOONLIGHT IN VERMONT, or starve!"

[crc]

Enjoying this blog, very much Ms. Victoria and Keifel! Brings back a lot of memories....

Coming out of lurkdom now

Black rum cake! ......writing about it reminds me how much i've missed it.

Keifel....I'll send you some..I make it all the time..just made some this week and it is just like back home! ( email me of PM me)

Keifel and I have been trying to figure the roti thing out. We don't have a tawa or a big enough griddle to make the thin flaky roti.

Use an iron frying pan if you have one if not a heavy duty saute pan will work, you will just need to make them a bit smaller...works for me if I am visiting and don't want to haul my heavy 100 yr old one, around!

I'm pretty sure I have that one - I'm pretty sure I have all of them - but what interests me is finding out that anyone in real life actually uses Angostura as part of his regular repertoire

as for cooking with bitters, i'm just upholding a long standing Trinidadian tradition, almost everything can be done better with a dash of bitter. the flavouring it adds it quite subtle.

Yes, it works for the upset stomach, great with meats as part of a marinade...as Keifel says the flavor is very suble unless you add quite a bit..Great in rum punch too!!

Hats off to you guys, this is a great blog...keep it coming

[ms. victoria]

If you were in New York, you might have starved before finding such a place...

That is slowly becoming true here as well. The only places that (usually) take checks are bakeries and pizzerias.

[ms. victoria]

Still no check But, it should arrive today.

Breakfast was as slapdash as dinner, though not because we were running late per the usual. We just don't have much quick breakfast type stuff on hand. The boychick had a big bowl of my mom's homemade applesauce and a glass of milk.

I made tea bread last night with some bananas we had in the freezer. We are out of butter (for shame), but I have a duplicate copy of my mom's 1940s era Good Housekeeping cookbook which has lots of rationing era recipes including a banana bread made with oil. It's good, not as good as the full test stuff with butter, but good enough toasted for breakfast with a glass of milk (out of coffee, too). In fact, it was so good, I'll probably have it for lunch as well.

[ms. victoria]

I am beginning to wonder if this blog is about what we are cooking and eating or when the check arrives.

No check, but lunch was good. More of the baked beans (they turned out fairly well considering they were my maiden voyage) and banana bread. Banana bread isn't exactly Boston brown, but it goes surprisingly well with baked beans. I am happily full and back at my desk. Well, maybe not happily back at my desk. It is Friday and it is lovely outside.

Tomorrow we are going to my mom's for the weekend. Sadly we won't have the camera but I will post our East Tennessee meals from her computer. We will also be raiding the pantry for homemade strawberry jam, applesauce and chili sauce, any of which I could just take a spoon to straight out of the jar.

[hathor]

Do you see the ad at the top of the page for Banana Nut Bread Wash??

I haven't made banana nut bread in years...now I'm hungry for it!

[ms. victoria]

Banana nut bread wash could be a dangerous thing... I'm not so sure Keifel or I either one would get out of the house much.

(Sorry if that was too much info.)

I can't eat raw bananas, some weird reaction I've had to them since I was pregnant with the boychick. I can eat them cooked, so banana bread and fried plantains are my only indulgence in what used to be my favorite fruit. The boychick is allergic or at least seriously intolerant. Keifel loves them, but only when they are slightly green or perfectly yellow. Once they develop spots they go into the freezer for bread (which never seems to last very long).

[Pan]

Victoria, I can't eat raw bananas in the U.S., but I loved eating them in Malaysia last summer! The problem for me is that bananas that reach the Northeast never ripen properly, having been picked weeks too early in order not to rot in transit. Of course, in Malaysia, they aren't picked until they're ripe, and they are in the market by the next day. Here, I can eat fried plantains or banana chips (I especially like the ones made in China using bananas from the Philippines, which I get from time to time at a huge Chinese supermarket in Flushing, Queens, NY) but usually avoid even baked goods with banana in them.

[ms. victoria]

Pan, cooking them seems to breakdown whatever sugar it is that makes me ill. I have a friend who is a dietician and was told by her that some people lack an enzyme to break down certain compounds in bananas. Coffee also kills off whatever little of that enzyme is being produced. I kept getting sick after my breakfast of Grape Nuts with bananas and milk with a cup of coffee. I thought it was the milk and switched to soy and was still getting sick. Gave up coffee, still. It never occured to me that it could be the bananas and that drinking coffee with them would make it worse.

My son on the other hand, can't even stand the smell of them or anything with banana in it. The first time he ate them, my mother was treated to cleaning up after a very ill toddler.

[balmagowry]

Pan, cooking them seems to breakdown whatever sugar it is that makes me ill. I have a friend who is a dietician and was told by her that some people lack an enzyme to break down certain compounds in bananas. Coffee also kills off whatever little of that enzyme is being produced.

How sad! I wonder what enzyme it is, and whether this might be one of those innumerable problems that can be resolved by yogurt with a high active-culture content. The more I hear and read about it, the more thoroughly convinced I am that yogurt is a miracle food for the ages. And I'm sure by now you've seen enough of eG's yogurt-making activity and lore to know how easy and inexpensive it is to make at home (well, less so now, since the increase in milk prices, but all the more important then that it's so much cheaper to make than to buy!). I'm not consistent enough in my habits to be a good test subject for its full benefits, but even I can say that several annoying medical problems that used to crop up frequently in my life have simply vanished since I started eating yogurt regularly.

