May the Wind Be Always at Your Back, and a Reuben in Your Stomach.

I happen to love St. Patrick's Day. It's soda bread and the Chieftains, watching drunks fall into gutters, and family tradition. 

This isn't Ireland, it's the Irish Hunger Memorial in NYC. It was right near the hotel my parents and I stayed at for my cousin's wedding two years ago and it's the coolest monument I've ever seen.

You could have a boring statue/plaque...or the Irish countryside complete with crofters cottage and mist. Check it out if you're ever in NYC.

I didn't do much for St. Patrick's Day last year and was a little bummed about that, so this year I was making up for it in my normal way: food.

First up, Margaret Bell's Irish Soda Bread.

Margaret Bell was an Irishwoman Miss Linda knew back in Jersey when she was pregnant with me. They lost touch but every St. Patrick's Day since I can remember she's made the Bell family recipe soda bread.

Soda bread is an odd thing. There's no yeast, it rises due to the baking soda and buttermilk having a reaction, and you barely knead it at all. In fact some other recipes I've seen say don't even attempt it, simply stir with as few strokes as possible to wet all the ingredients, form into a ball, and step away. That's what I did this time and can report no difference in taste from the original recipe, though my loaf might not have been as high as Miss Linda's are.

And have I mentioned letting the fairies out? That's right. Fairies. You cut a cross into the top of the loaf before you bake it, to let the fairies out (or to keep it from splitting...shh). Oh, and I forgot to brush on egg or milk or butter. And I hate raisins so used currants since they are at least cuter, being baby raisins.

Best when hot and served with a pat of butter and a mug of good strong tea. I love how bolder-like it is, a truly gnarly loaf.

My next dish is one I'd been craving since last St. Patricks's day and the Sandin family's traditional dinner for the day: Reubens. My Croat friend Miss Jess had never had one and clearly something had to be done about that!

Two slices of rye (marbled is pretty if you can find it) topped with swiss cheese and sauerkraut (in that order to keep your bread from getting too soggy).

Next layer on two or more slices of corned beef depending on your preference. Toast under the broiler until warm and the cheese is melty.

Finish with some Thousand Island dressing and a cold bottle of beer or cider. I also made a side of curry fries as Miss Jess hadn't eaten those either (madness!). Just get some frozen french fries and try to find some mild brown and boring Indian curry sauce to dip them into. It's fantastic.

Miss H joined us on Miss Jess's patio to feast and enjoy the warm weather. A truly lovely St. Patrick's Day, sláinte!

"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat,

How I wonder what you're at!

Up above the world you fly

Like a tea-tray in the sky."

Lewis Carroll

I had a sneaking suspicion last week after publishing my post that this was not the first time I had been completely "whelmed" in March. Sure enough last March I was also a blithering mess for a few days, I must be susceptible to the March madness. Of course not in the cute Bambi "twitterpated" way but the twitchy Alice in Wonderland's March Hare way...

So I decided to have a tea party. At least my manners are better than the Hare, I didn't throw scones at anyone. Though there was an unfortunate incident involving an avalanche of cream puffs!

Saturday was a delightfully sunny and warm day, a gentle breeze coming through the open widows. Miss Connie O, Miss Ireland, and I chatted for hours picking away at the spread of crumpets with jam, sammiches of salmon and cream cheese on pumpernickel, cucumber and hummus on french bread, cream puffs, and Brussels cookies. We drank four pots of tea!

My scarf from Italy made a lovely last minute tablecloth and I was finally able to use my Great Grandmother Alice Lavinia's lustreware tea set. Miss Ireland brought her silver tea spoons which have little dudes on them that look like the Javanese wayang puppets I studied ages ago in college. Pinkies up fancy!

Miss Connie O kept me company afterwards (she had a party to attend nearby) and we watched the 1924 Thief of Bagdad with the hunky/ridiculous Douglas Fairbanks and finished off the plater of salmon sammiches. I went to bed early as I was tuckered out after my tea party and having stayed up late Friday getting slightly plastered on pink ladies with Miss Cait!

