Thanksgiving Dreaming

A new stove is on it's way! We've picked one and ordered the shining beauty and it will bring it's magical goodness to the heart of our home on Saturday. I cannot wait to have a reliable cooking source again.

Image by Lane & Anne via Flickr

I have started mulling over what to make for Thanksgiving and am all salivatory over the possibilities. This year will be our virgin effort for local, "just us" and no-travel Thanksgiving celebration. I cannot wait to roast a turkey myself, to serve up a heap of fluffy mashed potatoes and to decide which rolls to make. How do you decide? I think I need more guests. There are not enough people in our house to eat all the things I want to make. There are the standards: turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, stuffing pumpkin pie and then the delectable sounding options for adding to the menu....maybe stuffed mushroom caps, a fantastic cheese plate and some sort of veggie dish. How to decide? Roasted cauliflower with curried spices? Caramelized brussels sprouts with toasted pecans? Steamed green beans tossed with olive oil and roasted garlic? *sigh*

Me helping with Armstrong Thanksgiving (photo credit to my sister-in-law Jane)

Bri-en-croute is a must, right? And some kind of sparkling juice so the kids can join in toasting...and then what about a fresh salad. That sounds imperative after all those heavy, warm foods. Greens with pomegranate, fresh pear, goat cheese, burrata, beet slices, persimmon...oh heavens! And maybe Oyster Rockefeller for a New England touch? How will I choose?

Megaman carves the bird of 2009 (photo credit to Jane again!)

 I cannot wait for that stove to get here. I need to do some serious elimination and recipe testing. And what bliss, to have a broiler for toasting things, a working temperature gauge and an oven timer that works, right on the top. I cannot wait!

Thankgiving Feast afterglow... (Jane again!)

I realize that you might think I'm a bit over the top, after all...it's not even November, I have three small children and I've never even made a Thanksgiving Day meal before. That list makes me sound bonkers but, truly, Rome was not won in a day, a girl with three kids has to plan ahead...well ahead. And I don't believe in defeatist thinking so who cares about the "never have's" and the fact that I am a young mother to several. I believe in full-on-insanity in terms of ambitious and adventuresome celebration, so bring on the turkey!

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Stone Walls and Kitchen Stoves

The weather is crisp, the air still and all of the leaves are starting to blush yellow and red. A and I spend the early morning hacking out the burning bushes and jet-berry that have grown up around the back edge of our property and then weeding and reassembling (in a rough way) the resurrected stone wall we hadn't known was along the back edge of our yard. Lovely to discover these little secrets. I had some qualms about ripping out the burning bushes right before they put on their amazing fall display but after the main trunks were sawed off and their various myriad sprouts trimmed away we were amazed at all the wide open space we'd been hiding there at the back of our lawn. I am still not sure what will go there to replace the errant shrubs. A second row of vegetable beds? A row of blackberries? A long strawberry bed? Who knows! But even if nothing else goes in there, it is amazing to discover that we have this hidden asset in space.

In other news, our rather ancient stove is now a bit dysfunctional. Not completely, just in a creeping sort of way. You remember this stove I'm sure...I mentioned it here and here. Well, welcome to a new stage in the saga.

First the oven thermostat is quite off...by as much as 50-100 degrees...too hot, oddly enough. I fixed that by adding a little temperature gauge that hangs inside the oven door. Then the broiler has never worked, which never seemed to matter much until our grill stopped working and then I was very sad about the whole notion. After the broiler the oven door stopped opening all the way. I had to move the racks up higher in the oven in order to be sure that I could get pans in and out without burning myself on the oven door. And sometimes it still makes me spill food off the pan, into the bottom of the oven with the angle of tilt that is required to maneuver the food in through the reduced opening. Pizzas are a particular challenge. Then this weekend two more disabilities visited our poor stove. First the oven door handle came off...fixable for now although hard to say how sturdy it is in the long run. And then one of the burners on the top of the stove had a sudden glitch which means that it now won't turn off.....worse yet, it is stuck at high power. We have resorted to popping the breaker after we finish making a meal to keep the stove from burning our house down while we're not looking.

Time for a new stove. That's expensive but also kind of exciting so, I'll go with the excitement part of it and be glad that we have a new subscription to Consumer Reports online to help with selecting a good bet financially. I am really relishing the thought of a modern self-cleaning oven, a smooth-top and another appliance with all the buttons and knobs working appropriately. Cold weather is calling and that will mean more baking and roasting and braising, and doing all of that in a newer oven sounds really alluring. I have a bunch of bananas in the freezer that want to be made into chilly leaf-kicking day, slices of toasty quick-bread with generous dollops of butter and hot mugs of tea. I can't wait to meet you, New Stove! Somewhere you're out there sitting in a giant box in a company warehouse, and soon you'll be in our house and I can promise once you come to live with us, the happy task of baking many birthday cakes, roasting many family Sunday dinners and a lot of happy wiping with toddler sponges! Please come quickly!

