GOOD GRAVY! AND BISCUITS!!

Okay, we’re gonna tackle the most bestest, basic-est of the Mother Sauces (TM; France, all of modern time).  White Sauce (a/k/a Béchemel).  Which I promised you ages ago, which is gonna get us into all kinds of trouble down the road.  Trouble I promise you will kick off right now.  White sauce combines Fat and Starch, then adds Dairy to produce a creamy sauce.  Just keep it in mind--That’s All, Folks.  Buttah, Flour, Milk.  Maybe a little seasoning.  

The Basic will get you a yummy sauce for baked potatoes.  If you have, perhaps, sautéed some onions, garlic and mushrooms, then stir these into the sauce and add some steamed fresh green beans, you have the start of real, yummy Green Bean Casserole.  See what I mean? Trouble already--When baked for a short time with buttery panko breadcrumbs on top, many of you would hole up in the back pantry snarfing this with the serving spoon at Thanksgiving dinner.

But wait! What’s this? You need a substantial Winter Dinner with Meatless Protein?  MAC ‘N’ CHEESE!  Yes, this is the darkest, dirtiest, yummiest level of White Sauce.  Cook some pasta for a very short time, make the basic sauce, add egg, shredded cheese and some spices, et, voilà, Mac ‘n’ Cheese ready for the freezer to defrost during the day and bake 30 mins at night.

And that way lies MADNESS!!  I have a couple of variations, some favorite add-ins, but then I saw one of those “Best of Blah-Blah” shows on Food Network which featured a restaurant famous for their Mac.  Not just some ol’ mac (small letters) made in large hotel pans, very good recipe, baked and warmed all day.  Noooooo, this dude was using these small cast iron sauté pans he found in France to make the stuff fresh for each diner.  Diners who could order Mac Combos from a List of Ingredients.  So I laid it out to Knitting Group--Name Your Combo! That will follow in my very very next post because the variations were, frankly (and this will surprise absolutely no knitters whatsoeveratall), borderline lewd and licentious, food-wise.  Feel free to imagine your own and post it here!

Needless to say, this is just round the corner and down the block from Fettucine Alfredo and all kinds of delightful nonsense and creativity.

So White Sauce truly is the Mother Sauce of all Evil.  

Tasty, Tasty Evil.

This weekend’s Evil Incarnate was Biscuits ‘N’ Gravy.  Ridiculously easy when you get the groove, and a little practice will buy you a pretty good groove, my friend.  Of course, I refer to the Joy of Cooking for the basic recipes, but they are reminders of elementary principals and proportions, which we will see shortly.

BISCUITS:

I use a Drop Biscuit recipe, which utilizes the bare minimum ingredients: Flour, Salt, Baking Powder, Butter, Milk.  Most basic cookbooks will have this recipe, and the rest is all technique:

1.  Scoop and Sweep to measure Flour:  Scoop with the measuring cup, sweep the top level with a knife to achieve an even measure.  If it calls for partial cups, e.g. “1 3/4 cups”, use the 1 cup and the 1/4 cups 3 times.   

Keep it simple, Keep it accurate.

2  Butter:  When they say “Chilled”, keep it in the fridge till you’re ready to use it, take it out, use those handy measuring lines on the wrapper and cut it.  Then cut it in little cubes touching it as little as possible and toss it in the dry goods.  If you have a pastry cutter, use it.  Recipes will say use two knives, but I’ve found that a fork works really well. What matters is SPEED--the colder that butter stays, the better. When the recipe says “Cut [butter and flour] together until the size of small peas”, basically it’s smooshing the butter into the flour until it looks a bit sandy--then STOP!  You don’t want to completely mix the two like a cookie dough.  What you’re doing is dispersing fat in uneven bits throughout the dough. 

"Blend to the size of small peas" 

3.  Finally, make a well in the middle, gently pour in the milk and gently stir with either a wooden or silicon spatula till it only just comes together. Don’t get gooey, HOWEVER-- Your directions may not say it, but have a small amount of milk handy, to add a bit at a time if the dough isn’t coming together as one mass.  If it really looks too dry and stuff isn’t sticking together, dribble in some milk and gently mix one or two more times.

Just Keeping It Together

At this point, spoon out onto parchment-lined, sil-mat lined or greased baking sheet according to directions.  

Golden, Brown & Delicious

So there’s the delivery system, let’s get to the goods!

GRAVY!!!!

