Rambling: Again the Rambling

So, what if I started blogging from all devices and without a plan? Would I blog more? Would it be worth reading?

Hm.

I'm writing on my phone right now (taptaptap) but I'm not logged in to the blog so I won't be posting instantly.

Part of the recent blog slump was because I was preparing for a Big Trip, and then on the Trip, and then back from the Trip. And I felt like I should blog about the Trip. But I didn't wanna. It was a lovely Trip, but apparently it requires some pre-blogging percolating. So I didn't blog at all.

Illogical.

If I had been able to blog in the moment ("Hey! I just saw a Himalayan blue poppy at the Chelsea flower show!") would I have?

Worth trying. Maybe.

Taptaptap.

I've been thinking a lot about my next career. I don't know if that will happen when I turn 65 (is 67 the official retirement these says?) or if I'll make a slow shallow turn in my current career. Or some other shift.

No, I'm not going anywhere with that idea in this post. Probably.

The farm is producing snap peas. Oregon Giant Sugar. I think. I need to recheck the name on the packet. Carol Deppe recommended them in The Tao of Vegetable Gardening, for both snap peas and pea sprouts eaten as greens. After eating the snap peas just three times, I'm totally sold and planning to plant at least triple the number of plants next year, and to attempt a fall-grown crop.

I was  surprised that the pods are flat--I expected them to be fleshy like other snap peas, and was afraid that the snow-pea-like flatness would mean snow-pea-like not-sweetness. But, no, they're quite sweet, the bigger the sweeter. Apparently the quite small ones are more snow-pea-like (I haven't eaten them really small yet) so I could treat them like two vegetables--maybe three if I eat the sprouts/tendrils. They get BIG, and eventually do produce nice little round peas. I suppose technically I could shell out those peas and declare s third/fourth vegetable, but that would be a tragic waste of the pods.

Another advantage is that a pod can sit on the vine for a very long time, from delicate little snow pea to big elephant-earlobe pod with filled-out peas. So if I don't pick in a timely manner, that's OK--I think a weekly picking would be just fine, as long as I'm good with a mixture of different sizes on the plate. And if I were going away for longer, I bet I could pick all the peas of all sizes and be good for two or three weeks.

They taste good. Really good. Sweet, but also with a flavor so distinctive that I want to figure out how to flavor butter and cook other things in that butter.

So far I'm just cooking them plain-with-butter: Boil a big pot of water, throw the snapped pods in, boil for one minute, dip them out into a strainer, dump the water, turn down the heat, throw in a glob of butter, let it foam, throw the peas into the butter, cook a little too hot until every bit of water from butter or bean is gone and the butter is syrupy and an occasional bean has a browned side--maybe two minutes. Put on plate. Salt. Eat. Look around for witnesses before licking the remaining butter off the plate.

Mmmm.

I think that's all. For now.

Image: (Ha! Fooled ya! No image!)
(Yeah, I'm a little sleepy.)

Blogging: The Undead Blog Awakens! (No, not this one.)

I was doing so well, and then a week rolled by, foom! No posts.

I blame Thanksgiving. I ignore the fact that Thanksgiving was a week ago.

So, remember that Rambling Chicken blog over there, the one that's been sleeping since 2011? I'd been thinking of trying an unprecedented experiment of a blog with a  fairly focused subject, and I'd been thinking of writing a sort of "where's the fried chicken in this city?" guide, and I realized that Rambling Chicken was a moderately perfect title for that concept.

And so, Rambling Chicken is about to be about chicken. Primarily in a food rather than a feathery bird context. I've already written this post about a Vancouver, BC restaurant that will serve you rendered chicken skin. On a plate. Like fancy potato chips, only much, much chickenier. I'm planning to continue writing posts about what restaurants serve what chicken-worth-eating.

I realize that there's limited demand for restaurant reviews/chickenfat rhapsodizing for cities where the reader isn't. One of the advantages of blogging purely as a hobby is that I don't feel an immediate need to solve that problem and get BIG STAT NUMBERS RAWR!

Ahem.

If I wanted big numbers I'd redesign the site and do...uh...stuff. About clicks and SEO and blah blah blah plus blah. Oddly, I do own the domain ramblingchicken.com, because Himself got it for me just in case. Right now, it points to this blog and not that blog, but I'll fix that soonish.

I'll still leave the old material there, so it will be a confused mix of chicken and fiction and other stuff for a while, but over time the chicken posts will start to outnumber the others. Unless I write chicken fiction. I did recently write a piece of chipmunk fiction, so who knows?

There's a good chance that this will go the way of my other blog spinoffs, including the previous incarnation of Rambling Chicken, but where's the harm in trying? I'll keep posting here, but Rambling Chicken will give me a built-in excuse and context for writing about poultry. And, who knows, maybe chicken vintage memorabilia, or history and culture topics related on poultry, or...well, we'll see.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Pancakes and Fur Collars

Sunday.

I fried two kinds of chicken last night.

I just made Swedish pancakes.

