d'oh!mestic

Hey, look! I finished another quilt, and this time it even has a binding and everything.

I wish that I had a couple of more days to really photograph the heck out of this sucker and take it around to the parents’ and show it off and take it to the Awesome Fabric Shop and show it off, but it’s a baby quilt for a colleague who goes on her leave tomorrow and we’re not close enough for me to do a post-delivery delivery.

Well, I do dawdle.

Tomorrow, I will give the quilt and the Sock Monkey away, which might explain why he looks a little forlorn.

Deets
The fabric is “Five Funky Monkeys” in cream from Moda. The binding and back piece is “Five Funky Monkeys Dots” in brown and red from the same line. Both were designed by Erin Michael. The brown was just plain ol’ brown cotton broadcloth.

Each patch was cut 12″x12″ and the binding was cut at 3″. It took about two weeks of puttering to complete the project. It’s my second quilt ever, and the first with a proper binding, but I may have said that already.

I hope the mama likes it. I’m honestly worried about it.

My job is cyclical.

It goes from being busy to being dead to being JAMPACKEDINSANITY before coasting into another lull. Right now, we’re in a JPI period, and I can tell my stress levels have been jacked by the way my jaw aches from being clenched, by the basketball-sized stress hump that’s popped up between my shoulder blades and by the increase in off-the-clock craftiness.

I admit that I’ve been doing the rounds at lunch — in the last week, I’ve hit the yarn shop, the woefully undercapitalized but wonderful fabric shop and the Fascist Fabric Boutique, all. I bought engineering paper and colored pencils and started sketching, and in the evenings, I’ve been up in the sewing room/photo room, not doing a whole lot outside of pressing fabric.

Oh my god, there is something enormously therapeutic in pressing fabric.

Anyway.

Last night I decided that the kitchen cafe curtain had to go. It was a Pottery Barn 75% refuge from five years ago. It was yellow and brown and kind of ugly.

See?

OOog-lay.

I wanted to replace it with something cheerful, but not perky — or lord forbid, cutesy.

Let’s face it. I straight up wanted skulls.

Oh, look. Skulls!

The Fascist Fabric Boutique came through with this Alexander Henry pattern. It took a half a yard and a half an hour to whip a new curtain, which I like a bit more than the last curtain, though Adam’s still not sold. It’s cheerful. It’s slightly morbid. It . . . still doesn’t go with our ugly tract housing cabinets.

But it’ll do for now.

The cat is sprawled across my lap and spilling onto my keyboard. She’s purring like a motorboat, with her left front leg out in front, paw hovering over the escape key. A travel mug of tea is shoved precariously between my knee and a pillow. The Capt’n’s in his chair, perpendicular to mine, with his laptop open to a car website.

It’s just another mundane Monday night, though “mundane” might be playing things down somewhat — there is a cheesecake in the oven, and how often does that happen on a Monday?

Actually, strike mundane. This is no ordinary Monday night. This is the last night of the George W. Bush administration. This is the night before Barack Obama becomes the combo breaker. Sure, we’re sitting in the living room loafing around, but it feels momentous and important, which could explain the cheesecake.

It has been a long weekend dedicated to eating. Thursday saw the traditional dinner at my parents’ house, with just the family in attendance. We sat around the heirloom dining room table and worked our way through quite the holiday spread and drank one hell of a wine and finished up with pie and conversation. As an adult, Thanksgiving has become, hands down, my most favorite holiday.

Friday found us back at my parents’ house for my second most favorite holiday — Left Over Day! This saw us crowded around the kitchen table digging into the plentiful leftovers before stumbling over to a spot in front of the fire for the second turkey coma in as many days.

And then came today. It’s cold and blustery, but bright. All morning, I’d had my nosed buried in “The Fellowship of the Ring” and damn if those hobbits don’t eat every three pages. By chapter eight, I was ravenous. About all we had in the house was an onion, and I wasn’t quite prepared to go out in the cold and bluster, so I did what any normal person would do. I picked up Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 and dug out the recipe for onion soup.

Look, Julia Child is not going to steer you wrong when it comes to the delicious. She might steer you to a heart attack, but it will be tasty.

The Capt’n sat down at the table and almost wept over the soup. As a child, his father dragged him all around central Europe, and he had fallen in love with onion soup and strudel. Strudel, I haven’t attempted, but the Capt’n claims that if I did, he’d have no reason to go back to Austria, because I nailed the taste memory of the onion soup. “Seriously, this is the best thing you’ve ever made,” he said, and I have to think that the way his eyes glistened when he said it signaled his genuine feelings.

