Crab Soup

Lemons beget lemonade,

cute little toast appetizers where you have to trim off the crusts

beget blueberry bread pudding with lemon sauce,

and half and half that's left over from a batch of cheese fondue

begets crab chowder.  Or maybe it's bisque.
What's the difference between chowder and bisque, anyway?
This soup is simple, delicious, and fairly frugal if you substitute fake crab meat,

which I did.
I'd also like to note that an eensy bit of patience is called for here, as you should let the soup thicken and come to a bubble over medium-high heat instead of blasting it on high, as is my wont.
I've always wanted to use "wont" in a sentence.
Happy now.
CRAB SOUP
1/4 c. butter
1/4 c. flour
4 c. milk (I used nonfat)
1 c. half and half
1 T. Worcestershire sauce
2 t. grated onion
1/2 t. salt
1/4 t. pepper
1 1/4 c. fake crab meat, flaked
2 hard-boiled egg yolks, crumbled
4-5 T. sherry

Melt butter in saucepan; add flour and stir.  Slowly, while whisking, add milk and half and half.  Add Worcestershire sauce, onion, salt, and pepper.  Heat over medium or medium-high heat, stirring constantly, until bubbling and thickened.  (This takes a bit of time -- maybe 15 minutes or so?  Patience.)  Add the fake crab, heat through, and serve, adding 1 T. sherry to each bowl and sprinkling each with a bit of the egg yolk.  Serves 4 - 5.

How to Cook Shrimp

My post-holiday bathroom scale has been hinting that perhaps a few more salads are in order.  So, inspired by this post for shrimp caesar salad at A Blog About Food, I headed to the local Chinese market for the freshest, juiciest shrimp around.

The market sells them with their heads still on (see those little shrimp eyes?).  And while whole shrimp take a bit more time to prepare, I think the extra flavor and juiciness is worth it.

It occurred to me that in this era when so much of our grocery store food is pre-cooked and pre-cleaned, somebody out there might not know what to do with whole shrimp.  So I share with you a method for cooking them that I just discovered a few years ago.  It's easy, adds no extra fat, and near as I can tell, is foolproof.  You don't need anything but a large-ish pot and some water.  The shrimp end up moist and never overcooked.  And if you buy them from my Chinese market, they'll be sweet and mmmm mmmm good.

1.  Put one to two inches water in large lidded pot.  Bring water to boil over high heat.
2.  Add shrimp that are IN the shell.  Cover, remove from heat, and let stand until shrimp are cooked through in center, about 8 minutes.

3.  Pour shrimp into colander to drain.  Let cool for a couple minutes.

4.  Pop off the shrimp heads (there might be some orange goo-squirting going on, so wearing an apron is not a bad idea).  Then snap off the tails and pull off the shrimp's outer shells.  (Gardeners may want to set aside the shells to dig into soil later; they add calcium to the soil, apparently, which helps prevent tomato bottom rot, I am told.)

And there you have it.  Shrimp deliciousness, ready for your next salad.

Not cookies.  Salad.  We are eating salad here.

The quest for cumin recipes . . .

Please tell me I am not the only one with files like this, overstuffed like a deep dish pie with recipes to try someday.

Most of these recipes I acquired pre-Internet days, back when cookbooks were king and magazine recipes were at least crown prince.  My files are passe now, I realize, as anyone with a mouse can ask the Great Wizard of Google to find recipes for, let's say, chicken livers plus mango salsa plus fresh lime juice.

But with a simple web search one would miss the thrill of the hunt.  The tactile pawing through of a ragtag collection of multi-sized scraps of paper, torn or carefully cut, some in neat rectangular shapes and others splotched together with scotch tape and folded, wonton-like, to fit into the bulging file folder -- that's the spirit in which I want to decide what to make for dinner.

It suits my librarian-like tendencies to spend an evening flipping through a file in my vast collection, looking for, this time, recipes containing cumin, a nice bag or two of which I acquired last summer while we were in Morocco for a friend's wedding.

(Yes, the careful reader may note those instructions are in French, and I'm pretty sure there's something there about aiding the stomach with diarrhea.  Moving on.)

This is the recipe I chose to make, Picadillo Tortillas, recipe pre-splattered (somehow) to save me the trouble.  From an old issue of Cooking Light magazine -- so old it's not on the Cooking Light archived recipes page -- it turns out this was a grand choice.  It used just 1/4 t. of cumin (unfortunately), but with a delicious hint of cinnamon, and the surprise of diced apple and raisins, it's a keeper.  Serves four (in our house, two), 232 calories each (in our house, 464).  I think I may multiply this by a gazillion and make it for the next big family reunion.

PICADILLO TORTILLAS
1/2 lb. ground round
1 c. peeled, finely chopped Rome apple
2 T. raisins
1 T. minced jalapeno pepper (I omitted)
1/2 t. salt
1/4 t. ground cumin
1/8 t. ground cinnamon
dash of ground coriander
8 oz. can tomato sauce
1 clove garlic, minced
4 8-inch flour tortillas

Crumble beef in microwave-safe 1-quart casserole dish.  Cook for 1 1/2 minutes on high; stir; cook for 1 1/2 more minutes on high; stir again.  If meat is still pink, cook for another minute or 2 until it's done.   Drain off fat to discard.  Add all the rest of the ingredients to the meat, except tortillas, then nuke on high for 3 minutes; stir; cook 3 more minutes; stir.  If it's still kind of soupy, cook for another minute or two until it's a little thicker.  Spread 1/2 c. of the meat mixture on a tortilla.  Can fold over, burrito-style, cover with paper towel, and heat just another 15-20 seconds or so to warm it up.  Then you get to eat it.

So tell me:  Do you have a pile of recipes somewhere that you're waiting to try?

Homemaking in the Fall

Turns out sometimes you're too busy being productive at home to actually blog about being productive at home.  Like a squirrel gathering nuts, I have been nesting -- saying goodbye to the season past and preparing for the one to come.

There were the leaves collected and flattened and traced and turned into the cutest autumn towels ever.

Idea from this delightful book.

There were the home-grown tomatoes, transformed into oniony/Parmesan-y tarts, soup for the freezer, dehydrated disks, and juice, glorious juice.

There were the apples made into chips, dehyrated snacks, and a nice little side dish doused with a citrus-y dressing of orange juice, lemon juice, and diced red onion.

There was the eggplant --  itty bitty ones, to be sure, but enough for a quiche and lovely cracker spread and a couple other dishes I forgot to photograph ;)

And finally, the peppers.  Are they not gorgeous?

This year, rather than making pickled peppers, I opted for lots of slivering for the freezer, and a wee bit o' roasting.

To roast, just cut them in half and remove core and seeds, put them in the oven on a foil-lined baking sheet and broil for 10 minutes or so, until quite blackened, then sweat them out in a sealed zippered plastic bag for 20 minutes before peeling.

A bit of work, I'm not gonna lie.  But in the end, the roasted peppers, pureed with a clove of garlic and a bit of olive oil, circled around a platter of lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, salami, and tomatoes -- probably the best meal of the season.

Happy fall.

Y'all.

NOTE:  Instructions for roasting peppers came from an old issue of Cooking Light magazine.  Salad idea with the roasted pepper puree came from another old magazine clipping -- maybe McCall's?  Not sure.