Thanksgiving 2012

I took several pictures over the Thanksgiving break, but in a weird quirk of Fate, all the photos of people and animals look terrible, while the food ones came out pretty good. That seems pretty fitting. In any case, here are some of the delectables enjoyed this past weekend.

In the kitchen with Limecrete, part I: The pecan pie I made for Thanksgiving dinner.



In the kitchen with Limecrete, part II: The pumpkin pie I made for a Friday evening party.



In the kitchen with Limecrete, part III: The triple-chip cookies (chocolate, white chocolate, and butterscotch) I made for an impromptu Friday afternoon party.



The turkey! My mom made a glaze of butter and currant jelly, which was delicious.



Corn cake. An experimental recipe, which turned out looking lovely. I think I prefer the traditional corn casserole, though.



Mixed sweet potatoes at the Friday afternoon party. These put out an unearthly scent. I mean that in a good way.



Various potluck offerings at the Friday evening party. That spinach cornbread on the bottom was remarkably good.

Naturally, there were other food offerings, from the marshmallow sweet potatoes to stuffing to bacon-wrapped dates. Thanksgiving is the best eating holiday of the year, and 2012 lived up to the challenge admirably.

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Cookie Party: Volume 5

Normally, I'd try to get a few different types of entries posted between Cookie Party ones, but I'm anxious to have all the old entries transferred over so I can move on to new and exciting recipes. One has already taken place! So, let's get the last of the old ones out of the way. It was originally posted on December 7, 2009, and as with all the others, some of the personal life details no longer apply. I am, however, going to be attempting my first full-sized pecan pie this week for Thanksgiving dinner, so this seems at least tangentially applicable.

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Holy crap, is winter upon us already? I'm wearing four layers today, so I'm guessing so. The approach of the holiday season meant that I had to get cracking on coming up with something for this year's cookie exchange party. First on my list was deciding on a recipe. I wanted something impressive, but that wouldn't take hours and hours of preparation like last year. An idea struck when I remembered something that Panny made for a party once. They're little pecan pies in phyllo cups, and their pure deliciousness has made me forget every other detail of the evening. Was it an Oscar party or New Year's Eve? Who else was there? I have no earthly idea, because those pies turned me into a drooling idiot. When I asked her for the recipe, she said it was the pecan pie recipe from The Joy of Cooking. That sounded straightforward enough.

Second on the list was pulling things together for a test batch. This would be a test not only of the pies themselves, but of the kitchen. I really love the new apartment's kitchen. There's a back door onto a deck, lots of natural light, counter space, a dishwasher, a disposal... Basically everything the old apartment was lacking. I'd be thrilled with just the dishwasher; the view from the above-sink window of the St. Louis skyline -- complete with Arch -- is pure bonus. I've naturally cooked a fair amount of dinner since we moved in, but this would be the first time I took on a big project in this kitchen. Getting photos of the process was yet more new territory. My camera met its end during the New York trip, so the only thing I have to take pictures with is the hand-me-down cell phone I'm still getting used to. The picture quality isn't the best, but at least it's portable, which means that I can capture opportune moments, such as weird things I might happen to see on my walk home from work:

So, filled with a pioneering spirit of adventure and the comfort of knowing it wouldn't take me an hour to clean up afterward, I dove into:

Mini Pecan Pies
The non-cookie cookie

As I said, I wanted to do a test batch to run by coworkers and resident sweet-tooth LabRat before the party itself. The ingredients are easy enough: Eggs, vanilla, butter, salt, sugar, corn syrup, and naturally, pecans. Instead of putting the batter into a pie plate, you fill store-bought phyllo cups, then bake. Tah dah! Oh, if only it were that simple. You see, the phyllo cups have baking directions that are vastly different from the recipe's baking directions. If the cups are too full, they tend to overflow and scorch, then gloriously self-destruct.

