December Food Therapy, Blog Therapy

 

My last post here was in October. It's now three hours until midnight on New Year's Eve and I'm squeezing in one post of 2024 that is basically one more post on blog therapy, food therapy. 

I'm turning off comments here because I'm linking to my post at my other blog, Dewena's Window, where I wrote the story of our losing our dear dachshund James Mason, not bearing to go through it all again here. And not to ask for comments here.

In other words, this is just a short food therapy/blog therapy post as I wrote about in October.

Christmas Eve was spaghetti, salad and french bread, comfort food that needs no recipe, made for decades but hopefully improved over time.

Christmas Morn Breakfast, RH version--my standby buttermilk waffles, an egg and country sausage.

Christmas Morn Breakfast, Dewena version, country sausage, my buttermilk waffles to which I've added James Beard's ingredients for Spiced Waffles:

1 scant teaspoon cinnamon

1/3 teaspoon allspice

sprinkle of freshly grated nutmeg

plus 3 tablespoons sugar, which I left out

a good sprinkle of golden raisins, my idea

Delicious.

Pardon My Therapy

 

Two posts in one day? I don't think I've ever done that but this is mainly a blatant attempt not to let some of my October 2024 pictures go to waste. Food pictures, at least. I'll forget about all the garden pictures I took this summer and fall.

Apologetically, I admit it is also an attempt to make time for the creative outlet of blogging. I don't have time to blog because I am so slow at just doing the basics of living these days but I think I really need to create something other than trying to check off my to do list and scribbling away at night on six books that will never be published.

And so, as self-help therapy, here is an October breakfast.

Scrambled eggs with fresh dill from my kitchen porch, cheese grits with jalapeño from the porch pots and lime juice, toasted cream biscuits made two days before--I had extra cream left in the fridge and tried this recipe for the first time. My son said they were almost like a cookie--our son in the first picture with his two darling daughters at a Daddy-Daughter Dance. Won't be replacing my buttermilk biscuit recipe but they were interesting.

Beer-braised Roast Beef from an old Bon Appetit recipe, found here at an old post at my other blog. at https://dewenaswindow.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-perfect-day-for.html. 

There was homemade mashed potatoes, for once not microwave ones, and broccoli Julia Child, Vol. 1. Basically reducing lemon juice till thickened then whisking in butter a tablespoon at a time, S & P. 

Leftover meat and gravy from this roast makes the very best vegetable-beef soup.

And there was the Chicken Tetrazzini I made one day.

Served on my wedding china for our 63rd anniversary. I've made hundreds of this casserole over the decades and it's a family favorite with two of our sons. I even used cream this time but RH and I finished our meal and decided to call our firstborn and see if he wanted the rest of it. He came and got it and they declared it wonderful. This is the story of so many of our old favorite meals; we just don't like them anymore. The sad thing about this is that with no leftovers I had to cook again the next night. 

There was Guinness extra stout in the roast beef and also in the dessert for this meal--brownies! Very good recipe from Yankee magazine but I couldn't find a link. 

 

And then there was this delicious Spice Applesauce Cake with Brown Sugar Frosting in one of my Lee Bailey cookbooks. RH took some of it to his brother and we gave more to our son and this was left for us. We had a slice every night until the last crumb was gone. 

In Alexandra Stoddard's The Art of the Possible she talks about Dr. Richard Totman's idea of a "blocked action." Stoddard says "whenever we become stuck...an overwhelming sense of hopelessness takes over. When we are unable to initiate and carry through activities that express our aliveness, it causes stress. This stress then upsets our chemical balance, weakening the immune system. It is not how much life stress we have, but how we manage it that determines our health."

Something to think about as part of my therapy.

What I should be doing is not always what I do.

 I should be doing so many things right now other than an admittedly boring food blogpost. I set out ingredients earlier to bake cookies but haven't started yet. Instead, I started changing things around in my kitchen and then my bedroom and then the dining area of our great room. 

