Recipe Improvements

I made the butter-swim biscuit recipe from The Kitchn website yesterday, at Poppy's request. I was reminded as I was reading it how stupid the first instruction is in the recipe.

You're supposed to melt the large quantity of butter that goes in the baking pan. The recipe suggests microwaving the butter or melting it on the stovetop.

But the oven is supposed to be heating up to 400 degrees, and the melted butter is immediately poured into the baking pan and then swirled around to coat the pan.

So why, in the name of all that is efficient, wouldn't you just put the butter in the pan and put the pan in the heating oven to melt the butter instead of using a whole other dish and another step? 

Silly.

I will give credit to that same recipe, however, for listing the ingredient amounts in the instructions. I dislike having to look back to a separate ingredient list to find out how much of anything I need to add as I'm going through the recipe instructions.

Do you have any recipe pet peeves?

A Potato Salad Tip

I have always been a big fan of potato salad. The American kind, with mayonnaise and hardboiled eggs in it. I don't use a recipe for it, but I have noticed that recipes for potato salads always recommend an all-purpose potato for potato salads.

In case you're not as interested in potatoes as I am and so don't know what an "all-purpose" potato is . . . there are waxy potatoes, like those red "new" potatoes. And there are floury potatoes, like baking potatoes (also known as russets or Idaho potatoes). All-purpose potatoes are in between the two in texture. The most recognizable kind is Yukon Gold.

The reason all-purpose potatoes are recommended is because they won't fall apart as readily when boiled. 

I don't buy all-purpose potatoes. I don't buy waxy potatoes, either. I only buy russets, because those are what come in the ten-pound bags, and I am all about quantity at this stage of my cooking life.

But! Russets, in my opinion, are actually better than all-purpose potatoes for potato salad because they will more readily absorb the dressing. Potato salad recipes also always tell you to put the dressing on the potatoes when they're warm, because then the potatoes absorb the dressing better and become more flavorful. So why wouldn't you want a potato that absorbs the dressing better?

You do, but you don't want to it to fall apart. Which leads me to my tip: Boil the potatoes whole, with the skins on. Just rinse them quickly, cover them with salted water in a big pot, and bring to a boil, simmering until the biggest potato in the pot is easily pierced with a fork.

(The fork is a better tester than a knife because it's not quite as sharp as a knife. So if a fork slides in easily, you know it's really done. And nothing is worse than an underdone potato.)

After that, drain the potatoes and let them cool down just a few minutes before peeling (a paring knife helps with this) and chopping into your desired size.

Boiling them whole does require a longer cooking time and more heat released into what is probably an already-hot summer kitchen, but it will retain the shape. No crumbling. 

Russet potato salad is the best potato salad.

I also put mustard and vinegar and diced dill pickles in my potato salad, but that's a matter of personal taste preference, so I'll leave that to you.

Just remember: Whole boiled russets and you're good to go.

I Got a Comment

That title there was the catch phrase for a radio show that used to be on in the car in the mornings when I was being driven to I think preschool in Georgia. I have no memory of any more of the show, just that--I can hear the intonation precisely--"I got a comment."

Another thing I remember clearly from my childhood is Oreos. We almost always had them in our cookie jar, and I definitely have a comment about those. 

I do not think the Oreos now have as much of the creme filling in them. At all. In fact, I have children who prefer the "Double Stuf"* Oreos, and so I buy those fairly frequently. This has given me the opportunity to note that what are considered double now would have been a regular Oreo in my childhood.

I mean, take a look at this, an actual "Double Stuf" Oreo.

There's barely anything in the middle of this! 

I never liked the double ones because they had so much of the creme filling that it grossed me out. But now I prefer them, because the regular Oreos have hardly any.

I don't have a good memory for a lot of things, but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this one.

Anyone else want to weigh in? Have you noticed this?

* Wow, do I hate that single F.

And Here We Are

It's sometimes handy that I've been writing here for 18 (!) years. It allows me to read older posts and shake my head with amusement.

Like this one from 13 (!) years ago, in which I discussed how much food I was going to need to make when the boys were older.

At that time, the boys in question were only the older two children. I didn't yet know I would have two more. And I really didn't have any concept of how much food would be consumed in our house 13 years from that time. I mean, kind of, in the abstract, but in reality? It was literally unimaginable then.