This is all a game of Proportions and Watching:

BASIC WHITE SAUCE RATIO: Fat-2parts:Starch-2parts:Dairy-2parts

Recipe:  2Tbsp Butter: 2Tbsp Flour: 2Cups Whole Milk, Salt, Pepper


The Big Secret is Proportions:  You will be able to increase or decrease as much as you need.  I have never decreased.  Ha.  However, if you like the Practice Makes Perfect approach, pare this down to the minimum ratio (1:1:1) and try a batch of White Sauce several nights in a row.  You will find a way to use it and discover you are, indeed, a GENIUS!


1.  Watch Your Fats:  When making the Basic White Sauce, you will use only Butter.  Butter will burn if left in the pan too long without actually cooking stuff.  The First Stage is Melting.  Second Stage is Foaming.  Third Stage is Slight Browning, and this is just as far as you should get until slinging food into the pan, because:  Fourth Stage is Burned.  It will smell bitter and taste worse.  Just pour it out, swipe the pan with kitchen roll and start again, no big, you’re learning!  

  

2.  A Word About Flour:  I use a super-fine milled flour, my life-long favorite is Gold Medal Wondra.  It blends beeeyoooootifully and creates a smooth sauce.  Any All-Purpose Flour, however, will work. Do not use Arrowroot or Corn Starch, these have really different thickening characteristics and will NOT work the same way.  Your sauce will not act the same and you will be unhappy. Measure flour first into a dish and have it ready, as the Sauce Steps go quickly.

3.  Heeere We Go!  Melt the butter, allow to foam and subside a bit.  Sprinkle flour evenly over and start whisking. Sprinkle in Salt&Pepper.  Allow this to brown slightly, whisking gently, creating a Roux.  





Sprinkle Flour from a Dish                      Whisk that Roux!


4.  Adjust your heat down to low-medium.  Pour in Milk sloooowly to start.  First, this prevents splashing and burnt milk on your hot stove. SECOND: Pouring a small amount of milk into the roux, gradually adding liquid into the paste loosens it up, whisking very well the whole time.  The more thorough you are in this stage, the more insurance you have against lumps.  Slow, complete blending in the start wins the game.  As the mix becomes smoother, pour the milk all the way in and keep whisking.  This is now your primary job, so do NOT leave off till the sauce looks thick and finished.  Helpful Tip:  Taste the Sauce Now.  Tastes like raw flour and milk, yes? Turn the heat back up to Med-High and Keep going!

Milk, Meet Roux--Easy Does It!  In The Beginning, It was Grainy.

5.  Are We There Yet?  When you have just finished pouring in the milk, a spoon dipped in will show the sauce is not yet well-incorporated and has a grainy appearance.  When the sauce has been lovingly whisked and has thickened, the same spoon, when dipped again, will show the sauce to have become silky, creamy white.  Turn the heat off immediately.  Taste the Sauce NOW.  Tastes like DINNER, YES???

AHA! SMOOOOTH 'N' CREAMY!

From here, I simply added in some cooked pork sausage and a bit of hot sauce to the JoC recipe and ladled it over the biscuits.   I served with my favorite vegetable, Bacon.

---->But YOU could add cheese and pasta, veggies and cheese, etc, etc, etc.  Remember---YOU'RE A GENIUS!!

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Cross Words, At a Loss For Words...OH LOOK! A CONTEST!

I started doing crossword puzzles!

Yah, yippee-kai-yay for you, right?

I never could before, somehow.  But we get the local paper at work and I started looking the puzzle over as I munched my PB&J a few weeks ago, and I got one here, one there, three more over yonder in the bottom corner.  I feel smart!


Except I have started to *forget* words.  Words I have known for years.  Odd words. Weird words. Arcane, archaic, trivial, esoteric words that have crowded my brain for yeeeaaars.  Remember the map of my brain? Left side: Trivia, Right side: Jingles, That's All, Folks

GingerMan informed me I share this condition with none other than Homer Simpson.

Clue: "Slippery"
Me: "---------"
Dictionary: "Greasy, Oily, Slick, etc etc etc...."
Me:  "--------"

Which brings me to last week's existential quandry concerning Knowledge of the Universe*.  GingerMan toddled off to Boy's Night last saturday so I popped down to Recycle Books in Campbell and cleaned up their Science section  quite a bit.  Some of which I actually owned myownself till they ended up a donation box I didn't look all the way through. Derp.  Supporting Local Business, Non?

