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Today, I decided to use up the beeswax I got out of a comb-in jar of honey and I made lip gloss. Orange vanilla, to be exact, with a beeswax and coconut oil base.
What? It’s a valid survival skill.When you’re out hunting zombies, the last thing you need are dry, cracked lips.
Flourless chocolate cake is pretty much the perfect chocolate delivery system ever.
The initial installment of the core Thanksgiving dinner was downloaded without incident. Looking forward to an evening of tweaking the add-ons and plug-ins. 
Currently tucked in on the living room futon working on some holiday gifts and hoping you are having a lovely holiday season.
Happy Foodmas to one and all!
If there is one thing I love more than almost more than life itself, it’s pie. And if there’s one thing I hate almost more than anything in life itself, it’s making pie crust.
Everyone has a variety of unique gifts. And I have more than my fair share of really awesome talents and skills. Making pie dough, sadly, is not one of them. In fact, if there is anyone who is essentially cursed in the arena of pie pastry, I am that person.
Some people can just sift together flour and a little salt, crumb a pile of butter or shortening into the mix, sprinkle on a mere misting of water and with a little boardwork – hey presto! They’ve got a smooth, satiny and almost sensually compliant dough that almost seems to leap into the pan with a eager flourish, like those anthropomorphic animals in meat commercials that are ecstatic at the the thought of being slaughtered and eaten.
Then there’s me.
Watching me attempt to make a pie crust is very much like watching one of those funny videos of a horny animal who really wants to get it on with another who isn’t have any of it.
I shape, I roll, I pinch, I pray. But every time I push my pin across the dough it scoots out of the way, folding up over here and squeezing out over there, or cracking apart like the Antarctic ice sheet, sending an entire quarter of the dough off in some random direction at an angle so oblique to the central mass that it should be part of the geometry SAT section. As I shape one area, another disintegrates by either falling apart or sticking to the pin on the backswing. Or, more likely, both. I’m the only person I know who can, when rolling out dough, create more destruction with every stroke than order.
I chill, I hydrate, I flour, I use parchment paper, I wield a French style rolling pin. But the dough comes out either too crumbly or too sticky to hold together. Or both, amazingly. It alternately sticks to the pin and refuses to stick to itself in such random and unpredictable ways that I swear some bored demon with a “Food Physics” remote is amusing himself by randomly pushing buttons.
I’ve use all the “sure-fire tips” like substituting booze for water and adding more fat. I’ve tried every recipe (including my mother’s oh-so-ironically titled “No Fail Pie Crust”, which indeed never fails to make me tear out my hair). I’ve even begged. But no matter what I do, the dough just keeps scooting away from me like a disinterested mate, cracking, sticking, breaking apart, crumbling, mashing up, curling, twisting and/or comically clinging to the pin just long enough to get dragged off the edge of table, where it spectacularly releases en mass and drops to the floor.
And that’s just the prep. Once I manage to shape it into something resembling a post-Deep-Impact Eurasia that’s big enough to (hopefully) do the job, I still have to get it from the table to the pan. Let’s just say the process more closely resembles botched back-alley skin grafting than anything culinary in nature, and leave it at that. Trust me, the less said about it, the better. By the time I get my Frankencrust into the pan and pasted back together into a semblance of a crust, I’m usually on the verge of tears and the kitchen looks like a pastry chef went postal in a bakery with a chainsaw. Which, all things considered, is a not-entirely-inaccurate depiction of what actually happened.
And don’t even get me started on blind baking. I have to handle the damn crust twice, giving it twice the opportunity to find new ways to fail spectaculary, from burning on the edges while refusing to cook in the middle to sticking to the weight materials to crumbling apart on contact with a potholder. Seriously, just don’t go there. It makes me twitch.
This year’s pumpkin pie recipe called for 2 Tbs of spiced rum. Hubby borrowed far more than was necessary from the upstairs neighbors, and yet the entire quantity of donated rum has completely disappeared. Read into that what you will.
