My Favorite Breakfast...

Consists of:
1. Peach yogurt. I know it's shamefully high in sugar, but I hate the taste of the fake stuff and I love how peach yogurt goes with...
2. Peanut butter toast. A simple, protein-containing classic. But these sweet and salty components need one more taste to truly sing. They need...
3. Strong black coffee.


I don't know. Is it that everything has a really strong flavor? The yogurt's reeeaallllllyyyyyy sweet; the peanut butter toast is very salty (and crunchy! Yum); the coffee is bitter and black and rich and unadulterated by the dairy products I occasionally add.
I had a long and rambling bit about how my perfect breakfast is like Rock, Paper, Scissors in its elegant simplicity and balance, but I deleted that because it was embarrassing (even though no one is reading or even aware of the existence of this blog, I like to put out a quality product).

Oh, and Dog loves to lick clean the dregs of my yogurt container. And she loves tiny bites of peanut butter toast. Sadly for her, she never developed a taste for coffee, so she is doomed to live the rest of her life missing one leg in the golden tripod of My Favorite Breakfast.

on living up to the name of this blog

I have been learning how to sew. But it's a painful process, a little bit like learning long division. I don't have a strong sense of three dimensional space, so three-dimensional objects (like aprons, pillows, tissue-box covers...) blow my mind a little bit. Table runners, I can handle.
Anyway, when I'm finished with a three-dimensional object I don't want to revisit the agony of its creation right away. I'm satisfied knowing that it came together successfully--the same kind of satisfaction I get solving 2,467/49 by hand, using techniques I learned in 4th grade. I want to go play now. I don't want to sit down and upload photos of the pretty solution.
That's one of the reasons I haven't put up pictures of this apron, which I made for my friend at the beginning of April. I even embroidered a "S" on the pocket. I think it's cute, and now it resides in Tennessee, where it probably hangs on the hook in her kitchen where she put it when I gave it to her. I fear this is not the kind of apron a person wears. It's a little frilly and fancy and trouncy, but I'm glad I made it because now I've made an apron. So I know I can do that. It's a skill set, like long division.

Coq a Vin...

The chicken was purple. Like, in a blue way. The photo does not do it justice. It's probably pointless to post this picture, except I think it does illustrate how unappetizing the meat turned out.
It looked positively revolting when I removed it from my beloved enameled cast iron casserole. I returned the chicken to the pot and it was like a carnival dunk tank filled with butter and other viscous fats, and anything with that much butter (and other viscous fats) cannot stay truly purple. So when it hit the table, the "chicken cooked in wine" was brownish-purple, and luckily I'd already plied the guests with blue cheese (it was Maytag, and that's really how they spell it) turnovers and booze. Plus the scalloped potatoes were quite breathtaking in the cast iron skillet, topped as they were with patches of browned, bubbled Jarlesberg cheese. So everyone graciously (and tipsily, I think) overlooked the dyed poultry.
The asparagus was lovely (I didn't tie it like Julia said I should, but Husband was very conscientious with the salt-to-boiling-water ratio, so they were well-seasoned) if a little overcooked (I blame Julia for that, actually. She said it would take 12 minutes; I checked them after 9 and they were already a little soggy). Maybe it would have been better if I'd peeled them like she said I should. But Husband prevailed in that as well, scanning the destroyed teensy kitchen and pointedly remarking that he had never, ever eaten a peeled asparagus spear. Plus we had guests and at that moment Dog was their only available host; she tends to be overly demonstrative and olfactorily curious, especially when pastries are being eaten on her couch. So peeling like 30 asparagus spears was completely out of the question.
Oh my, I still shudder to think of the way our kitchen looked as we sat down to eat. There were so many soiled, damp kitchen towels! The little pot smeared with melted chocolate (oh, but the entire cake got eaten even after that audaciously rich coq a vin! I'm getting better with that chocolate cake); the slightly bigger pot that served as a double boiler; the huge pot we used to boil the asparagus--ew, green, asparagus-smelling water--; the various dinner plates, strainers, forks, salad plates, ramekins...Lions and tigers and bears, my ass. Oh my.

But it was worth it. We sat at our makeshift "dining room" table until after midnight (on a Wednesday!). We talked about politics, feminism, football, basketball and baseball, TV, real estate...In short, it was the quintessential dinner party. For some of you, that might sound frightfully quotidian, and someday I'll explain why it wasn't so for me. But Jeebus, I can't get into it now. Look: this is a very long and disappointingly-illustrated blog post. Husband is all up in my grill about brevity being the soul of wit (actually he tactfully suggested that I start a haiku blog), so I'm going now.

