just a quick note to recommend this product from Rick Bayless:
Rustic Guajillo Salsa, available at your local Whole Foods if nowhere else
It's delicious. Great the first time as a dip for chips, great several more times as i used up the jar as a cooking ingredient, either alone with a bit of chicken broth to finish off a thick pork chop, or mixed in with onions and other stuff i forget what to make a thicker more complex stewy dish. Stands on its own, plays well with others, keeps months in the fridge, tastes great. Yummy. Bayless continues to rule.
Last night i caught up with work by about 5:30pm, astonishingly enough, and so i went downstairs and made that apple pie. The apples were just about to croak, but they were still fine, and last night's first slice was delightful.
I am really trying to work on my pie crust, since i come from a line of women who make truly great pie pastry and mine is not yet up to snuff, my impending middle-age notwithstanding. Last night's crust ended up being extra-flaky, which i attribute to the speed with which cold butter can be cut in when using an old-school wire-style pastry cutter (which i've not done lately, because I forgot where it was). It was shatteringly crisp and golden, but yet somehow still a little bit tough. I wonder if I overworked it a bit, trying to get the water incorporated? Or trying to roll it out thin enough? Or perhaps it's because I made the crust then realized I'd not peeled a single apple, so I put the crusts into the fridge to hold for a half hour or so while I cranked out filling. Not sure, but will continue to experiment.
Also, I am not sure I approve of tapioca as a thickener for apple pie. It seems texturally weird to me, in a way that it doesn't when it's in a berry pie. Perhaps I will go with flour next time.
(photo coming)
Haven't made a pie, haven't made the sticky rice.
Did manage a decent panful of fried rice last night, made from leftover rice (clever me made a double batch the night before, yay), freezerburned soybeans, carrots, leeks, and the last scraps of salt-fried pork chop from Wing's Kitchen.
Given the bounty of the winter veg share, we are going to have to start eating meals based on root vegetables, and pronto. Perhaps some nice mittel-european dinners based on pork and cabbage and turnips... and maybe the occasional curried stew of winter squash and potato... the gears are grinding now, hope for the best.
Too busy to have many posts. God damn it, this better stop soon. Anyway:
Pretty much anything about Bob Dylan bores me within 30 seconds. There's a long article about him in the otherwise riveting Oxford American Music Issue, and I got about 3 paragraphs in this morning and couldn't take it anymore. (for what it's worth, subscribe to the Oxford American -- the writing is good, even if not always to your taste, and the annual Southern Music CD is worth the subscription price alone.)
i am dying to make the sticky rice with chinese sausage and smoked oysters from the recent Gourmet magazine. I am stockpiling ingredients for the time, hopefully soon, that I will have time to undertake a cookery project that isn't streamlined to the greatest possible extent so as to fit in the scraps of time I am not working or sleeping or attempting to hang up the art in my house.
i also need to make an apple pie. I have twelve boatloads of apples and several eagerly hopeful requests from the husband.