The pies burned easily if I didn't keep a fairly close eye on them, but I managed to turn out a serviceable batch. The tribunal at work gave positive reviews, but they're happy to stroke my ego for free baked goods. I knew I could count on the discerning dessert palate of LabRat for some honest feedback. "Hmm. There's kind of a lot of batter. They're a bit chewy. Could you put more nuts in?" I agreed with his assessment, and made some adjustments for the big push on Saturday. Instead of a cup of pecan halves, I threw in a cup of chopped pecans, then topped each cup with one full pecan half.

I popped the first cookie sheet in at 450 degrees, set the timer for a modest fifteen minutes, and left them alone. Mistake. The new kitchen's oven runs a lot hotter than my old one, and with less batter to cook in each cup, they got burned. Not so much that they were ruined, but they were definitely more well-done than they should have been. More adjustments were made; I turned the oven down a full 75 degrees, and baked for ten minutes, babysitting them towards the end. That hit the sweet spot, and I was soon cranking out perfect pies. I had bought five boxes of fifteen-cup phyllo, figuring I'd easily use up one pie's worth of batter. As I filled the last cups, I saw that I had more than enough batter for more pies. The new place is literally behind a grocery store, so I popped the last cups in, told LabRat to keep an eye on them, and dashed out the door.

I made it a little game to see if I could jog to the store, buy a couple boxes of phyllo cups, and get home in ten minutes. I would have made it, too, if it weren't for the dill-holes at the ghetto Shop 'n Save in my neighborhood. Three people in front of me in the express line was Senile Sally, who couldn't remember the PIN for her debit card. After three attempts (with another customer's help), it locked her out, and the cashier had to pull all her groceries to the side so she could go home and look up the number. Tell me again how much faster debit cards are than cash, Visa. Sigh. The next lady was only buying cat food and wine, but managed to waste yet more time by sending the cashier to fetch some cigarettes. The guy behind her was getting margarita mix, turkey slices, and Hershey's bars. Man, there were some interesting evenings ahead for these folks. I finally got checked out and went home, where the pies were long since done. Boo! Still, I was happy with how they had come out, and with the fact that it took about a fifth of the time that last year's almond-jelly sandwich cookies took.

It was a snap to pack them up, bundle the dishes into the dishwasher, and settle in with LabRat for the evening to watch a Lifetime movie starring Kristin Chenowith and a bunch of shirtless guys, then the World's Ugliest Dog competition. Sunday morning, I went over to my Dad's house for brunch and an early Hanukkah gift exchange, then straight to the cookie party. It turns out that I wasn't the only male invited this time. Granted, the only other dude was three years old, but still. Progress! I headed straight for the mimosas. A few of those, and I wandered around with a dopey grin, earnestly pestering the woman who made carrot cookies about precisely how carroty they were. She was rescued by the arrival of Tiffany and Gnat, who distracted me with sugar cookies and caramel-covered marshmallows.

Last year, we drew numbers to see who would get first crack at the cookie spread, but the hostess didn't feel like messing with it this year. A few other mischievous souls and I waited until nobody was looking, then snuck downstairs and began filling our Tupperware containers from the platters, rearranging them afterwards to make it look like they hadn't been touched.

We stashed our ill-gotten gains, then walked back upstairs, lying through our teeth to a curious woman who asked us what we were up to. "Just looking at what people have brought!" I said brightly. "Hey, have you tried the cheddar soup up here? It's amazing!" Having gotten away with my crime spree, I chatted with a woman who told me that the pumpkin maple cookies she made this year were quite time-consuming, just like the recipe she had made last year. My brain, which cannot retain what I did six minutes ago, but files away other minutiae for decades, and cross-references everything it hears, raised a red flag. "Wait a minute," I said to this lady I've exchanged a grand total of twenty sentences with. "You said last year that your cookies had three ingredients, and took, like, half an hour." She grinned. "Okay, you caught me. I was totally lying about the time these took." Heh. There's all sorts of nefarious goings-on at this ostensibly innocent cookie party.

