Oops, Now What

I can't believe I read the whole thing! Yet, since my last post, I have read all of Louise Penny's mystery series. There are 5 all together and after reading the last one first, I hungrily dashed through the other 4. And now it's over. Please, Ms. Penny, please, please, please, write the next one soon.

I was listening to one of them while in bed on the 24th. It was very cold for South Pasadena, I think in the 50's. I kept debating about what I should be doing instead of being warm and listening. Then the reader talked about making split pea soup with a ham bone. That got me out of bed. I was at the counter of the Honey Baked Ham store in no time. I bought the smallest ham they had, honest. It was 11 pounds. For two people. Tsk. To make matters worse, I bought a smoked turkey breast because I started to think about how much I miss turkey. Tsk.

Thank goodness for the freezer. The ham bone, much of the ham and most of the turkey are tucked away for future use. The big plan now is to make red beans and rice for New Years with that ham bone. It's supposed to bring you good luck. And don't we need some of that?

Actually, I've been doing fairly well on the luck side of things. I started jury duty on the 28th and didn't have to go in for the first two days. We'll see if my luck holds for the last two days. I'm not sure how many trials start the day before New Year's Eve and on New Year's Eve. I'm guessing not many, but you never know about those lawyers.

I also found time to finish The Brothers Bulger. I didn't know that Howie Carr was some conservative talk show host from Boston. But I'd already paid the money to him, so I decided that I might as well read it. Not bad, but not very interesting either. I guess it would mean a lot more if you actually lived in Boston. The story takes place from the late 70's to the early 90's. What I learned was that the FBI was terribly corrupt in that area. In order to get rid of the mafia, they turned a blind eye on their Irish snitches. One of those was Whitey Bulger. The other brother was the president of the state senate. I totally believe the part about giving jobs to everybody and their dog and retiring with a huge pension. What I really didn't care for was the run down of every little action the brothers took. Boring.

Not boring was When you are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris. He reads this series of random stories. For once, I'm glad to hear the author speak. He does have a little whiny voice that might be irritating, but it is droll. His observations are hilarious. I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy the last few segments of the book about quiting smoking, but I did. He and his partner move to Tokyo so he can do this. Like all his stories, the main topic is not what the story is about. Or it is, but there are 50 other main topics thrown in. His inability to learn Japanese, Japanese customs, lots of stuff.

When he is in the Japanese class he tries to learn how to obfuscate. The Japanese people are far less direct than Americans, so learning how to say something without really saying it is quite a knack. While reading about this, I kept thinking about the last time I was on jury duty. A couple of Japanese tourists were mugged by a local hoodlum and the police went to Japan to get an ID. The other members of the jury couldn't figure out why the victims didn't say absolutely that the picture they selected was absolutely the doer of the deed. Culturally, it was never going to happen. And I was never going to convince the other jurors of that fact. So maybe it's better that they don't call me in this time.

A Christmas Gift

Let me be the first to admit that I am not a voluntary Christmas celebrant. This is the one bad thing that I will lay at the feet of The Times. For more years than you can imagine I had to work on holidays. This means that Adrian had to be prepared for Santa to show up on any door step where he might find himself. Santa might come days early or late. Poor child must have guessed something was afoot before he could really start believing in the magic.

When I got out from under the yoke (misspelled as yolk. I can't get that image out of my mind, so I thought I'd put it into everyone else's mind) of work, I would spend Christmas with Mom and Dad and then Mom alone. We didn't have any traditions to disrupt (thank you, Times) so we kept them company. I remember one strange Christmas spent on the Queen Mary. Actually, that was pretty interesting, but Mom was becoming a little more unsure of life by that time.

And now it's just the two of us, so we are spending the time in our undecorated apartment doing what we do best, cooking up a storm. And reading. I just got the most wonderful present, a new mystery series. I read the last book in the series first, A Brutal Telling. It is set in a village south of Montreal, just above the Vermont border. The plot is intricate. People are complex. Fabulously written. My only warning is that you should really start at the beginning. I am now reading the first in the series. I have the second waiting on my iPod. The only danger I see here is that I may read them too fast and get to the end of the short series before she plops out a new book. That would be sad because I know I will be sad when that happens. Until then, I will just enjoy an expected Christmas present.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good read.