Bought  back my book on Paul Erdos, a buncha Richard (saaawoooooon) Feynman books and a couple by Brian Greene (Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Universe).  And this one called:

"the book of nothing"

Like the Hitchhiker's Guide, it just seemed non-threatening, welcoming, even.

Vacuums, voids, the origins of the universe.  I've got two outta three nailed, right here in my little coconut.

*Mine= Notalot.

Speaking of which, ONE WEEK LEFT TO ENTER THE CONTEST!!!

Okay, people.  At the tender age of 38, I finally understood a physics experiment because someone inserted a little extra clause in once sentence which illuminated Everything.  Think about what you cook, think about what you WANT to cook, but getting through the instructions and to the practical it seems like something vital  is....missing!

Is it an incomplete description? A technique poorly explained?  Something about a recipe that just doesn't make sense yet?  Unburden your heart here and I, your Joy of Cooking Fairy, will attempt to Enlighten Us All!  Rules and Entry in the Comments here: Missing Piece Meets the Big OOOOOHHH!!!  Prize is your very own Joy of Cooking! Pin It Now!

The Missing Piece Meets the Big “Oooooh!”

SCIENCE! DISCOVERY! A CONTEST!

So wow, this summer has been fast.  I’ve been a bit quiet here as I thought I’d take a little time here and there to get things done, celebrate the unreasonable number of birthdays, etc.  This last week has been the culmination of a huge decorating/clean out effort--New Sofa is here, Under Stairs Cupboard of Doom has been cleaned out, re-packed *very* efficiently by GingerMan and roughly a mazillion tonnes of stuff was delivered to the highly efficient Goodwill donation and distribution centre very near my house.  

They are a drive-in Goodwill.  Stuff your car, drive through the lane out back of the shop, pull all the way forward, hand them the goods and zoom off.  Ta and Da.  Four huge bags of clothes and shoes, a chandelier, a suitcase and a couple of whatnots.  Suddenly the household universe is a more spacious situation.

Then my new Schact Sidekick travel spinning wheel arrived. Bringing my total number of wheels to four.  Four. If you are interested in an Ashford Joy double-treadle or Elizabeth II single-treadle, both in excellent condition, feel free to contact me here.

So pieces fall into empty spaces.

Back in the day, I was technically enrolled for my senior year at a high school in Boo-Freakin’-Foo, Northern California, but after a rocky first semester in which a drunken English teacher accused me of plagiarism and was proven wrong, I was rewarded with independent study for the remainder of my stay.  Which I spent zooming round anywhere my older friends had matriculated to, sleeping on dorm floors, saucing up and living bohemian on a parent’s Chevron gas card. Not a movie, real story.  Ah, the 80’s.

My greatest regret has been I did not actually complete the maths and science requirements.  I had been taking Physics, which was mostly maths-centred and based on modules where the end product was building something that proved the overall theory and provided a fun competition-- trestle bridge building, the egg astronaut, you get the idea--Physics is Phun!  I didn't finish the final project or end-of-term exam.  I wasn’t even taking maths that year, so I’ve only ever finished Algebra 1.  I’ve tried Algebra 2 FIVE TIMES in college and never finished.  Never touched Chemistry.

I repeat these things over and over to myself and others, like a mantra.

“...OOOOMMMMMMM....I’m lacking...I’m stupid....I couldn’t....I can’t.....OOOOMMMMMM.....”

During my Navy Wife stint in Norfolk, I had a great time at Old Dominion University, where I took Astronomy and LOVED it.  Mr Hannah, if you are still out there teaching, you are the best science instructor EVER.  He even had a red Corvette with a license plate reading “REDSHFT”.  It was endlessly interesting.  I understood.  I got it.  Two-hour classes in the planetarium, where I would, in pavlovian fervor, wait for the lights to dim and the stars to illuminate the black ceiling.  And the lab time...lab time?  HA!  I lived for lab time!  Lab time was fun! I showed up early!  Then, like Pretty Woman, I followed a jerk far, far away from it all...

As a lifetime habit, I still watch a huge amount of educational programming, including (write these down and go Tivo  them now):  


**NOVA: Science Now with Neil DeGrasse Tyson 
**Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking (narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch)...
                                      ...And, most certainly, 
**The Wonders of the Universe and The Wonders of the Solar System with Professor Brian Cox.

Science has come a looooooong way, baby.  It is hot.  And seeeexy. Brian Cox is a Professor of Physics and a People Magazine Sexiest Man Alive. 

Is it hot in here?

Uh-huh. It’s a bewildering juxtaposition of randiness and ignorance that chafes me more than ever.