After everyone else had gone down to the basement, I went back down for another round of scavenging and squirreled away what I could, including several varieties of chocolate chip cookies, which I knew would make LabRat happy. I don't care what he says, though -- chocolate chip isn't a holiday cookie! The pecan pies were well-received, and I'm happy to add something relatively simple to my dessert arsenal. I'm also pleased with the variety I brought home. Sweets are LabRat's catnip, and with enough cookies to last us to Christmas, I've earned all sorts of brownie points, ironically without a single brownie.

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Cookie Party: Volume 4

Everyone always thinks that money is tight for themselves, but lately, my dollars have had to stretch further than they ever have before. What better time to revisit a cost-saving Cookie Party, originally posted September 2, 2009? Enjoy!

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Hey, you may not have heard, but we're in a recession. Put down that lobster thermidor, yuppie! Frugality is in fashion, which is fine with me; I've always been adept at saving a buck or two. Well, except in one area of life. I spend money freely when it comes to food. The happiness that I derive from the burst of salmon roe on my tongue or from the soft pink of a perfect, medium-rare steak makes them more than worth their hefty price tags. I rarely regret expensive food, unless it doesn't live up to expectations. If you're going to charge me ten bucks for a sandwich, it had better be a corker. All that aside, I wanted to see if America's newfound love of penny-pinching could be applied to my baking experiment. Is it possible to make a serviceable cookie without gourmet buttercreams and Chilean dark chocolate?

In order to test this out, I reached back into the past. Here's where you can help me out by making those wavy arm movements and "DOODELEE-OOP! DOODELEE-OOP!" sound effects that everyone uses to signify time travel. Fortunately, one of my friends is descended from a line of Rombauers, and keeps a print of every edition of The Joy of Cooking ever published. Fascinated, I paged through the older ones, and happened upon a recipe from the 1936 edition entitled "Plain Cookies. Very economical." If there's one thing people living through the Great Depression were looking for to lighten their spirits, it was a recipe like this. It's got the instant happiness that a dessert brings without the sorrow of an already-stretched budget reaching its breaking point. So, as a minor act of contrition for my gastronomical indulgences:

Great Depression Cookies
Brother, can you spare an inflation-adjusted dime?

Now, the whole point of these cookies is that they're extremely simple. No bells and whistles here. Do you have any idea how much bells and whistles cost? So, there's not much of story to spin about the cookies themselves. They're just a basic sugar cookie. I can say that they took an amazing amount of flour, to the point that I was worried the dough wouldn't coalesce, and would crumble into little, gravel-like balls.

Luckily, the butter was sufficient to pull it all back together as it warmed up, and I had no trouble rolling it all out. The only cookie cutters I have are letters of the alphabet. I noticed with some dismay that E was among the letters I'm missing. Crap. I managed to cobble one together with the F and the I, but only did it once. The stiffness that the flour gave the dough made the cutouts simple to lift and transfer onto cookie sheets, so there were no Lace Cookie disasters this time around. Of course, you don't have to roll Lace Cookie dough out a gazillion times.

Like I said, sugar cookies are basically the white bread of the cookie world, so what I was really interested in this time around is how cheaply they could be made. I went to a local store that keeps prices low by having customers bag their own groceries. Once there, I prowled the aisles, and wrote down the absolute lowest price offered on each of the ingredients I'd need. I'll admit right now that I didn't actually buy any of these items. If it's a waste of money to buy overpriced cookie ingredients, it's even more of a waste to buy cheap ingredients that I don't need because I've already got all of it sitting in my cabinets at home. The batch I made actually had some very nice vanilla in it - the discounted imitation vanilla is merely a hypothetical thrown in to see how inexpensive this recipe could be. Recording the prices was the easy part. The tough part was calculating the amount of ingredients I was using. It's all well and good to know that I'm using three tablespoons of milk, but that doesn't do me much good when the volume is given in gallons and liters. Fortunately, I've got something the Great Depression cooks didn't have: Internet conversion tables. Ready for some math, you nerds?