I am currently in the phase with one boy where I ask him every morning how many eggs he wants for breakfast and he asks me in return, "Is there going to be anything besides eggs?"

This was a morning that also included peanut butter toast, hence only five eggs. 

If he was given all the food he could eat, he would literally eat two full breakfasts, two full lunches, and dinner. Plus dessert. Since I am not nice enough to be cooking all day long, however, he has to content himself with snacks in lieu of the extra breakfast and lunch. And with staging elaborate death by starvation scenes every day at 4 p.m. when he's trying to convince me he's not going to make it another hour to dinner.

And this is just the one child. His younger brother will be right there with him soon, I'm sure.

We're just gonna keep ramping this up until they start leaving, I guess. And then A. and I are going to eat nothing but beans and tortillas forever more.*

* That is obviously a joke, but I certainly will not be making so much bread, granola, yogurt, etc., to say nothing of the full meals.

To Each Her Own

I was at the grocery store with the oldest son last week and I told him he could choose an ice cream flavor. He surveyed the options for a minute before deciding on black cherry.

That was pretty much the last flavor available that I would have chosen. 

These were the small cartons of ice cream, so I also got butter pecan for the rest of the family. All of them like that one, although again, I don't care about it at all. It doesn't actively repel me like black cherry, but I still won't bother eating it.

I did choose one for myself, though: chocolate moose tracks. Chocolate, peanut butter, and more chocolate? That's more like it.

A tale of two ice creams.

A. has always preferred fruit-flavored candies, ice creams, and desserts. I have always preferred chocolate. Preferably with peanut butter. He does not understand this. I likewise do not understand why anyone would eat black cherry ice cream when they could have chocolate moose tracks.

Variety is the spice of life, they say, and I guess that means our lives are plenty spicy.

So tell me: What kind of ice cream do you pick, given the choice?

Homemade Jello

I guess that should just be gelatin, so as not to use a proprietary name, but then would you know what I'm talking about?

Actually, I guess I really should just call this Mom's Gelatin, because it doesn't resemble the brand-name stuff in anything but texture.

I started making my own gelatin maybe two years ago. I have one child with an unfortunate tendency to frequent digestive upsets. When liquid diets are prudent, gelatin is one of the very few things that can be more or less eaten, rather than consumed as a drink. It's interesting how much one misses chewing when on a liquid diet. Gelatin requires a little chewing, which makes it a nice break from juice or stock.

I didn't do a whole lot of research into the best brand of gelatin. I just went online and bought one that looked good.

Grass-fed, unflavored, etc. With the unfortunate name of "Hearthy."

You can see that I wrote right on the bag the proportion of gelatin to liquid. I had to figure that out for myself, because all the recipes I found online for homemade gelatin were from keto people who wanted as much gelatin as possible. Those recipes made a very, very firm gelatin. That wasn't what I was going for. I wanted something as much like the texture of the name-brand Jello as possible. After some experimentation, I settled on 3 cups liquid to 2 tablespoons gelatin powder.

The next thing I learned was how important it is to dissolve the gelatin all the way. The general recommendation is to sprinkle the gelatin powder over cold water and let it sit for a bit before stirring it into hot liquid. I don't do that. I just sprinkle it over the hot liquid right in the dish and then vigorously whisk it until it's dissolved. If I see any little lumps, I just fish them out with a spoon.

Flavor is really where this is different from store-bought gelatin. Whatever liquid the gelatin is mixed with needs to be a clear juice. I don't have strawberry or raspberry juice to imitate the flavorings used in the name-brand stuff. What I make most often is lemon gelatin. That's just lemonade--sugar, boiling water, bottled lemon juice, and for this a bit of salt as I'm trying to hydrate the eater--with the gelatin mixed in. 

For the child who loves switchel, I'll make switchel with all boiling water and mix in the gelatin. I have also successfully used the liquid poured off of home-canned pears and apples, which makes a gelatin that tastes like apple cider. I bet peach juices would work as well, although I haven't had enough of that to try yet.

It takes a few hours to set the gelatin properly, so it needs to be made well ahead of time. And then you give it to the sick child and cross your fingers that solid food can be consumed before you have to make another batch.

A Vegetable Lull

The current contents of my refrigerator crisper drawers include five medium carrots, two mini bell peppers, and the last few small interior leaves of romaine lettuce. It has been two weeks since I have purchased any fresh produce at a store, and even that was just a minimal stop at a very small store in a very small town.

