What Was Cooking on New Year's Day?

While some of the menu for New Year's Day at our house may change from year to year, there are always collards in the pot and black-eyed peas. 

But before I get to that meal, let me wish everyone a very happy and healthy 2019! It is so very kind of you to visit here at this odd little duck of a blog where I am the only one quacking away. 

While I love blogging at Dewena's Window where friends drop by to carry on two-way conversations, Across the Way is a place where I can write more often of the little moments in my life that I don't want to let slip away.  

So thank you so much for continuing to come here to Across the Way! I hope that your New Year's Eve was pleasant and that 2019 presents you with opportunities for meaningful work and relationships and growth of spirit.

RH and I enjoyed a quiet New Year's Eve at home with BreeBree and James Mason and had one of the most comforting soups in my repertoire for an early supper, Cook's Illustrated Farmhouse Vegetable & Barley Soup.

Recipe here! I tried to link directly to the magazine's recipe that I use but evidently you have to be a member to do that and who needs another password to keep up with, right? But I found the same recipe that you can print out. 

On New Year's Day morning, RH started cooking pork chops in his favorite black iron skillet. 

With it we allowed ourselves a special treat that before we've only made when family was with us, Silver Palates Fabulous Croissant French Toast. I found a recipe link for you that the Chicago Tribune had for it in a column they did back in 1985, here.

I'd been saving these croissants that were on sale at the deli after Christmas. I gathered my ingredients while RH was cooking the pork chops.

Why two bowls? One recipe with lactose free milk for RH and half and half for me in the other one--Publix was out of heavy cream the day after Christmas but this was almost as good. And I was out of Triple Sec but substituted Chambord instead.

I set the table with two plates from a stack of old restaurant china I have, The Clock restaurant.

Breakfast was so good! Then we started cooking for an early supper, RH washing the collards and doing the tedious job of cutting the heavy part of the stem out of each leaf while I started the bacon cooking and the onions after the bacon came out of the pan. 

I don't use the hog jowls that most people do here in the South when cooking collards. It was only when I first tried Gourmet magazine's recipe for collards (here) that I discovered I loved collards.

I'd soaked the black-eyed peas overnight and got them going next and then got the small pork loin ready to roast.

I use a recipe from my old Southern Sideboards cookbook for that, a favorite with the excellent introduction by Wyatt Cooper, Anderson Cooper's father.

This is a Junior League cookbook and those are always good. My copy is falling apart, I've used it so much for decades. During this year's holiday season I've made three or four recipes from it. I do add some Boar's Head sauerkraut to this dish the last half hour of cooking.

This was more cooking than I usually do for just the two of us but New Year's Day is special. And it was one of those cloudy days where it was fun to be in the kitchen for hours. And I had this beautiful amaryllis 'Caprice' from White Flower Farm to keep me company. There are four blooms open now but yesterday the first two opened.

Here's a closeup. Red amaryllis are my favorite, double ones at that, but we forgot to bring them in before frost so I was in the mood for a pink one for my kitchen, in the silver golf trophy bucket with moss from our yard tucked around the base.

I sat down to rest after everything was cooking and the dishwasher loaded and caught up with some blog friends. RH got some much needed relaxing done while watching marathon Firefly episodes on television in between checking on his favorite football games.

At last our first supper of 2019 was ready and we sat down to the table and gave thanks for the meal and the blessing of living in our cozy house on Home Hill.

We know not what the future holds in 2019 but we know that the Heavenly Father will be there with us every day and night. And I am always like a child looking forward to Christmas morning on New Year's Day. I am expectantly watching for the gifts that each day will bring.

As Abbie Graham writes about the gifts of a new year, I will watch for "the gift of hours and far-seeing moments, the gift of mornings and evenings, the gift of spring and summer, the gift of autumn and winter."

Happy New Year dear family and friends!

Fallen Into Disgrace

And take biscuits--biscuits had fallen into disgrace right along with cake. Would anybody eat a biscuit anymore? No way, not on your life. Too fattening! Too much cholesterol! All that white flour! All that shortening! On and on, 'til you could keel over and croak. She'd been born in the wrong century.

Jan Karon's Esther Bolick in

In This Mountain

I share your pain, Esther. I thought about you while I was basting my buttermilk biscuits with more buttermilk before popping them into the oven. 

I know you did finally keel over and croak, Esther, many books later, but I blame that on all those orange marmalade cakes you baked over the years, not the much maligned biscuit. 

After all, my mama baked them her whole life and she's in her 90s now, and she basically used the same recipe I still use, found here.

