The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

A Closer Look at Meringue

Just because.

Feeding the Boys

Last night we had some college guitar students over for dinner after their juries, or final performance exams.  I think there were 7 of them - not the 12 I had been told originally.  Plus the other classical guitar teacher - that made 8 extra mouths to feed. 

But it was more like 16 or 20.  Doesn't anyone feed these people?

I had some of the food out on the table by the time they started arriving, and Bill, who had zipped home after the juries, was grilling up the flat iron steaks and corn and chicken. 

I took a few pictures of the table before everyone arrived, but that was it.  I'll upload them at some point before the weekend is out. 

I love doing this sort of thing.  Well, I don't enjoy cleaning the house.  But I like cooking for a crowd.  And this crowd was special. 

For one thing, I didn't know any of them, except the other teacher.  And these kids had just finished up the semester by performing in front of both guitar teachers and maybe one other teacher (I think), after working on their performance pieces and scales and finger exercises, and they were, I know, just so glad it was all over with.

Last Sunday, most of the guitar dept (students and teachers) gave a small concert at a church and rather than write a check for the performances, the tradition at this church is to pass the hat.  Bill had thought that it would be nice to take that money and use it to buy the food and have this dinner for the students.  So that's how it all came about.  And we decided after last night that we'll make this a tradition.

They clearly weren't expecting the kind of spread we put out.  I don't know what they did expect, but I don't think it included brie or crab and roasted corn and cheddar quesadillas.  They were actually whispering "wow" when they saw the food.  It was cute. 

And they ATE.  Seconds, thirds.  Good thing there weren't 12 students last night because we wouldn't have had enough food.

Oh - and my kids - especially Julia - were a riot.  Not at all phased with all these strangers coming into the house, eating from out table, playing darts and fooseball in the basement.  Julia, in particular, rose to the occasion as 2nd hostess, sometimes showing the guys where the food was (though they already knew), and directing them to the type of cheese they should try.  "You can cut some of THIS one!"  She knows her foods.  Earlier in the evening, while students were still arriving, she was hungry, and took a plate and said she just wanted "some of this" and helped herself to a small piece of prosciutto.  That was it.  A minute later she was back.  "I'm still hungry,"  she told us.  "But I only want this."  And there went about a quarter of the remaining prosciutto.  Girl knows what she likes.

It was a really nice night.  The guys were polite, appreciative, and nice to (and extremely tolerant of) my kids, which scores the most points with me. 

Anyway, that was last night.  Today I will be attending the Mother's Day Tea at Alex's kindergarten, and I am SO looking forward to that.  He's been wiggling with the job of keeping all the little planned events a secret - not easy for a kindergartener.  He's let a few things slip, but that's okay.  It's like watching the trailers for a much-anticipated film.

Anyway, that's where things are at the moment. 

And here, since I haven't uploaded yesterday's food pictures, is another flower for your viewing pleasure.

Have a good day!

Taking Five

Yes, it's Corned Beef day today.  I've got lemon sponge pies and tarts in the oven - Julia helped measure ingredients for the filling earlier.  And in a moment, I'll be taking the briskets out of their briney baths and wrapping them in plastic til a bit later this afternoon.  I've got vegetables to prep and some tidying up to do...a table to set...serving plates and so forth to decide upon...and then about mid afternoon the cooking will begin.

I'm in heaven.

I've got the camera nearby and I'm taking pictures of all these food-related processes, and my goal is to get that all posted in the morning. 

But for now - I think it's time to put the laptop in the other room. 

I'll be back tomorrow to let you know how everything turned out. 

Wish me luck!

Today's List of Things to Accomplish

(As if I write such lists on a daily basis!  Ha!)

Anyway, in an attempt to organize my scattered thoughts, here goes...

1.  clean out the fridge (to make some space)

2.  Make chocolate dough for lemon sponge tarts

3.  Make American Irish Soda Bread (why the distinction?  Because I bought carraway seeds, dammit, and I need to use them somewhere.  The traditional Irish Irish Soda Bread doesn't contain carraway - and I don't even LIKE carraway seeds, but since I bought them, I need to use them.)

4.  Make Horseradish Cream and Guinness Mustard from the recipes in Bon Appetit to go with the Corned Beef dinner tomorrow night.

5.  Prep the vegetables for tomorrow - peel, chop, slice, dice - whatever they need.  Except the potatoes, because they'll get brown.  And I don't need to peel them anyway.  So never mind that part.

6.  Finish that risotto post.

7.  Tidy up the dining room.

8.  Tidy up the kitchen.

9.  Is that all?  I thought I had more to do.  Hm.  Oh well.  Since the list isn't so bad, perhaps I'll actually get it all done!