And yet, I eat salad every day.

I have been doing this by eking out my remaining lettuce with chopped collard greens from the freezer and relying on pickled beets and onions as other add-ins, besides the carrots and mini bell peppers.

Last night's salad before adding the pickled beets from the jar.

Similarly, vegetables for the rest of my family have mostly been coming from the freezer.

Last night's fried rice included frozen peas, collard greens, beet greens, and a few dandelion greens I picked by the back steps.

There's still cooked cabbage, squash, green beans, peas, and corn in the freezers. There is sauerkraut from what I canned last summer in jars on the office shelves.

We have zero fresh fruit right now, but I do still have canned apples and pears and applesauce. Plus some store canned peaches.

It has been a recurring event in my adult life to have periods of time where the stock of fresh produce in my house is very low, but it doesn't really bother me. It's just part of living really far from stores. And it's why I keep fall-back vegetables and fruit in freezers and jars.

Anyway, it just makes it that much more exciting when I do finally get to the store and come home with such thrilling things as oranges, bananas*, and cucumbers. It's the little things in life.

* My children do actually consider having fresh bananas to be a notable luxury. Low standards, as always.

A Dangerous Discovery

When my children got home from their trip to Arizona to visit family, they presented me with a bag of kettle corn my mom had sent home for me.

I love kettle corn. Like, a lot. It checks all the salt/fat/sweet boxes that make something taste good to me.

I did send a jar of it with each of the younger two children to be their school snacks a couple of days, but then I ate the rest of the bag all by myself. Which is what I do when given access to kettle corn.

Popcorn, however, is a pretty healthy snack all in all, and I thought maybe I could make something like kettle corn that would satisfy my desire to eat something sweet without going overboard on the sugar.

I make popcorn on the stove in a big saucepan. Typically, I pop the popcorn in the pan, dump it into a bowl, and then put the butter right in the very hot pan to melt before drizzling that over the popcorn and then salting it. 

To make something like kettle corn, I figured I could just add my very dark maple syrup to the pan before the butter, and the maple syrup would quickly release most of its water content on contact with the hot pan. Then I could add the butter, etc.

That is what I did, and it did indeed work quite well.

But then, of course, I had kettle corn. A lightly buttered and sweetened kettle corn, to be sure, but still the salt/fat/sweet popcorn that is so hard for me to stop eating.

I fear I did not. I managed to put a few cups in a jar for one child's snack. But I, um, ate the rest of the batch. It was like five cups of kettle corn. 

The only survivors.

So I will not be making it again unless all of my children are home to eat it before I do, but now you know: Homemade kettle corn is easy. And addictive.

Homemade Brown Sugar

Did you know you can make your own brown sugar? Brown sugar is literally just white sugar and molasses. I knew I could make it. I even knew how to make it. And yet, I have not been making it.

Logically, I knew I should. I use a lot of it, given how much I bake. It's much cheaper to make than to buy, especially since I prefer dark brown sugar, which is always more expensive than light brown sugar. And I already have a gallon of molasses.

I kept telling myself I should start making it next time I ran out. But then my laziness would overcome me and I would buy more brown sugar when I was at the store.

However.

Here we go.

I finally did it. I used two tablespoons of molasses per cup of white sugar, which makes very dark brown sugar.

I mixed it in my food processor. It wasn't hard, of course, although I did overfill the food processor and have to split the sugar in half to get it all combined evenly.

The most annoying part of making it is getting sugar all over the counters and floor, which seems inevitable with this quantity of sugar. But now I have a lot of brown sugar on hand, and I can always make more when I need it.

A Quick Cookie Tip

I make a lot of cookies. They are my younger children's primary snack at school, which means I make cookies once a week. I have the recipe for chocolate chip cookies memorized because that one uses melted butter and thus requires no creaming with a hand mixer. And THAT means I don't have to have soft butter to start with. Handy. 

I've made those cookies so often that I play pretty fast and loose with the ingredients, usually adding peanut butter in addition to the butter and some oats instead of all flour. I also don't actually measure the salt, baking soda, and chocolate chips, instead just eyeballing those ingredients.

