A Spring Cake

It's truly rare that Jac asks for a dessert, so when he does I tend to listen pretty intently. He adores coconut cake. The first time I made it for him I proudly presented it and he declared it good but explained that real coconut cake has coconut in the cake itself as well as in the filling and frosting.

This cake was a week in the making. I'd intended to make it at the river and got as far as putting cake mix (hey, shortcuts help!) in the bowl when I axed it from the menu. Jac packed the cake in a plastic bag and it sat on the kitchen counter for days while he asked hopefully when I was planning to make him a coconut cake.

Finally I dove in. I just made white boxed cake and added coconut. I made Ina Garten's delectable frosting combining butter, cream cheese, confectioner's sugar, vanilla and almond extracts. Then I liberally added coconut. Jac declared it an unqualified success and over its lifespan ate at least three servings - that's like you and me eating the whole pan of brownies on the Like-O-Meter.

So, another year, another culinary success on my husband's favorite's list.

Constant Craving

For days I had a yen for an apple crisp with vanilla ice cream. I really would have preferred to just swing by a shop and pick one up because I didn't have a recipe in mind and I wanted a spot-on apple crisp.

I have to admit that my bar for apple crisp was set many, many years ago before my palette was truly established. You see, nothing beat a Roy Rogers apple crisp in a shiny red tin. I don't think there was even ice cream involved -- it was just that good. Where the dessert went - off to discontinued dish heaven I suppose, I can't be sure, but its memory lingers on.

So this was one of my instinctual cooking events, the kind that leaves me with no reliable recipe to give you. It was baking with a scoop of this and a dash of that. The Internets did give me the clue to use oatmeal in the topping, which gave me a crisp, chewy crust. The rest was a delight of apples, cinnamon, brown sugar, flour, butter and a little salt. I baked it at 350 for as long as I could stand. It was even better reheated the next day.

7th Carpenter's Shelter Cook Off

It is a bad blogger who forgets her two quality cameras when she does bloggable stuff only to have to resort to the less-than-ideal iphone camera. Just how small does my point and shoot have to be to make it into the purse?

Anyway, late last week my sister told me she had a friend with tickets for the 7th Annual Carpenter's Shelter Cookoff today. Food for a good cause? I'm in! And free? Bring it!

Jac and I drove to Del Ray and were among the first through the doors. I've never been to the Birchmere despite many shows that we belatedly thought, "Ohhh, we should have gone to that." Arlington and Alexandria restaurants offered tastes of their dishes and the price of admission included the samples. I could have just kept getting in line at the Asia Bistro table all day for the veggie dumplings. They were heavenly and scored my ballot for best restaurant. Jac noticed the serious prevalence of pork and ultimately declared "no more pork!" right before I pointed him to the chili dogs. It is in the 90's today which is strange for April - so I suppose the restaurants couldn't have predicted that hot chowder and some of the heartier dishes would go over like a lead balloon today.

We both wanted to bid on the live auction's trip to Atlantic City, but the auction didn't start until 1:30 and both our power-tasting ability and our new found support of the Caps had us out of there way before 1:30.

We're glad we went. The Carpenter's Shelter is a great organization. I love that they've been able to take and use random hygiene products I've donated on a couple of occasions. 

A Beautiful Day for a Cookout

April doesn't strike me as prime cookout season, but when I heard about the weather forecast for Saturday I knew we'd be lucky to have an outdoor party that day. I sent out a Facebook invite on Tuesday and by Friday night things were coming together for a lovely gathering.

My approach was remarkably simple by my standards: raid the pantry, make a random assortment of things that I enjoy, get the main dish from the Maine Avenue Seafood Market and enjoy. Saturday morning we set out for the market. We'd been there once before years ago with friends. Andy's eyes grew wide as we approached a wall of seafood. We ordered a couple pounds of shrimp and a couple dozen freshly steamed crab and zipped back to Virginia. One quick stop at the grocery for ice and beer and we were ready to party.

I surprised myself when I realized we really haven't entertained in this house much and we've been here nearly four years. But the group who showed up were compatible and we had a very nice afternoon on a surprisingly hot spring day.

Wildly Hostile Coffee Shop Signs

Probably my favorite moronblogging post by a person who didn't know the term for what they were chronicling ever:

Diary of a visit to a coffee house run by a madman.

by Uncommon Priors

discovered, naturally, on Consumerist.

Easter Crepes - Savory Style

Rosemary's Great Crepes

I may have posted these crepes before. If I have, enjoy the subtle but succulent difference cooking them with bacon makes. These are what we had for Easter supper. 

For crepes:

⅛ teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons Unsalted butter melted

14 tablespoons Flour

3 eggs

For Bechamel sauce:
4 teaspoons minced onion
⅔ cup flour
white pepper6 cups milk
8 tablespoons Butter
1 teaspoon saltnutmeg

For filling:
12 slices -15 ham
2 egg yolks beaten with 1/2 cup heavy cream

3 cups grated Gruyere and Parmesan cheeses 

slivers of chicken and cheeses.Make the crepes. 

Cook chicken:

Bake or poach chicken and cut into thin slices. I baked the chicken topped with bacon in a 325 oven for about 40 minutes. 