As I suspected, a large pinch each of cinnamon and fresh nutmeg did magical things for my pot of tomato/veggie broth based vegetable soup.1 Oh. My. God. SO GOOD!!!
Playing backup on this meal were fresh scratch-made biscuits that hubby put together and a fresh salad from the tailgate market including mixed salad greens, fresh watercress and a sprinkling of sorrel weeded from the flower bed. A perfect fall dinner, with plenty of leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch. Om nom nom.
Today my afternoon started off with a visit to the early voting location to express my preferences about who should sit on our city council, moved on to a leisurely walk through a local arts and crafts fair, then on to the bookstore (to check on the availability of a book) and the library (to renew my pile-zilla of current reading material). Afterward, we continued our leisurely walk around town, including a surprise stop at a sample table set up on Wall St. by Imladris Farms, a local berry and fruit farm that makes and sells jellies, jams and stuff, where I sampled the OMFG heavenly apple butter, chatted up the farm’s proprietor for ideas about taking successful blueberry bush cuttings and got a free farm-tour pass for later. On the way back to the truck, we picked up a bag of chocolate at the Fetish for later (mmm…choc covered candied orange peel FTW) and I got to pet a very happy dog and get wet nose prints on my cheek.
After our jaunt downtown, we stopped by Sunny Point Cafe for a lovely lunch in the sun, for which I shall doubtless pay with a massive sunburn. I don’t care, though, since I’ve spent most of the previous week stuck behind my keyboard in a chilly, rain-damp apartment bemoaning the onset of cold weather and chilled to the bone due to the building’s thermal lag and (on our side) poor sun exposure (it’s great in the summer and not so hot, literally, in cold weather). I was like a lizard on a hot rock, soaking up the infrared and hugging the sun-warmed table to thaw out my cold hands. Ahhhhh.
After lunch, of course, there was the getting-to-be-habitual stroll through the restaurant’s garden. I’m beyond envious of their massive nasturtium spread…I have the worst luck with nasties and I love them soooo much, both for their pretty flowers and their spicy salad leaves. I just want to lay down in their overflowing flower bed and chew my way out.
After our stroll, we hit the farmers market and got stuffed to the gills on apple samples. We ended up with a box of Johnny Gold apples (the honeycrisps are a bit mellow this year, and we both wanted something with plenty of zing), some grapes, assorted veg and the only carton of figs I’ve had all year (too cold for good harvests, I think). Also, some local 5-year-aged Chedder sharp enough to make Freddy Kreuger think ’safety first.’ Tomorrow, I am making the Times’ fig and carmelized onion tart for dinner (although I’ll probably substitute some soft goat cheese for stilton). Yum!
So that was my day – voting, strolling, art perusing, chatting, dog petting, patio lunching, sun soaking, garden touring, farmers-market shopping and chocolate munching. Some days, my life seriously doesn’t suck.
So, spent the afternoon doing the “weekend in Asheville” thing that I love to do – grabbing a meal out, squandering a portion of my mortal hours in mindless enjoyment of this place, and catching some entertainment before heading home for the night.
Today’s tour d’ville started with a late lunch at Laughing Seed (both of us ordering our current favorite, the hempnut burger with goat cheese), where we were treated to the sight of a dove and her babies who were nesting in one of the patio’s hanging flower pots. Adorable. The staff have even named them (the momma dove is Penelope, but the waitress couldn’t remember the babies’ names).
After, we had over an hour to kill before our movie, so we rambled around the river arts district looking at houses and neighborhoods, in case we find someone doing a Crazy Eddie sale on a reasonable piece of property. Today, though, we got a total surprise when we rounded a turn down by the river, just to the East of the Patton St. Bridge, and saw a flock of turkeys in the road! For a moment, Thom thought they were wild turkeys, until I reminded him we were still more or less in downtown Asheville not a block out of a heavily industrialized zone. As we slowly drove down the street, we watched the turkeys head up into a yard with coops and gardens (and across the street from them, I just barely caught a glimpse of something vaguely goat-like in another yard).