I have to remember this one for later in the winter.

It’s been overcast this weekend, and it finally started to rain this morning, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say I find the dark and slightly dank inspiring, I will tell you that I’ve always liked the way rain-splotched light looks in my kitchen. It’s soft and cool — rare commodities for New Mexican light. Rainy days soften the edges and lend a bit of gentrified glamor. Well, maybe “gentrified” isn’t the right word, but you get my meaning. Nothin’ like a bit of an overcast to give my kitchen and my cupcakes a touch of that Muffin-in-the-Aspirational-Lifestyle-Magazine feel.

These are Devil’s Food jobbies with a banana cream cheese icing. The cake itself is standard — any recipe you dig up for Devil’s Food will do — it’s the icing I’m bragging on. It came out runny, lumpy and tasting like heaven. I’m not quite sure why I haven’t run across this flavor before; it seems like the sort of thing the local cupcake shops would be down with.

And another thing to brag on — this is the first time in the new year that I’ve felt well enough to bake. The Capt’n and I were both felled with a Milwaukeeian Death Cold over the holidays. I went to bed on Christmas feeling kind of stuffy and woke up the day after New Year’s with a chapped nose and no memory of the preceding week, with the exception of one blurred recollection of me standing in the kitchen in mismatched pajamas trying to replicate a hot toddy for the Capt’n, who couldn’t do much past coughing.

Evil, evil virus.

Banana Cream Cheese Icing
8 oz. package of cream cheese
1 stick of butter, softened and cubed
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 ripe banana
3 cups sifted powdered sugar

In a mixer, beat banana until mushy. Add butter, vanilla and cream cheese, and beat until fluffly. Slowly add powdered sugar and beat until smooth. For frosting (rather than dribblely icing) add two to three extra cups of sugar.

The Capt’n's Hot Toddy
In a mug, combine two packets of instant hot apple cider, two tablespoons of honey, several drops of lemon juice, a jigger of rum (optional) and hot water. Stir until everything dissolved and add cinnamon stick. Serve to grateful invalid

I think I might be having an issue with the ginger. Specifically, I’m a touch obsessed. I say this, because when I woke up this morning and saw that it was snowing, I decided — after breaking out the extensive profanities — that I’d make gingerbread cookies.

Actually, I think I said, “Oh, boy! It’s snowing! Now I can make gingerbread cookies!” Which I then envisioned eating with a cup of ginger tea — and then I had trouble deciding which ginger tea, because I’ve amassed several lately.

Problem.

(Oddly enough, my beautiful tin of powdered ginger didn’t make it into the shot)

I used Martha’s gingerbread recipe, because it was at hand, and I have to say it turned out well. As per my MO, I swapped out the black pepper for fire engine red cayenne to bring out the latent heat in the ginger, and really, I could have stood an extra yolk’s worth of moisture (the eggs I used weren’t as large as they could have been), but the cookies rolled out and baked up nicely, so I’m counting this one as a win.

However — and there’s usually that “however,” isn’t there?

When I got to the cutting phase of the recipe, I decided to forgo the usual shapes and just slice rectangles. I was inspired — the color of the gingerbread was an exact match for a paper bag, and while it might sound rather odd to some of my friends, paper bags are very much a part of Christmas in these parts. No New Mexican Christmas is complete without a string of luminarias marching across a snow-covered adobe wall.

( A quick primer on luminarias, or, if you’re from northern New Mexico, farolitos. Same/same.)

So I cut rectangles, and dreamed up an icing scheme.

The icing scheme didn’t quite work out the way I planned. It’s less paperbag-y and more rhombus-y. Sigh. I did figure out — after I had managed to toss the extra icing, mind you — that if I pressed the cookies into raw sugar, I got a lovely, lighted brown effect similar to a luminaria. I smacked my forehead good after that. A quick-thinking genius I am not.

But next time, next time, I will remember to smear the cookies and dip them in sugar, and maybe, if I’m really ambitious, I’ll do a stained glass version with melted butterscotch centers, to give them that lit-from-within feeling of the real thing.

Or not. I’d like to think my obsession has its limits.

(Tomorrow! I’ll do it tomorrow!)