I did eat some broccoli with the chicken. That makes it all OK, right?

It's raining out there.

I was going to finish making a skirt this weekend.

That's looking increasingly unlikely.

Oops. I was also going to plant the French grey shallots.

But the rain is an excuse for not doing that, right?

I've been thinking of learning how to make pot roast. But that wold be unhealthy.

Heh.

I bought more rhinestones. And a cool pin that looks sort of like a metallic Tribble.

That's a Maine Coon. The cat, that is. The one with the sort of Bugs-Bunny expression. If we get a cat again, I want it to be a Maine Coon.

I dug out the pieces of that skirt so far, and was startled to realize that it's made of wool crepe instead of denim. A person should really remember these things. It's wool crepe that I've had for years and years. It seemed like time to do something with it. I remember my thinking now that I have the (partial) skirt in hand.

I bought a couple of hundred yards of bias binding in assorted colors, and thirty yards of black twill tape, when we were in Portland. Because it's harder to find that stuff in Ashland. I'm hoping that the result will be that I knock off some skirts. I prefer bound hems.

While I was at it, I bought two more patterns for the Casual Shirt Grail. The Casual Shirt Grail is the goal of a simple shirt that I can get from cutting table to wearing in roughly three hours--and that I'm subsequently willing to wear.

I already have the Gored Skirt Grail that I can make that fast--assuming that I didn't spoil the pattern last time I re-traced it. It was a patchwork of cut pieces and masking tape from all the alterations. I'm pretty sure I traced exactly precisely the pattern from the last successful one that I made, but with the tape giving way and pieces of pieces falling on the floor, and with Version I and Version II and Version III floating around, it's hard to tell for sure.

The Casual Shirt Grail requires (1) no collar, because I can't finish a shirt with a collar, even a simple collar without a stand, in three hours. And (2) not-set-in sleeves, because I have yet to solve my tilted shoulder problem, plus set-in sleeves are precise enough that I suspect I'd be doing a little tweaking with each different fabric. And (3) no required buttons. When this pattern is right, I want to be able to cut and sew it without even needing to try it on.

The goal (Huh. This post is starting to narrow down to a topic here) is to have a reasonably flattering shirt pattern that's so easy that I have spare attention for embellishments. Piping, binding, contrasting stitched-down facing, beading, embroidery, decorative buttons--not, I promise, all on the same garment.

I'm looking at a vintage 1950's swing coat with a gorgeous fur collar and wondering if making something with really high-quality fake fur would end with people spitting on me and throwing red paint at me. I guess the more obviously fake the fur is, the less likely that would be to happen, but I want things that look more convincingly first-half-of-the-twentieth-century.

Meanwhile, I do have a really nice-looking swing coat pattern.

That is all.

Image: By Takashi Hososhima. Wikimedia Commons

Garden: No cheese

I don't know what kind of salad it is, I'm eating a salad, okay? I'm doing it, do I have to know the names? There's no difference between them, it's a bowl of weeds. Some of them have cheese. This isn't the kind with cheese. Does that answer your question?
Toby Ziegler, West Wing

The garden is producing food! Hah!

No, it didn't produce those walnuts. Or the cranberry raisinesque things. But the greens, yep yep. And there's a wad of kale in the fridge waiting for me to remove all of its health benefits by cooking it with butter and onions. Mmmm.

Um.

I'm going to eat my bowl of weeds now. Possibly more later.

Photo: Mine.

Rambling: Dinner

White bread.
White cheddar.
Chives.
Melted butter.
Toasted sesame oil

Build sandwich with cheddar, bread, and chives.

Fry in a puddle of butter and sesame oil.

Tasty.

But I got my keyboard buttery.

That is all. At least until my hands are clean.

Daily Ramble: Portland Carbs

St. Cupcake is back.

Blue Star has a new location that isn't going to do the close-when-they-run-out-of-dough thing.

We're going to be spending a fair number of weekends in Portland. That's not cause and effect, it's just an additional fact.

Increased roundness looms.

Random: Weekend Rambling

Well, that daily blogging thing fell down. But it was an extended holiday weekend--I've been off since Wednesday. That's different, right? Right? Sure it is!

We went to Portland. We ate food. We looked nervously at the notices telling us what to do about the boil-water notice. Then we ate more food. Then we cheered at the news that the boil-water notice was over, and the fact that we could now reliably get ice in our beverages. Then we ate more food.

Some of the food, such as the cured salmon at Paragon, was reasonably diet-appropriate. Some of it, such as the doughnuts at Blue Star and the biscuits at the Pine State cart, was (were?) emphatically not. The fried chicken at Screen Door was not appropriate for any normal diet, but since my diet is currently focused on sugar reduction, it was just fine. Except that they brought me honey for it. Which I used. Oh, and except for the cookie that I bought from Waves of Grain while waiting for a table at Screen Door.

Yes. Yes, I did. I walked to another business and purchased a snack to carry me through the wait between signing in at a restaurant, and sitting down. Did you ever see the Portlandia episode about the brunch line? I assume that it was based on the Screen Door. Except that the Screen Door doesn't have a cult leader kidnapping people to punish them for violations of line protocol. I assume.