Sometime I might write a post over on Dewena's Window about my two months of cooking from the pantry...

fridge and freezer...

supplemented with cornbread...

and gifts from our mini-garden...

and generous garden gifts from a brother-in-law...

(our 4th bag of fresh cut okra that gave us many dinners of fried okra...)

(and fried okra salad...)

(and Okra Creole)

And mighty good eating it all was, still...

When I finally was making up a grocery list this weekend, what did RH and I both crave?

Ham and Biscuits!

And was it ever good for Sunday dinner!

(Ham recipe here.)

I figure that big ham will give us many suppers and breakfasts, with a ham bone left for another big pot of pinto beans. 

[yes, I like ham the color of red mahogany,

just like Frances Gray Patton here]

And there's leftover buttermilk so I'm thinking of James Beard's Buttermilk Basil Bread and maybe the sweet tea buttermilk pie that looks amazing on the current cover of Garden & Gun magazine.

Now I need to figure out what to do with odds and ends of things left in the pantry. What can I do with a can of condensed milk, a can of cherry pie filling, a box of cake flour, more sardines, and a jar of orzo?

I'll google it.

Pork Thoughts

I'm beginning to have a slightly uncomfortable relationship with pork on my menu.

I've always liked pork: pork chops, ham, good country sausage, and oh my goodness, bacon.

I can hardly get scrambled eggs down without a bite of bacon for every bite of egg. And then there's that delicacy of pork, the tenderloin. Marinated, roasted and then sliced and stuffed in my homemade buttermilk biscuits and served with stone ground grits and a salad is a family favorite, with leftover stuffed biscuits frozen for quick breakfasts. Can't be beat.

But lately pork has just not appealed to me. And beef hasn't been far behind. Actually, I don't even crave chicken, never have. I don't think I have ever once ordered chicken when eating out. It's always seafood or fish, or a filet if we're in a steak place. Unless it's a Krystal hamburger, a food group of its own.

I recently bought two pork tenderloins packed together in a pack where normally I only buy one small one. It was on sale. I tried a recipe out of Elizabeth Bard's book Lunch in Paris: A Love Story with Recipes, Pork Tenderloin with Apples. I marinated it overnight in garlic cloves, thyme, rosemary, apple citer vinegar, red wine and olive oil.

After drying the meat well and browning it all over in butter and olive oil, I put them on a platter and sautéd apple quarters and shallots, put the meat back in the pan and added a cup of apple juice as I didn't have the hard cider Bard called for.

And I added a lot of yellow fennel flowers because I read somewhere, can't remember where, that pork and apples love the addition of fennel flowers. 

[8/20/18: found it! Frances Mayes in Everyday in Tuscany said to scatter yellow fennel flowers in pork dishes and apple dishes because "They dance to the same tune." I love that!]

After the pork finished roasting in the oven, I put all the solid pieces on a platter, covered it with foil, then added a couple of tablespoons of brandy to the pan juices. I didn't have the Calvados the author called for. I adore Calvados, used to buy a new bottle every fall to use for my white fruitcakes, but then the stuff went to over $80. Even my brandy was from the tiny bottles Santa Claus puts in my Christmas stocking so no way was I going to put out $80 for a pork dish.

That reduced sauce was out of this world! I put it in an old USA creamer that was from RH's mother's dishes and then added a sprig of fennel flowers for garnish to the platter.

It was all excellent, it really was, the meat flavorful and tender and the apples like the very best homemade applesauce. But I couldn't face eating much of it or the leftovers.

Maybe because it's summer? Maybe I'll crave pork chops when frost comes just like I'll crave chili when we have the first really cold spell? 

Could it be because of this recent Goodwill picture coming home with me? Surely not. I jokingly told this cute little family that I loved them but it didn't mean that I was going to stop eating bacon.

Right underneath them were photographs of my father, a man who knew how to grill the best pork, beef and chicken ever, and my mother's father who had his own butcher shop. I reminded my new little Oink Family that I was from carnivorous lineage.

They didn't give me the evil eye, I don't think. The little shoats kept on frolicking, Mama Sow didn't get up from the mud she wallowed in and Papa kept on watching over the whole pig sty.

I've grown to love their black spots and their curly little tails.

Does this mean I won't ever again eat ham or country sausage--or bacon? Probably not.

My pork philosophy is that hogs are food for man just as cattle and chickens are. I think I'm just not as comfortable eating it the way I always have, bought at the average supermarket. Not when I keep seeing stories about how resistant these chains are to committing to the Gap Animal Partnership (GAP) standards that stores like Whole Foods are adhering to. 