One friend of mine not only swears by it but recently told me something that dovetails curiously with what you say about coffee. She has for many years suffered from an exotic GI parasite picked up on a trip to Turkey, and it's been a saga - years to hammer out a diagnosis, years to research treatments, the upshot being that there is some kind of pill that kills the thing but you can't get it legally in this country and even elsewhere it's pretty dodgy blah blah blah you get the idea - and then one day she told me that she thinks the thing is actually going away or gone, because of yogurt. The critical factor? That she had started eating her yogurt first thing in the morning, i.e. some time before drinking her first cup of coffee. According to her it has made an absolutely astonishing difference in the way she feels.

Having seen what this critter of hers does to her when it's active, I can only say that if yogurt is really able to kill or even only suppress it, then it's a miracle cure indeed! It has certainly had a good effect on me - and I too am now eating it first thing in the morning, well before that first cup of coffee.

As usual I've rambled on far longer, and much farther off-course, than I intended. But in my unscientific way I really do think this bears looking into - not just yogurt, but all those other related "good guys" that inhabit analogous cultured products. Who knows, one of these days you might find yourself eating bananas again after all.

[balmagowry]

Hey, you two! Your necessity became the mother of my invention. After the other night I continued to ponder what you might have been able to make for a celebratory Cinco de Mayo drink given the materials at hand. (I had to guess a little as to the likely contents of your fridge, but, um, most of the ingredients are optional anyway....) And now, the sun being over the yardarm as far as my crazy body clock is concerned (hey, it's only 10:15 PM), I am drinking your healths in the newly-created... Keifel Cocktail!

It is simple, light, elegant, subtly fruity, and deadly. If you permit, and if I am still standing after consuming it, later this evening I will post a picture and the recipe.

Edited May 8, 2004 by balmagowry (log)

[keifel]

balmagowry please, please post. if only to indulge my own vanity at having a cocktail named after me.

today has been a long and tiring day and at the last possible moment when things seemed really bleak, the cheque showed up, albeit at our old address.

following Mr. Snaffleburger's instructions we've Conformed, Consumed & Obeyed our way down to Cool Springs, primarily to visit le Target, but dinner at this point was a prerequisite as we were all crabby and hungry.

in the brutal landscape that is StripMall™, AnyTown, America, your food choices are basically the best of a bad lot. Our dining choice tonight was Chili's, moderately priced; well at least in comparison to our other dining choices; and not fast food; really not fast.

Even though we got there, at what we thought was early, we still had to wait 15 minutes to be seated. Vic's general complaint about Chili's ambience is the school cafeteria noise levels and i have to agree with her. i'm not one of absolutely silent dinners, but neither do i wish to shout my conversation across a two foot table.

we started with the south-western eggrolls which were ok, but even hours later, i'm still pondering if the chicken that was supposed to be part of the eggrolls managed to make a break for it before it got to the table.

for our main course, our dishes all diverged, the boychick going with the corn dog and fries, Vic having the lettuce wraps and myself, the ribs that Chili's was once famous for.

the ribs were nothing to write home about and after the first mouthful of the accompanying apple sauce, it was quickly put aside. i had tasted Doris' apple sauce earlier in the week and i was spoilt for life.

Vic has had a bad track record eating out, having the skill to prepare most of the dishes put before you, tends to make you a little sceptical about what crosses your palate. the lettuce leaves were old and bruise and i think hunger and trying not to look like a food snob and cause trouble on a busy Friday evening are the only reasons that the lettuce wraps weren't returned to the kitchen forthwith.

We are off to Doris' [kitchen] for the weekend and we must awake and away early in the morning for we are being breakfasted and it is a three hour drive.

anon, anon, anon.

edited for grammar.

Edited May 8, 2004 by keifel (log)

[balmagowry]

.

Very well, then. Behold in all its simple glory...

The Keifel Cocktail

... a work in progress, but already rather tasty, if I do say so.

(Ironically, when the time came to try this I was a bit more constrained myself than I had expected: a minor spot of car trouble has made me wheel-less for the weekend, so I'm on my mettle to feed myself as best I can from what's at hand. Ain't doing too badly, either, but that's a story for another thread.)

Proceeding from the premise that you had tequila but lacked the makings of a Margarita, I took the liberty of hoping that you might normally have a little orange juice around the house. I've kind of lost the OJ habit myself, so - I confess! - I made up a small amount from the emergency can of concentrate in the freezer, and it worked very well. My first thought was to call for a small lump of sugar, but I didn't happen to have any around myself and didn't figure you would - so I used about 1/2 tsp ordinary white sugar. I'd be willing to bet, however, that your special grey sugar would be a brilliant substitute. I don't have any of the fancy mixologist tools or the experience to know for sure which ones would be appropriate to this particular mixture - we can ask our local experts about this later.

The formula, then:

equal parts tequila and orange juice - I used 1 shot of each

2 dashes Angostura Bitters

1/2 tsp sugar (adjust to taste)

plenty of ice

Stir (or shake in shaker maybe?) until thoroughly blended and well chilled. Garnish with lemon, if available. (NB I like a nice little chunk of lemon, and I like to squeeze/twist it to get a touch of both juice and oil - but again, the lemon garnish was a flight of fancy on my part - YMMV.)

To your very good health!

Respectfully submitted....