Oh, Hey, I Have A Blog, Don't I?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my Best!Job!Evar! has made for a lot of big adjustments in life at Casa AC - especially with the decrease in time for elaborate meals and extensive food prep.  We've been eating a lot  more crock pot meals, and more quick-cooking dinners as well.  We're still avoiding the extensively processed food, which is good.

Last night was the annual Crawfish Boil in our neighborhood, which includes (natch!) lots of mudbugs, barbecued pork, brisket, homebrewed beer (not mine, but maybe next year) and a rich assortment of homemade sides.

This was my first helping.  First of many.

It's a good feel, to come together as a neighborhood like that.  A sense of community, the pleasure of sharing with my neighbors, the delicious food - they're all good for me.  This year, I bought some bread (I'd planned to bake it, but a stomach bug on my day off meant no food prep), as well as 3 bottles of my Riesling and some orange and mango-habanero mead (still not completely aged, but darn tasty nonetheless - and 15% ABV, so with a nice kick).  My Bock just got bottled, so it's still 3 weeks out from being ready to drink.  Next year, I'm going to be ready earlier, and I'll have more wine and beer ready to haul out, and probably some cheese as well.

Today is mostly recovery - I helped clean up and put away tables and chairs, and I've got some housecleaning to do, and then it's making Mozzarella, and starting a batch of Shiraz so I've got it ready for our trip to the beach in August to celebrate my parents' 50th wedding anniversary.

I'll be trying to get back in the swing of things here, aiming for a post a week.

So, how YOU doin'?

Holiday Prep and Woolgathering

Despite the best efforts of retailers to convince me that it's already Christmas and I need to ZOMG BUY SOME STUFF OH GOD PLEASE BUY SOMETHING, I'm focused entirely on Thanksgiving.

No, Wait, Not This Turkey Day

This year, it's Turkey Day Proper at the In-Laws', where my FiL will cook up a tasty turkey, and there will be all the usual trimmings - cornbread stuffing, mashed sweet potatoes, cranberries, green bean casserole, bread pudding and gravy.  Melissa will be bringing her unique baking wizardy to bear in the pie department (chocolate and pecan, I hope), and I think I'll be throwing together these honey rolls.  Friday, we're having our annual Day-After Leftoverpalooza, a casual affair with no set ending, and lots of turkey soup and a clearing out of leftovers and free-flowing wine and (I hope) enjoyable conversation.

I've always preferred Thanksgiving to Christmas - don't get me wrong, I love Christmas as a time for being with family, but it's a little too... frenetic for me.  Thanksgiving, though - a day dedicated to a good meal and just eating and enjoying.  I don't have many bad Thanksgiving memories - I'm lucky enough to have a pretty stable family, without the drama and simmering fights that some people have to suffer through (and to those unfortunates, you have my empathy - I'd gladly invite you over to my place for a drama-free meal, as long as you don't torch the furniture or drink all the booze).

My parents have never been afraid to have a non-traditional Thanksgiving.  We had our share of turkey-and-all-the-trimmings growing up, but we also did some pretty offbeat celebrations as well.  One of my favorites was during my high school years.  We drove down to St Mary's, Georgia and camped nearby, then on Thanksgiving Day, took a ferry to Cumberland Island and spent the day hiking.  It was cold and blustery, but I remember enjoying it, despite my status as a Surly Teenager and desperate desire to Not Enjoy Anything Suggested By Parents.  We hiked to the northern end of the island and near lunchtime, found a spot on the beach sheltered by dunes and set out a picnic lunch.  I don't remember what we had - maybe turkey sandwiches -I just remember it was something we could easily pack in our backpacks.  As we ate, a stranger rounded the dune and asked if we minded if he sat down out of the wind and ate his lunch.  My parents got to talking, and invited him to share our meal, and we got to know him.  He was retired, from New England, and was driving a friend's car down to Florida for them, and had decided on a whim to stop and see the island.  We spent the rest of the afternoon hiking with Bob, and after we left, he and my parents kept in touch.  Several times, he stopped over at our farm on his way north or south.  In my memory, that Thanksgiving memory stands out the most - not for the food, but for the feeling of it.  As I look back, I think on how that welcome, and the friendship my family got out of that, sums up for me what Thanksgiving should be about.  For me, it's about finding commonality with people - with family, with friends, with complete strangers - and finding things to be joyful about.

So that's how I approach Thanksgiving.  No matter what, I see it as a chance to, if only for a brief while, acknowledge the things that are going right.  The rest of the year, I worry, and stress out, and get agitated.  Right now, though, it's noticing the things that I don't have to worry about.

AT LAST, MY HAND IS COMPLETE!