And then I came to a stopping point, needing RH to come home and help me with some of the heavy stuff--a large picture to move from the dining area to my bedroom, the upper open shelf in the kitchen for him to clean and move things around on like I had done the lower shelf. There are things sitting on my counters, the dining table has hammer, nails, dust cloths and polish sitting on it and a few final Christmas things I took down and need to be stored, the laundry  basket sitting in a chair by the dining table waiting for the table to be cleared so I can fold white things, the vacumn pulled out on the floor for him to use it on the top of a large armoir, a stepladder waiting for him to climb. And now he's home and wants to wait until tomorrow for his honey-do list. 

So I'm sitting down to rest and wanting to change a blog post here at Across the Way that has not been changed since December 9, that's December 9. 

And everything I wanted to blog on requires this little thing or that little thing to finish up first. So I am going to dump on my poor few readers one of the many food posts that I never got around to posting. And it's a ham based menu at that, Ham, on readers who include vegetarians and people who probably never fix ham because they always blog such beautiful healthy meals. 

All I can say is, please, please, please don't feel as if you have to comment, not even my faithful few who still come here. You are totally excused! This is just for my own family because we love ham. Or at least some of us do. About every three months RH buys one at Costco and we have ham and vegetables, and ham and eggs for breakfast, and ham sandwiches, and the ham bone goes in the freezer for flavoring dried beans.

And then the last scraps of ham go into a ham and potato casserole. And it is delicious!

I don't have a written down recipe but I cook the potatoes first in a pot till tender and slice them and it has sliced onions and milk and cheese and pepper and whatnot in it.

I serve braised cabbage with it.

And this particular time I had cranberry sauce in the fridge.

And that small bowl to the left was Silver Palate's Pineapple Bake, a bread pudding that is so good with ham.

Here's a link I found to the recipe that shows how simple the recipe is.

And I might as well include the recipe from Food & Wine that I use for ham broth that I make from the ham bone to flavor dried beans. Maybe you can read it if you're interested.

It's kind of fun to make, just as is any stock. At least I always feel thrifty and housewifely when I make my own stock. 

Now if tomorrow I can finish up all those little projects I started today. Anyone else ever do that? Oh I forgot, you're not supposed to leave a comment on this one!

Peppers, Mainly

I love peppers. Other than the onion family, they may be my favorite vegetable. This year we grew Serrano, Jalapeño, Cayenne, Super Chili, and Anaheim (my favorite), and Tabasco peppers. 

The day before our first freeze was predicted RH cut all the Tabasco peppers, one pepper I hadn't used all summer, saving them for hot pepper sauce.

I save pretty glass bottles that are perfect for hot vinegars that enhance pots of pinto beans or collard greens all winter.

This is the easy kind of preserving that is all I do anymore. No more chili sauce, corn relish, pepper relish, pickled peaches, and every kind of jam and jelly that I made as a younger homemaker.

Here's a picture of my mother who keeps me company in the kitchen, the expert chili sauce maker. I especially love this picture that was used at her celebration of life service the week before everything shut down in 2020. I was sitting by her when the picture was taken, our arms around each other, and I think about that when I cook.

Dewena was her middle name, as it is mine.

I stepped out on the kitchen porch later that day to cut the rest of peppers and some herbs for Bolognese sauce for supper.

Our little cayenne plant remained small all summer, not producing enough peppers to string and hang in the kitchen.

I'm wondering if I can just store them in a glass jar after they all dry? 

Look what RH brought in from a friend later that day. Wow, the mother lode of peppers! Perfect for stuffed peppers!

It was also a day for bringing in a few houseplants and I asked RH to bring in my favorite outdoor pot with three shade plants that was still so pretty. I picked them out with birthday money early summer, two different tiny ferns and the tall plant I can't remember the name of. Will they survive in the house? 

I also cut a few blooms from the Mandeville vine I bought with my birthday money.

This was our first time to buy this plant and it rewarded us with blooms all summer long in the garden.

I wish I could have brought the whole vine in for winter. Naturally after the hard freeze we were back to beautiful days. 

Perhaps we'll even have a Tender Tennessee Thanksgiving. 

What's it looking like where you live?

P.S. Here's the Bolognese sauce cooking away!

