easy, satisfying day in the kitchen

I'm at the tail end of a good Saturday with some nice work in the kitchen.

No, work is too much. This wasn't a hard day, a difficult day, in any way. I made some things, I was pleased with them, and all of them took relatively little effort.

(and once again excuse the rather poor quality of iPhone photos if you view them in larger size)

First "project": scones. Part of my joking Scones for Smelts program. Just a nice treat for various friends on the team when I see them at Saturday AM practice. Two batches, with a few kept for me and Conrad.
The first ones were simply currant scones. The second batch were dried sour cherry (from the awesome Lily's of Traunik store) and chopped walnuts. I think they turned out well.

After practice, before I did some housecleaning, I made some mixed spiced nuts. A simple and very good, reliable recipe from the Union Square Cafe cookbook - rosemary is the twist that makes them so appealing, I think. We'll have these to snack on, including when Conrad heads out of town in a handful of days.

Dinner tonight? I'm rather pleased with it. Two Saturdays in a row of producing nice meals. A little thought works. Here's what I did:

• Marinated two pieces of halibut in fino sherry with olive oil, lemon zest, pepper, fennel seed, coarse salt, and saffron. Baked it at 450 degrees.
• Lightly caramelized parsnip with some shallot, seasoned it with salt, pepper, and thyme, then cooked it tender-soft in chicken broth. Pureed it and strained it.
• Blanched Brussels sprouts. Sauteed chopped thick-slab bacon, removed most of the rendered fat, added chopped onion. Mixed in the Brussels sprouts and set it all to bake in a small tin at 450 degrees as well.

All of this plated up nicely. We dined at the kitchen table,
and sipped some Conundrum white wine, a favourite.

And now Conrad has gone back to do some work he must get done in the days ahead. A lovely dinner, and a fine day all around in the kitchen for me, however. I feel a little inspired to perhaps tackle cookies tomorrow!

family celebration

Another overdue post from the UP trip of earlier this month, this one to show off the family a little and spread some good cheer. You see, Conrad's birthday fell a few days after our trip up there, and so we had a get together with pizza, salad, and Conrad's cake.

Yes, Conrad's cake. I love this: Conrad, like me, had a special birthday cake while growing up. In my case, it was a chocolate-flavoured mayonnaise cake with green, mint-flavoured frosting. For Conrad, his Mom makes a white layer cake generous frosted with a chocolate fudge frosting.
And, because Hallowe'en is near, some seasonal candies for decoration.

Really, how can you not love it? And love it we did. We shared dinner in Conrad's Mom's kitchen. Karen was there (Terry was laid up with a dreadful cold). Justin and Tonna, too. Dan, Conrad's other nephew, was at a wedding that evening with his girlfriend, so no cake for him. Happily, he recently had a birthday and got his own special cake from Conrad's Mom.

After such a lovely evening, then, you'd think I'd let the birthday boy have a good night of rest. Sure. Mostly. Until around 7ish when I stuck the phone camera in his face and caught a little smile crossing his face. Poor guy, stuck with a morning person like me. Ah well. More cake makes everything better!

antiques/junk?

It's a gay stereotype, isn't it, that we all like antiques? That we comb the shops of smalltown America (and Canada) looking for exquisite pieces at bargain prices.

I must be a bad gay.

I mean, add in that I really couldn't care less about all the diva icons I'm supposed to care about as a gay man, and toss in a whole slew of other "gay" things that have as little relevance to me imaginable, and I'm not doing too well. Heck, I even read Sports Illustrated.

So how is it that I find myself a few times a year up in the UP, browsing through antique shops in small towns there?

Well, credit the Conrad and the family with this one. Conrad - I think this may be well known by now - has long collected vintage Fiestaware,
and his sister is an extremely knowledgeable estate sales manager and dealer in antiques. So I go along, and I actually enjoy the hunt for the Fiestaware (and American Modern pieces by Russel Wright - perfect for the Vancouver condo). The thrill of the chase. That's what I go for.

Once in a while, though, I just have to shake my head at some of the things in these stores. Some examples from out recent trip up to the UP, browsing in Ishpeming
and Negaunee:

Snowshoes! Of course! It's the UP - far far north. They need these for going out and shooting things, right? ;-)

Piggy banks. I'd never buy this, but it gave me a great laugh when I entered a room of the store and came face to face with it.

Ties. Antique ties? Seriously? Oh my. If there's one thing I would be very disinclined to purchase at an antique shop, it's clothing. And you know, for all that I said I'm not gay enough, I can tell that most of the ones here are not as fabulous as they should be!

Chairs. Piled up all higgledy-piggledy in a basement, or so it felt. At this point, I start thinking "junk" instead of "antique". Happily, there's always more fun discoveries in another shop.

Autumn vegetarian dinner

You know, a challenge in the kitchen can be fun. No, really. I don't mean some sort of horrid, demeaning Quickfire Challenge thrown at me, no. Instead, I like the notion of having some sort of restrictions or parameters tossed my way and going ahead in respect to them.

This time, it was vegetarian cooking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you say. Big whoop. Lots of vegetarians out there. And I agree. But Conrad and I are not vegetarian, and it's second nature for me to reach for chicken stock (to name one thing) to get some good food going. A little bacon to enhance that? You get the idea. Worse: given Conrad's need to regulate his starches, I couldn't do a pasta or risotto and thereby take an easy way out. I didn't eliminate carbs, but they were in check.

Deborah and Harry came for dinner, and a nice dinner it was. Conrad and I had all the clean up/set up well in hand by the time they arrived, so that started the night off for us on a good note. Table set, flowers out.