I recently bought a new knife.

We've had the same wooden block of kitchen knives since we got married.  The knives were good enough, but *coughcough*twenty years*coughcough* was a long run.

So since my sister-in-law recently started selling Pampered Chef products (hi, Laura!), I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone.  A new knife, to gradually rebuild the set to replace the wobbly-handled, perpetually dull, old knives and also, I help out someone in the family.  I ordered a chef's knife, since that's my go-to Implement Of Kitchen Destruction.

Gotta say, I'm loving it.  Got a knife with one of those self-honing sheaths, so it's always nice and sharp, and it's made a huge difference.  It's easy to forget how much difference quality tools can make in getting work done - I get things cut and chopped faster, and it's a great deal safer, too.  Given my impressive record of self-inflicted kitchen injuries, this is an important thing to take into consideration.

Next up, I need a paring knife, and then I'm thinking of upgrading our single-use gadgets - a vegetable peeler, a new garlic press, an extra set of measuring spoons, and then maybe a new food processor.

My current favorite kitchen tools:

(1) Kitchen-Aid mixer.  These things are awesome - indestructible, sturdy and simple.  I need to get some attachments, like the meat grinder and the pasta roller, to round it out.

(2) The Knife.  Nicely balanced, sharp and I don't let anyone else use it.

(3) Wooden spoons.  I use them for everything from stirring soup to tasting to waving in a threatening fashion at people or animals that get in the way while I cook.

(4) The dishwasher.  It's a standard model, but it's a true labor-saving device.  It's so nice to just load it up and run it without having to stand and wash and rinse everything from dinner.

How about you?  What are your favorite things in the kitchen?  Apart from the food/beer/wine - that's a given.

Another Thinky Thoughts Post

I'm still finding my feet on the blog, and sorting out my voice. I'm partly running off of feedback I get, and partly making it up as I go along. Let me know what works for you, and what doesn't.

That said, I'm moving into winter mode. I'm planning lots of soups for the menu, and looking forward to Thanksgiving, and the pies that come with it. More homemade bread, as well - I'm trying out some new cooking methods, including baking the loaves in cast iron skillets, and trying some inclusions, like cheese and baked garlic. Or dried fruit.

I've done some homebrewing in the past, and yesterday, I picked up (thanks to some friends that really want me to do it) the equipment necessary to make wine at home.  Thanks, guys!  I've got a kit for a malbec shiraz and a reisling, and will start with the shiraz.  I'll post photos of the process, for them as are interested.

Also, I bought some local blackberries at the grocery store today, along with pectin and the rest of the stuff I'll need to render those into some freezer jam.  My peach and strawberry jams were hits at home and in the neighborhood, so I have high hopes for the blackberries.  Photos of that process will be posted as well.

I've got some thoughts about school lunches and Halloween to post, as soon as I get them sorted out.

Pigs, And What They're Good For

There's something about the smell of a whole pig cooking over carefully banked coals that's just right to me.  It started for me when I was a wee tot, growing up in Atlanta.  We lived then in a nice, middle-class neighborhood in the northeast of Atlanta.  The houses were built in the 1920s and 30s, there were oaks and dogwoods and all the trimmings of that existence.  A group of families started having a pig roast every September, on Labor Day weekend, and inviting everyone to come.  My father was a part of that, and he and the other men would set up camp in a local park on Saturday morning, where they had a permit to dig a pit and cook the pig.  They'd set up a couple of awnings and haul in coolers full of Pabst Blue Ribbon, unfold their lawn chairs and dig a pit, lining it with cinderblocks.  The fire was started with the proper ceremonies -  wood would be stacked in, doused with lighter fluid and a lit match would be thrown in, causing a mushroom-shaped fireball to jet up towards the tops of the poplars around the roasting site.  Shortly thereafter, someone would show up with a huge (to me) dead pig in the back of his car, which would be carefully set on a steel pipe/fencewire rack, and once the fire had died down and the coals were spread out evenly, it'd be manhandled on to the pit.