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Virtual Cooking Lessons: Potato Soup

Virtual cooking lessons? You bet!

A month or two ago, a friend contacted me long-distance and said that she was thinking fondly about how I'd been cooking mentor to a young pal, but sighing over our geographic separation.  So, she thought she'd broach a crazy idea with me...what about doing basic cooking lessons long distance together?

I thought it it was genius. So, there she and I are on our second month together and A said, "Why not take this live and let others join in?" And here we are. In email form I'll be covering two recipes a month, things I feel should be part of any cook's canon. I've decided to share only one recipe a month here as I don't want to end up with an unwieldy post that leaves you scrolling down for years.

Feel free to observe, cook along, report on your cooking experience, pipe up with your own tips on the topic or just enjoy the photos and salivate. Dig in!

Its soup season so, we're going to make a good creamy potato version part of our canon! This is my own hurried jotting down of my mom's standard potato soup. Its fairly quick to make, has no strong flavors and so suits all palates and its wonderfully thrifty to make! I hope you like it as well as I do. I have a very soft spot for it in my soul.

When I was a naughty little tyke and said I didn't like soup...I meant that I didn't like any other soups...just this one. We always ate it with a sleeve of Saltine crackers for dipping into our bowls. I still serve it that way to my own boys but for grownups a few dinner rolls, biscuits or a nice loaf of bread with butter would be a warm accompaniment.

Classic Potato Soup

5 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
1 carrot, diced
1 onion, peeled and diced
1/3 c. of heavy cream
1 T of butter or bacon fat
2 1/2 t. salt
4 c. water
1 t. dried parsley

First, melt the butter or bacon fat in a saucepan over medium heat. When it is nice and melted but not smoking or snapping yet, add the onion and the carrot, no need to peel the carrot...just chop it up and throw it in. Stir to make sure that the mixture doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan and wait to move on until the onion is translucent.

Next you add the 4 cups of water...which will cool the whole mixture down a bit so I sometimes turn up the heat to medium high...although you have to watch to make sure that it doesn't boil raucously. Once you have the water in the pot...add the diced potatoes. You can cut up your potatoes in generous, hearty hunks to fill your spoon robustly or you can cut them into dainty little cubes just because you like to see them marching in diminutive evenness down the cutting board. Whatever you like. It really is about how you like it best.

Once the potatoes are in, give it a good stir and then cover the pot and let the mixture heat up. Once you can tell its starting to simmer and steam nicely, uncover it and begin to stir occasionally and watch for the potatoes to be done. You're ready for the next stop when the potatoes are tender. You can use a fork to poke them, a knife to spear them or you can scoop a cube out of the pot and burn your tongue testing its mettle with your own teeth.

After your potatoes feel tender, take a potato masher (like you use to make mashed potatoes) and squish the soup, right in the pot. Again, there's no real rule for how much squishing would be enough, its about how smooth versus how lumpy you like potato soup. Some people like a velvet broth, and some (like me!) want a portion of chewable little bits in there for interest. Do whatever you like. Make sure to stir after mashing so that you can see how the texture of the soup is feeling as a whole, and mix the water with the potatoes and thus avoid any burning. This is a good time to make sure that the burner is back on medium...no more.

Once you have the texture you like then I often stir it over the heat and let it cook for another 2-3 minutes to be sure its nice and thick. After the consistency is where you want it, add the heavy cream, the salt and stir to mix. Taste it to be sure that the flavor is right...you may want more salt. Then add the dried parsley...mix it in and serve it up. We always have ours with a pat of butter melting on top of every bowlful.

If potato soup is old hat or you just feel like something different I sometimes add:

• grated cheese (Gruyere, sharp cheddar or smoked cheeses are lovely)
• some cooked salmon chunks and dill
• freshly chopped chives
• chicken
• sausage
• ham 
• bacon

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Just popping back on to add that I've now received a few other brilliant suggestions for additions:

• sweet corn
• fresh green beans
• crab
• lobster
• clams
• kielbasa
• and my grandmother and mama both did a budget variation with hot dog slices (which sounds totally horrible and my husband A recoils over, but it was totally deluxe to me as a kid)