She has just returned from Turkey with some excellent stories about sleeping in caves. An added bonus was discovering the Japanese restaurant down the street has a ridiculous happy hour: 4 5-piece maki, 3 sushi for $16. Clearly I will be here every Friday after work.

 Thankfully, all these lovely things exorcised my March Hare twitch. Time to move on to the Frabjous day.  Let the slaying begin, I've got my ladle ready!

Chicken, Moosies, and Ducks.

Ummm so the hampster that runs my brain has been doing overtime lately and when I asked him if we could work on a blog post he shot me a reeeally dirty look. So I haven't got much in way of cohesive thought for this post and you're just going to have to deal with it. Take it up with the Hampster. 

I made some tasty chicken last week.

I really don't cook meat that often, and almost never on a weeknight, but this marinade is scrumptious and they cook fast enough I wasn't gnawing on my hand waiting for the chicken to cook through. Plus, who doesn't love getting back to their troglodyte roots by tearing flesh off bone. Drumsticks rule. Why don't I make them more often?? I don't know. 

Speaking of meat: moose face. No lie. MOOSE FACE (Cait for the love of god don't read about this you'll cry vegetarian tears.) Not one not two but three new blogs to read.  All relating to inedible food, either because it is in fact not edible being made of plastic, or so hardcore historical you just don't want to eat it. See: moose face.

Reading through this book at the moment, and accordingly did many domestic-y things this weekend.

Bathtub laundry (I dropped pasta on myself.) dried over radiators.

Clippings from the Jew since it's begun to wander too far from the pot and invade my icon corner.

It has such a gorgeous shimmery texture and those purple underbellies!

Thought about hemming a coat. Didn't. Thought about watching Amelie. Didn't.

Thought about a lot of things this weekend, some of them very big thoughts indeed which have left me a little whelmed and scattered. And with a lot of things to do! They're bunny thoughts which seem to spawn as soon as you turn your back and now I have a head bursting with bunnies. But bunnies are good things! I just need to sort them out before I get twitchy*. And maybe buy some carrots.




* Note: only solution found so far for Lexana Bear Twitch is rocking back and forth giggling at Martin Van Buren.

The Cold War and Coconuts.

I had an excellent and restorative three day weekend (thanks Presidents Day!). Saw Tinker Tailor (again.) and got some fun groceries. Grapefruit! Ooo!

I even treated myself to some non-red roses...

...that are now drying on my front door.

As if seeing Tinker Tailor that morning wasn't enough, I spent Monday evening watching the original Tinker Tailor with Obi Wan Kenobi Alec Guinness as George Smiley.

Meat loaf seemed like an appropriate accompaniment. Very 70s. If I had a tv tray I'd use it.
This is my Grandma K's recipe-it's the classic meat, bread crumbs, onion, egg, and Hunts tomato sauce loaf. The sauce on top is soooo deliciously tangy though. Hunts tomato sauce, cider vinegar, brown sugar, French's Mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. I even take it a step further and squirt ketchup over the top. I'm crazy like that.

This time, however, I had to do things a little differently than usual. I forgot I don't have a pan large enough for a full loaf so I ended up using a muffin tin. That's right. I made meat muffins. Worked really well actually. I just used a 1/4 cup measure to plop the mixture into the greased tin, smushed them in and spooned some sauce over the tops. Took 20 minutes to cook (so I guess this is also a good course of action if you're really hungry and forgot how long a full meat loaf takes to cook as I usually do!).

One note-if you make one full batch of meat muffins and then use that same tin for the second batch, spoon some water into any empty spots if you've got some residual meat stuck in them. Otherwise it burns to a nice crisp and can both set your smoke alarm off and be a total pain in the ass to wash off. Just saying.

We actually got some snow on Friday. Seeing as I've been whining about the lack of snow this winter I took full advantage. Wore my Ice Princess Boots, down parka, and stomped through as many sludge puddles as possible.

Finished up my snow day with a wintry dinner of roast acorn squash and The Bourne Identity.

I love that you can see just how many times (5??) I stabbed that lower one with a fork, just to be really really sure it was thoroughly cooked. Clearly I have issues.