Except for last week, for approximately 12.2 seconds. An event occurred which will forever alter not only my comprehension of the universe but my willingness to perpetuate this useless mantra of inability. 

You see, light is both waves AND PARTICLES.  I get the waves bit.  Got that right away--like sound, light travels as waves, shorter and bluer the faster it travels, longer and redder as it slows.  Doppler Effect!  Fire engines!

nnnnNNNNNEEEEEYYOooooooorrroommmm!!!

Right? What girl doesn’t like firemen?  But particles?  Really?  Haven’t we grown so far past the charming ancient Greek philosophers who posited that the Ether of the entire universe was filled with Celestial Spheres that held heavenly bodies and acted upon each other etc etc?  What I remember about science class included laughing at this theory till we wet our 8th grade pants.

I mean, I see the particles bit as far as the Sun throwing them off and space being full of it, but it all goes fuzzy in relation to Terrestrial contact--is the atmosphere really full of light particles?  Is my lightbulb giving off particles?  Am I walking through my lit-up house bonking into this stuff at every turn????  I feel like a four-year-old jabbering on about dragons while twirling round the living room in my Disney Princess costume (complete with matching shoes, wand and tiara, thank you).

Meet the First Day of Physics Class:  The Double-Slit Experiment.  Keep reading that Wiki-link.  Allllll the way down.  I passed out after the second paragraph.  I revived at the first bibliographic reference name--the late Nobel Laureate, Professor Richard Feynman.

Mr. Hotness of Quantum Physics  

He was a Quantum Hottie at Cal Tech (I look him up for some Quality Private Time.).  

Stephen Hawking included the Double Slit experiment in the first chapter of his book A Brief History of Time, which I tried to read three times. The link goes to a new, improved version I will soon be diving into. Here is my Fairy-fied version:  

You have two pieces of cardboard.  One is plain and solid.  Stand it up like a wall and leave it.  Take the second one, cutting two rectangular slots in it, then standing it up parallel to the first one, and several inches in front of it.  So you have two parallel walls, one with holes in it.  Easy.  Then go across the room, position a light to aim right at the centre of the hole-y cardboard and turn it on.  


This is the way it’s always been presented to me--the next sentence is the Triumphant Finish:  If you could see all the light particles hit the solid board after passing through the slots in the first board, well gracious! They’re not two tidy stripes as though the particles all crowded right through the two slots you cut, it’s an uneven spray all the way across the back board! Yay!

Wait, WHAT?????  Here you see the inception of my insecurity, paranoia and constantly-reduced-to-tears-anxiety about Science and Maths.  Everyone Else got The Punchline.  I did NOT. 


(richardfeynmanrichardfeynmanbriancoxdeeeepbreatheverything'sok....)

Until last week, when a program, which I’ve sadly forgotten the name of, inserted one teensy, tiny little extra clause into the last sentence and suddenly freed me: SOME of the particles bonk against the slotted board and go through the slots at angles, OR break up, go through the slots, then **SMOOSH BACK TOGETHER ON THE OTHER SIDE, GOING ANY DIRECTION THEY WANT**!!!!!  Therefore creating a spray of particles against the solid back board.

“Like water around a boulder in a river” said the presenter.  Aaaaannnddd.....as you can watch in that water’s path round the boulder, waves moving through the water as well as the individual particles.   Frakkin’ Waves and Particles.  

Okay, so there’s a lot more to it, but I need it really quite simple. My tiny brain is now transported back to Ether and Celestial Spheres like some ancient philosopher literally grasping at air for answers to The Universe. One who then awakes in the Quantum Age to find it might once again be true, but in bizarre and unimaginable ways. 


...And ya know, all these lightbulbs are still looking rather shifty, if you ask me...

Thus, a Contest! And a Community Learning Project!

So I started on my pissy little litany of ignorance “I didn’t/I couldn’t/I don’t know...Ahhh-Menn--”... Jedi Jasmin dutifully pointed out, with an admirable self-discipline which allowed her to let me get that far, that for much of the world, cooking is the same seemingly insurmountable obstacle.  It doesn’t come naturally to toss beans in a pan, know when they’re done, dump on an appropriate, unmeasured, amount of curry powder and squeeze on some orange.  I read this and it sounds possibly snooty the way I’ve said it.  But I just did it last night and I cannot recall a time when it did not occur to me how to do things like that.  So I propose an Exchange:

1)  CONTEST!!!