Four Queens and a King

The province of Provence once had a family with four daughters who became queens of England, France, Sicily and Germany. Four Queens is about their lives and how they came to power. This is also the story of four sisters so you know there is a fair amount of back stabbing and intrigue. Even when you have a favorite sister, there is still the other two to contend with. It's a somewhat dry book, but I learned a lot about the age. Their father and mother kept a very enlightened house, teaching all four girls to read in an age when most boys did not have that advantage. There were troubadours and poets. It's a shame that they had to leave that to live with mean mothers-in-law and political intrigue.

If you bought 4 books Audible gave you $10.00 toward a future purchase. I didn't want to get sucked into spending even more money because if what I was saving, I decided to buy a book that cost less than the $10. The Abominable Man was a nice Swedish police procedural that fit the bill. The protagonist is Martin Beck. I think I worked with him at The Times. Hopefully a different person, because this Beck is a little dour. So I had a good read and still have $.24 to spend. Cool.

I continue to be the never ending baking machine. Never ending to the point that I ran out of flour. Adrian remedied that problem, but in the meantime I'd found this recipe using cake flour. It only uses 1/4 c. + 1 T. so I hardly dented the new box of cake flour. I found the recipe on a blog called Chocolate Shavings (ourchocolateshavings.blogspot.com). I have no idea how I found that, but these are amazingly good. We did not have them with the ganache so ours were much healthier.

As soon as I got these out of the oven, Adrian made a deep dish pizza from scratch. He is amazing. I don't like deep dish pizza, but I loved this. I did get a picture, but haven't down loaded it yet. Next time he visits you, be sure to ask him to fix this. He is definitely the king in this story.

Chocolate Pear Cakes
Serves 2

1/2 stick of butter
2 tablespoons of lightly packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
1/4 cup + 1 tablespoon of cake flour
1 good pinch of kosher salt
1 tablespoon of cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon of baking powder
1 tablespoon of milk
2 pears

Preheat your oven to 350F. Add the softened butter and sugar to a medium-size mixing bowl. Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy (about 3 minutes). Add the egg and beat until just incorporated. Using a small whisk, whisk in the vanilla extract. In a separate bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, salt and cocoa powder. Add the flour mixture to the butter batter in small batches, whisking the mixture until homogeneous. Whisk in the milk.

Peel the pears making sure to leave the steam intact. Using a small knife or melon baller, carefully scoop out the core of the pear leaving the pear intact. Ladle the batter evenly into 2 individual ramekins. Form a well in the middle of the batter with the back of a spoon and place the pear inside the well. Gently press down so that the batter settles around the pear.

Bake for 20 minutes or until the top of the batter is set. The inside of the batter will be gooey so the toothpick test will not be a good indication here. Let the cakes cool and serve with chocolate ganache.

Butternut Carrot Soup

Adrian teases me that I buy butternut squashes and then forget about them. That can be said of a lot of the beautiful vegetables I have seen at the farmers' market. I try hard to remember them all and cook them. But a squash and some carrots have been lingering, so I made a wonderful soup with them. You could substitute any type of onion or seasoning. This is just what I used.

Cut the butternut squash in half from top to bottom, take out seeds. I baked that at 375 for about 30 minutes. Just bake until soft while you are doing the rest of the stuff.

One bunch new onions (they look like pregnant large scallions), diced to part way up the greens. Saute in a bit of olive oil, don't brown.

3 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed. Throw into the pot with the onions.

7-8 medium to small carrots, peeled and cut into large chunks. This was just part of a beautiful bunch of little carrots. Adrian bought regular ones from the store and they look big next to these beauties. Throw these into the pot with the onions and garlic.

1tsp dried thyme. I got a bag from Penzey spices. Lovely thyme. Threw that into the onion pot as well. Grated pepper in as well. You can add more pepper when you taste for saltiness at the end.

1 carton of low sodium chicken broth. Could be vegetable because there is no other animal in this soup. Added that to the pot.

3 inch piece of fresh ginger. I grated that while the carrots were getting soft. What a tedious task. The only thing tedious about this soup, but the fresh ginger is what makes the soup.

Peel the baked squash and throw into the pot. Add the fresh ginger. Use an immersion blender to make this mixture smooth.