When I was eleven years old, my mom got tired of listening to me beg for treats and chucked (okay, handed) the Joy of Cooking in my general direction and told me to figure it out on my own.

Except, she said it nicely, because my mother is a very nice woman.

Still, at the age of eleven — or maybe I was nine — I was expected to suck it up and do it myself. And on the day I was ushered into the kitchen, I was taught the basic rule of baking: use what you have, and for god’s sake, pay attention to the measurements called for.

I have a vague memory of my mother telling me to pick a recipe by what we had at hand, because she was not going to make a special trip to the store just so I could burn a batch of cookies. I remember that she suggested brownies, because we had everything for them, and I remember how she got down the tin of Hershey’s cocoa powder special and then left me to my own devices, just me and the cookbook and an overwhelming desire to make something good.

And I remember how, spurred on by my initial success and establishing a pattern that still holds later in life, I made brownies every day for weeks afterwards, and even after I had branched out into other treats — oatmeal chocolate chip cookies or pumpkin pies, say — brownies were the old standby, a quick way to pass an hour on an endless Sunday afternoon.

I’m sure that in a parallel universe, this would be the point in the narrative where I would talk about spending my teenaged years in the little kitchen of my childhood, making the transition from pedestrian bake sale fare to elaborate Asian-inspired pastries, thus setting a course for my future glamorous side project of baking and writing about it on the intarwebs. However, in this reality, I didn’t hoard back issues of Bon Appetite, and I’m sorry to say that by the time I finished high school, I had stopped baking completely, and with the end of my baking came the end of my brownies.

I lost the magic. I have lost the magic. In the intervening years since graduation, I haven’t been able to make a single decent batch of brownies.

A couple of times during my college years, I took a crack at making pan, but they’d always come out weird — the cocoa would be off, giving the end product a color more similar to creamed coffee than, y’know, brown, or, if they were brown, it would taste like I’d dangled a single packet of sugar over the mixing bowl. Sometimes the squares would have the consistency of wet cement, or sometimes they’d resemble baked adobe bricks. It didn’t matter how faithfully I followed the recipe, I could not reproduce the earlier successes of my childhood.

I blamed many factors — decrepit rental ovens, faulty memory, altitude — but when I got into this house, my house, and I started baking in earnest, I still could not produce a single batch of edible brownies to save my life. I hate to bring up the Kate Hepburn incident again, but the proof (as it were) is in the pudding. I suck at brownies, which means I fail as an American.

Seriously. In a piece which appeared in the April 11, 2007 edition of The New York Times, Julia Moskin speculates on the decidedly American origins of the simple brownie and its evolution from deflated chocolate cake to a chocolate-heavy soul food and status symbol among hip French pastry chefs and talks about how simple, how easy they are. Why, even a child can make brownies. And hell, any food that a moderately stoned hippie can make (with added, grassy ingredients) can’t be anything but simple, right?

Failed. American.

But there I was this afternoon, hanging about the kitchen, bummed out for other reasons, needing a distraction. I didn’t even know what I was going to make when I started pulling things out of the pantry, it was just whatever came to hand.

What came to hand was fine, unsweetened chocolate, sugar, eggs — the idea started building — pecans, heavy cream, flour, vanilla. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. I started mixing without giving name to what I was making. I just melted the butter and the chocolate, added a little more, beat a few eggs, it needs more sugar. This was baking by feel, something I thought was impossible. It was part muscle memory and part invention. And by god, when the experiment came out of the oven after thirty-five agonizing minutes, I was pleased to say I succeeded.

Sort of. I added a half bag of pecans to the batter, thinking it might liven things up. The Capt’n, who claims not to be partial to brownies, shunned this batch when he discovered the nuts. I’m not sure he’s wrong, either.

Still, it’s a success, and damn it, I’m going to post the recipe.

Almost There Brownies
12 oz. 100% cacao unsweetened baking chocolate (1 1/2 baking bars)
3/4 pound butter
3 eggs
2 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 Tbs baking powder (yeah, I know, but damn it, it’s over a mile up in altitude here)
1 Tbs baking soda
2 Tbs vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 c flour
Pecans (really, really optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

In a heavy duty saucepan, melt chopped up chocolate and butter over medium-low heat. When all the lumps are out, remove from heat and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, beat the three eggs and add in two cups of sugar. Continue beating. Add brown sugar and final 1/2 cup of white sugar. Continue beating. Add the bicarb, baking powder, vanilla and cream, and mix until everything’s combined. Pour in the buttery-chocolate mixture and mix until just incorporated. Add flour and mix throughly. Pour into whatever pan you have at hand and bake for 35ish minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out mostly clean.