>>What is your Cooking Bete Noire? Your Culinary Waterloo?  What seems like you should get it but seems to be missing that little piece of information that obscures the entire operation?  Tell the Fairy and I’ll answer to the best of my abilities, try it and see, or go hound someone smart till I find out.  
      >>Caveat: I know nothing about bread and any answers would be conjecture at best.  Anything else is Fair Game. The best question, being the one that may stump me the most or bestow Universal Enlightenment upon us all, wins a copy of Joy of Cooking!!
   
      >>Time Limit:  Contest starts Today, Monday, 29 August 2011.  Entries will be accepted until Midnight on Monday, 12 September 2011.  Judging period is two weeks, Decision Day is Monday, 26 September 2011. 


      >>Entries:  As always, post your entry as a comment to TODAY'S blog post.  Good Luck!!

2)  COMMUNITY LEARNING!! I need your suggestions for getting hip to physical sciences and maths.  Books? Online courses?  Anything else?  Where would I find a reliable tutor?  What subjects, in fact, would you recommend checking into?  Clue me in!

    

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Food Brain, Colander Mind

We spent a weekend in Vegas and had a great time.  Saw Russell Brand, Penn & Teller, and  Cirque Du Soleil’s Love.  We went to the BodyWorks Exhibit, the CSI: Experience and Madame Tussaud’s.  We ate at some really fabulous restaurants, including Marion Batali’s Otto, in the Venetian resort.  Twice.  The first time, we ate Squash Blossoms 

Fried with Spicy Cheese Filling, Salty Rice Tempura 

Perfection

And The Perfect Pizza.  Dark, savory deeply sun-roasted tomato sauce, perfect thin crust, gorgeous cheese and just the right pepperoni.  I swooned publicly. The second time our server, The Sensational Suzie, found two spare signed copies of Mario’s books for me after we had discussed, in depth, the existential necessity of olive oil gelatto with sea salt on top.  GingerMan pointed out there was no room in our luggage for two cookbooks.  Suzie, whom I had apprised of the fact that should she find herself in a foreign berg she should hie herself to the nearest fibre establishment and ask for dining recommendations as fibre fanciers are big eaters.

Short end of a long story, Suzie personally shipped the two books and I’m knitting her daughter a hat.  Tragedy?  I’m not close enough to teach her Girl Scout troupe to knit.

An Act of Closure:  At BodyWorks, I finally, FINALLY got to see the backside of a bellybutton!!!!!  Didn’t you ever wonder?  Ever?  Looks like a tornado.  I’ve been wonder for over 30 years, and now I rest easy.

However.  There be not, apparently, enough olive oil gelatto to assuage my current existential untidiness.  In Cirque’s Love, an ode to the Beatles, Sergeant Pepper drags an increasingly massive pile of broken band instruments behind him as his life progresses.  Huger, ever more ungainly, a ball of Past Things.  

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean lies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  In various estimations, it is now comprised of three parts stretching from here on the west coast of North America to the east coast of China or one great roiling mess the size of Texas, and deep as an iceberg. 

The State of Me

I am twisted up in these seemingly inescapable mental images, tied up in Things I own and Things I’ve lost in the vast ocean of life.  A life of chaos meant leaving people was easy, but Things are precious.  Things never left until they broke or went missing, at which point the loss was devastating, and the penalty twofold.  Scorn and disappointment from the parents.  Things and Grades Mattered.  But more crushing was the deep sense of grief at losing a Friend, as these Things were my closest friends.  

Lately I have experienced what I feared was early-onset dementia.  I do not claim that blithely, I truly thought I would have to seek evaluation from my doctor, I was loosing words, sentences, whole ideas, directions and abilities to do things I could usually do blindfolded.  And I started losing things.  It started in March with the Purple Shoes.  They were beautiful lilac colored suede loafers with a dark lavender velvet lacing tying in a bow on top of the foot.  I wore them with everything nearly every day for two weeks.  The day I went up to Spice Heaven to accept the job offer, GingerMan and I went to lunch in Menlo Park after, then he drove me down to knitting.  Whereupon Brass Needles and Jedi Jasmin proclaimed we would brave the heat and walk from the coffee house to the shoe warehouse across the parking lot to find me some of them fancy toning trainers.  So we did and did.  And I wore them out of the shop, placing the Purple Shoes in the trainers box.  And immediately forgot I owned these beautiful shoes.  Forgot.  I returned home that night, and every night for the next two months wondered, with ever-growing panic, as my memory slipped away, what went on that slot in the shoe rack???

