Potlikkery

food pairings

Normally I don't worry about pairing a beverage with food because my two beverages of choice, water and unsweet iced tea, go with everything. Almost forgot milk. I'm drinking my weight in milk these days. Nothing suits me better than hormone-free milk with every meal.  But there are plenty of folks out there who fret and send themselves into a tizzy trying to perfectly pair beverage to entree.

Now that He Said Beer, She Said Wine (2008) is on bookshelves, those folks can quit worrying and start enjoying life and eating and drinking a bit more. It's a slick book. Lots of colors, lots of photos. Wow.

It's written by Sam Calagione, the beer man, and Marnie Old, the sommelier. They duke it out round after round to prove that beer, or wine, is the best accompaniment to each dish presented in the book. Before they enter the ring, there are pages and pages that introduce the reader to each beverage, it's strengths, and weaknesses. Old deconstructs wine labels and informs the reader about what region is known for what kind of wine, as Calagione does with beer.

The authors then pair their respective beer or wine with cheese, vegetables, sandwiches, pizza and pasta, spicy food, shellfish, regular old fish, poultry, meat, desserts, and fruits. Following that up are specific guidelines for hosting your own wine vs. beer debate at home. It's a fabulous idea and surely great fun.

The only problem I foresee is procuring some of these beers and wines. If you don't live in a very, very urban area, finding the beer varieties Calagione touts, may be difficult. Likewise with the wine selections that Old makes.

Be sure to leave a comment. I'll pick one to send a copy of this book to.

seriously unstructured scones

Believe it or not, my favorite scone recipe is one of Tyler Florence's. It's from Real Kitchen. Can't quote you the page number though.

What is finer than a sweet biscuit? When I was young, I'd only eat the innards of a biscuit because the tough bottom and crunchy tops didn't suit me. I liked that tender in-between bread best of all. Also made sure my Mamaw cut the crusts of my toast, or else I nibbled around the edges and left all those cripsy crusts behind. I'm still that way, sometimes. And mostly I ate homemade biscuits and rolls, but occasionally there'd be one of those kinds that come in the cans you had to pop open. I can't recall the exact name of the brand, but there was one whose innards peeled apart in fine layers. That was a treat, but didn't last too terribly long. had to go through biscuit after biscuit after...

But Tyler's scone recipe is my favorite because you don't overwork the dough. You sift flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder together first, mix in 5 tablespoons of butter, then make a well for the heavy cream, then fold in the berries. I probably under work the dough, and that's why my scones are seriously unstructured. These aren't scones that you roll out and use a cookie cutter on. Tyler tells you to make a rough rectangle then cut that in half, then in fourths, and then slice those into triangles. It works.

They fall apart when you lift them from the parchment paper. I usually skip the lemon glaze, though I'm sure it's tasty. I've made these with all kinds of berries, but blueberries are my favorite and I happen to have at least two more pints in my fridge; usually they accompany my morning cereal.

These were Sunday's breakfast. Yum. Hot from the oven. No need for butter at all.

the french toastiest

I took the day off today because I could. And because Ian would be home much of the day. Having him home for almost an entire day is rare, so I wanted to spend my day with him. He got up, let out the dogs, and unknownst to me, ate a bowl of cereal while he fed our pack of dogs.

I texted him and asked if he wanted French Toast this morning. But he left his phone on the bedside table. I called him on the home phone and that is when he told me he ate cereal.

"But go ahead and make French Toast," he said. "I'll eat a piece."

So I came into the kitchen, got out my utensils and pan, and got to work. Just used two slices of sourdough bread from a loaf he picked up at the store a few days ago. It was well into the loaf, so those slices were huge. Dipped them in two beaten eggs, then threw them into my pan all slicked up with melted butter.

>

They cooked in no time. I finished up mine with blueberries, confectioner's sugar, and a little white corn syrup. Ian's had the confectioner's sugar and Mrs. Butterworth's. No blueberries for him.

Great way to start out the day with a semi-hot (cause it had cooled in the time I took me to snap a few photos) home-cooked breakfast.

bananas today

spoonbread or corn pudding?

Of late I'm frequently inspired by Baking Bites. The first recipe I've tried from that site/blog is the Buttermilk Spoon Bread. Its preparations were a little unusual; not what I'm used to. You take your milk and buttermilk along with the cornmeal and bring it to just under a simmer in a saucepan. I did that part. But I didn't follow the rest of the directions exactly. Plus, I added more sugar and some corn niblets from my freezer.

Another thing: I didn't use yellow cornmeal. I always use white, like my mother. There's something about yellow cornmeal, yellow cornbread, that makes me think "cheap." In my mind I feel it's coarser tasting than the "refined" white cornmeal. I don't know if that's southern. Or something else. My mom was born in Baltimore, but her mom was from the same area that I live now in East Tennessee. And so I don't know how, or whether, other culinary influences made their way into their repertoires. But I believe that sugar in cornbread is a Northern thing, not so much Southern.

Anyway, I cooked this spoon bread variant 30 minutes, five more than the recipe called for and it didn't turn golden brown, though I have issues with golden brown, too. I'm so silly. Really. But I don't like my toast, or anything baked to ever reach any color close to brown. Amber is more my taste.