Sugar: $1.88 for 4 pounds - Using 1 cup for dough and 1 cup for topping = 24 cents.
Flour: $1.53 for 2 pounds - Using 3 cups = 61 cents.
Baking powder: $1.77 for 10 ounces - Using 1 teaspoon = 3 cents.
Egg: 87 cents for 8 eggs - Using 1 egg = 11 cents.
Milk: $1.77 for 1/2 gallon - Using 3 tablespoons = 4 cents.
Butter: $1.78 for 8 ounces - Using 4 tablespoons = 47 cents.
Vanilla: $3.17 for 2 fluid ounces - Using 1 teaspoon = 26 cents.

Even using the cheap, imitation stuff, there's no getting around vanilla as the most expensive ingredient. That said, since you're only using 1 teaspoon, the 3 cups of flour winds up being the most expensive component. Still, check out that list. If you had none of these things on your shelves, the grocery bill would come out to $12.77 before taxes. Not bad. And considering that most home kitchens have most, if not all of these things already on hand, the bill drops even lower. I didn't have to buy a single thing to turn these cookies out, so I expended only the amounts needed to make one batch, which comes out to about $1.76. That's $1.76 in 2009 dollars. I don't have the resources to correctly deflate this back to 1936 prices, but it must be pretty damn low. I managed to get 42 cookies out of this batch, which was more than enough to fashion LabRat's name, feed the Top Chef viewing party, and still have enough left over to satisfy the vultures at work. 42 cookies into $1.76 is just over 4 cents per cookie. Impressive! I've never seen a four-cent cookie, even at the shabbiest of bake sales. Hell, by this standard, the Girl Scouts are a veritable cookie Mafia.

Clearly, no-frills sugar cookies will likely elicit the least excitement of any recipe that gets made for the Cookie Party. They're tasty, but not much to write home about. Even so, when December rolls around, and I'm elbow-deep in holiday baking, I'll take a moment to look down at whatever intricate concoction I'm attempting to whip together and think to myself, "There's no fucking way I could ever get this for a nickel."

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The Secret Ingredient: Anchovies

When it comes to most Secret Ingredients, I can count on public support. I mean, there's nothing very controversial about loving limes. There are a few cherished foods, however, that leave me stranded on my lonely limb.

The most glaring of these has got to be anchovies. I adore anchovies. When someone in a movie or TV show wrinkles their nose in disgust when anchovy pizza is mentioned, I want to throw something at the screen. When you have a salt tooth instead of a sweet tooth, nothing could be better than the salty surge of this amazingly adaptive fish.

It's good in stir-fry. It gives a tang to vegetable dishes. It's a must for Caesar salads. I can toss it into sauce or pasta or rice or eggs or toast or a million other things, and it never fails to make me happy. Anchovies may not be the most popular kid on the block, but to me, they're damn near perfect.

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Cookie Party: Volume 3

Cold weather is increasingly upon us, and making cookies serves the double purpose of providing quality treats and warming the apartment. But cookies aren't just a fall and winter thing. Here's a springtime cookie experiment, originally posted May 10, 2009.

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Other people get to have relatively stress-free Mother's Days. They take their mom out to brunch. Maybe they'll go see a movie. Some just make do with a card and a phone call.

That namby-pamby bullshit doesn't work on my mom, though. Bless her sweet heart, if there's one thing my mother loves, it's free labor. So, in addition to her actual gift, she also got her furniture dusted and her garden weeded and her deck swept. I was able to negotiate something out of the deal, though. When my sister and I were young, my mom would often make a delicious cookie that we loved. We loved them so much that we would fight tooth and nail over who got them. One day, my mother snapped, and vowed she would never make them again. Sticking to angry vows is something my family has always excelled at, so I haven't tasted this cookie for more than fifteen years. I figured that with the passage of time and with my sister safely in Kansas City, it was safe to break out the old recipe and make a batch together on Mother's Day. Lo and behold, she agreed. So, back by popular demand, I bring you:

Lace Cookies
From the Limecrete Family Vault

Mom didn't actually come up with the recipe. It's from a cookbook published in 1973 by the "Women's Committee" of a Baltimore art gallery. Mom used to work for the Baltimore Symphony, and must have been hooked up with all sorts of people within the arts community. As for preparation of the cookies, nothing could be simpler. Mix together melted butter (Limecrete's Mom Chime-In: "I use sweet, unsalted butter. I never bake with salted butter; it's unnecessary."), light brown sugar ("[Limecrete], don't just pour. Spoon it out of the bag."), oats ("[Limecrete], pour those out over the mixing bowl, not the counter."), vanilla, and a beaten egg. Stir together.