The shoe box went in to the recycling, unchecked.

I cannot tell you, even now that two months has passed since this discovery, four months after it happened, how painful this is to think of.  

It turned out that a medication was causing the memory problem and the dosage was reduced.  I once again feel (mostly) human, remembering where I am, what I’m doing and keep track of stuff.  Through all of this, I believe this is why food has always been so important to me.  Yes, I am an emotional eater. Duh. And I do love me some processed junk food.  I believe I have extolled the virtues of Kraft Dinner here before as well. And Donuts.  And Nachos.

But food is always here. Food can always make life livable, better, happy.  Feeling adrift, panic-stricken and chaotic, believing I truly had early stages of Alzheimer's, cutting up a bunch of white peaches and tossing with an experimental dressing is truly therapeutic.  It tastes sweet and fresh.  It is full of vitamins and sunshine and color and happiness and well-being.  Meatloaf is full of protein and fresh herbs, flavor and comfort, it feeds you for three nights and therefore quells some small part of the panic  for a week. 

And Food extends me back out into the world.  I somehow cannot create anything that will feed a number fewer than the 5th Army Infantry Regiment.  So I have to reach out and share it.  And share a bit of the crazy, and share some wine, and then share a bit of a laugh and feel...sane again.  Like the Things don’t anchor me in this world, that the life full of People and Love that I have created in the last several years now ground me.

Except for Vegas.  I’m fairly particular about traveling protocol, especially when decamping, but I managed to lose a pair of pants and a Bare Minerals foundation.  

Bugger.  

0-:-D  ~~Now it’s hot, simmering August, so grab some White Peaches or Nectarines and have some fun!  First, how to cut up a pit fruit all pretty without significant injury to self :


1. Fruit:  


2.  Hold the Nectarine in one hand on the cutting board, knife in other.  Remember from here on out, you will turn the fruit, against the cutting board, NOT in the air in your hand, NOT moving the knife a whole lot. Stability Saves Digits!

.  

Haha, this looks like I'm lying, but it was the only way to photograph the next  two steps:

3.  Stand the Nectarine stem up.  Start slicing into the flesh, rotate the fruit all the way round so you have cut it in half.


4.  Stand the Nectarine stem up once again, but turned 90 degrees so when you make these two vertical cuts you will have made four quarters of your fruit.  It will start to loosen from the pit.


5.  Turn the Nectarine on it's side and place the knife near the stem end again.

  

6.  Start slicing in and rotate the nectarine all the way round again.
7.  You will be able to make 2-3 radial horizontal cuts  from top to bottom before:





8. The bite-size pieces start to loosen and come right off.  Ta-Da!

 

GREEK NECTARINE & BLUEBERRY SALAD 
6-8 medium White Nectarines

1 box Blueberries

1/2 cup Grapeseed Oil (Or Canola/other neutral flavor oil)

1.5 Tablespoons Lemon Juice

1/4 teaspoon Dijon Mustard

Zest of One Lemon

1-1.5 teaspoon Greek Seasoning (Penzey’s is best, or Cavendar’s)

1/2 teaspoon Red Pepper Flakes (or more to taste)

DIRECTIONS:

1. Cut up Nectarines into bite-size pieces, place in a lovely bowl. 

2. Add Blueberries

3. In another bowl, thoroughly whisk together all other ingredients

4. Pour dressing over fruit, toss gently

5. Cover and refrigerate for half hour or more

6. Eat until you feel a sunny well-being overcome you once more.

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Bad (Pasta) Romance

“...Give me Reason, but don’t give me Choice, I’ll just make the same mistake again....”

--James Blunt, Same Mistake

A beautifully heartbreaking song about a relationship filled with pain and sorrow, in which I face the Ishbel shawl.  I’m frogging her for the last time and setting the beautiful Verb yarn aside for another project.  It’s a relationship in which we count points against each other in daily battles and never triumph.  Farewell, beautiful shawl, we were never meant to be.

My second triple-cable sock in Sanguine Gryphon Bugga yarn is steaming along, and will be my Vegas weekend vacation knitting.  It seems to speed along so fast when I’m counting repeats, that there will, in a blink, be only the interminable heel flap before the exquisite delight of heel-turning and the blind run through the foot to the Dance of the Toe Graft.  I love heels and toes.  They’re delicate bits of magic and math and physics.  Suddenly vertical stitches are horizontal! End of a tube? Shazzam--No SEAM!!!  The knitting runs over the edge and just keeps running right back to the heel! MAGIC, I TELL YOU!!!  And **I** can do it! 

