d'oh!mestic

The Capt’n asked that, maybe, if I could get around to it, could I possibly knit him a hat? For Christmas?

Well, that was a big ol’ “heck, yeah.”

I dug out a skein of Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk out of the stash basket last night and went to town. It knit up fast — I had it finished within six hours of of casting on, and the pattern will follow at the end of the post. (I also want to note that I have joined Ravelry, in case you want to skip all the opinions and recipes offered here, and just look at my projects. I have the same name — dohmestic– and all of my patterns will be cross-posted there.)

It was a big ol’ weekend in D’oh!Mestic land, all the way around. There was the gingerbread of last post, more ginger cookies, (because, as I might have mentioned, I am a touch obsessed with the ginger), truffles (more on those goodies later this week) and bagels, because the Capt’n and I both forgot to pick up any sort of bread product at the grocery store.

And the hat. The hat. The hat that I swore would be the last Christmas item I knit, the hat was finished and now I’m working on a pair of gloves. God, I am a sucker for punishment.

I’d say it was an ultra productive several days. We had dinner at my parents’ house this evening, and as I was half-bragging about what I got done, I started listing off what I have on tap after I finish the Christmas presents — gloves on commission for a co-worker, a hat for a co-worker, socks for myself — when the Capt’n asked if I’d considered setting up an Etsy store.

The short answer is yes — a D’oh!Mestic Etsy store will probably come about in the New Year. When in the New Year is up for debate, but I will probably start knitting with an eye towards stocking a shop. But if I could figure out how to ship off the goodies as well, that would be gravy.

Anyone have any advice?

The Capt’n's Christmas Hat
Cast on 96 stitches on size 6 DPNs. Divide evenly, careful not to twist
K2 P2 for 12 rounds
K until piece measures about 6″ from edge

Shaping the crown:
Shape the crown:

Slip last stitch off of needle three and onto needle one.
K2tg, K6 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.

Knit round

Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K5 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.

Knit round

Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K4 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.

Knit round

Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K3 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.

Knit round

Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K2 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.

Knit round

Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K1 to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.

Knit round

Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K2tg to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.

Knit round

Slip last stitch from needle three onto needle one.
K2tg, K2tg to end, slipping last stitch to next needle.

Break yarn and thread through remaining six stitches.

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.

“So then, I like to take a haaaaaaaaaaalv cup of suggggggggah and mix it with a haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalv cup of achingly sweet golden syyyyyyyyrip shining like Rapunzle’s hair after she had a day at the spa, and then because I like it so much, I do it again.”

“Please stop. I can’t take Nigella in my kitchen.”

“Now, usually when I’m making this southern favorite, I like to add just a little bit of rum, just about two tablespoons, but this pie is going to a party where some of the guests don’t drink, so I’ll substitute an exquisite –”

“No. Seriously. Not the vanilla.”

“Ex-quisite Mexican vanilla.”

“Oh, for the love of God.”

“Mmmmm, the aroma of this vanilla speaks of the mysteries of Central America, where they’re not afraid of spices and all the women are beautiful.”

“Please. Stop.”

“And where the men all speak the one language we need to know, and that’s the international language of amore.”

“You suck.”

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.

Growing up, chicken pie was a regular Sunday night dinner. It was one of my very favorites, but rather labor-intensive, which is probably why Mum saved it for the weekends and special occasions like my birthday or the fall of communism.

Later, when I was living on my own, I asked her for the recipe, but because it involved canned mushrooms (and for some reason, I had it in my head that canned mushrooms was where Botox was formed) and began with the string of words, “first, make a roux,” I never attempted it.

But the Capt’n, even with his gouty toe, is a big fan of chicken pie and had been asking for it, and his pleas had doubled after an episode of Nigella Express which featured a chicken pot pie, so I figured, what the fuck.

Chicken Pie

Simple puff pastry recipe from the yellow book
1 lb chicken breasts
1 thing of mushrooms
1/2 pound pearl onions
Chicken stock
Thyme
Rosemary
Flour
Butter

First, make a roux. Seriously. I took two pats of butter and two tablespoons of flour and did the thing in the pan. Once it was all roux-like, I added in cut up pieces of chicken and set it to brown, giving it a tablespoon of olive oil, just to mix it up.