Drop half-teaspoon globs of the mixture onto cookie sheets. The recipe says to use ungreased cookie sheets. This is boldly stricken-through with purple marker, and a note is written to the side: "Use teflon-coated cookie sheets lightly sprayed with Pam." Take that, cookbook! The globs of dough should be very spaced out - about three inches apart. This gives them room to spread when they bake.

Pull them out of the oven ("Watch your ass, dear. I don't want to hit it with the cookie sheet."), let them cool slightly, then transfer to a cooling rack. There's just one more thing you should know before you make these cookies.

You can't make these cookies.

Well, that's not entirely true. You can make the cookies just fine. You just won't be able to serve them as cookies. You see, these are called "Lace Cookies" for a very good reason. They are more delicate than porcelain. If they cook for even a minute too long, the butter will over-caramelize and shatter. When you try to lift them from the cookie sheet with the spatula, they'll shatter. When you place them on the cooling rack, they'll shatter. While they're sitting on the cooling rack, the oats in the center may become too bottom-heavy, and they'll shatter. When you transfer them from the cooling rack to a storage container, they'll shatter. When they touch another cookie in the storage container, they'll shatter. Look at them cross-eyed, and they'll shatter.

Limecrete: "I don't think you stopped making these because Veruca and I were fighting. They're just too difficult."
Limecrete's Mom: "No, I liked making them. They were a challenge."

She left me to finish the last ones by myself, and at one point, I was actually able to transfer one or two intact.

Proudly, I hefted it off the rack to show her. It shattered. ("Practice makes perfect, sweetheart.") By the end of the process, I had a container full of lace... Well, let's call them lace crumbles. They still taste good. Maybe I can take another whack at the recipe in a week or two. It'll be tough, though. There's something about Mom Food that imbues it with magical properties. Her matzoh ball soup always has the right seasoning and consistency. Her Thanksgiving turkey always comes out juicy. And her Lace Cookies always stay intact. She totally deserves the day off.

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Test Kitchen: Pumpkin Seeds

Recipe: Roasted Pumpkin Seeds
Source: Allrecipes.com

Halloween is my favorite holiday, but I don't always have the time or money to get as involved with it as I'd like. This year, I was fortunate to be able to pull a costume together, attend a party, hand out candy to trick-or-treaters, watch some scary movies, and naturally, carve a jack o' lantern. My top priority probably should have been meticulously slicing clean lines into my pumpkin. My actual top priority was making sure I snagged every single seed so that I could roast it later.

There are various opinions out there as to how long the seeds should dry out before they're cooked. For mine, it took at least a couple of days before they seemed dry enough to proceed. I list allrecipes.com as my source, but that was really only for ideas about oven temperature and cooking times. I knew that I'd be coming up with my own seasoning blend, and it was vastly entertaining to consider various combinations. A bit of seasoned salt was always a given, but as to the rest, my ideas changed daily. The internet suggested coating the seeds in melted butter to make sure the spices stuck, but I opted for a thin coat of olive oil, instead.

My final decision was a combination of seasoned salt, curry, garlic powder, cumin, and a dash of cayenne; I wanted them to have a kick. So how did they turn out?

Well, they were beautiful. And I wish to hell that I could say that they were delicious, too. After all, they certainly took plenty of time and work. But they weren't delicious. They weren't bad either - they just didn't meet my high expectations. I'm not sure what I should vary to make them better. The length of time I let them sit before roasting? The spice blend? The cooking time? I'm not sure, and I won't be carving another pumpkin anytime soon to find out. Ah, well. There's always next Halloween.

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