Make the crepes:

Sift flour and salt together. Beat (or in blender) eggs, butter and one cup milk until very smooth. Add more milk until the mixture is the consistency of thin cream. Cover and let rest for 30 minutes. Brush 6" crepe pan with butter and put on medium high heat until a drop of water skitters, but butter does not brown. Pour in 3 tbsp. Batter and quickly rotate pan to cover the bottom with thin, even layer. Pour any excess back into batter bowl. Lightly brown underside, carefully turn over and brown other side. Remove and place on wax paper. Lightly brush pan with batter for each crepe.

Crisp the bacon:

I collected all the bacon from the chicken breasts and cooked it in a pan until crisp but not burned. When cool, crumble by hand.

Make rich Bechamel sauce. Bring milk and onion to boil, remove from heat and let stand for 10 minutes. Melt butter in heavy saucepan, stir in flour over low heat. Cook and stir about 3 minutes. Stirring constantly, strain in milk until sauce boils. Lower heat and cook, stirring frequently, for 20 minutes. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. Mix a little sauce into egg-cream mix then pour into sauce, stirring until thickened. 

Put it together. Lay a slice of chicken on each crepe, sprinkle with 3 tbsp. Grated cheese, top with 2-3 tbsp. Sauce and roll up in crepe. Arrange crepes side by side in a flat, buttered baking dish, spread remaining sauce on top. Bake at 300 degrees for 15 minutes then broil to lightly brown top. Garnish with bacon and cheese slivers. Freezes well.

A Magical Place

I keep forgetting that God created a magical place called the Internet where I can tell you all the crazy shit that goes down in my life and you can chortle and get back to reading porn.

Monday: 

woke up, damnit, it's Monday. This week is going to suck.

Day reliably sucked. Clients: crazy. Work: busy. Word Twist: sub-par.

Editing document written by septuagenarian who has risen to a startling level of business without the ability to create a noun-adjective-verb sentence.

Tuesday: 

woke up, damnit, Jac got a ticket for an expired sticker on his car.

He could not remember to deal with stupid sticker in entire month of March because everyone in the fricking world was having a medical emergency and needed him!

Client moves deadline up 10 days.

Wednesday: 

woke up, damnit Citibank what do you want? Oh, 5 days late, eh?

See, Citibank sent Jac a new card last month when they had a shocking security  breach and they just thought it'd be safer to send him a new card. Naturally this new card was not hooked up to our electronic billing thingamagig, thus we got no bill. 

Thursday: 

woke up, damnit, it is just going to keep sucking for the foreseeable future isn't it?

Spilled my second choice soda all over my second choice handbag.

Noticed dog pee on freshly cleaned sisal rug. Do you know what it's like to clean a sisal rug?

Client loses mind.

Husband makes me dinner and takes me to get mint chocolate chip ice cream which also happens to be free. - Wait! That didn't suck! That was very good! That was excellent a step toward this week not sucking...maybe...

But I know something about tomorrow...it's called Good Friday, that's something, right?

Dogz Rulz

As rule-based people go, I am probably pretty up there. Someone offered me the vacant men's room while waiting in a long ladies' room line this weekend and I declined - just wouldn't be right. I think there should be a website to out restaurants that cheap out by using Sysco's generic ketchup instead of Heinz. I don't step on the cracks. I am an awful liar too.

We set out for the dog park on the most glorious of days. It was the first real, "Yeah you should wear shorts today" day. Jac was in a great mood. The dogs were ready for some serious frolicking. We unleashed Kirby and he darted up to a plain beige dog. Naturally he put his mouth all over him.

The dog mom went completely postal, "Oh my God," she wailed, "she's been bitten!"

Now I'm going to digress all over the fricking place. Because there are some people who maybe should not be taking their dogs to the dog park. They should especially not be doing that on the dog park equivalent of Black Friday. At one point I saw an interaction between a dog and a stroller that resulted in the dog owner saying she was, "So sorry!" to the stroller owner (it was occupied) who replied, "Hey, the stroller's in the dog park." She got it, it is the land of dogs. The dogs are there to be dogs. Unfortunately, there are others who take the park's posted name "Dog Exercise Area" to mean that the sole purpose of visiting the park is "dog exercise". They are the ones who sniff at any dalliance between dogs. They fail to return the friendly glances you give them. I'd like to accuse them of being the non-scoopers too but that probably falls into another parchatype. 

So when I approached the beige dog and it's delirious owner, I laid my hands on her (the dog). The woman was pointing to three spots of slobber on her dog. I looked at them and felt them and as gently as possible showed that there was nothing there. She huffed and she puffed and she hauled her dog from the park.

Suddenly though, I felt we were the ones who didn't belong. Kirby broke the rules. Not by actually hurting another dog or by being aggressive, but by making an owner uncomfortable, which made me uncomfortable. In fact, the beauty of the day melted away. I was filled with venom for what had just happened. Yes, our doofus "developmentally delayed" dog made a mistake darting up to a dog and slobbering all over her. Yes, we've tried to teach him that sometimes the dog owners don't take it well. Our doggy shrink pointed out that the dogs don't seem to think he's any sort of threat at all. It's the equivalent of the seedy guy in the club shadow dancing behind the cute girls until their friends notice and get her out of the situation - tacky but not reason to be put to sleep.