When I make other recipes--peanut butter, gingersnaps, oatmeal--I do more or less follow a recipe, but with one exception: I never, ever mix the wet and dry ingredients in separate bowls. Instead I mix the wet ingredients first--fats, sugars, eggs, vanilla--and then right on top I put the flour and other dry ingredients. 

I'll sort of shallowly mix the dry ingredients right there before incorporating them into the wet ingredients, but I really do not see the point in two bowls. Cookie dough is always thoroughly mixed anyway. It's fine to just stir it all up vigorously in the same bowl.

Wet on the bottom, dry on top.

This saves time and another dish to wash. So feel free to also be a rebel and disregard the "in a separate bowl" instruction if you, like me, are always trying to find more efficient ways to get through kitchen tasks.

Kitchen Alchemy

I have been the recipient of so much food recently. So much food. It started when Rafael asked us to come pick the apples off his tree. From those apples, I made several crisps and pies, and also canned five quarts of apple slices in cinnamon syrup.

Next was the lady who runs the coffee shop in the village asking A. and me to pick the apples and pears from her trees.

These were Granny Smith apples.

Those became a crisp and six quarts of canned apple slices. The pears are still ripening, but I'm guessing I'll can at least five quarts of those. And there were great quantities more of both fruits on her trees, should we decide to get more.

Our elderly neighbor that A. helps brought me a box of sand plums the next day.

These are a small, local variety of plum, the only use for which is jelly.

Those became two and a half pints of jelly.

Such a pretty color. Delicious, too.

Next, another mom from school texted me to ask if we would like the extra roosters they weren't going to get around to butchering. A. picked those up that day and we spent the next day butchering them.

And of course, we had one for dinner that night.

When I stopped by that mom's house to give her back two of the six prepared roosters, she asked if we needed any pears or apples. I didn't really, but I took some pears anyway, just because they had just harvested the ones from their tree and she said she didn't have time to deal with them.

She also said she had saucing apples, and I couldn't say yes fast enough to those. Most of the apples here are definitely NOT saucing apples; they don't break down enough in cooking to make sauce. My family can eat astonishing quantities of applesauce, and they're always sad in the fall if I don't find good apples for it.

Small, but tasty.

I came home with enough apples to make 12 quarts of applesauce. 

I only canned seven quarts, though, because that's how much my canner holds. We ate the rest just from the refrigerator.

I also came home with eggs, because she said she was overrun with eggs from all the new pullets they got this year.

Four and half dozen eggs, and she wanted me to take more.

People here give us food a lot partially because they know I have a lot of kids to feed. But also they give it to me because they know I know what to do with it. If they ask us to, we will harvest fruit from trees. If they give me fruit, I will can it. If they give us animals, we will butcher them. No preparation is necessary on the part of the givers.

Also, and crucially, I always give them something back. Rafael got a small apple crisp. The lady at the coffee shop will get a jar of canned pears. Our elderly neighbor got a pint of jelly. And my fellow mom got two chickens ready for the oven, a quart of applesauce, and a loaf of bread.

No one asked me for anything in exchange for all these things, but it seems only logical--and polite--that they should get some small part of this food back, but in a usable form. I don't have to pay for these things, except with my labor.

Make no mistake, it is a LOT of labor, but it's also a lot of food. Seems like a good trade to me.

Twice-pickled

This has not been a good year for cucumbers. For the past several years, I have grown Armenian cucumbers. These are not cucumbers at all botanically, but rather a variety of muskmelon. I don't like them quite as much as real cucumbers--they have a faint taste of muskmelon that is detectable when eating the Armenian cucumbers raw--but they have the great advantage of never getting bitter. Even when they grow to huge sizes, they're never bitter. This was a frequent problem I had with true cucumbers. Also, the Armenian cucumbers make excellent refrigerator pickles, which is my main use for cucumbers.

This year, I planted the Armenian cucumbers, and then I decided to try again with pickling cucumbers. I noticed early in the summer that the grasshoppers had eaten only the cucumber vines that were already climbing. They had left the vines still low on the ground. I think it was the Armenian cucumber vines they ate, because I have zero Armenian cucumbers.

I am getting some cucumbers, but they are almost all bitter. Predictably. So I haven't made any pickles from them.

However! One of the former teachers at school showed up to the county fair with lots of cucumbers and mentioned she's been getting great quantities. So I texted her to ask if she would be willing to sell me some cucumbers so I could make pickles. She responded that she wouldn't sell them, but she'd be happy to take some pickles.