I'll be back a bit later....

A Little Tip

You know how on TV those really good chefs hold an onion and slice away really fast?  And the hand that holds the onion in place has the fingertips curled under so the side of the blade slides down the knuckles, and no blood is shed?

I really need to work on that. 

Oh, I've got the fast slicing down, but the curling the fingers under part...not so much.

I was slicing away at a cucumber and then off came several layers of the tip of my left index finger.  I found the bit of skin stuck to a slice of cuke.  I tossed it, in case you were wondering.

Now I have a Curious George bandaid on my finger and it's really hard to type.

For example.  Here's how this post would have looked if I hadn't looked at the keys and fixed things as I went along:

"You know how on rc rhose eaally good cheds hold an onion and slice away eeally dastr?  And rhe hand trhat holds thw onion in place has rthe dingertips cuerled under so ther side od the blade slides down thw knuckles, and no vlood is shed?

I ewally need to woek on thatr."

I think you get the picture.'

In case you don't - here's one:

Learn from me:  Work on those knife skills!!  Or suffer my fate!

Valentine's Day Ideas to Resume Shortly

Friday and Saturday - I just didn't put up any Valentine's Day food posts.  Friday, well, too many other things going on.  And Saturday...I was taking pictures with Julia and then I just...oh, I have no excuse.  I just didn't do it.  So now...I'm going to try to catch up.

We Interrupt This Photo Essay on Last Night's Dinner Preparation...

So yesterday Bill (mainly Bill - I was soft shell crab fry cook, dishwasher, and photographer) prepared this absolute FEAST of Japanese food.  Primarily sushi - related things, but not just that.  I'll post the recipes separately, because there are too many to cram into this one post.

But after the meal, and after the clean-up, I uploaded the pictures I'd taken while the meal was being prepared, and what struck me funny were not the pictures of the food, but the unexpected pictures that showed up here and there in between the chronology of the food prep.  Basically what happened was while Bill was making the soft shell crab maki rolls, and I was taking pictures of them, Alex yelled from the other room "Mommy!  Come quick!  The sky is pink!"  And so I just peeked out the kitchen window, saw that yes, the sun was setting and pink clouds dotted the sky, and took a quick step outside to take a few pictures before the pinkness was gone.  Alex knows I will to this, so he is vigilant.

So here's an example of my viewing experience...

Thai Spring Rolls, Green Chicken Curry, Sesame Noodles, and Rice Noodle Soup with Shrimp and Banana Blossoms

Before we had kids, Bill and I used to cook meals together a lot.  When we had kids, that kind of fell by the wayside for a while because someone usually had to tend to a baby or a small toddler or a baby AND a small toddler or two small toddlers...until now.  Now, we've got a kindergartener and a preschooler, and they are amazingly tolerant of their parents' desire to both work on something AT THE SAME TIME. 

So we've started doing that, mainly on weekends.  Sometimes one of us does more of the cooking, and the other one is kind of the assistant and will maybe take charge of one dish.  But still - it's nice to be elbowing each other out of the way and fighting over burner space on the stove top again.

The weekend before last, we did up some Asian dishes.  Now, sometimes we'll stick to a particular country, like Japan or Thailand, when we pick recipes.  Other times, it's just whatever sounds good to us or whatever we have ingredients for.  Bill actually planned ahead for this meal, and went to one of the local Asian markets on Saturday so we'd have everything we needed to cook on Sunday.

Here's some of the haul:

That brownish bud-shaped thing to the right of the limes is a bud from a banana tree.  You peel away the petals and underneath are little skinny banana blossoms that (obviously) haven't bloomed.  They're a couple inches long and the same color as the outer petals.  They don't taste like much, but you can detect a little sweetness.  You could use them like lily buds, though lily buds, to me, have a distinct apricot flavor.

Anyway.  That's what Bill likes to do - he'll pick a couple of items he's never seen before (usually labled "Fresh Vegetable" in English and something in Thai that he can't read.  And sometimes he'll ask what it is, and other times he won't.  It's fun.

He did most of the cooking that Sunday.  My job was the spring rolls.  We got our ideas and actual recipes from two books:  Keo's Thai Cuisine, by Keo Sananikone and published by Ten Speed Press, and Classic Oriental Dishes, edited by Lisa Dyer - a bargain book put out by Smithmark years ago.  We've had these for about ten years - along with a couple of other Thai and Japanese cookbooks we bought one day.  They all bear the splatter stains from frequent use. 