What's French for "Eureka!"?

Coq au vin! It's perfect, I think: multiple steps, which appeals to my longing to be put through Julia's paces; super-French-sounding; elegant and appropriate for an Occasion...
I'll still serve scalloped potatoes (a level of richness that Julia Child would not approve of, I think, but what if the chicken didn't turn out and all we had were her suggested parsley potatoes? That would be a failure, I'm sure) and asparagus, and a salad to start. Chocolate cake for dessert, and cheese puffs if I get ambitious with the hors d'oeuvres. (Full disclosure: I totally had to look up how to spell hors d'oeuvres. I'm a babe in the woods with this French s#@%.)

I'm nervous about the dinner party tonight. I've had Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" for like a year and a half and have only made three or four things from it. So I decided that tonight's menu would come exclusively from that book, thinking it would be a good way to get some practice. But now I think that will make for a rather boring dinner: roast chicken; scalloped potatoes; asparagus. Chocolate cake for dessert? How un-jazzy. ("Jazzy" being a word I picked up this weekend at my parents' house when perusing their 1968 "modern" cookbook, which had some of the grossest-looking recipe photos I've ever seen, and hi-larious titles like "Jazzy Meatballs.")
But the party is tonight! My other options for meat were not very promising: expensive cuts of beef that would probably embarrass everyone with their price tag; tongue; veal; pork chops.
This is where my inexperience as a dinner party hostess really shows itself: the menu. (Couldn't it show itself in something a little less showy, like the wine's too bold for the fish?) It's going to be unimaginative in the extreme unless I find some way in the next hour (the farmer's market opens at 10) to, well, jazz it up.
Julia is encyclopedic on the subject of mushrooms, so that is where I will begin.

How I roll

A few years ago, I resolved to learn how to bake bread. I even embarked on a (quickly abandoned) attempt to keep up my own sourdough starter. That was foolish, as those were my harder-partying days, and the only thing I did every day without fail was smoke lots of cigarettes. I did learn to love the process of baking bread (with yeast packets) back then, but fell away from it in the intervening years.
This year I fell in love with Mark Bittman's recipe for no-knead bread, and I've made it dozens of times. Just around the time when that started to feel like cheating (it takes less than five minutes to assemble the four-ingredient dough), I saw an intriguing recipe on this blog for bread or rolls. The first rise happens while the dough is wrapped in a dish towel and submerged in warm water. It's haunted me ever since: that floating dough, wrapped neatly and adorably in a tea towel; its "satiny" consistency; those glossy, beautiful photos of the finished product...
We're having our first dinner party in the new (or new-ish--it's been eight months!) city tomorrow night--a birthday party for a new friend, with a total of five guests--and it's the perfect opportunity to try the wet-bread recipe.
So I made it today. I was thoroughly charmed by the first rise:
The charm was certainly amplified by the fact that, with uncharacteristic foresight, I used my only pretty dish towel to wrap the dough. It looks just like a pillow, dunnit? It was really cool, and I'm so glad I did it, even if the results were...well, keep reading.
Next step was to shape the rolls.

The white thing between the two rows is a little spool of crewel wool. I never trust myself to judge what "doubled" looks like when I'm baking bread, so since I was taking photos already, I decided I'd try this.
The dough was absolutely beautiful: satiny, like the lady said; glossy; smooth; golden-yellow. The pictures, of course, don't do it justice.
So they rose.

Looking back, I realize they could have risen a bit more. But I was bored and excited to see how they would turn out. And Husband is doing taxes (note the date--I've been pushing for an extension for at least the last week), so I felt compelled to at least appear industrious. So I mixed some milk with a beaten egg and brushed it over the little rolls. This was my favorite part of the recipe, after the tulip-towel pillow. The pillowy little dough balls yielded to the brush sumptuously, languidly springing back like sleep little 1970's porn stars. I know that's a lot of adjectives and the porn star image is out-there, but I can't help it. Bread dough is sexy like farmer's daughters are sexy: innocent, unspoiled, up for anything and ready to delight in whatever comes along. I'm trying to say this: it's not a dirty-sexy. It's a good-clean-fun-sexy.
So the pert domes baked away (sideways, here) and the house started to smell like yeasty, yummy rolls. This is a smell I closely associate with my mother, who makes the rolls for our family's Thanksgiving dinner every year. Her batch of roll dough is always huge, big enough for annual experiments with dried cranberries, orange zest, savory spices...and always, pecan rolls that never make it out of the kitchen before they're devoured by anyone lucky enough to be present when they come oozing and sizzling out of the oven.
Here is the moral of the story: although tonight's rolls came out looking lovely,
they were not as good as my mom's. The water-rise is little more than a gimmick, I fear. I am glad I tried it, but the next time I feel the urge to make dinner rolls of any kind, I'm going with my mom's good old-fashioned Better Homes & Gardens (she calls it the "red and white cookbook") recipe.