Dude. Someone in AVL has a flock of fricken turkeys. And their neighbor has a goat-ish something! That so rocks. That is totally my kind of neighborhood. I’ve been tickled about the sighting all damned day.
Tonight’s entertainment was “Julie and Julia,” the movie about Julia Child and the blogger who got a book deal from blogging about making every single recipe in Mastering The Art of French Cooking in one year.
Total foodie porn. Loved it! My favorite line in the whole movie was about the fact that there really is no such thing as too much butter. Seriously, someone cooking Julia Child’s recipes could keep a small local dairy in business all by themselves. I spent a few hours poking through blogs and articles around the movie, and all I can find are people freaking out about the damned butter. One person even admitted to making Child’s infamous Boeuf Bourguignon with canned french onion soup and canned cream of mushroom soup so they could avoid the unhealthiness of all that butter!
Uh, folks…two points:
1. That canned shit has so much crap, chemicals and faux food in it that it’s only slightly more healthy than radioactive sewage sludge.
2. Julia and her hubby ate butter-soaked French food for pretty much every meal of their lives from their 40’s on, and lived to be 90+.
Seriously, people. Don’t fear the butter. The butter is your friend. Embrace the butter, throw out the crap and live to be an extremely well-fed 90-something without a shred of regret.
Having seen the movie, now I want to learn how to cook, official-like. Luckily, there’s an excellent culinary school just down the road, and I have some college money that needs spending. It’s a serious thought, although if I did go I wouldn’t be going for the degree (I’d never get ll the credits anyway, since I wouldn’t be taking the meat courses). Nor do I want a cooking job (god forbid – chefs get up way to frakking early, work like dogs until the late evening and apparently spend the entire day cutting themselves with red-hot knives coated in flaming brandy, to hear Anthony Bourdain kvetch about it in his book). No, I think I’d just saunter (or perhaps sautee) my way through the classes that interested me and call it a day.
And yes. I’ll be using butter. Lots and lots of butter.
I love this site. Enter your phrase of choice, click the button and watch it translate the phrase back and forth into Japanese until equilibrium is reached (same translation back and forth).
Talk about a great weekend. Early Sunday afternoon, we started off the day by taking part in a service to dedicate 16 more homes with Habitat for Humanity. That’s 16 families who used to live in housing projects and dangerous neighborhoods, and who now have a great home in a great neighborhood in a quiet little cul-de-sac just up the hill from a huge sports park, down the road from a public library and a hop/skip from grocery stores and other businesses. A home they can afford to pay for, heat and maintain, in a place that safe for the kids to play outside.
I got all choked up. Damned allergies…sniff.
During the ceremony, they called up the families to receive a book of faith and to say a few words, and it turns out that one of the families was one that I had worked with in my Americorps service, a single mom with two kids that I really got attached to during my service. The brother and sister are really good kids (their mother is doing a phenomenal job of raising them despite the circumstances), but during the time I worked with them, you could see the gang-violence-heavy and poverty-saturated environment of the projects starting to make inroads into their actions and choices. I was so worried about them after my service year was up and I had no idea they were one of our families, so I got so excited to see them at the dedication that I was literally bouncing up and down in my pew and had to restrain myself from squealing out loud.
*squeeeeeeeeee!* asplode!
After the service, we did the kool-aid and cookies meet-and-greet thing, and I got a sudden idea to ask the HFH staff about the possibility of putting a community garden in the neighborhood. Turns out they have a few lots in the development that are unbuildable for some reason, so they’re hooking me up with the community’s HOA to talk about possibilities. I’ve got no clue how to do this, but when has that ever stopped me? Here’s hoping it works out.
After the event, hubs and I grabbed some take-out burritos and spent the rest of the day hiking around the arboretum’s nature trails and soaking our feet in the (brrrrrrr…cold) creek while we ate our late lunch/early dinner.
Totally one of the best ways to spend a Sunday afternoon. I highly recommend it to anyone.