You need to see their chicken and waffles. See this photo. From this post on The Joyful Table. Yes, it is customarily shared. And everyone leaving the restaurant seems to be carrying a box.

That is all.

Rambling: Dieting again

Quack.

No, the image has nothing to do with the post. Sometimes you just need something fuzzy.

So, I'm trying to diet again. As mentioned, no Coke. And I suppressed urgent doughnut and chocolate milk cravings today. And got the duck potstickers and wokked broccoli for lunch, instead of the Fried Chicken Bits. (I don't remember what they're called.)

Actually, the fried chicken wouldn't have been forbidden on the current step of my (self-declared) diet, because it's currently all about reducing sugar, to be followed by reducing simple carbohydrates. Fried meat will come later. Reducing buttered vegetables might never happen, because, really, there's only so much butter that can cling to a piece of cauliflower, unless you carve the vegetable and use it as a spoon. Or increase the butter's clinging potential by beating it into a nice hollandaise. I'm eagerly leaping on the Oops, Maybe Fat Wasn't That Bad After All bandwagon.  Partly because I believe it, and partly because I want to believe it.

I'm anxious. I use food to counter anxiety. Every time I go on a diet, something makes me nervous, and I eat in order to knock down the anxiety in order to deal with the something. I only recently realized that this adds up, in the end, to valuing every single one of those worries over my health.  I'm not young enough to do that any more. It's time to find anxiety management that doesn't involve chocolate milk or doughnuts. Being unemployed, or broke, or looking stupid, or any of the zillion silly things I worry about, are all still better than being dead.

Now,  I can tell myself that the deadness isn't that likely anytime soon, but neither are the other things. And the deadness is going to come someday (barring download of my brain into a Cylon body), and what I do now does presumably have a statistically plausible impact on how far away "someday" is.

But I still really want a chocolate croissant.

Image: By Fir002/flagstafffotos. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Rambling

I'm overdue for a post. I was doing so well, too. For a little while, there. So I ramble.

Um.

Rambling requires a topic. I don't seem to have a topic. I'm thinking about ice cream. And the fact that St. Cupcake in Portland has stopped selling cupcakes. Well, mostly stopped. As I read it, one of their other stores will eventually serve a very (very) limited selection of cupcakes.

On the other hand, Blue Star Donuts is good. Really good.

On the other other hand, I'm supposed to be reducing sugar and carbs again.

To continue with joyfully destroying one's health at Portland restaurants, Tilt has astoundingly good bacon. I don't think they serve it as bacon; I seem to recall that it came in a sandwich and was so perfect that I extracted it from the sandwich for maximum bacon focus. There's also the praline bacon at Screen Door. And the maple bacon donut at Blue Star, which I think is better than the maple bacon donut at Voodoo Doughnut.

Also, the charcuterie at Gruner. And the charcuterie at Little Bird. And the marrow bones at Little Bird.

I'm sure that Portland has green food. I don't eat much of it. Except for the sliced fried okra at Bollywood Theater. And the strawberry balsamic ice cream at Salt & Straw next door contains fruit. That's health food, right?

Um.

I feel fat.

That is all.

Image: By Steve Morgan. Wikimedia Commons

Food: Back on the Wagon

Did I mention that I fell off the low-sugar wagon? Yeah. Not so much fell as leaped, claws extended toward the nearest candy treat. Stress, work, travel to That City Where St. Cupcake Lives, and it all fell apart.

Saturday I'm starting again. I'm prepped. The sliced turkey, olives, and Greek yogurt are ready in the fridge. (Greek yogurt, you might ask? That's milk, and milk has carbs, you may say. Yes, I know, but a limited dose of the stuff worked well last time.) We've got plenty of teabags for iced tea.

So what's the plan? The same one that worked last time. Starting Saturday, no candy, no cake, no sugar-bearing condiments, no sugared drinks, no fruit juice drinks, nothing that's hiding sugar in its depths, except for:

• One piece of chocolate, per day.
• One bowl of Greek yogurt with one tablespoon of honey, per day.
• One piece of fruit, per day.
• One Coke, per week.
• One full-on sugary treat (doughnut, cupcake, candy bar, whatever), per week.

I realize that that's probably a year's worth of carbs for a true low-carber.

Last time I did this I cut out the sugar, waited a few weeks, and then cut the simple starches. This time I think I'm going to try to cut them both at the same time, because I think that just extended the misery--once they were both pretty minimal, I felt OK and was no longer tempted to detach and eat the limbs of innocent passers-by. So, no potatoes, no white rice, no potato chips, no bread, and so on and so on. For the first few days, in fact, I'll probably also cut out the whole-grain, er, grains, restricting my bready eating to the crispbread that I make my turkey sandwiches with. I'd cut that out if I could, but I just can't; I've tried. Turkey without anything filling the role of bread depresses me.