1 pkg active dry yeast
1/4 c. warm water
1 c. milk
1/4 c. sugar
1/4 c. butter
1 tsp salt
3 1/2 c. flour
1 egg, beaten

-Soften yeast in warm water. Combine milk, sugar, butter, and salt in large glass measuring cup in microwave. Heat until butter melts. Cool to lukewarm. Add 1 1/2 c. flour. Beat well with wire whisk. Beat in yeast and egg. Gradually add rest of flour to form soft dough, beating well with wooden spoon. Place in greased bowl, turning over to grease surface. Cover and let rise until double. (1 to 1 1/2 hours or you can refrigerate overnight or up to 5 days). Turn out on lightly floured surface and shape as desired. Cover and let rise until doubled (about 45 min. if at room temperature; 1 1/2 hours if refrigerated).
-For cloverleaf rolls, make three balls of dough--each ball should be the size of a grape--in each muffin tin. For pecan, raisin or orange rolls: roll 1/2 of dough into 8"x 12" rectangle. Spread 1/4 c. melted butter on dough. Sprinkle with mixture of 1/4 c. brown sugar or white sugar and 1 tsp. cinnamon. Roll up from long side. Cute into 12 slices. Place in 8" square pan.
Bake at 375 for 12 to 25 min.
-For pecan rolls, first heat mixture of 1/4 c. butter, 1/2 c. brown sugar, and 1 tbsp corn syrup in saucepan; pour into 8" pan. Sprinkle broken pecans in syrup. Place rolls on top, nestled into the pan.

What it feels like to create

Found this blog late last night, and it has really gotten under my skin--in a very good way. As I've been sewing and embroidering and being intentional about making our house lovelier, I think I've also been getting a little gentler. The crafty-girl blogs I've been reading (especially this one) are so positive and delighted with the world. And I think I used to be more like that. But I've gotten more critical and snarky and sarcastic--it all adds up to a kind of negativity and stinginess that have no place in my prodigiously happy, love-filled life.
So--as the flowers rest under an unseasonable layer of frosty cold, I will put my faith in the inevitable warm-up, and let my spirit set a good example for the plants: I will bloom a little bit. And then I'll bloom a little bit more.
I know this about myself, but something about my inner compulsive procrastinator keeps me from consistently acting on it: when I have an outlet for my creativity, I am happier and somehow clarified. Like butter! I finished a table runner late last night, a project I started on a whim after finally finding a non-Wal Mart fabric source in my town. Our rarely-used table (shameful fact: we almost always eat while watching "Jeopardy!") was set for a while with the loveliest, if fortuitous and accidental, color combination. Orange candles, yellow tulips and daffodils, and a fruit bowl with lemons, Granny Smith apples, and oranges.
Anyway, the only way I ever manage to create something pretty like that is by accident, and accidents like this one don't happen too often to me (I'm not as observant as truly talented artists are). So it stuck with me--orange, yellow and bright green have been on my mind for a month now. And the fabric store had two fabrics--one orange and yellow, one green, white and orange--that I just knew would go far in duplicating that table.
Reader, I bought them.
I promised Husband I would do no such thing after a fairly brutal trip to a store in Columbus, during which I squandered all my birthday capital. (It was worth it!) But this stuff was reasonably cheap and I got out of there with 3 1/2 yards and some thread for only $32. Not bad, compared with the (eek!) $125 I spent in Columbus (double-eek!).
The original plan was to make a runner for one of the many radiator covers we live with--they're in at least one corner of every room in our tiny house, shrinking the furniture-arrangement possibilities. But this turned out so beautiful that it will forever be a centerpiece at our dining table.


p.s. it's reversible! Amy Butler's lotus in cherry--solid. pretty!