Thus, the year's first refrigerator dills have been stowed away.

We already ate one of the pint jars of dill pickles. Rather than throw away the pickling liquid, however, I re-heated it in the microwave and used it to pickle some carrot ribbons.

I do this a lot with the liquid from the pickled onion slivers I almost always have in the refrigerator now. When I finish the onions the first time, I either re-heat the liquid and pickle more onions, or I pickle (store) radish slices.

Pickle trio.

This way I always have some kind of pickle on hand. I only use the pickling liquid once more before dumping it, but at least I get more than one use out of it. I was dismayed to see a gallon of white vinegar priced at over four dollars last week at the store, so I feel like the less of it I have to use, the better. 

Didn't vinegar used to be cheap? I feel like even the gallon of vinegar was like two or three dollars not too long ago. But maybe I'm misremembering.

Anyway. We have pickles, and that makes everyone happy.

The Grand Total Was . . .

For that small basket of nine things at the grocery store, I spent $56.37. Yikes.

I wasn't at a fancy grocery store. I did, however, buy a few name-brand things--Skippy peanut butter, Riesens, and Nutrigrain bars--which I rarely do. Also, jerky is expensive even if it is store-brand.

Mostly, I think it's because I was buying packaged snacks. Another thing I rarely do. 

Which is why I bake way more than I would like to.

So I guess I'll just carry on with my low-snack, store-brand shopping style, lest I bankrupt us with Nutrigrain bars and candy.

I Learned Something

I have discovered that the store version of Fritos are pretty much always good. The chips with more kinds of flavorings--like Doritos or Cheetos--are generally not as good in the generic version. Fritos are very basic, though. They only have three ingredients. How can you screw up corn, corn oil, and salt?

Well, you can do it if you pretty much leave out the salt.

I did not even know this was a thing, although I had noted that the corn chips I bought awhile ago said "salted" on the bag. I thought that was weird, because of COURSE they're salted. When are they not?

I found out last time I bought some. These were labeled "original," and they had so little salt it was almost impossible to taste it.

Can you imagine Fritos without salt? It was very strange. And not really appreciated.

 

Original=pretty much not salted.

Luckily, they're greasy enough that I could just shake salt into the bag and it would stick to the chips, so they were salvageable. But now I know to look for salted corn chips, not original, if I want them to taste like actual Fritos.

And now you do, too, I guess. 

The Tea Party Hostess

One of the many surprising things about my life is that I host tea parties. Tea parties were not something I grew up with. I don't even remember drinking tea as a kid. I do remember going maybe once to one of those tea rooms, the fancy restaurants that serve tea and tea foods. But it wasn't anything close to normal thing.

My first experience with tea as an event came at Blackrock, with its wealth of china for every occasion, and the MiL, the baker extraordinare. The older boys looooved tea parties as little ones. They had their personal tea cups and even their own little creamers. The MiL would sometimes bake scones for them, or I would just make them little plates of crackers and cheese or whatever. It was very low-key and thus, much more frequent than something very fancy would be.

However, boys are not likely to have tea parties to host their friends. They still love the food that comes along with a tea party, but the delicate china and elegant table? Not so much.

But now I have a girl! And she has girl friends! And they reeeeally love the delicate china, elegant table, and the chance to dress up.

Although I used to have tea parties without the nice china, I now have the delicate china thanks to my sister. She has the entire set of my maternal grandmother's lovely set of wedding china. My sister never used the tea cups and saucers, so she asked me if I would like them. Indeed I would. 

Waiting for a tea party.

That is why I am able to host a fancy tea for little and big girls alike. As I did yesterday in honor of the MiL's visit. I invited Poppy's best friend, her older sister, and her mother, who is also my friend. 

I always bake at least one thing fresh for a tea party. This time it was just biscuits. I had made strawberry jam earlier in the day, and I also set out plum butter my sister had made, and apple butter some little girls at school had made and given me. In addition, I made cucumber and cream cheese tea sandwiches (meaning they were cut very small and had the crusts removed), some pumpkin bread I had had in the freezer, peanut butter cookies from the cookie jar, and cheese and crackers. The tea was decaffeinated black tea and an herb tea.

Our guests brought with them a big bunch of wildflowers from around their house, which went right in the middle of the table. All the foods went on small plates to be arranged around the table, I set out the tea with the cream and sugar, and it really was quite a lovely table.