After scolding Kirby in a animal behaviorist-approved manner, we walked around for a long time. Slowly, the venom began to drain and the color of the day crept back in. I got to tell the story to other wheaten owners and they provided all the stranger approval a girl could ask for. So, after a good long time at the park, we indulged Kirby in his greatest love plunging in the water with dogs.

There must be something in the water, because there Kirby is transformed. He is confident and the ultimate BMOC. He plays beautifully, fearing no dog. He runs with the pack. He bounds through the water. He is free of all the crazy dog park ladies and scary dog park men with deep voices. That's him, second from the right, center of the pack.

My Bare Apple Trees

This weekend we planned to visit Gettysburg, PA around a memorial service being given for the father of a co-worker in a neighboring town. I hoped we could sneak in a little mini-adventure. I found us a dog-friendly hotel and had started packing on Monday. The dogs knew there was a trip in the car!!!!! Sorry, but our dogs use a lot of !. 

On Friday I went out for a couple of errands when suddenly there was such a clatter I arose to see what was the matter. Oh sorry, actually there was an OMG stabbing pain in my back below the ribs. Could it be...a kidney stone? But I gave the union the weekend off! So I called my doc and they scheduled a CT scan for mid-afternoon. I cancelled our hotel. The CT showed nothing. It is super duper frustrating when you spring for the pricey radiation and it says you're crazy.

I took my meds and sure enough the next morning even my body was saying there was nothing wrong. We hopped in the car and headed up to rural Pennsylvania for the memorial service. It was beautiful. The reception after was huge. It was clear the man was widely cared about. We stopped for lunch in Frederick, MD, though it turned out neither of us was up for a sightseeing day. We had lunch at the blandest most incredibly average Mexican restaurant in all of north-central Maryland. We got home to our dogs and they had left us a colossal but not their fault mess. (The kind that requires washing two area rugs.)

Exhausted, we collapsed into our tv zones.

And then, yesterday morning, early, I went out to get the paper. That's when I discovered that the two Obama magnets on the back of my car - the ones that gave me a sense of pride and joy every time I saw them while unpacking groceries for the last nine months or so, were gone!!!!! See, now the dogs have me doing it.

My mind reeled - did it happen here? In rural Pennsylvania in the parking lot of the Evangelical church? On the streets of Frederick? Was it someone I know or a stranger? Oh it was infuriating. We're pretty sure it wasn't here since Jac's car was parked 5 feet away and did not suffer the stripping.

So the bare apple trees are fitting for today. I'd hoped to take a heap of photos this weekend, but ended up with just a couple, and open-toe heel-clad feet were coated in cold oozing mud in the endeavor. 

The First Time I Made Orzo

I haven't made orzo before and I wasn't encouraged by the instructions on the package that directed me to "cook until desired doneness". There were some tragic times back in college when I turned angel hair into something approximating congee because I couldn't determine its "desired doneness".

This is a dinner born out of our marital culinary differences -- an attempt to find a common ground. Jac had enough pasta in Africa to last the rest of his life. He isn't even open to one pasta night a week. I guess I needn't have mastered that angel hair cooking afterall. But Jac, being a good Southern man, does appreciate a bowl of rice. A couple of months ago I had a starchy epiphany -- isn't there some pasta that masquerades as a rice? Of course, orzo!

But circumstances beyond my control prevented me from obtaining and experimenting with the semolina solution. About a month ago I finally brought a bag of the good stuff home. Finally, the fates allowed me to dive headlong into the world of orzo tonight.

Jac is pretty fond of asparagus and I would eat Brussels sprouts for weeks on end. So it's...

Sherry Chicken with Orzo Two Ways

3 Chicken breasts

1/2 c Dry Sherry (liberally add as desired as you cook)

2 tbsp Lemon juice (I am post-game guesstimating here, it's the 3rd flavor to the dish)

2 tbsp Butter (yeah, just 2 tbsp...or so...)

Salt

Pepper

Gruyere cheese

Orzo pasta

Asparagus or Brussels Sprouts

Saute chicken, covered, for 25 minutes turning once. Bring water to a boil in a separate pan. Place Brussels sprouts on a baking sheet and roast for 20 minutes in a 375 degree oven with olive oil, salt and pepper. During the last 10 minutes of cooking add asparagus and toss everything with the olive oil, salt and pepper mixture. Add 1 1/2 cups dry orzo to boiling, salted water. Stay close to the orzo. It cooks quickly. Ours was perhaps 6 to 8 minutes. Remove orzo from heat, pour through colander. Return colander to rest over pan and allow orzo to drain and cool. Slice chicken.

Assemble bowls with orzo topped with grated Gruyere cheese, butter, salt and pepper. Jac's bowl had more pepper than mine. Top orzo with sliced chicken. Add selected vegetable (Go Brussels sprouts!!). Ladle sherry sauce from pan over the chicken and orzo. If you're me, remember to immediately photograph and write about my meal, because it just became one of my favorites.