Dessert First

Ever eat your dessert first?

We didn't do that but I'm writing about dessert first here as it's terribly hard to get excited about green split pea soup, even if the soup is one of our favorites and so yummy loaded with chopped onions, celery, carrots, garlic and potatoes.

What's underneath that whopping spoonful of fresh whipped and slightly sugared cream in the picture above?

That's my leftover pancake batter fried like sopapillas and inside is a slice of fresh pineapple, sugared lightly and macerated for an hour in Kirsch, then coated lightly with really good apricot jam and then dipped in the pancake batter.

And it is good enough to make you want to smack your momma, as a preacher friend of ours used to say.

I got the recipe for Pineapple Fritters from The Happy Table of Eugene Walter.

I found Eugene Walter by way of Pat Conroy who wrote fondly of the Alabama writer.

Eugene Walter was a southern writer of dazzling gifts. He possessed an uncanny ability to make the English language dance the flamenco across the page. He loved great humor, clowns, monkeys, food, and bourbon, in no particular order. He acted in Fellini movies, wrote screenplays, poems, cookbooks, translations, novels, and short stories of rare but complete genius.

I could always trust Pat Conroy's book recommendations and it is one of my sorrows that he left this earth much too soon to recommend more to me. 

I've only read Walter's cookbooks, three of them, but when I pull one out to use a favorite recipe again, once more I find myself reading great chunks of his book and wanting to try many more recipes.

And because of Eugene Walter I stopped shaking pepper that comes out of a can on my food--he called it dead dust--and only use freshly ground black pepper because he said that the volatile oils in freshly ground pepper was good for the digestion.  Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but the vintage pepper shakers in my kitchen still hold black dust only because RH prefers it.

So while the split pea soup and buttered rye bread was delicious last night, knowing that it was to be followed by Pineapple Fritters made with my leftover pancake batter was even better.

I even had it all for lunch today too because I had a very special guest join me--our firstborn son! While it is wonderful to have all four of our children together at one time, it is very special to sometimes have just one of them here.....

                              all to myself!

Never use the dead dust sold as ready-ground pepper. Don't bother. Freshly-ground black pepper has volatile oils which only last about an hour after grinding. This oil is an aid to digestion, a stimulant to appetite...

                                              Eugene Walter in Termite Hall

 
 

 
  

Thinking of Pat Conroy

                                                 [October 26, 1945 to March 4, 2016]

I really liked this man and I'm not alone. I miss him, miss watching for another book he wrote. I came late to them, first meeting him in his cookbook The Pat Conroy Cookbook: The Recipes of My Life and then going on to his novels. 

In A Lowcountry Heart, Reflections On a Writing Life, Pat made me chuckle writing about this cookbook that I love.

We all know what we should eat, what's healthy; I wrote that cookbook for people who were trying to speed up the dying process. If there was a just and merciful God, a dry martini would have one calorie and a bean sprout would have three thousand.

Tell me about it!

I won't go on and on about this beloved author but will close with another quote from the same book because it shows why it's so easy to love this author who didn't seem to have a pretentious bone in his body. He writes about visiting Paris, a city he loved so much.

When Parisians spoke to each other in restaurants and cafés, it sounded to me as though they were passing orchids and roses through their lips. I spoke French like a donkey, and no amount of mimicry or fakery could make any of the French think differently. There was not a French word I could not make potted meat of as it fell to the floor from the meat grinder of my tongue. 

You have to love that.

Every time I make Pat's Roasted Chicken I think of him, or his Swordfish and Pasta Salad, or his Spaghetti Carbonara. 

Or his chicken stock, some of which is in my freezer now. 

I'm thinking of you today, Mr. Conroy.