Farewell, Garden

Last night the temperature dropped below freezing, and this morning I woke up to some extremely bedraggled plants. Poor limp leaves. I now have two more containers of pickles gestating in the fridge. Hopefully they’ve turned out well; I’ll know in a few days.

(I’m going to a show in the city tonight, so this entry is very early and very short. My apologies.)

Braisin’ Semi-Failure: Celery

[image: celery growing in a flowerpot]
[image: celery growing in a flowerpot]

Now that my celery is approximately two months old, I thought I’d post an update on how it’s doing. (Here is the first post about it, when it was a mere two or three weeks old.) As you can see, it’s thriving! And by “thriving,” I mean bolting. The other celery that I planted outside (which I fully expected to get eaten by rodents) is in much more of a traditional celery shape—one central nestled stalk formation, no wild shoots reaching for the stars.

I think I know why the squirrels aren’t going for the celery, though. I tried a bit. I was expecting it to be kind of bitter, but I wasn’t expecting quite how amazingly, overwhelmingly bitter it was. I had to spit it out. Commercial celery is covered up for its final few weeks, to tame the bitterness and sweeten the inner stalks and leaves. Mine has been sitting in the sun (the little we get these days) and the wrong pH of soil (I haven’t tested it, but I’m assuming that’s part of the problem).

HOWEVER, I am only counting this as a semi-failure, because both plants are still alive. And even if I can’t eat them, I’m enjoying the dark green foliage.

HOWEVER HOWEVER, what can be counted as a total failure is those wildflowers I tried planting at the beginning of November. A month has nearly passed and I have… a pot of dirt. I guess four and a half years was too long to wait to plant that little card.

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

[image: roasted pumpkin seeds]
[image: roasted pumpkin seeds]

I hope folks had a nice Thanksgiving. I’m stuffed and can barely think about food right now. My mom likes making low centerpieces (so people can still see and talk across the table, but they’re still colorful and festive) for our Thanksgiving table. She hollows out small sugar pumpkins and puts flowers in them. They’re really cute!

This year I took the seeds and roasted them. I set aside a handful to dry out and plant next spring. I may have failed at the kabochas this year, but I’m not going to let that stop me! Pumpkins ahoy!

a bunch of raw pumpkin seeds
olive oil
salt

Heat oven to 325. Rinse the pumpkin seeds to remove any giant pieces of pumpkin flesh left clinging to them. Don’t be too obsessed with removing every last strand—small pieces are fine (they’ll add to the flavor, maybe). Spread out and dry with paper towels. They’ll stick to the towels, just flick them off. Toss with a little olive oil and salt. Spread out in a single layer on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Sprinkle with a little extra salt (kosher is nice). Roast at 325 for 30 minutes, stirring every 8 minutes. Keep an eye on the doneness after 20 minutes to make sure they don’t burn. You want a nice toasty brown. Cool completely before storing (otherwise they’ll lose their crunchiness).

(This isn’t really a recipe, just some broad guidelines. Mostly it’s because I like that photo.)

Roasted Creamed Onions

[image: creamed onions]
[image: creamed onions]

This may be my family’s greatest Thanksgiving dish. It is annoying to make but so great to eat. Do not wimp out and use frozen pearl onions. No good. Those bags of pearl onions you see in the store? Don’t use those, either. They are too small and it’ll take forever to prep enough to make a full dish. Cipollini onions are an okay-ish option, but they don’t roll properly and therefore won’t brown evenly. What you really want, and what are increasingly difficult to find (at least in our area), are “boiling” onions, which are white, round, and about 1″-1.5″ in diameter. Good luck.

My parents got the casserole dish we’re serving this in back in the 70s. It’s beautifully retro. C is not for Cookie. It is for Casserole!

