Sabbatical

There is no cooking tonight, in large part because my feet hurt. I may fix myself some cheese and an apple after while, but that’s gonna be about it.

I was going to go grocery shopping tonight for the staff dinner party on Thursday, and even make the coconut cake so it’d have time to get good and moist, but…see above. I’ll make the cake tomorrow and hope it’s ready by Thursday night.

(Aside. I have been in this damn business for 12 years. I should know — I should KNOW — that if I’m going to spend the day walking around industrial buildings, I should wear shoes that are made for it. These were fairly comfortable, but they had a thin sole; think of walking on concrete in a ballet flat with a one-inch heel. M’mm h’mm. Like that.  Consequently, I am On Strike until this Bloody Mary takes hold, and then I may go off strike long enough to fix a snack and another one. Or I may not.)

In any event, I had promised you the menu that, in a moment of weakness, I have promised to cook for our staff retreat this Thursday and Friday. With updates through the week as I cook. So here goes.

Serious cookery Sunday

Oh, yeah. I’m all about it, today.

First, we had this breakfast.

Now, THIS is a breakfast that'll stay with you all day.

Bacon, eggs, latkes, apple butter, sourdough toast. M’mm h’mm. Yep. Ate that at 10, and am just beginning to think I might want dinner after while. But I am cooking dinner right now, because my weekend guest is departing this evening and of course, I must feed him before he leaves.

So tonight, I am doing Moroccan. Tagine of chicken with preserved lemons and olives; eggplant casserole with tomatos and chickpeas; houria, a spicy carrot salad; and couscous with dates and ras-el-hanout.

Because I just felt North African.

Home from the war

Really. See?

 

Union cavalry surrenders to Confederates in the skirmish at Prairie d'Ane.

Because, you see, I am a Civil War nut, and when there’s a reenactment an hour and a half from me and it’s a gorgeous fall day and I have dinner cooking the crockpot, I’m gonna go watch black powder smoke curl skyward.

Thusly:

 

The Confederate infantry, about half a company of it, steps out in advance toward the enemy...

Sometimes, I amaze myself

Oh, my.

 

Posole. Arepas, albeit in muffin form. I am a happy woman.

This is why I love the internet. I’d probably have never found this recipe for posole. And my life would have been much less satisfactory than it is tonight, when I have had perhaps one of the best soup/stews I have ever tasted in my life.

At the outset: Allow me to credit this recipe to Chris Amirault, director of operations for the eGullet forum, who in turn credits this recipe to his mother-in-law. Chris, everyone should be so lucky to have such a mother-in-law. Because this? Is some Seriously Good Shit. It’s the first posole I’ve ever made. It will be the last posole recipe I ever try, and possibly the last dish of posole I will make until, oh, maybe three days from now.

If flank steak defeats you….

I TRY to work with flank steak. Really, I do. I want to do all kinds of perky little 45-minute low-carb, high-protein dinners like Rachel Ray, with that gorgeous flank steak seared a succulent looking brown on the outside, and still a juicy-looking bright pink on the inside, sliced in those lovely little strips across the grain.

It defeats me. Flank steak, skirt steak, hangar steak, whatever you call that cut of meat, I STILL can’t cook it for 5 minutes on a side and have it come out anything other than tougher than an Army boot.

My child loves me…

…because I made her a chicken pot pie.

 

Pot pie for the kid. Roasted tomato caprese for me.

 

 

All three of my children have their favorite dish, one that I can pick up the phone and just say what’s for dinner and they’re out the door on their way before I can hang up. For Child A, it’s Italian roast chicken. For Child B, it’s red beans and rice. And for Child C, it’s chicken pot pie.

Sunday redux

Well, the most egregious of summer clothes are emptied out of the closet, the dishes are washed (which had to wait until we had hot water again), the fridge cleaned out, the laundry done, if not put up, and dinner has been served.

Call it "what's in the fridge" stir-fry.

And for a “I really ought to use this up” dinner, it was pretty damn good, except the pork was freezer-burned, which simply meant it had to be picked out and pushed aside into a little porky mound, and I just ate veggies.

I was trying to see just what I had in the fridge when I ran across a big damn butterflied pork loin chop, about the size and thickness of a piece of Texas toast. It had some ice crystals on it, but I thought, “Oh, it’ll be OK.”

It wasn’t.

Won’t make that mistake again.

Sunday recovery time

I’m home, staring out the window glassy-eyed at the odd sight — sunshine and blue sky. And it’s only 8 a.m. because we fell back last night and I got an extra hour of sleep, which I badly needed, thank you very much.

When last we spoke, I had been to Dallas. Since then, I’ve come back to Hot Springs, spent one night, went to Lake Dardanelle for a board retreat, spent a night, came home long enough to acquire Child C and the pup, and made an overnight trip to Memphis. Got back last night, managed to stay awake long enough to see the first couple innings of the Series before announcing “to hell with it,” and going to bed.

There was a filet at the board retreat that wasn’t bad, nice roasted carrots and some kind of sauce (I think maybe a bordelaise?) and asparagus with it.  Actually not bad at all when you consider they were cooking them for 20+ people to get them all done at the same time. Dessert, though, was pretty awful; a dark chocolate cake that was extremely dry, if attractively presented.

But I did have a helluva burger the next day, at CJ’s Butcher Boy in Russellville, which is near displacing the canonical Feltner’s Whataburger in my affections. They advertise that they use only freshly ground-on-premises chuck in their burgers and they keep big slabs of chuck in their display cooler to prove it, grinding one when they run low on the one-third-pound balls of beef housed next door in said cooler.

Dallas dining

Two more good meals in Dallas. That’s four in a row; I’m on a roll.

These two restaurants, for dinner last night and breakfast this morning, are both in the Uptown district of Dallas, the fringe of Downtown, which is undergoing a significant renaissance with boatloads of trendy new shops and apartments and condos and hotels and, yes Lord, restaurants cropping up everywhere.

We were staying in the Stoneleigh hotel, a renovated circa 1923 hostelry that someone poured a great deal of money into and did a damn fine job of renovating. My only quarrel is that while the building itself is a beautiful example of Art Deco architecture, the interior decor leads a little more toward Victorian, which is kinda disconcerting, when Art Deco decor is so ultra-cool anyway. (I love me some Art Deco.) And we had a reception up in the Penthouse Suite, which is pretty freakin’ spectacular, complete with two, count then, two private terraces, a living room, a kitchen, a dining room and a library. I’ve lived in apartments that were half that size.

Comfort foods

Fall’s just the time for comfort food, and I’ve rustled up a couple of them in my CrockPot in the last couple of days.

I love my CrockPot. I know it’s really cheesy, very red-state, the antithesis of edgy and cool cuisine, and generally calls for things like canned mushroom soup. (Which, by the way, I consider about one level above wallpaper paste, except for the golden mushroom stuff when you’re making the canonical green bean casserole for the holidays.) But if you (a) brown the components that need browning before they go in the thing, or (b) use stuff that doesn’t need browning, and you want it to cook along while you’re out drinking beer, as was the case yesterday, or out working, as was the case today, it’s a Good Thing.

Because it turns out dinners like this:

 

Redneck cooking at its finest. You can't beat it.

Well, it almost turns these out. I had to fry up the cornbread, which takes all of about 5 minutes to mix and fry. Quicker and easier than muffins, and you get more crunchy outside.