Oh, and no milk. Lotta sugar in milk. Also, Himself thinks it makes me crazy.

So, turkey. And chicken. And pickles and olives and vegetables. Massive quantities of them, and zero effort to control fat. This is a single-topic diet. There will be butter on the vegetables and mayonnaise on the turkey-and-crispbread. (I just rushed to check the mayo jar for sugar. Nope. Thank goodness.)

Wish me luck. And best keep your limbs out of reach, for a little while.

Image: By Uwe Hermann. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Fat and Bones and Heels

It's been three weeks since I last posted. That means that it's time for one of those "write something!" posts.

I really should have had something to say, because we went to Feast in Portland. And ate things. Many things. At Feast and at restaurants.

Marrow bones at Little Bird. Deep-fried fish bones at Raven & Rose. Roasted goat neck from the girl of The Girl and The Goat, guest-cooking at Nostrana. A lot of cupcakes from St. Cupcake. A magnificent sandwich from Expatriate. General food glory from Beast. Thin-sliced fried okra from Bollywood Cafe. And more and more. "Mint leaves with sea urchins meringues" (!) ice cream from Salt & Straw. Khao Man Gai and fried chicken skin from Nong's. Why didn't anyone tell me that they sell fried chicken skin? I really need to read menu boards more carefully.

I am fatter.

It was worth it.

I also tried to  pursue that Fashion Thing, with less success, in part because of that fatness factor. Preestablished fatness, not the newly acquired padding. I was hoping that Portland would offer more clothing choices for the pudgy, but without much luck. I did get a bra fitting, having been convinced of the value of doing so by watching all those What Not to Wear episodes, and bought some bras that, well, fit. And stocked up on hose and tights. At Avalon Antiques I bought a vintage brooch that looks rather like Cthulhu if he'd gone on a supermodel sort of diet.

And I wore heels to brunch. Girl clothes. That was interesting.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Rambling: Frying the slow way

I just fried chicken "Mom style" for the first time since Mom died. I've fried plenty of chicken since then, but I always fried it the faster, less greasy, Alton-Brown-inspired way. Tonight I realized around nine o'clock that I had a whole chicken that wanted to be cooked before it expired. The crust of Mom-style chicken is better the next day, and the method works better for bone-in chicken breasts, so I did it that way. I'm eating some, wiping my greasy fingers and typing between bites. And of course, the taste makes me think of Mom.

When I say that Mom didn't love me, I don't mean that she hated me. I mean that she didn't know how. I believe that for her to understand on an emotional level that another person had a mind, and thoughts, and feelings, for her to try to bond with that separate mind and to succeed to any extent, stretched her emotional understanding to its limit. She did that with one person in the world--my brother. I'm proud of her for achieving that. I've accepted--well, sometimes--that to expect her to generalize that, to love even one more person, would be expecting something beyond her ability.

But to the extent that I perceived love from her in childhood, I perceived it most in her fried chicken. And I realize just as I type that last sentence that in a way, this whole bleeping blog is dedicated to fried chicken, and so...

Sigh. There's always one more tether to childhood and your parents, isn't there?

Mom fried chicken for me. She made her spaghetti sauce for my brother. Both appeared with equal frequency on the dinner menu. She always floured and fried the stray little bits of chicken and skin that appeared when she cut up the chicken, and fished them out of the pan along with clumps of fried flour, and let me steal these "crunchies". I ate some of that fried flour before I sat down to chicken on a proper plate. Shatteringly crisp. The taste of greedy childhood.

Chicken skin as love?

So be it.

Image: Mine.

Rambling: Chicken and Snacky Things

Chicken thighs make the best fried chicken skin. Wings are second. The middle sections of wings, the ones with two little bones. It's harder to look civilized while eating the wings. You can nibble around the edges of the two little bones, but it's much more fun to sink your teeth in between them, tear them apart, and then eat the mostly-intact skin.

Lindt dark mint balls, the kind that they only sell at Christmas, are the best chocolate. Himself got me a supply. Himself is very clever.

I've developed a growing fondness for those sesame snap snack things. I just learned that you can buy them online. Of course you can buy them online; you can buy everything online. I just hadn't thought of it. I've also developed the habit of eating them after eating baked chicken from the local grocery deli, while watching the British show My Family. Habits are weird things.

I'm out of turkey. Turkey is an essential component in surviving the sugar-reduction diet. It was a mistake to run out of turkey. It was a further mistake to run out of Greek yogurt. Greek yogurt  has some sugar of its own (well, lactose or something), but you drizzle one little teaspoon of honey into a big bowl of it and stir it around, and it's a lot of sweet taste for not that much sugar.

Of all things sugar that I crave, I miss Mint Milanos the most. Except maybe for Coke-in-glass-bottles. Well, and the pralined pecans they sometimes have at the candy store. And cupcakes from St. Cupcake. I'm also remembering the cake that Gardener Artist brought to the Christmas party. It was a really, really, extraordinarily, oh-my-God, good cake. We ate all the leftovers. It's gone now. I miss it.