It’s a new relationship, a new outlook, a new conquest!

As in knitting, so with cooking.  A work mate, a lovely, funny Israeli girl, is leaving. Her husband’s contract job is ending here so they are heading home after two and a half years.  We bid farewell to her with a potluck after work Sunday afternoon which, as you may imagine, at a spice shop is a pretty smashing shindig.  I was making Mac & Cheese, using jack cheese, chipotle, chili flakes, bacon and brown rice penne.  

I seem to know a growing number of Gluten-Free people, and have been noting the growing number of Gluten-Free products on the market.  So I read up and asked around and bought the Hodgson Mill Brown Rice Penne.  Usually, in a dish like this where you will have a secondary cooking stage, you pull the pasta a couple minutes early, when it is just pre-al dente.  Due to a kitchen snafu, I left it in 3 minutes past when I would have drained it.

Huge mistake.  In the colander, it appeared quite pale and overly inflated.  But I was determined to stay on schedule, and found I somehow had run through my entire back stock of pasta (stupidstupidstupid).  So I popped it in the pot to heat-dry and added the butter, then the liquid.  I knew then disaster loomed, but I charged ahead, straight into a relationship I knew was troubled in the first go-round.  I stirred and noticed some tube breakage. I added the cheese.  Like consecrating a terrible affair with a trashy wedding and kids.  Just throwing in all the binders and valuables knowing full well the end was nigh and it was gonna be ugly.

The pasta disintegrated with every stir.  Disintegrated.  To the molecular level. I shouted, derided, accused, to no avail.  So I threw the pirate spatula down and walked away.  Divorced of the entire venture.

A couple of minutes later, I decided to try dating again.  I reached for my purple Cuisinart Thunderstick.  

If you don’t have a stick blender, go buy one for about $30 or $40 at Sur La Table, Amazon, or somewhere and do it quick-like.  Anything that seems like a dauntingly large task or unsalvageable situation because it would require the use and cleaning of a blender or multiple batches in the food processor suddenly, like a good therapist, becomes easily dealt with when faced with a Stick.  It goes straight into any pot, pan or dish your food already occupies and deals with it.

So I plugged him in and plunged into a new relationship.  With Cheese and Bacon Soup.  Turns out, once you blend all that milk, eggs, spices and cheese with the pasta; then add more milk and the bacon, what you get is perfect soup.  The rice pasta and butter that were the base of the Mac & Cheese turned into a roux and the rest became the cheesy, bacon-y goodness.  Thick, rich, savory, spicy bacon-y goodness. 

I know this is gonna seem weird and all, but since I took my new date to a work ‘do and he didn't drink all the beer and dance on the counter singing  Save A Horse Ride A Cowboy loudly to himself, I will share my unconventional new boyfriend with you here.  I state in the directions to add milk until the soup reaches desired consistency, and I like a nice thick cheese soup.  So I add the buttermilk, then add whole milk until it’s as loose as I want it.  Just what you want in a good partner, right?

Ingredients

4 ounces ANY brown rice pasta

4 tablespoons butter

2 eggs

4 ounces evaporated milk

6 ounces buttermilk

12-16 ounces whole milk

2 Tablespoon hot sauce

2 teaspoon kosher salt

Fresh black pepper

1teaspoon dry mustard

1teaspoon Chipotle powder

1.5 teaspoon Chili Flakes

2 teaspoon Garlic Powder

2 teaspoon Onion Powder

10 ounces Monterrey Jack, shredded

1/2 pound bacon, cooked and crumbled

Directions

1. In a large pot of boiling, salted water cook the pasta 12 minutes and drain. It will look pale and bloated, like a bad ex. Return to the pot and melt in the butter. Toss to coat.

2. Whisk together the eggs, add evaporated milk, 2 ounces buttermilk, hot sauce, salt, pepper, and spices. Stir into the pasta and add the cheese. 

3. Over low heat continue to stir for 3 minutes or until creamy.

4. Apply stick blender, adding first 4 ounces buttermilk, then whole milk until soup is desired consistency.

5. Stir in bacon, or crumble on top, as desired.

I'm sure you can see the attraction, and this time All *I* Need Is Love--and Bacon.  Bon Appetite!