I meant to get a lot of things accomplished today, but I spent most of the afternoon laying in bed with my heat pillow and a bout of wicked lady cramps watching the rest of the Guinness Tinker Tailor (I read the first Smiley book in less than 24 hrs this week. I'm on a bit of an espionage bender). They'd buggered off by the evening though so I made Miss Linda's comforting Honey Curry Chicken for dinner.

And after taking a walk to the grocery store I whipped up these delightful little coconut cakes to stave off the odd craving for coconut I've had the last few days. 

I've never really pegged myself as a coconut lover, though I'm not a coconut hater. I suppose I'm generally sort of apathetic towards it. I annoyingly keep spelling it as 'cocoanut' which I feel is wrong, but according to spell check and Wikipedia is just archaic. Typical. We usually had coconut in the pantry when I was a kid. I can't remember a specific thing Miss Linda used it for (Mom-can you remember what you used it for?? Did you have a coconut dessert/dish I'm totally blanking on? Or are you just that Boy Scout level prepared for any baking situation that may arise?*). D-Mon and I used to put chocolate chips and coconut on soft flour tortilla shells and heat it up in the oven to make a snack if we craved something sweet. And I typically do feel it my duty to eat the lone coconut filled chocolate in the box since nobody else will. It just seems cruel to leave it there...

I've never actually craved it before though. I blame this week's Smitten Kitchen. I didn't have enough of the ingredients to do Smitten's muffins, and the recipe for macaroons I have calls for ground almonds which I also don't have. The Sweet Paul recipe seemed the most reasonable, and more along the lines of what I wanted, a cake thing that was coconut-y. Of course I (unlike my mother) didn't have any coconut or coconut milk in my pantry so had to go to the grocery store anyways. I really could have made any of these things. I think I made the right choice though, they really are delightful and smell divine. I didn't want to make a whole cake in a spring form because whole cakes are ridiculous when you live alone. I don't have mini-bunts pans (again with the never having anything ever) so I whipped out my handy dandy muffin tin. They are dense and moist with a pleasing vanilla and coconut flavor that's not bad suntan lotion/pina colada coconut-y.

Craving sated. Yay for coconuts.

Clearly I would starve to death if I didn't own a muffin tin. Yay for muffin tins.

And a final yay for George Smiley. He's kind of fantastic.

*Update 3/7: Apparently the coconut was used once a year to make German Chocolate Cake for Dr. Karl's birthday! The world makes sense again!

V-Day.

A lot of single people talk about "surviving Valentines Day". As if this one day in 365 makes their current situation so utterly horrific it may very well kill them. Clearly they are chicken shits. For me, "surviving Valentines Day" is more akin to "surviving The Holidays".  It implies that you are going to have several days in a row so packed with things to do/people to interact with/shit with that you may burst into tears before the end of it. Not because you feel sorry for yourself but because your brain is so blitzed that crying seems like an appropriate thing to do. That was Saturday through Tuesday of this past week. 

I knew it was coming of course, it was all written down in my calendar, I prepared in advance as well as I could, but it was still a little intense. And there was approximately .5 seconds of tears.

First up was making sugar cookies for work with Miss Jess and later that night the Valentines Dance with my Ladies H&M. I look forward to the dance every year, it's basically a wedding reception without the wedding or annoying relatives. Lots of dancing, drinks, photo booth (!) and looking like a real girl! It also makes me stock up on "lady things" like mascara, jewelry and pantyhose. Made it home by midnight.

Sunday (thankfully hangover free) was Flower Shop Day where I processed over 300 red roses. Which is basically the most epic game of He Loves Me/He Loves Me Not ever played. Rose petals everywhere! Pincushion fingers! It's completely put me off red roses. If anyone ever gives me a dozen red roses I may punch them in the face.

After a trying day at work and a botched cookie hand-off I was back in the shop after work on Monday. I stuck baby's breath into arrangements, shoved tulips into vases, tidied the shop, and did whatever else Miss Cait and Mr Chaaarles told me to do. I had a lot of fun, mostly because I didn't have to be there for the total shit storm of V-Day itself. I'm glad to say the two of them made it though with their sanity intact. Mostly.