Oh, and Julie's ice cream bars. The vanilla with dark chocolate. Ooooooh.

Oh.

Hey.

Hey.

Hey.

TOMORROW IS TREAT FRIDAY!

I can have an ice cream bar! Bwahahahahahaha!

Ahem.

OK, this round of the low-sugar diet seems to be wearing on me a little more than the first round. You may have noticed.

Now I'm going to go shake the refrigerator and demand that it produce turkey.

First Image: Jon Sullivan. Wikimedia Commons.

Second Image: By ltshears. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: More big plans

You may have noticed that I tend to make Big Plans That Fall Down. The latest ones involve food.

See, I've been resolving to do more cooking. Partly to save money, and partly so that if we keep up the "farm"ing, we actually eat a decent percentage of the crops. And partly for better control over my diet. "Diet" in the "foods habitually consumed" definition rather than the "trying to lose weight" definition. Though both definitions are relevant.

But we've learned that we tend not to properly cook on a nightly basis. So that leads me to cooking for leftovers, and cooking-and-freezing, and so on. It could even lead to canning, except for my fear of botulism. I know that many people have canned without dying, but it makes me twitchy.

There's Once A Month Cooking, a concept that probably doesn't need a whole lot of explanation. You buy a lot of ingredients, you spend a chunk of the weekend making large batches of several dishes, you freeze 'em, and boom! You have a month's worth of food ready to reheat. Well, I don't suppose there's anything magical about the month, it's just a tidier acronym than, say, "once every five weeks cooking."

We even have the freezer, so there's really nothing to stop me from making a giant pot of...

OK, do you have recipes (maybe "recipes" is too dignified a term) that you make when you're going to be eating alone, when no one else can see just how much of a food barbarian you really are? One of mine is...Goop. There's Chicken Goop and Pea Goop. Really, Chicken Goop is essentially simplified Chicken a la King (chicken, frozen peas, perhaps slow-cooked onions, in a cream sauce), but to be most authentically Goop, the cream sauce is overcooked and overbuttered to the point that it "breaks", the fat separating from the thickened sauce. Pea Goop is what you make when you want Goop but you don't have any chicken. They're both morally wrong. Yum. I could happily make a giant pot of Goop, divided it into Ziplocs, and eat it whenever I'm in a sad butter-craving comfort-food mood.

Not that that's relevant to the farm. We don't grow chickens on the farm (They grow on vines, right? And the features are green until they're ripe?), and it's unlikely that we'd grow enough shelling peas to need to stash the leftovers in the freezer. Fresh shelling peas are so good that I'm not positive that they'd even make it inside to a buttered pot. But I wonder how other vegetables would freeze in a cream sauce? Would they do that thing that so many frozen vegetables do, where the freezing seems to tear them apart from the inside, or would the magical blessing of butter prevent that? Sugar snap peas, for example, come to mind--a much more plentiful crop than shelling peas, but similarly pleasing.

I would have assumed that onions would be ruined by the freezer, but I recently read that caramelized onions freeze extremely well. The obvious realization comes to me just as I type this: That means that I can grow quite large quantities of Copra onions next year and caramelize them en masse, rather than struggling to make space for the bulbs in the freezer. In fact, I could caramelize this year's modest crop, and the remains of last year's crop (yes, they did survive a full year) and put the results in the freezer. Though the crops are small enough that I might be tempted to just eat all the finished  onions with a spoon.

I could similarly cook a great volume of tomatoes down into freezable tomato sauce. The difficulty with that is that tomato sauce is available at every grocery under the sun, or a least in the state, and I don't know if the homemade kind is significantly better, especially after a few months of freezing. Now that I've had the onion inspiration, I'm tempted to forget the tomatoes and just grow more onions.

Big plans.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Gluttony

St. Cupcaaaaaaaaake!

We're on vacation. In Portland. Eating. Everything.

Ok, maybe not everything, but I just ate a fabulous peanut butter chocolate thing from a company named (lemme look...) Suzanne's Chocolaterie at the PSU Saturday Market. And a pint of chocolate milk from Lady-Lane Farm that competes with a long-mourned chocolate milk that was fortified with cream that we used to be able to get in the Bay Area before it vanished. And before that I ate a vanilla-with-chocolate-icing cupcake from St. Cupcake. It joined its sibling, which I ate yesterday

(Did I mention that I've been losing weight on a low-sugar lowish-carb lowish-milk diet? Yeah. That will resume post vacation.)

Of course I also ate low-carb food yesterday. Like the fish sauce wings from Pok Pok. And a charcuterie plate and gravlax and fried chicken from Irving Street Cafe. That's healthy, right?

Then there was nose gluttony. I finally bought a bottle of Parfums de Nicolai Number One at The Perfume Shoppe, after accepting that I can tell myself all I want that it's functionally redundant with Serge Lutens Un Lys; I'm still going to want it. And I ordered a small bottle of Chanel 28 La Pausa at Nordstrom's and they're going to tell me if they can get small bottle of 31 Rue de Cambon and we'll see if fiscal responsibility wins.