A few weeks ago I brought a container of raspberry honey home to my honey. Cause I like surprising him with unusual food items and this one just happened to be sweet. Whew boy it was sweet on my spoon bread. I ate a small portion. It was hot. And good. But seemed more like cornmeal mush than spoon bread. Guess that's what I get for not following instructions closely. I may stick to corn pudding from now on.

tub o' hummus

avoiding that center garnish

Surely my eating habits are not an anomaly.  I like to think that I'm not bizarre. I'm prone to obsess over one thing for weeks and then be over and done with it. Not rice, I'm still on that kick. But my supplemental food obsession began last week when I cracked open a tub of hummus and started dipping melba toast rounds into it.

Then after Ian finished the last of the melba toast rounds without telling me, I went crazy for a short time. But then we stopped at Fresh Market on the way home from Atlanta Sunday and I bought some even-more-fabulous-than-melba-toast-rounds crackers. Ian loved them, too. He said they remind him of baked pita chips, but they're just really thick crackers seasoned with a bit of sea salt.

Hummus is a the perfect protein packing snack. It keeps me from feeling ravenous, which is a frequent thing of late. I've never been a constant snacker, but I am now.

the gypsy flies with sweet melissa

From the moment I opened The Sweet Melissa Baking Book, I knew my relationship with this cookbook would be different. First, lots of her recipes appealed to my sense of taste immediately. That doesn't always happen. Like that Magnolia book? Eh. I opened, I browsed, and I never made the first thing from the book because while the products looked appealing, their flavor combinations were short of interesting me.

Another aspect to my fondness for Sweet Melissa is the book's design. The cover art is delicious. Its typography is inviting and I love the honey bees buzzing around the page. There are at least six or eight glossy pages of photos showing off the dishes with delightful styling.

And every time I think about the book, that line from the Allman Brothers tune haunts me. I'm hearing it in my head. Will have to get out my Allman Brothers greatest hits CD and listen to it in the kitchen. But hey, what is more appropriate in a southern kitchen than listening to the Allman Brothers? Okay, I can name at least a dozen other good old southern fried rockers or creoles or folkies or bluegrass or blues people to listen to in the kitchen. But it's Allman Brothers in honor of Sweet Melissa.

As a huge fan of cooking with Guinness, I stopped at the Guinness Gingerbread, and it was the first recipe I tried. Loved that it uses white pepper and a generous amount of ginger. There's also dutch process cocoa, which I found unusual, because my favorite gingerbread recipe, circa 1934 from the only cookbook my Mamaw Lestie owned and cooked from certainly doesn't put that much ginger in there or any white pepper at all in there.

For at least two weeks now I've hoped for the energy to get in the kitchen and cook. My health has been iffy. Nothing serious, just dead dog tired all the time, and so lounging on the couch reading or knitting appeals to me much more than serious work in the kitchen. Anyway, I worked through my tiredness, donned a new fancy Anthropologie apron I bought in Seattle or Philadelphia, and turned to the recipe.

I had all the ingredients! I bought fresh eggs and a package of dark brown sugar at the store in advance. I was ready. I preheated the oven. I buttered and floured my square pan. But it wasn't the 9 x 9 x 2 that Melissa Murphy indicated. I wasn't about to go out and buy one. I was ready to bake. And I wondered what kind of difference it made in the end.

It didn't. The 8 x 8 x 2 pan I had on hand, or in cupboard,  worked fine. It worked perfectly.

Threw all the dry ingredients together into a bowl and then read that I should SIFT. So I sifted. That wasn't a major deal. I love to sift, actually, it so throws me back to my childhood and cooking with Mamaw because she almost always had something for me to sift. And I have an old-fashioned sifter like hers, though not hers.

Had to use a brand of molasses I wasn't thrilled with. But since I don't keep it on hand, I used what I had, and it did the trick.  Ian spied the bowl later and asked what I made with chocolate in it. I suggested that what he thought was chocolate was actually molasses.

Then it baked for 50-60 minutes. At 48 minutes I inserted the wooden end of a matchstick into the cake and nothing came off. Yeah, I looked around for toothpicks. This is not the first time I've used a matchstick in a pinch. Ian didn't find the toothpicks, either, and so he pulled the plastic off a new box of matches and handed me one.

I cut the Guinness Gingerbread into 9 pieces and put two on two plates for our dessert. It was thick, dense, and could have supported the weight of a can of soup, no doubt. But I didn't try that.

We dug into our pieces and I was disappointed. It was dry, heavy, almost like a brownie, but not even a moist brownie. It reminded me of a bad batch of brownies I made for a boyfriend when I was 15. Ian liked it, liked the flavor. I did too, though. But I needed a glass of milk to dip it into. Then I said, "Gosh if the recipe had oil or butter in it, it'd be good." Got out the book again, turned to the page, and there, at the bottom, it lists cup of oil.

My mise en place is never in place, and somehow I missed that last, that vital ingredient. I decided to throw out that batch and try again.

If you'd like a copy of Sweet Melissa, let me know by leaving a comment and I'll select someone, if there's more than one, to send the book to. It's too good a book not to share it. I feel really selfish by keeping it all to myself.