[image: casserole dish]
[image: casserole dish]

2 lbs. whole white boiling onions (1-1.5″ in diameter)
Olive oil
Salt
1 tsp sugar
1/4 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup water
2 fresh thyme sprigs
1 Tbsp butter
like a quart of heavy cream

Peeling:
Drop the onions into rapidly boiling water for 1 minute. Shallowly trim the root end, squeeze the onion out the root end (they’ll pop out once you apply enough pressure, be quick catching them!), then trim the top and cut an X 1/4″ deep into the root (this keeps them from bursting throughout the rest of the cooking).

Roasting:
Heat the oven to 350. Toss the peeled onions in olive oil to coat and sprinkle with salt. Put them in a roasting pan large enough to hold them in a single layer. Roast onions until they are tender, 30–45 minutes (really depends on the size of the onions, though). Check for doneness with a sharp paring knife. Every 10–15 minutes, roll onions around so they get browned evenly.

Creaming:
Place the cooked onions in a frying pan or saute pan large enough to hold them in one layer. Add sugar, white wine, water, and butter. Reduce this to a syrupy state, rolling the onions around to glaze. When reduced, add the cream and thyme. The cream should come halfway up the sides of the onions (this usually takes about a quart for us, it may be more or less depending on the size of the onions and the size of the pan). Simmer until the cream reduces to a sauce-like consistency. Discard the thyme and adjust seasoning (it will definitely need more salt by this point).

Note: can be made a day ahead and gently rewarmed. If the cream sauce becomes too thick, add a little more cream to thin it out (probably could use milk or half and half by this point if you’re out of cream).

Pacifica Tuscan Blood Orange

A while back, I was making a Sephora order and needed something small to get me up to free shipping. At the time, Pacifica was getting discontinued, so I was able to pick up a travel bottle of their blood orange body wash for like $3. The first time I opened it up in the shower I basically wanted to eat the soap. It smells so amazingly orangey.

Fast forward five years or so, I have tried several products in their blood orange line, and the body wash and body butter are my favorites. The spray perfume I use occasionally, but it doesn’t last very long and it’s somehow missing the mouthwatering aspect that is very present in the wash and lotion. The bar soap I don’t really like, it leaves my skin feeling somewhat uncomfortable. (I think it may be that glycerin soaps just don’t agree with me.)

Pacifica currently has a gift set featuring full-size tubes of my two favorite products for $20. It’s really nice stuff. I highly recommend it if you are a fan of citrus.

(Haha, the dreaded soap post strikes! I wanted to write about my family’s creamed onion recipe, but the only photos I have are are terrible—they’re from 2012, taken on my old-old phone. I’ll have to wait until Thanksgiving to take new ones.)

Thanksgiving Prep

Like many Americans, I have spent the past few days shopping for Thanksgiving ingredients. My dad’s trying out a new preparation for the turkey (the house is already awash in the smell of roasting turkey bits for stock and gravy—he’s got it in the oven overnight), my mom has exhausted every single store in the region trying to find the perfect size and shape onions, and I’m girding myself to try out a new sweet potato dish this year.

I really like sweet potatoes (garnet yams, whatever), as long as you keep them away from that goddamn marshmallow topping. I like my sweet potatoes spiced up with chipotle peppers! You may recall that for several years I attempted to make a perfect version of this Bobby Flay recipe, which my parents ate at his Vegas restaurant. At the restaurant, they received a perfect pie-like slice with perfect layers that stayed together beautifully. My version… oof. Time and time again I tried, and time and time again I ended up with a goopy broken sauce, oceans of oil sitting on top, and an upset stomach. Slices? Layers? Ha! It still tastes pretty good, but the presentation is seriously awful.

Last year I gave up and made Alton Brown’s chipotle smashed sweet potatoes. It was fine but not particularly revelatory. It was just fine.

This year, I’m going to try something weird—maybe. I’m going to do a dry run of a recipe tomorrow morning, and if it turns out well, I’ll do a full version for Thanksgiving. If not, well, my brother wants me to give the Bobby Flay version another go, but I don’t know if my digestion can handle it. Seriously we just have way too much heavy cream in everything, and I will give up my sweet potato recipe long, long before I say goodbye to my mom’s creamed onions. Those are my #1 Thanksgiving Must-Eat Dish.