That is all. Right now.

Food: The Best

Anybody who doesn't think that the best hamburger place in the world is in his home town is a sissy.
Calvin Trillin

The best Thai iced tea in the world is served at Tour Eiffel in Los Altos, California, along with the world's best egg rolls. I hadn't tasted either one since we moved to Oregon; I'm happily full of them today. We've been traveling. And eating. (Read Himself's post for the details and the restaurants that you really should visit.) And I've been thinking about the best foods in the world, past and present, available and lost. The best foods, that is, according to my memories.

The best cupcakes in the world are sold at Saint Cupcake in Portland, Oregon. They're not the usual bought cupcakes, the kind that are mostly sugar and oh-yeah-maybe-we-should-add-some-butter. They taste of enough butter to make your fingers shiny when you eat them, and of eggs, and chocolate--that is, if you get the yellow cupcake with chocolate icing, my choice. The buttercream icing has the texture of chocolate ice cream that's thawed to precisely the point of no resistance, except when you're dealing with ice cream that point is followed fourteen seconds later by melting into liquid, while the cupcake can stay there all day. Or at least half an hour, which is the longest I've ever kept one uneaten.

The best fried chicken in the world was cooked by my mother. I'm pretty good at frying it myself now, though I only sometimes achieve the level of glorious greasy crunchiness that she accomplished regularly. I've learned part of the secret--it's a side effect of cooking more chicken than will fit in the pan. But I think there's more to learn, and Mom doesn't cook it any more, so I'll have to figure it out on my own.

Early in my St. Louis childhood, I learned that the Flaming Pit was the best burger restaurant in the world. We moved away to Nashville for a few years, where I ate the micro-thin steamy burgers from fast food restaurants. And then we moved yet again, back to St. Louis, and my brother and I begged to rush to the Flaming Pit. I have a clear memory of my first reunion with that burger, in its fat, smoky charredness... and not liking it one little bit. My mis-trained palate betrayed my memory, and as far as burgers are concerned, it never recovered; I never asked to return again, and have never appreciated a really good burger.

My memory asserts that the best Chinese food in the world is served at King Doh's in Kirkwood, Missouri, the town where I spent my teen years. I remember when King Doh opened, decades ago; back then, the term "stir fry" was a new curiosity, at least for folks my mother's age. The first time she was invited, Mom said that she didn't want to go, because she didn't like fried food.

We figured it out eventually, and ate a lot of dinners there. Mom was delighted by the chopsticks and the feeling of experimenting with the exotic, Dad looked forward to the hot sake; they both seemed more jovial than at most other family occasions. I hope my brother experienced those meals as happy, too. Me, I loved the food and still remember it as having a flavor unmatched by any Chinese restaurant I've eaten at since. Did it, or is my memory colored by happy moments? I suspect I'll never know.

Rambling: Turkey Zombies

We're fatter now.

This year we had a heritage turkey from Rogue Valley Brambles. Yum.

We'd heard delicious-sounding things about this turkey. Moister breast meat. More fat, and there's no time when I don't approve of more fat in my meat. Actual turkey flavor. So last year we tried to order one in early fall, and while they didn't precisely laugh at us, we were too late. So this year we got our order in somewhere in midsummer. We drove up with the cooler to pick it up on Monday, Himself started brining it yesterday, and he roasted it today, largely based on the method described in this post on Tigers & Strawberries.

It finished roasting far sooner than we expected--we had put the turkey in, contentedly made and eaten pancakes to tide us over the anticipated turkey-roasting hours, cleared the decks in the kitchen, and were lolling with our computers when I got up for a drink and glanced at the thermometer tethered to the turkey. Our goal temperature for turning the oven off and finishing with residual heat was 140, and the thermometer read 124. Panic!

We went into a frenzy of washing and trimming and boiling and melting and smashing things, which taught us that we will spend exactly as much time cooking a meal as we have available to us. Without the rapidly browning turkey bearing down on us, it would have taken us two or three hours to make the mixed-white-and-yam mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts and the second batch of candied yams. There would have been puttering and debating and examination of multiple cookbooks and much discussion of whether the potatoes were ready to mash. We didn't actually eliminate any of these steps, we just went through them a great deal faster. ("Drain 'em! Drain 'em now!") Everything landed on the table while the turkey was still in its resting-after-cooking prime and was just ready to carve.

Again, yum. Best turkey we ever had. It had so much flavor that Himself has resolved to also start buying chickens from Brambles, to see if they're similarly superior. Sadly, we'll have to wait until May--they don't harvest chickens in the winter. No one took us up on our Thanksgiving invitation; it was sad to not be able to share our turkey, but on the other hand it allowed us to be post-dinner slobs. The first load of dishes are swooshing in the dishwasher, and we're watching classic Thanksgiving television now.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Parfumes de Rosine Rose Kashmirie, and Tastebud Rambling

For the first hour or two, Rose Kashmirie reminds me of candied orange peel. I don't mean that it actually smells like citrus. But like sugared citrus peel, it has a strong bitterness paired with, but not really tempered by, an equally strong sweetness. And I don't like bitterness; its presence usually distracts me from all other notes. I keep trying to like bitter roses--Paestum Rose, Une Rose, No. 88, Dark Rose, Incense Rose, the list just keeps going. I like the idea of a sweet flower made darker and deeper and more interesting by contrasting notes, but I just can't stomach the bitterness. Gasoline? Yes. Mothballs? Great. A little touch of bitter? Eeeeew!