Tea for six.

Our guests always arrive in tea party apparel--dresses and sometimes hats--and I put on tea party music. The MiL, who is a classical music aficionado, suggested Mozart. The perfect atmosphere for elegance.

There were also four boys--the brother of the girls came to hang out with my boys--and A. roaming around the house. We've done this a few times now, so I know better than to invite the boys to join us. After we've had our tea party, they get paper plates and can fill them from the food left on the table. I make enough to ensure they get plenty, and then they can take it outside and have a nice, masculine time chowing down without worrying about being polite. A. does get invited to the table after we've mostly finished eating, so he can have his tea and finish off whatever food is still there.

I don't know when Poppy will age out of tea parties, but I'm enjoying it for now. And so is she.

Happy Fat Tuesday!

I have mentioned before--maaaaany times--that my mother is from New Orleans. Because of that, certain traditions from that city have always been a part of my life. Mostly food, since that is a big part of the culture of New Orleans.

Pork, greens, black-eyed peas for our health, wealth, and happiness on New Year's Day. Red beans and rice. Grillades and grits. King cake for Mardi Gras. 

This year's king cake, sent by my mother from Haydel's bakery and eaten by us for Sunday dessert. Warmed up with butter, of course.

And now, jambalaya, biscuits, and pecan pie for Fat Tuesday.

This was not something my mother made when I was growing up that I remember. Not on Fat Tuesday, at least. The jambalaya was something I made for the very first time last year, just because A. was remembering Popeye's jambalaya so fondly, and I was sure I would be able to make something at least as good.

This year, I'm adding the biscuits (these butter-swim biscuits) because they were very much like the greasy Popeye's biscuits that A. also loved. And the pecan pie because I now have a really good recipe for it that everyone in the family likes (except I use dark maple syrup instead of golden syrup.)

So I guess I've come up with my own tradition for Fat Tuesday. It's funny to think that these are the things my children will carry forward into their own lives--or not, we'll see--and consider just family tradition because it's what they remember from their childhoods. 

I have become the tradition maker instead of the recipient. An inevitable generational shift, I suppose.

So tell me: What family traditions have you inherited or started yourself?

P.S. I used this as our wake-up song this morning. After it was over, one boy announced, "I like that song. It has lots of food in it." Indeed.

Insane Lasagna, Denied

We don't celebrate birthdays in a really big way in our house. The birthday person gets to choose all their food for the day--breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert--and then we have a little family party after dinner with presents. 

The food is obviously a big part of that, and I have always made anything my children have requested.

Until this year.

This year's new 15-year-old* requested this lasagna for his birthday. 

Ugh.

I never wanted to make that again. It was just too much. But it's a birthday! And I always said I would make anything for their birthdays!

So I resigned myself to two days in the kitchen, plus some sore arms. As the birthday grew closer, though, and I realized how much I was dreading it, I just . . . said no. I told him I would make him lasagna, but it wasn't going to be that particular one.

Whereupon he changed his mind and said he'd rather have pork ribs and mashed potatoes. Which are about a thousand times easier.

I do feel some guilt about this, but not enough to make the lasagna. And I did make cinnamon rolls for his birthday breakfast, so that kind of makes up for the lasagna, right?

I made them on Sunday and just par-baked them because his birthday is today and I was working yesterday. (The pan in the back right has bar cookies for Sunday dessert.)

I guess even I have my limits in the kitchen. And that lasagna is it.

*I am now in the stage of figuring out how to get teenagers a driver's licenses, which is wild. Also wild: I will not be out of this stage for another decade.

A Few Things of Note

It snowed last night. Only about an inch, but it will make my children happy. They, like all children, are really hoping we'll have snow on Christmas.

I have to drive one son to the dentist this morning. Although I'm not much looking forward to the 200 miles I will spend in the car today, it will give me the opportunity to buy the gifts two boys are supposed to have for their class gift exchanges. I was just given the suggested gift ideas yesterday, which means no time to get anything ordered online and delivered. My choices for gift-buying today are Tractor Supply, Dollar General, and the grocery store. I can work with that.

I went to our staff Christmas party last night and I brought this maple popcorn. Holy cow, is it good. 