(My other Thanksgiving prep today was putting a basecoat on my fingernails and picking out all the most harvest-y colors in my nail polish collection. Holiday manicure!)

Hanukkah Ornament Wreath

[image: my hanukkah wreath!]
[image: my hanukkah wreath!]

Barbara May and Barbara Jo invited me over for a craft day this weekend. Our friend Sara is really into kitschy crafting, and she had been collecting old globe ornaments over the last couple years for ornament wreaths! I decided to go for a blue and silver color scheme for a Hanukkah theme. I think it turned out well. Very pretty. A little less pretty in person, since there are some errant hot glue strands. I only burnt myself three or four times, though! Well done, self.

[image: my hanukkah wreath, beautifully backlit]
[image: my hanukkah wreath, beautifully backlit]

Here is the tutorial we used! Just a word of warning, though: that link contains some instances of the word “ornaments” being shortened to “ornies.” That is a garbage word for garbage people.

*decisive head nod*

Gorgonzola-Buttermilk Dressing

Once again, a recipe using up buttermilk from a recipe I never posted. It’s just that the more I eat the cornbread I originally bought the buttermilk for, the less I am enchanted with it. So I think I might not post it. It was an adaptation of this cornbread on Smitten Kitchen. It sounded awesome, but I think the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

One of my favorite meal salads is this kit:

[image: stock image of eat smart's sweet kale salad]
[image: stock image of eat smart’s sweet kale salad]

The poppyseed dressing that comes with that kit needs doctoring, though. It is way too sweet and gloppy. I thin it out and tone it down with some fish sauce, rice wine vinegar, and lemon juice. And then I dice up a bit of chicken breast to add some extra protein.

When I can’t make it out to Costco to pick up a giant pack of the Eat Smart salad, I go to Trader Joe’s for a runner-up: the Cruciferous Crunch.

[image: stock image of trader joe's cruciferous crunch salad]
[image: stock image of trader joe’s cruciferous crunch salad]

This is just a bag of salad, no dressing or other crunchy accouterments like the Eat Smart. So I pulled together some ideas on how to make a good blue cheese dressing.

1/4 cup crumbled Gorgonzola
1/4 cup buttermilk*
2 Tbsp white wine vinegar*
2 Tbsp grated Parmesan
2 Tbsp mayonnaise
2 Tbsp minced fresh parsley
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
1/4 tsp Worcestershire
heavy dash Tabasco sauce or sriracha
Salt and pepper to taste

* If you don’t have buttermilk, make clabbered milk by whisking together the vinegar with 1/4 cup regular milk. Let sit for 15 minutes before making the dressing.

Whisk everything together in a bowl (or combine in a jar and shake the dickens out of it). Season to taste with salt and pepper. It’s best if you can refrigerate it overnight before using so the flavors can meld together, but I’ve only been able to manage that feat once. (I can’t wait for my salad cravings.)

Jan Dismas Zelenka

Gosh I love Zelenka.

Tonight I went over to Pikacello and Hoshikaji’s house for dinner. During the course of the evening the conversation turned to music. I am an occasional oboe player, while Pikacello is a professional cellist and Hoshikaji is a violinist. I happened to mention one Jan Dismas Zelenka, my favorite baroque composer, and before I knew it, I was fetching my oboe so that we could sight-read his third trio sonata. AND GOSH IT WAS FUN.

Back in college, I played the first trio sonata (two oboes, bassoon, and continuo). Man, that was an amazing experience. There’s this stretch in the second movement in the first oboe part where you can’t breathe for like a minute. It’s so good. I seriously loved playing for stuff like that. (Someday I will regale you all with my tale of Pasculli cadenzas, but that day is not today.)

They’re all amazing pieces. This is a superb recording, headed by the great Heinz Holliger, or you can listen to them here on YouTube.