All was ready.

First up, with a bottle of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, was a bowl of a white bean puree, plus some nuts, caperberries, and buttered toasted bread slices. Simple.

First course: empanadas.

Or quesadillas, I guess - perhaps I need to re-consult the Rick Bayless cookbook I took the dough recipe from. I filled the little turnovers with roasted trumpet mushrooms, sauteed with white onion, thyme, and chopped reconstituted New Mexico red chile, and mixed with grated chihuahua cheese. Fried them up, set them atop a roasted tomatillo sauce and some sour cream atop. Despite my normal aversion to mushrooms, these were rather good.

Round two (three?): salad. Water cress with roasted grapes glazed with sherry vinegar, toasted pistachios, and manchego cheese. Once again, a simple course, but decent. The grapes are my new obsession.


The "main course": savoury pumpkin souffle.
I fried sage leaves and used them for garnish along with some thin slices of Parmesan.

All in all, I'm quite pleased with the meal. Some new recipes, for starters. Tasty food. Decent plating. Easy clean up. Can't ask for more than those, not for a dinner party, and not with such enjoyable guests. Bonus: having guests means we cleaned up the place a bit. Always nice.

Also, it must be said, little is hotter than a husband who does my dishes on the rare occasion I ask him to. ROWR!

Autumn foliage

We had feared that by the time we got up to the UP last weekend, the early snow (no trace of it by the time we got there save for some oh-so-light flurries on the late Friday night drive) and the late date would mean that we'd have missed the lovely fall colours of the Upper Peninsula.

Happily, it was far from that case.

Saturday the weather wasn't as cooperative as we'd like, but in the patches of sun that hit Escanaba and the UP, we could see some fiery hues. Quite spectacular, often in the sudden appearance of a flame-red tree here or there.

I didn't get that sort of autumn colour, growing up. Evergreens and yellow-leaved trees like birch and cottonwood predominate. Seldom was there a glowing orange or red.

I took this first photo on Conrad's Mom's block. Not a spectacular tree, but I feared I would see few that day. In fact, we really didn't take many photos that day - the weather didn't help, of course.

The drive back home through Wisconsin, however, is another thing. A lot of sunshine, and some patches and swathes of yellows, oranges, and reds. Gorgeous. Given an easy schedule, we took a leisurely detour by way of Plymouth, and just outside that pretty town we stopped and took a few shots.




Ah, Plymouth. Also looking autumnal, but I'm mighty curious if Antoinette here gets garlands of lights and holly at Christmas.

big ass radish

There is no other way to describe this beast of a root vegetable. Big. Ass. Radish. Grown by Conrad's niece, Tonna.



The family is a little daunted at the prospect of cutting into it and trying it out, I think...

Dutch treat

Ah, the fun of sleepless nights. Occasionally it happens, and I don't think the horribly mild, even warm, weather helps. I was in bed for about a half hour before giving up. No worries. I've been getting a lot of work done tonight.

Over 2.5 hours in, though, I realized, "Hey, I should catch up on blogging." Just me, I guess, putting the needs of the Library and its users first.

;-)

So let me launch a puffy, soft little entry out there. I actually feel a little drowsy now, and I may attempt going to bed soon. Before that, though, I present to you a treat, potato chips.

For most of my life, until perhaps 5-6 years or so ago, I thought that Old Dutch was a Canadian brand (and western Canadian at that!). Imagine my thrill, finding the brand on a UP trip, and imagine my chagrin at discovering they were USian. Darn it!

A late lunch in Negaunee last Saturday had us at the Midtown Bakery. Inside, I was delighted to see a display of chips that included my favourite flavour: dill pickle. Apparently, it's not a well-known flavour in the US, nor is another flavour I recall less fondly from childhood: ketchup. No sign of salt-and-vinegar - I guess some things remain resolutely Canadian.

Even before lunch arrived at the table, though, I'd opened up that bag and started on the salty, tangy chips. Heaven. Bliss. My own little Canadian treat in a part of the world that is pretty darn close, geographically, to the homeland anyway...

dinner at Hinterland

At the risk of sounding like a horrid snob (which, I'm aware, I frequently do anyway), we've found a really super restaurant in Green Bay, of all places.

Now then, before any Green Bayites flood my comments, let me state that my experience of the city has overwhelmingly been fleeting, stopping for coffee, barely seeing anything, passing through downtown to and from The UP and usually at times when the downtown is utterly dead. Hardly fair. But, that's what has shaped my impressions, and I'm happy that there is dining like at Hinterland Brewery to totally knock my notions down.

It's likely somewhere farther back on my blog, our first visit to Hinterland. A chance encounter, thanks in part to Opentable.com (are you using it yet? no? why not???). We liked it. We liked it again for a proper meal earlier this year. And a week ago we stopped in again.

I've said this elsewhere and before, but I love to see a menu where I am so torn because so many things jump out at me. I prevailed on Conrad to share small plates, and as a result, we had a good sampling of things.

Alas, it was a very dim room, and we had only the flashless iPhone for photos. As a result, you will never see how lovely and delicious our salads were, or how impressively crammed with crabmeat the crab cake was (and we loved the habanero aioli - ZING!). I did get a shot of the beef and mushroom meatballs,
though, as well as the plate of (mostly, I think) local cheeses.

Conrad was driving the rest of the way, so he had water. I had a glass of a richly fragrant wine whose name now escapes me. A Spanish Garnacha, though.

A good place. It's in a perfect spot to break up the drive up north, and we think that when we next head up there, on a likely snowy December weekend, we will stay in town so we can have a proper meal without driving the next day.