Even better would be knowing that pigs and cattle and chickens had had a decent life before becoming my dinner.

Richardson Wright, editor of House & Garden for decades, wrote this in one of my favorite books, Gardeners Bed-Book, back during the Depression:

When they first arrive, I delight in their cute tricks, their squealing and running around the sty. Through the summer, I rejoice in their sensuous mud-wallowing. With Autumn my thoughts turn to size and weight. Their ration includes Corn, with an occasional bucket of windfall Apples for dessert. Soon we shall start feeding them Peanuts as they do in Virginia, to add (so I hold the childish faith) a nutty flavor to the meat. Like condemned men awaiting execution, they are given a rich and abundant cuisine.

Yep, I guess I am a little hardhearted like Mr. Wright was. Pigs are for meat, even for me, depending on how fond I might become of the future grandpig I keep hearing I might have someday. 

I don't really have a fight with their purpose. I do have a big fight with how they are mass produced and crammed into cages while awaiting my dinner table. 

My father grew up on a farm that his father sharecropped. He and his six brothers and sisters worked hard to help their parents feed the family. They ate seasonally from what they grew or produced, bought very little in a store. When something was finished for the year, it was gone except for what my grandmother and aunts had preserved and canned.

When cold weather came in November it was hog butchering time. My father, being the youngest, didn't help with the actual butchering. But he did help his mother render the lard. He told me: "That's where the cracklins came from. Mama wouldn't have what she called compound shortening (Crisco) in the house. The best cornbread was when we had cracklins in it."

 His family didn't even get to keep all the pork they ended up with. They sold the hams. They kept the shoulders, made sausage and then canned jars of it, covered with grease. It was spiced plentifully with Grandma's dried hot peppers.

I imagine everything but the oink was put to use. I remember seeing my father eating pickled pigs feet out of a glass jar when I was a child so I know his mother must have pickled the trotters. 

The real treat of hog butchering day was the tenderloin. My grandmother cooked that fresh that very day, according to my father. Maybe she had it with homemade buttermilk biscuits. If so, that was probably one fine meal.

That tenderloin that my father and his siblings ate that day was a cut they called "hog killing meat." That's realism for you.

Farmers are tough. Most don't keep pigs for pets. You can tell that from this family photograph that I call our Grapes of Wrath family portrait. My father is the young teenager in overalls standing up behind the others.

I probably won't stop eating pork but I would like to have it only occasionally and then only from a store that adheres to the Global Animal Partnership. 

Here is a link to more information about that.

Perhaps by the time my granddaughters grow up and have their own families there will be enough stores participating in this that large chain stores will have to comply too, which means that producers will be forced to comply.

I'm not asking for pork to be eliminated from the national diet. I just wish that the pigs could have a decent life before they become pork for the table. 

Breakfast for One

Visions of being the Beaver's mom rise up to make me feel guilty once again.....a perfectly set breakfast table,
                                                     for two.

Scrumptious weekend breakfasts I usually manage,
sometimes a blogworthy breakfast table......though usually
something like our vitamins and daily pills lurk,
                                                    unnoticed.

Weekday breakfasts? A pretty table for two? 
                                                   Get real.

Both of us sitting down together at the same time? 
                                                    Not likely.

Both of us eating the same menu? 
                                                  
His quick cooked oatmeal or fried baloney sandwich?
               Gag to the second and where oatmeal is concerned,
I am most particular...steel cut oats sautéd in butter and at last boiling water stirred in, cooked at least 20 minutes,
cinnamon, chopped dried apricots and walnuts added...
                                                     That's oatmeal.

For breakfasts I last longer when an egg is on my plate,
the egg sandwich Mama used to make me at the very least.

But my weekday breakfast indulgence happens when RH leaves me a sausage patty from his early breakfast...
                             from locally made Jake's country sausage.

A toasted sourdough English muffin from the Publix deli,
          the sausage on top,
                      a scrambled egg next,
                              a smear of mashed avocado
                                  topped with chopped jalapeno.

A side of fresh pineapple, please.

Breakfast for one, on the sofa, dogs sitting by me...
                                                   hoping a crumb will drop.

TV remote in my hand, no cable news, no news at all,
              no talk shows.

HGTV on, something I can walk away from shortly and
                        not become mesmerized, hypnotized,
                               energy zapped...
                                         temper rising.

That's a perfect weekday breakfast for me.

What about you?

Join me in your jammies and tell me

what your perfect breakfast for one is.

Please. Pretty please with sugar on it?

"My wife and I tried two or three times in the last

forty years to have breakfast together,

but it was so disagreeable we had to stop."

Winston Churchill