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CALL ME ISHBEL

This winter, after two years of knitting, I met Ysolda Teague.  She is a certified cutie-pie Scottish pixie and prolific designer, who was just releasing her second small book of patterns in January.  I was in Long Beach for TNNA with the Knitmore Girls and filling in booth time with Abstract Fiber--a cheap, flimsy façade for entry to the fabulous National Needle Arts Association convention.

The night before the convention opened, the equally fabulous Unwind yarn store in Burbank, CA held their anniversary party, complete with the awesome Ravelry geniuses, roughly a hundred fantastic knitters and Ysolde.  She was sporting a gorgeous red lace-pattern cardigan with little blue and white vintage bakelite buttons.  Due to the fact we had set out just that morning at Bum-Crack-’O-Dawn and just arrived in SoCal, I was conversationally stupid.  As an aside, we had just arrived home, in the same circs, a week later, when we rolled up to A Verb For Keeping Warm’s Open House party for their new space and I saw her again and was again basically a drooling smunchkin.

For the record, Ysolda, I have been meaning to tell you for six months that your books are lovely, your designs range from pretty to achingly adorable.  I made the Icing Swirl hat twice and it was fun and easy, and as I have a mysteriously slippery head all  I had to do was a bit more to the decrease band in the back to keep the sucker on me ol’ scone.

HOWEVER.  I got soooo excited about the book that I took it back to Verb the next next week, full of exuberance, bouncing all over Adrienne for yarn to make my very first shawl, your Ishbel.  I wanted anything at all in the best colorway name EVAR--TRANSNATIONAL FURY!!!  It’s a red-coral-ly color on their Metamorphosis yarn--a Superwash Merino/Silk blend in Sport weight, and I LOVE it!  So I scrambled home, got my needles, swatched and started.  The promise of wispy beauty floated through my mind....

The pattern starts with stockinette and a bit of eyelet, easy-peasy.  Then comes The Charts.  I smacked straight into it and went stupid.  I’ve done charts--I have!!!  Socks, an actual chevron lace scarf from two-ply handspun as a sample for a shop, I’ve done this, but I fritzed.  So I complained and whined for months.  Like a brat.  Like a baby.  I gave up all my power to the stupid Charts. 

So for Tour de Fleece, I decided I was a Hand Cycler, and plowed straight through my Citron in Huckleberry Knits Silk & Silver down to the ruffle and beaded cast-off (to be enjoyed later--really, I’m relishing it, it’s my reward for the following); then jumped into the Ishbel, which I frogged, Ribbity-Ribbity, right back to the ball.  Zippity straight through the StSt, Zippity Doo Dah. 

Helloooooo Vine Chart A.  Okay, Read it through, employ New Secret Weapon:  Office Depot here in San Jose on Blossom Hill across from Oakridge Mall (in case you can’t find anywhere else, cuz this is AWESOME) has--drumroll---4X6 SuperSticky GRAPH PAPER STICKY NOTES.  Each line, including pattern repeat within each line, can be written out tidily then crossed off as I complete each section.  Voy-OLA!!  Okay, I’m actually getting through this, and I’m not saying a WORD--not a damn word --to anyone about this.  I get to 4 rows (WS purl row) out of 8, and all seems well, then count, and something’s wrong. I try every method I can think of to count, double count, start at the middle and compare stitches to the end, then start at the ends and move in and CANNOT FIND THE SCREW-UP!

Hours lost trying to fix, tinking back one row, seeming to get the correct count, everything seeming stable.....

I’ve been varying stages of near-total gray-hair-ness from age 22, and I swear this made me ginger then even grayer all over again in one afternoon.  I feel like I took every precaution, like I faced a fear with my patented 3-prong approach:  Read the books, Consult the experts, then Make Stuff Up.  I read the pattern and deconstructed it according to suggestions from more experienced knitters, then acquired tools and made up a system.  Attack!!  

This is, as the Knitmores say, When Knitting Attacked.  So, I have two questions:


1.  RE: My Citron shawl-- It ends with a stockinette ruffle, but a couple of people mentioned they used a garter stitch to keep it from curling.  Any opinions?


2.  Ishbel, My Great Pink Whale:  Should I keep going? Should I tink back to the stockinette and make another run at it? Maybe I was overly confident in taking a break for the night at that purl row 4 and jinxed it?  Or should I just take it apart, ball it up and harpoon it repeatedly?

“Call Me Ishbel...Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul... and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to Knitting as soon as I can.”--Moby Knit


I'm at a block and no hat will be safe.  Or shawl, come to think of it.  If knitting my own drives me to the verge of madness, why not just start stealing yours?  Help me now and keep me on the curb!

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