In a separate pan, I cooked the onions and mushrooms (and some garlic) in olive oil, adding fresh rosemary and thyme and letting everything cook down some. When the onions were giving up their juices and the mushrooms had whithered, I added in about two cups of chicken stock and let it simmer away.

Once the chicken was cooked through, I added it to the onions and mushrooms, gave it a couple of stirs, and then tossed the whole thing into a casserole pan and draped with the puff pastry dough. The pie was then shoved into a 350 degree oven for 25 minutes. It came out nice and golden, though I think it could have stayed inside for another 3 to 5 minutes, and really, it could have stood for some green chile, but over all, mmm.

No, kitty. That is my pot pie.

The idea that Thanksgiving is on Thursday still hasn’t taken hold, not even after spending a weekend fighting for the last bag of Las Cruces pecans, not after watching a chorus line of Butterballs go down grocery conveyor belts, not even after having the “what should I bring” with conversation with my mother. It was 75 degrees today. Really, it’s just not decent to be thinking about roasting a turkey when it’s still that gorgeous outside.

Thanksgiving is on Thursday.

Thanksgiving is on Thursday, and I have been charged with making pies.

I can make a mean pumpkin pie, we all know that. But pecan pie can be a different story. I’ve made a few in my day; some have turned out, some have turned into boiled monstrosities. I decided to get a practice pie in before I have to make one for real. The Capt’n has no problem with this; it means he gets more pie. [More pie! -- Teh C. ]

So I made a pecan pie.

And now we know why I always put a cookie pan under the pecan pies.

So, note for Wednesday night, don’t fill it quite so much.

But hey, that wasn’t the only project in the kitchen. There’s a potluck scheduled for Tuesday, and even though I was late to the sign-up sheet, nobody had jotted down a pie-type dessert. So, I’m bringing pecan pie bars.

The recipe’s out of the yellow book, but instead of using honey, I substituted light corn syrup to make it conform to my notion of what pecan pie should taste like.

And I also have my very first attempt at puff pastry setting up in the fridge for tonight’s dinner (chicken pie!), but whether or not it will actually puff remains to be seen.

The Capt’n was kind enough to change my oil this afternoon. Normally, that’s a chore I can do by myself, but the Capt’n wanted to crawl around under my car, and hell, I was going to let him, but I did want to repay his kindness, because rolling around on the cold November concrete is a serious act of love, one which deserves recognition.

So I made him cookies.

Years ago, the Capt’n introduced me to Flying Star’s triple ginger cookie — large and soft and drizzled with a ginger-spiced icing — a grown-up version of the ginger snap. I was hooked. And for years, getting a triple ginger cookie was part of the charm of Flying Star or Satellite Coffee, but as this d’oh!mestic phase settled in last winter, I was convinced that anything they could bake, I could bake better.

After months of experimenting, this is the current version of my triple ginger cookie, and one which the Capt’n swears is the best.

D’oh!Mestic’s Triple Ginger Cookies
[Better than Flying Star's -- Teh C.]

3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1 large egg
1 Tbs Mexican vanilla
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
4 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp red pepper (optional — it kicks up the ginger to a slow burn)
1 Tbs cinnamon
Fresh ginger
Crystallized ginger
12 oz. good milk chocolate chips

Hack up a fist-sized ginger root, throw it into the food processor and blitz. Meanwhile, dice up about six ounces of crystallized ginger and set aside.

In a mixer, cream together the butter and the sugar. Add molasses, vanilla and egg. Toss in the fresh ginger and mix until evenly distributed. In a separate bowl, sift together remaining ingredients (except the crystallized ginger and chocolate) and gently add to the sugar mixture. Mix well. Fold in crystallized ginger and chocolate by hand. Place in the freezer for 15 minutes, and then bake at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes, or until cookies are slightly brown in color.

Eat.