(This little plaque was in my mother's kitchen! Wish I knew it's history. Maybe my sisters remember?)

Dumping some pictures of my winter meals on my blog.

Spring is here, which means Tennessee weather can't make up its mind. Three nights of hard freeze means the buds on our one lilac bush are freezer burned and probably the crabapple trees out front.

It seemed a good idea to cut some of the beautiful spring bulbs before 17 degree lows arrived. 

 

I wish so much that I had our daughter's talent for arranging beautiful vase bouquets but I usually just plonk them in. These went right on the dining table where  we can enjoy them at meals and on the bathroom sink in the old Jersey Farms milk bottle that has held my bathroom bouquets for decades.

Now that I've shown some pretties I'll slip in this one of raw New York strip steaks because I have a whole winter of meals I took pictures of and never got around to using. My apologies to my vegetarian friends!

I fix less and less beef these days but twice this winter Publix had their Greenwise strip steaks on sale and this is my simple way of prepping them, whether cooked inside in a black skillet or if RH grills them out. I salt and pepper them, rub with brown sugar and leave them uncovered in fridge on an old enamel pan for 24 hours.

The steaks always have to have mushrooms (Shitake are my favorite) and this time I remembered to get a log of my tarragon butter out of the freezer to top them with.

And yes we both like it medium well now. When we were first married I would order steak rare and love every bloody bite. I don't know what happened. And I always try to have fresh parsley simply because I learned years ago from James Beard that mushrooms need to be topped with acres of fresh parsley.

And I try to remember to drizzle on a little of this balsamic reduction sauce that is wonderful on so many things, just a little sugar stirred into balsamic vinegar and cook till reduced. I don't use my expensive balsamic for this.

My life is becoming all about simple meals now so if we have hot bread with steak we don't have potatoes, and vice versa.

 

But there always has to be a salad. (I love the taste that a little bit of heavy cream gives when stirred into a vinaigrette.)

That is, unless there's fresh asparagus and Mama is too tired to make a salad. (And if there's no fresh parsley on hand, oh I miss my big summer pots of herbs on my kitchen porch!)

 Most of the time RH and I both leave enough steak on our plates to make hash for an easy supper the next night.

With enough potatoes and onions and all the leftover mushrooms and drippings from the steak pan the night before (the tails, Tamar Adler calls these little spoonfuls left in the pan), it doesn't take much meat to make a good meal for two. 

But always a salad, even a thrown together one.

By the way, have you ever tried Stonewall Kitchen's Country Ketchup? It is so good and no high fructose corn syrup in it.

Most of our meals though are either chicken or fish/seafood. Pacific Wild caught sockeye salmon is almost always in my freezer, from Costco, and I have a dozen ways of fixing it. This looks like one of my easy ones.

You probably can't see much of it in the picture above but I'm using my Wallace LaReine wedding silver there after hearing on a food podcast that a study showed that when people ate their meals with heavy silver they enjoyed their meal more. So maybe we should use our good stuff for our everyday meals, right? I keep a place setting for two on an easy to grab shelf in my china cabinet now--not that I always remember to get them out.

Here's one of my favorite recipes, Shrimp with Scallions and Orzo.

It may not look very pretty because a food stylist I'm not, but it is delicious. Here's a link to the recipe. 

And here's what I add to Bon Appetit's recipe:

a tablespoon of soy sauce

a bottle of clam juice

fresh chopped cilantro 

red pepper flakes

a teaspoon of tumeric

a little vegetable broth to make it a little more risotto like

and lemon to squeeze over it

It's so good cold the next day for lunch too!

You can tell how exciting my life is now when I dump a bunch of meal pictures on my blog with no real story to go with them so thank you to anyone who read through this.

Actually, I have a bunch more. About a half dozen of Tieghan's Half Baked Harvest recipes that I've made this winter. Maybe I'll share them at Dewena's Window soon. 

Many thanks to blog friend Melanie for leading me to Tieghan on Instagram! Melanie, have you listened to The Skinny Confidential podcast where Tieghan was guest? She was delightful! When I learned that she's a Gilmore Girls fan I knew we had one thing in common. That's a start, right?