Round Two - Days 11, 12 and 13

I've gotten a little behind again, we had dinner guests last night and the night before so I was more consumed with the cooking than the writing about it. I can't exactly remember now what the breakfasts and lunches were for the last three days, but if I had to put money on it I would say breakfast was either eggs and hasbrowns or oatmeal, there's little chance of it being anything else. I do know that we used the runny yogurt to make a smoothie. I think that was on Tuesday. It was runny yogurt, frozen mango, frozen strawberries and apple juice concentrate. This was great because all of that had been in our freezer for ages, so I was happy to have a use for it. The runny yogurt was perfect for the smoothie, creamy without requiring juice to thin it out. It was delicious.

 

Otherwise we probably ate leftovers and vegetables, nothing terribly memorable. On Wednesday night we had DR's cousin Tammy over for dinner. I found a great recipe in Food and Wine for Pan Roasted Pork Chops with Creamy Cabbage and Apples served with Potato Puree (fancy name for mashed potatoes). I was pretty pleased with how this turned out. The cabbage recipe called for bacon, which I mentioned I was in the process of curing, but not finished. I ended up cutting off a strip of the pork belly and frying it up.

It's only missing the smoking, so it's essentially salt pork. It doesn't have the red color that bacon usually has, but I think that is because I didn't use any nitrates in the curing. But maybe the smoking will redden it up... we'll see.

We had a pumpkin pie for dessert. This was my first time making a pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin. I had heard that it can be stringy, but luckily we didn't have that problem. The pumpkin was a bit on the small side, so the pie was a little shallow. I should have used a smaller pie pan. And the crust was really salty, which was strange. I used a different pie crust recipe than my previous two attempts. It didn't seem like it called for a lot of salt... I have gotten a little better at rolling out the dough, but it still falls apart when I try to move it. However, I watched a video on making pie crust this morning, and I think I have been "overworking" the dough when I cut in the butter and shortening. Also, I think a pastry cutter would help. I've been using my hands which might be warming the fats up too much. (Do you like that? "warming the fats up").  I will conquer this eventually. The girl in the video was able to fold the rolled out dough into fourths and unfolded it onto the pie pan, like it was a piece of fabric... AMAZING!

Thursday night I had my book club over. We had read Farm City by Novella Carpenter. It's about a woman who lives in a rather rough part of Oakland, CA (redundant, perhaps) where she creates an urban farm, complete with pigs, turkeys, chickens, ducks, bees and a garden all in her backyard and the abandon lot next door. I enjoyed it for many reasons, the least of which not being that I was reassured that this woman was way crazier than me. For this event I made the Pumpkin Chowder with the other pumpkin I had left from my CSA. I was excited about this because it was so good the last time I made it, and it was a chance for me to use the curry powder I had made again. It was very disappointing this time. I made the mistake of using the original recipe I had printed out, and not the one I wrote up here after having made it. The original recipe forgets to mention where to add the flour and curry powder, so I think I added them too late. Also I used a much bigger pumpkin, so I think it needed more curry powder, as well as more bacon. I was very conservative with my bacon since it was still in process. It probably also needed more milk, and less chicken stock, I used about twice as much chicken stock as it called for on account of the pumpkin being so much bigger... so you learn... but kind of bummer in the showing off department. Another disappointment was the bread didn't cook all the way through. Seeing as I have made a loaf of bread every 3 days for almost two months now, this is a surprising miscalculation. I did make it with entirely whole wheat flour this time, instead of half white flour. I don't know if this affects the cooking time. It was a slightly larger loaf as well. When it's gooey in the center it kind of makes me gag, but my guests seemed to like it. They were very lovely about the whole meal. I didn't wash the lettuce until about 45 minutes before people were due to arrive, and I don't have a salad spinner, despite this being a consistent issue. Four paper towels, and quite a bit of shaking didn't quite get it dry enough, but I had to move on, so the salad was a little wet, but I still thought it was pretty good. I had a yellow heirloom tomato, an avocado, red onion and a green pepper all from the farmer's market and in the end I also added a red tomato from the grocery store because I felt it needed a little more color. I think the crowning achievement of the meal was the salad dressing, which was super simple, but really good. 1/4 cup olive oil, a splash of white wine vinegar, a shallot chopped, a clove of garlic chopped, salt and pepper. I think it will be my go-to dressing from now on.

For dessert I went back to the high maintenance apple pie, which was pretty good. Again, I had an easier time with the crust, but it was still a bit of mosaic. I have to say that this pie also wasn't as good as my first pie. I feel like the whole evening was a bit of humble pie. This was the biggest audience I have had since the project began, and I would have liked to wow everyone with my new found culinary skills. Instead I feel I made an impressive effort that resulted in a mediocre meal. The most disappointing element of that is it makes me seem even more imbalanced, if I'm going to go to so much trouble with all this food and it's not even that good. Oh well...