This could be revised later, but it kind of made my day.

The secret shame is that I have an affinity for Blueprint, the hipster nesting mag from Martha Stewart Omnimedia. The more secret shame? I tried a recipe from this quarter’s issue, more specifically, the Cauliflower and Roasted Garlic Soup.

Of course, being me, I didn’t bother reading past the ingredients list (and even then, I was sort of just reading the whatfors, and not so much the quantities), so when I got down to making dinner this evening, I discovered I was going to have to improvise my way through.

This is what I did:

Improved Soup-Chowder

Lay three heads’ worth of naked garlic on aluminum foil, and cover in salt, pepper and olive oil. Squinch up the foil to a tight ball and bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes

Meanwhile, slice up an onion and a half a head of cauliflower. Warm up a scant 1/4 cup of olive oil in a deep pot, turn in onions and cook until they’re soft. Add 2/3 cup of dry white wine (I did not pay heed to the “dry” part and used a Muscat) and the cauliflower. Add about six stems of finely minced thyme and cook until the wine’s reduced by about half, or about six minutes. Add 2 1/2 cups chicken stock and a scant 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce. Bring to a simmer and then cover for 20 minutes. When the 20 minutes are up, uncover and let simmer for an additional 15.

When the simmering’s up, add the roasted garlic, and then add 1 cup finely shreded Parmesan cheese and 1 1/2 cup heavy cream. Bring to a simmer, stirring occasionally for another three or four minutes. Serve immediately. Feeds two hungry people

It snowed Thursday night, which prompted me to stomp around the house, muttering compound, multi-hyphenated profanities. I’m not the biggest fan of the snow, and besides, the previous Sunday, it had been 78 degrees and sunny. But there it was. Big fat wet flakes, falling from the sky.

Don’t think that the snow “inspired” me in any way for the next project. Not in the drippy sense of “a toasty project inspired by winter’s first snowfall,” because I like to think of myself as not being that damn slavish to the Seriously Sincere brand of craft porn. Inspiration more came from “It’s cold. We’re going to the ‘rents’ for lunch. They’ve got a fireplace. Marsh-fuckin’-mallows.”

Marshmallows are like my culinary parlor trick. “Watch me pull a marshmallow outta my hat!” The Capt’n — though he claims to be astounded — is more practical. “Why not just buy a pack of Jet Puffs for $2.49? Seems easier.”

But hell, I am a woman of few-ish talents, and homemade marshmallows can be used as a trump card. “Oh, this is a homemade pie.” “This is a homemade cookie.” “Homemade marshmallows, anyone?”

Yes, if pettiness was a sanctioned even, I would be dreaming of Beijing and practicing my homemade graham cracker recipe. Go for that Gold! Metal!

Um, flour.

Anyway. Marshmallows. I follow the Martha Stewart recipe, though this time, circumstances forced a single substitution: when I ran short of corn syrup by a quarter cup (hello, pecan pie), I substituted an 1/8 of a cup of honey and made up the difference with water. It combined with the vanilla to give the mallows a divine taste — better than anything store-bought, believe me.

I also finally found a use for some disposable foil cake tins I’d had for awhile. It only required brushing the sides with vegetable oil, and when it came time to unmold the Cakes o’ Mallow, there wasn’t any problem.

I squeezed about fifty out of the batch and boxed them up in four Glad sandwich meat containers. They stood stacked on my counter like a Leaning Tower of White Fondant, though we took one box to my parents’ for roasting — we didn’t actually roast them. And the Capt’n utilized a few in a cup of hot chocolate, but really, it wasn’t until I was looking at the stacked boxes of finished product that nobody really likes marshmallows around here. I can’t eat them, and, well, the Capt’n prefers store-bought.

I just can’t win sometimes. Damn it. So close.

I have ordered yarn off the intarwebs. I have become one of those people.

It was rationalized thusly:
• I needed it to finish the six socks project
• My local supplier was out
• I honestly wouldn’t have used the left over yarn for this project if I didn’t think I’d had enough in my stash to finish. Obviously, I underestimated.

I still feel kind of dirty.