As it turns out, Rose Kashmirie sweetens over time. After an hour or two, it becomes a very warm female scent; it feels like furs and velvet and quirky old-fashioned hats. Around the sixth hour it's almost all sweetness, mellow and powdery and deep, a perfect comfort scent without the sticky-foody aspect that dominates so many comfort scents. I love this final drydown so much that I'm tempted to buy the perfume just to have access to it.

When I read other reviews of Rose Kashmirie, I don't see much made of the bitterness--it's acknowledged, but no one seems to get, or at least be bothered by, the teeth-on-edge feeling that I get. It's rather like my reaction to red wine; for me, all the sweet or raisiny or other flavors are drowned by a gritty bitterness that most people either don't perceive or actually enjoy.

I've read more than once that small children are picky eaters not because they're unsophisticated little monsters who want nothing but sugar and have spent too much time at Krispy Kreme, but because they can taste sharper flavors much more strongly than adults. Perhaps as a survival characteristic--many poisonous things that a toddler might stuff in her mouth have those unpleasant tastes--small children are wired to reject bitterness. Over time, those extra bitter receptors go away. 

In fact, over enough time all of our taste buds go away, one by one, until when you're very old almost the only thing you can taste is sweetness. My father, late in his life, was often only willing to eat meat when it was accompanied with cranberry sauce, and he couldn't understand why he no longer liked green beans. I proposed the sweetness theory to him, and he largely rejected it, while at the same time being quite pleased with sugar-glazed carrots. I suppose old habits are hard to break, and I rather wish that I had broken them for him and made him some sugar-glazed green beans to try. Sugar and soy and garlic might have made them perfectly palatable to everyone at the table. I'll need to remember all of this for when I'm older.

There's also the phenomenon of the "supertaster", a person who even in adulthood has an enhanced response to certain tastes, including bitterness. My taste preferences seem to run along the supertaster scale, and I'm using that as an excuse for why I was a terribly picky eater as a child. I also blame the cuisine of the parts of the southern Midwest where I grew up - vegetables in those areas were very thoroughly cooked, or canned and then again very thoroughly cooked. In the water from the can. And then they were served in the water from the can. Salad, too, was often served in a pool of water that diluted the Wishbone dressing. I'm not sure why all produce had to be accompanied by dampness.

I remember my amazement when I ate a package of Green Giant Boil In Bag Chicken A La King (and I find myself wondering why we had one--it was surely pretty expensive for Mom's frugal habits) and ate a pea that was still colored green. Bright green, not gray-green. And sweet. Peas have sugar; who knew? I realize that many people can taste the sweetness of canned peas; my father used to love the tiny Le Sueur ones. I've never gotten any flavor but "can" out of canned vegetables; maybe it's another supertaster thing.

So my introduction to "fresh" vegetables came from frozen food; that seems vaguely sad. It's not that Mom was a bad cook, but her talents lay in thoroughly cooked meat dishes--spaghetti sauce, fried chicken, pot roast. Himself goes into rapture over restaurant pot roast that makes me say, "Yeah? Tastes like Mom's." Sadly, Mom doesn't remember how she used to make the pot roast, because she doesn't make it for herself; I'm going to have to figure out out myself. All she's sure of is that it involved a packet of onion soup mix, and all I'm sure of is that it involved chunks of beef, not a full-size roast.

Er. Where was I going? Acquired tastes, that was it, and bitterness specifically. Red wine is a lost cause for me, and so are bitter salad greens. I'm fond of olives, though I prefer the butterier, blander ones. I like my chocolate with extra cocoa but also extra sugar to counter it. The puzzlement is why that preference, which is surely about tastebuds, should extend to smells. I'd like to acquire a taste for bitter perfumes, but along with red wine, it may be a hopeless cause.

Image: By Bilby. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Dinner

Cream saaaaaaaaauce!

Ahem.

Things got busy tonight, and dinner was three glasses of iced tea and two peanut butter cups. For me; I'm not quite sure what Himself had. I'm thinking of topping that off with a tablespoon or two of actual peanut butter.

I used to cook -- "used to" being a few years ago. Not fancy cooking, but I cooked more than this. I cooked garden vegetables this summer, though not nearly as many vegetables the garden pumped out. But now that the garden isn't out there pressuring me to "cook me! cook me!", we're eating a fair number of dinners that include Halloween candy, corn chips, or Ben & Jerry's.