My night wasn't over yet though, I still had a dozen sugar cookies to frost!

After watching a Bones episode when Booth and Brennan shoot Tommy guns at the firing range for Valentines Day I decided I wanted to make V-Day Massacre cookies. Fortunately Miss Jess was completely unphased by my morbid suggestion. She even suggested we make broken hearts. We got red coloring for the icing and French Drangees (silver balls) for the bullets.

I had too much fun layering blood over bullets on the hearts (and humming Bon Jovi to myself)...

and smearing it around on the poor gangsters.

We used a recipe from a dear family friend of mine, Miss Rose, who kicks her icing up a notch by putting some almond extract in there (I skipped it this time but it is really tasty and I suggest you try it!).

 By the time V-Day actually arrived I was pretty worn out. I had grand plans of seeing Tinker Tailor (again), but was too damn tired to keep up with cold war espionage. So after a particularly hellish bus ride home (crying babies AND detours?! whhhhyyyy) I treated myself with a no effort required dinner of take-out sushi, a pint of B&J's Mudslide, and not one but TWO Pink Ladies (the Elise de Wolfe version, not the one with eggwhites. Blech). Miss Anwen and I watched the New Girl together via gchat. The diabetic down the hall managed not to burn the building down when she collapsed while making her dinner thanks to the speedy response of the CFD. Didn't do my dishes. Went to bed early.

The rest of the week was an exhausted blur which ended in me making a truly disgusting dinner. Not sure exactly where I went awry but there was waaaaayy too much salt. Or soy sauce. Or fish sauce. Or reducing it made it salty-er. I don't know. Something terrible happened somewhere. What was supposed to be sticky asian chicken over rice tasted like a salt lick. Not that I've ever licked that. I'm not a deer. But that must be what they taste like. I scraped the sauce off the chicken and made myself eat some of it, but I know deep down that the leftovers are going to sit untouched in my fridge until my next trash day.
Boo hiss.

Today was Tax Day (which I sickly enjoy doing for some reason)! After the horrible incident the night before I decided to play it safe and get chicken lo mein from down the street to accompany my number crunching and Stranger Than Fiction watching (duh. what else would you watch while doing your taxes.). And I am pleased to report that Uncle Sam owes me. And I aim to collect. Now I can drink my tea peacefully, with no muttered threats to dump it out my window in protest of clearly being un-represented.
Or turn into an anarchist baker.
Totally want more gangster cookies though....tasty tasty murder.

"Waiter, there is too much pepper on my paprikash" When Harry Met Sally

Hello February! I started the month off right with a package from Canada of homemade beeswax candles from a childhood friend (want some?? I've got the hook up!). They're making my apartment smell like a monastery and I'm soooo okay with that. 

Miss Cait joined me for a lazy Friday evening with pjs, take out, tasty chocolate delicacies, and Parks and Recreation (Which is the cause of the posting delay. Can't stop watching. Blame her.).

I think I did an excellent job at quartering the rrrrrraton! I ran the knife under hot water to get a nice clean cut. Kept giggling the whole time I did it too.

The next day things got started early (The only bad thing about crock pots). It was chicken paprikash day. I keep saying it like Harry does when they're talking silly in the Met. Pap-reeee-Kash!
I needed a crock pot recipe since I had a massage in the afternoon and knew I would be limp as a noodle and starving when I got home. Which I was.

Instead of egg noodles I did my favorite strozzapreti. Though I may try spaetzel next time...

I reduced most of the liquid down to a spice filled sauce (I always end up with a shit ton of liquid, might omit the broth next time).

Chicken thigh!

Slow cooked onion and red peppers.

Nom-ed with white wine (and Parks and Recreation).

Followed up with a V-Day gift to myself.

Not a bad start to February if I do say so myself. Though I have a dance to attend, morbid cookies to make, Downton dinner, and side-lining as a florist's assistant this weekend, don't expect a post until after V-Day.