Juice of 2 mandarin oranges. Actually I would have liked the juice and peel of one or two regular oranges, but I didn't have them and the Cutie mandarins that I got at Trader Joes needed to be consumed.

Fabulous. Adrian ate two bowls of it. Laughed when he said it was a little textureless for his taste. I think to remedy that you could put croutons or roasted pumpkin seeds on it. He laughed because he complains that my usual thrown together soups are more like stews because there is too little broth. But there are a heck of a lot of different textures. Can't win them all.

Today I'm baking more cookies. These are chocolate cake cookies with left over macadamia nuts, chocolate chips and peanut butter chips. Num. Throwing them in the freezer as soon as they cool. Adrian says they are too cakey, but I think all the women at his gaming party next week end will love them. Uuummmm chocolate. Homer should try these.

It's Autumn!

It must be autumn. It is in the 50's, the trees finally have a reason to change color and drop leaves. It is so hard to be a tree in Southern California, you never know what you should be doing.

I finally know what I'm doing. I went to the tree trimming party on Monday with several dozens of cookies. Everyone liked them, so that was good. I baked one batch this week of fresh ginger cookies with cocoa and chocolate hunks. I threw in macadamia nuts because I had them and had lost the recipe that uses them. Punt.

Dined with a few friends during the week, Dan and his wife Karen on Thursday, then breakfast with Maggie on Friday. Man, I've gotten to be such an old lady. Adrian and I eat dinner early, about 5:30 - 6:00. Dan wanted dinner at 8:00 on Thursday. Somehow I brought out my young self and survived. The cookies I baked on Thursday were for Maggie and Ernie. I'm not sure if Ernie got any. I know Adrian's friend Emily didn't get any. Those I didn't give Maggie were consumed in no time. Which makes me think I should probably stop baking for a while.

It started raining late Friday and continued through the farmers' market on Saturday morning. For once I got to sleep in late because I knew the parking lot wouldn't be jammed an hour before opening. It was worth going. Dungeness crab is in season. I bought a big one and some salmon. And I made sure to thank every vendor as I shopped. It would have been horrible to show up and have them all tucked in their beds. One vendor and I marveled at the abundance of the market. We still have grapes, berries and tomatoes. I think the tomatoes are grown hydroponically, so it isn't really weather centered. We are very lucky to live near this wonderful market. This book, Madness Under the Royal Palms, is about people who think they are lucky to live in Palm Beach, Florida. Boy, what a hive of sickies. Or maybe it was the author who brought the sickness. Leamer is famous for his books about the Kennedys. I get the feeling that he is fascinated with wealth. The folks in Palm Beach have it. They don't like poor folk, they don't like Jews, they don't like gay couples. They do like young women if they are old men, they do like gay men to escort divorced older women, they do like to leave a huge carbon footprint.

I like South Pasadena.
Let The Great World Spin is mostly about the time when that French guy walked a wire between the World Trade Center towers. It tells a series of stories about an Irish priest-like person and his brother, a prostitute and her daughter, a judge and his wife, among other stories. They weave together with the story of the wire walker. This book won the National Book Award for fiction this year. I liked it. I always like stories that interlink in interesting ways. It was also very evocative of that time when the man walked, a war raged and a president resigned. It's a good book.

Aah, Oops

I went early to the Elf event last night and listened to the end of a book while I waited for the hour to arrive. As I was waiting, I got a call from my brother, Jeff. My overjoyed, besotted brother Jeff. Seems he is now a grandfather of this most adorable bundle, Aydin.

My dear nephew, Bill, is his father. Aren't they sweet together? Jeff says that Bill tweeted updates of the birth throughout Sunday. Aydin arrived three weeks early. That might be a worry, but he is well over 6 pounds and has all appendages in tact. He also has his priorities in tact.

His Aunt Cathie and Uncle Tyler were in town for Thanksgiving from Ohio. Three weeks later and they would have missed out on all the fun. All this came out in the joyful phone call I received from Jeff. As I sat in my car in front of my friend's house. One week early for the party that will take place next Monday.

But here's my thought on that. If I hadn't been sitting there, I'd have been in my house, fooling around with my computer. I would have gotten the news from Cathie's lovely email and blog. I would have missed the unraveling of the story from Jeff. Not all mistakes are bad things.