Of course, I'm still frying chicken now and then. Chicken legs, chicken wings, chicken fingers. And Goop, which is essentially Chicken A La King with the sauce thickened to the consistency of cupcake frosting. (Hey, I didn't say I was proud of it.)

But I used to stir-fry things. And we made chicken and dumplings. And vegetable dishes more complex than "boil, drain, add butter". And I remember roasting a very fine duck. And there are photographs of us prepping for a party, with recipe printouts taped all over the kitchen. What happened to the cooking?

I'll have to work on it. Maybe a nice cream-based chicken soup would be a good first experiment. After, of course, NaNoWriMo.

Image: By Evan-Amos. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Travelling gluttony. Oh, and perfume, too.

Last week, we went back to the Bay Area to finish off some business and touch base with our respective employers. And (who am I fooling here?) to eat. Himself will no doubt be blogging about the eating, and I'll be offering a link when he does. Updating earlier travel, Himself has posted about our second day of northern gluttony and sightseeing, in September, here.

Regarding food, I'm just going to tell you that if you're ever in San Francisco, go eat at House, my favorite restaurant in the world. We went there for lunch. Then Himself, because Himself is very nice to me, changed our dinner reservations and we went there again for dinner. (Not that Himself doesn't also adore House, he just tends to believe in variety.) If the last train out of town hadn't been leaving at midnight, I might have suggested that we wait around to get hungry again and go there a third time.

I don't like salmon or mustard or cabbage; the House salmon roll with mustard and cabbage slaw is one of my favorite plates of food in the world. I don't like chicken livers; the only thing that kept me from completely cleaning my plate of chicken livers and baby greens at dinner was the fact that I was trying to finish it and the salmon roll after also having eaten the tuna tartare, and of course after an earlier lunch of another salmon roll and the rare-tuna BLT and chocolate cream pie. Did I mention that I also usually don't like dessert? I scraped the pie plate clean.

Ahhh. House. Go. Eat. Have the salmon roll and, if it's available, have the panko-crusted tuna roll. Beyond that, you're on your own recognizance.

OK, apparently I'm going to talk about food after all. I have a question. We ate at Picadilly Catering, where, by the way, they had very fine fried chicken of a school different from mine (battered and seasoned; I go with a dusting of flour and no seasoning other than salt), prepared with a skill greater than mine.

But the question is about the cake - they had layer cake with a very, very thin coating of frosting, and I realized that to me, the modest amount of frosting was exactly right, and somehow familiar. Why familiar? Are there regions of the US where a very modest amount of frosting is more popular than the huge sugar-bomb globs that seem more common nowadays? (Sugar-bomb globs that are partially responsible for the fact that I don't usually like dessert.) How much frosting do they use in Tennessee? I spent much of my childhood there, but I just can't remember.

Anyway. Where was I? Ah. Yes. Bay Area. In other words, Barney's territory. We went there, and Himself kindly settled into one of the "guy" chairs for the duration. I expected to rush in and rush out, but instead I had a lovely conversation with a man whose name starts with 'Mar', and if he ever happens to read this I apologize; I've never been able to remember the names even of people that I meet day after day, and I'd have lost the 'Mar' if he hadn't commented that our names have the same first syllable.

He kindly gave me samples of Parfums Del Rae Bois de Paradis and Mythique, and guided me to skin-testing Carthusia Corallim and Nasomatto Pardon. Corallim was lovely, but too bright for me to appreciate as summer's winding down; I'll be trying it again in the spring when what's now a slightly-too-fruity vibe will, I suspect, be just the right amount of fruit and bergamot nicely muted with the woody notes.

Pardon, on the other hand, was perfect for the season. It had a sandy, dry texture that reminded me of Serge Lutens Serge Noire, even though the notes had very little resemblance. I suspect that it will be more wearable than Serge Noire, a scent that's glorious in full heat or full cold, but that feels "sticky" to me when the temperature isn't right for it. In that day's in-between weather, Pardon was woody, rich but not too rich, sweet but not too sweet, and complex enough that I can't really speak to the notes yet. On my arm, it puffed clouds of scent up to my nose a little too aggressively, but the memory of it is haunting me, and I suspect that in the long run I'm going to end up buying it and making it a back-of-the-neck "waft" scent. Of course, I won't buy it without sampling it again. Really. That Would Be Wrong.

I just dabbed on the Mythique, and I'm enjoying it too. The first minute or so was a bit of a jumble - I don't know if this was a result of dabbing rather than spraying, or if I just don't like the very first top notes. But five minutes in, I'm already liking it - a nice smooth, dusty, powdery thing, without annoying girly sweetness. The reviews refer to fruitiness and flowers other than iris root, and I'm not getting that at all; I'll have to try this again, maybe decanting my sample into a sprayer, and produce a proper review. (At least, as proper as my reviews get.)

And the Chanel boutique had the small bottles of Les Exclusifs. I acquired their only small bottle of Cuir de Russie with unseemly haste. With my usual protectiveness of the associations of scents that I've committed to, I'm saving the first wearing for this weekend.

Yum.

Image: By the27thmaine. Wikimedia Commons.