I had to put the finished product out of sight on top of the refrigerator so I wouldn't keep grabbing a few pieces every time I walked by it.

I tripled the recipe, because six cups of popcorn doesn't really go that far*. I also added a full half teaspoon of salt, instead of a few pinches. The recipe as written will make something like caramel corn. If you add more salt to it, it makes something like kettle corn, which I like much better.

Using the dark maple syrup works so well for this. So much flavor.

It was, I must admit, a little bit of a pain. One of these days I should probably get a candy thermometer for things like this, so I'm not messing around with bowls of ice water to determine a "soft ball." Also, I decided halfway through that I didn't have nearly enough, so I was popping popcorn while making the syrup. Also also, I made so much, there was just a lot of bulk to be finding bowls and pans for.

Worth it, though. I would recommend it for any party you might be attending this season. It would also be very handy to make and put in little bags for any larger groups of people you might need gifts for, like neighbors or co-workers.

That's all my notes for today. Have a lovely day.

* It doesn't go far with my family, that is. A single recipe would have been adequate for my party contribution, but there was no way I was getting out of the house without leaving some of this for my family to eat while I was gone. They can eat a lot of popcorn. Especially popcorn liberally drizzled with maple syrup and butter.

Awe-Inspiring Abundance

It's good for me to sometimes leave my very limited remote bubble here and enter the outside world, if only to realize how odd my life is in the grander American scheme. This was really highlighted by my trip to a grocery store in suburban Albuquerque last Friday.

I went to Albuquerque to pick up the traveling kid from the airport. Because his flight was coming in on the later side and we had to drive so far back home, I did not want to stop on the way home at the grocery store. We wouldn't have gotten home until 11 p.m. So instead I went to the store before picking him up. 

The grocery store I went to was just a Smith's, but it was in what is quite clearly a major area of commerce for the Albuquerque suburbs. In fact, I entered the heart of American consumerism. My exit off the freeway brought me to a road lined with every store and restaurant I've heard of or read about, but never actually shop at. Like Chick-fil-A. And Target.

I realize these are not uncommon for most of you. But they are for me.

Thankfully, this was a big road with good traffic flow, so although it was busy (keep in mind, this was Black Friday), I made it to the grocery store without too much delay.

And there I was taken aback by the experience of sheer opulence that is American grocery shopping.

This store was as big as the entire Walmart I typically shop at, except instead of half the store being things like storage containers and camping equipment, it was all just . . . food. There was SO MUCH. So many options, so many displays, so many perishable things that I never see.

I just stood there in the produce section for a minute, staring around me in awe. 

They had a fancy cheese section! And a seafood counter! I mean, I couldn't buy anything from it because whatever I bought was going to be a sitting in a cooler for six hours and that seemed like a bad idea for fish, but still. It was there. I do not ever shop anywhere that has a seafood counter.

When you drive roads like this regularly, the nearest seafood counter will be a couple hundred miles away.

In the end, I didn't buy too much. A few of the fancy cheeses and some multi-color "snacking tomatoes" were about the extent of the indulgence for me, but it was fun to visit the Other America for a little while before returning to my little bubble.

Green Beans to Soup Beans

Despite the very spotty germination on my Kentucky Wonder green bean plants that resulted in exactly nine plants growing to maturity this year, I have actually been harvesting green beans. I have two gallon-sized bags of green beans in the freezer right now, thus ensuring my favorite green beans+bacon+onions for Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, given the fact that I never did put up fencing for the plants to climb, I also have a lot of beans that get lost in the jungle and grow too much before I harvest them. This makes them tough and starchy. Not what I want to a green bean to be.

But it IS what I want a soup bean to be.

Green bean on the right, soup bean on the left.

"Soup beans" are what I call those green beans that over-mature on the plant before I find them. Some of those over-mature ones I leave to dry out, and then I save them to plant for next year. But most of them, I freeze as soup beans. 

It takes me a few days to harvest enough beans to bother with, but when I do have enough, I go through them and separate them into green beans and soup beans based on their size. All of them get the stem ends snapped off. The green beans are frozen whole. The soup beans are chopped into short lengths before being frozen.

Like so.

And then I have a bag of bean pieces ready to just throw right into soup when I make it.

Soup beans in soup.

I have about a quart of soup beans in the freezer right now, and I'll just keep adding to it as long as the plants are still producing beans and I keep missing them until they're too big.