One of the nice things about having a garden (and growing a variety of hot peppers) is that we can make up batches of green and red Thai curries and freeze them in ice cube trays, to use all through the winter.  (I say "we," but this is really Bill's territory.)  So one of the easiest things to do for this meal was the green curry Chicken.  (Extremely easy for me because Bill cooked it.)  All Bill had to do was take out a couple of cubes of the green curry...

 

thaw them, and cut up some chicken,

and throw the whole thing together.  (Those skinny brown things in the upper right are the banana buds, which he used in his soup.) 

It's a delicious, hot/spicy, fragrant dish, and the recipe actually calls for shrimp, but you can use chicken, pork would work, and we've also used tempeh, which is a fermented soybean and grain product that's got a nice non-meat but meaty texture.  For this meal, Bill also added in sliced red chilis (hot), mushrooms, scallions, cilantro, and baby corn.  Here's a little glimpse of the final product....

Bill also made sesame noodles, primarily because if the kids didn't like any of the other stuff, sesame noodles are a sure bet.  He's made these so often he doesn't use a recipe.

And the soup...it was kind of a thrown-together noodle soup using rice noodles and shrimp, cilantro, scallions, banana blossoms and a chicken stock.

I made the Thai spring rolls, as I mentioned, which I've put up in a separate post so it's easier to find later.  But for now...some snapshots of the evening...

Bill at his "station" - the wok and the pot on the back burner are his.  He'd already made the sauce for the sesame noodles, and the noodles themselves were in the warming drawer of our stove.  Those bowls over on the right, near the glass of beer, are all his too.  I have to juggle all my stuff in order to deep fry the spring rolls.  He hogs the whole place....

 

This is the green curry chicken coming together in the wok.

And these (above) are some spring rolls just after I put them in the oil. 

   

Time to eat...

We serve the soup in this...with some sterno in the center to keep it hot and to scare the heck out of Alex when the flame flares up.  Heh heh.  Dinner should be exciting, we say. 

And speaking of exciting, we always put out chopsticks for the kids to use when we have any kind of Asian meals.  Their techniques vary a bit....

They do love their sesame noodles...

They both tried a spring roll and some of the soup.  Julia liked the mushrooms in the soup.  Alex didn't like the soup or the spring rolls - he's a sesame noodles guy, and that's that.  Julia also tried one of the baby corn from the green curry chicken dish, but didn't like the heat from the chilis.  We don't force them to eat everything, especially the spicier dishes, but they can try anything they want.  Sometimes if we don't put something on their plate, they'll want to try it, which is nicer for us than if they just see something odd we've put on their plates and they reject it without even knowing what it is.  Alex will sometimes take a look at a new dish and just tell us he doesn't like it.  But as long as it's not spicy, he has to try it.  Just have a taste.  If he doesn't like it, fine.  But the point is to always try new foods.  To be adventurous. 

For your entertainment

Alex REALLY REALLY wanted to make gingerbread men.  Not just any - he wanted to duplicate the gingerbread man from (what else) the Shrek movies.  So last night we made a batch of gingerbread dough and cut out some cookies, and the kids decorated two each before bath time.  Here they are:

Complete with gumdrop buttons.  Alex's, that is.  Julia's...gumdrop goiters, perhaps.

Was That All??

Well, the other refrigerator repair person came out yesterday.  Bill and I were prepared for more headaches.  Bill has actually been saying he hates the fridge, which I think is a bit extreme for an appliance, but whatever. 

So anyway, the guy comes out and takes a look in there...(I had just brought the kids home and I was taking coats off and herding them downstairs so they wouldn't insist on helping the repair man)...and he told Bill maybe the part they'd replaced the other day was defective or something...so he starts looking in there, and - AHA. 

The wires weren't connected.

That's it.

So he connected the wires, and that was IT. 

I think what probably happened was that the guy-in-training last week had installed the baffle but hadn't connected the wires, and the teacher-guy didn't check that.  Simple oversight.

I'm so glad that's all it was.  And sure enough, once the wires were connected, the arctic air stopped pouring from the little vent thing up in the top back of the fridge, and this morning - ooh!  aah!  the kim chee isn't frozen any more!  My sister's pickled peppers aren't frozen!  The apple juice!  The leftovers!  The grapes!  The brie!  NOT FROZEN!

Bill brought the other foods and the milk and half n half up from the fridge downstairs, and yay, all is right with our little world today.  At least in the fridge.

And now, I've got to get the kids ready to go, and myself.  I had started a post about the other birthday cake I did last week, but I don't have enough time to do it properly, so that will just have to wait until tonight, I think.

Have a lovely day!