The children of the neighborhood were segregated by age - those under 5 didn't come at all, 5-10 could stay until nightfall (when their mothers took them home), but the kids 10 and up - oh, what a treat!  We were allowed to stay up all night long!  As a rule, most kids didn't manage that - sometime around 1 or 2 in the morning, their fathers would find them curled up in their sleeping bags, sound asleep and worn out from the excitement.  Some of us, though, made it through the night.  By the time I was 11, my older brother and his friends had figured out that after 10PM or so, the dads stopped paying close attention to the beer coolers.  This led to some experimentation, never to dangerous excess, but I look back and cringe at the thought of something like that happening today.  The past is truly a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley wrote.  My brother Scott and his friend Beau were like Gods to me - Scott 1 year (FIFTEEN MONTHS, he used to insist, to put more space between us) older and Beau a year older than Scott.  As much as Scott and I fought (and like most brothers, we fought a lot), I wanted more than anything to have his ability to be casual and easy talking to girls.  He'd even kissed girls, lots of them!  Beau was... well, he was the kid in our neighborhood that, if you'd come up with a dare so dangerous, so wild and ridiculous that no sane person would contemplate it, because even admitting you'd considered it would get you a swift spanking, if you had a stunt to try that made your knees buckle thinking about, you'd ask Beau.  Ride a skateboard down Dead Man's Hill?  Beau did it first.  Take a 10-speed bike over a five-foot tall ramp?  Beau did it, and survived without a scratch.  Beau was (and still is) funny as hell - he could reduce me and the other kids in our circle into helpless, pants-wetting laughter with a word.  When Beau and Scott teamed up, you never knew what was going to happen, but you knew in your bones it would be dangerous, thrilling, terrifying and, occasionally, bloody.  They introduced me to beer, and tried to make sure that I didn't do anything too stupid (apart, of course, from drink the warm beer they provided).

The taste of stolen beer, the feel of the can in my hand, the sounds of the neighborhood men talking and telling dirty jokes drifting across the park towards us, the sight of the tennis courts in the moonlight - these and more come flooding back to me when I smell a pig cooking.  It's the scent of my youth.

By dawn, the men were either sitting and silently watching the coals, or snoring gently in their chairs.  As the sunlight washed over the park, we kids scurried to hide our empties and clustered around the firepit to warm up.  Someone would put an enamel coffeepot on the fire, and under an awning, my father would get eggs and bacon going on the camp stove.  We spent the day wound up and strung out from lack of sleep, but unwilling to show weakness in front of the younger kids, who listened with awe as we told them about drinking beer, and repeated the jokes we'd overheard and only half understood.

Around noon, the pig would be done, and it was pulled off the fire and chopped.  If your hands were fast, you could grab a hard, crispy chuck of pigskin to chew on, dripping with fat.  BBQ sauce was produced, and other neighborhood residents showed up to set up tables and put out side dishes - potato salad, loaves of white bread, beans, and always at least one pasta salad.  When it was all ready, folks lined up and paid their money.  My father (a preacher, though running a contracting company at the time) would say a short prayer and it was time to dig in - paper plates were piled high with pork and sides, people sat at picnic tables, or stood around balancing soggy plates in their hands.

I'm a little older now than my father was then.  I live in a nice neighborhood in Austin, but it's not as close-knit as we were in Morningside.  We moved out of Atlanta in 1982, and I spent high school living on a farm.  The pig roast moved out of town with us, and became a part of our Easter celebration (about which more at a later date).  A pig roasting is, for me, a trip back to that foreign country that was my youth.  It's a glance back at what was, and a reminder of how things are different now - some for the better, some not.

"The only constant is change." - Heraclitus

Well, Here I Am

I created this blog sometime in the last year or so, thinking that in my (ha!) copious free time, I could maybe do a little writing devoted to food, cooking and feeding people things that you hope they'll enjoy.

Now, finally, I'm forcing myself to set aside a wee bit of time to actually do that writing.

So, here I go.

Like most Americans, like most people in the First World, I've had a ridiculously complicated relationship with food. In most of the world, and for most of history, food was... food. You ate it, and didn't starve, or you didn't eat it, and you starved. Here and now, though, we find ourselves dithering over what kind of food to eat, the ethics of how it's grown/caught/processed, wondering if such-and-so is bad for us, or if eating that little thing there right now and today will make up for the bag of potato chips we wolfed down the other night after everyone else in the house went to bed.  And other things.  We invest our food with near-magical properties: oranges fight colds, celery scours our colons, fried food will kill you deader than a dead thing.

For a long time, I didn't have room in all that to just simply enjoy food, to anticipate it as I cook it, to savor it as I eat it, to remember it fondly once I'm done.

And that, I've discovered, is what I'm after with food.  It's more than just something to keep me alive as I run from a hungry hyena.  I love food, good food.  I don't eat as much as I used to, but I still prefer a good helping on my plate, if possible.  I love at least something of almost every national cuisine.  I'll try just about anything once, twice if I'm drunk.

This blog, it's going to be about me and food.  Some rambling philosophicalities like this, some stories, some recipes, some restaurant reviews.  I'll probably dive into beer, wine and spirits.  I'll try to update at least once a week, more often if interesting things happen to me, or I have a recipe to brag about.  Watch this space.