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We did a lot of cooking this year, because we had three Thanksgivings in a row.

It started out on Tuesday with an early stinky-fish day (when the stinky fish man comes to the house with a box of fish for good boys and girls).

That's Noel picking bones out of the whitefish.

For Wednesday we made Noel's potato gratin. The secret is you deep-fry the potatoes first.

For Thursday I made two pies:

Apple crumb, and

*yawn* pumpkin. The pumpkin was by request; I rarely make it because I find it boring. Though I did get a recipe the day after Thanksgiving for a pumpkin pie with a pecan-pie topping which sounded much more interesting. I also hardly ever make pecan pie because it is so sweet.

The crust decorations are little crust cutters from Williams-Sonoma. The set has a leaf, an acorn, a pumpkin, and a turkey.

The fancy cutouts require a bit more attention lest they burn, but I think they made the pies look very fancy. And the chasm in the pumpkin pie was easily hidden with whipped cream.

Here's something I did recently: signed up to be a marrow donor. I'd like to say I did it for all kinds of altruistic reasons: generosity, caring, that sort of thing. I mean, I've been an organ donor since I got a driver's license, my family knows my feelings about that and agrees with me that if any part of me is useful after I stop needing it, take it away, doctors.

And I have genetics that reach into central Asia, which is where the banks have limited matches and are always looking for more. Maybe I could say I joined the registry because they needed me.

But I really did it for selfish reasons. I'll never meet anybody who gets my liver, or my heart, or my corneas with their superhuman vision. But if you donate marrow, you might get to meet the recipients. You might get to meet their families. They will have your blood inside them (their blood changes to your blood type!).

I hope I never need to go to the marrow registry. But I also hope that the swabs I sent in last week are a match for somebody, and I can help save a life.

(And yes, I do give blood, but that's a totally selfless donation. I wanted to do something a little more selfish, too.)

We've had several celebrations in the last month. I thought I'd share some photos from some of them.

The second weekend in November we flew to Minnesota for a surprise birthday party for my in-laws. Noel's parents were born within two days of each other, and they were both turning 70, which is a pretty significant birthday. With the help of an old friend, we tricked them into coming to a restaurant where the three kids and I were waiting to surprise them.

They were very surprised and a great time was had by all.

There's the family all together: Joanne (the family friend who helped coordinate it and managed to keep the secret perfectly), Lynn, Anne, Michael, Sandy, and Noel. In front of the restaurant.

The next day, the weather gave them another surprise birthday present, which was several inches of wet soft snow. My sisters in law immediately got stuck in the driveway while going shoe shopping.

The next weekend, A Verb for Keeping Warm had their store-warming party, a big celebration of their fancy new location in a real retail space. I'm a big fan of Verb, and next weekend I'll be teaching a class there on the physics of spindle spinning.

They had this awesome cake, made to look like a bundle of fiber in their "Thai Iced Tea" colourway.

Then it was time to plan for Thanksgiving. I started by taking out the traditional turkey mold.

I love this mold, but unfortunately I can only justify using it maybe once or twice a year.

I modified my last pumpkin pie turned into cake recipe to make it spicier (it tasted a little bland even to me, which is pretty bland indeed), but I didn't like how the cake came out of the mold. So the next few days were spent on experiments and then truly deconstructing the idea of cake.

But you'll have to wait for the big reveal on the final product, because the day before Thanksgiving is also a holiday in our house; it is Stinky Fish Day. Noel stays home from work and the Stink Fish Fairy (the Fedex guy) brings the special package from my family:

It's a big package of fish and bagels from Zabar's.

A good time was had by all, though not everybody got some fish. (The dogs traditionally get the skin from the whitefish, though, so there was a happy ending for them, too.)

For Thanksgiving dinner we brought the potatoes and the dessert. We re-imagined the potatoes as a trifle, layered with hash browns at the bottom, then purple mashed potatoes, then potato gratin, then white mashed potatoes, then purple again, then a piped layer of mashed potatoes beaten with extra cream to make them pipe better.

The deonstructed deconstructed pumpkin pie turned into layered pumpkin desserts: the bottom layer was a circle of pumpkin cake soaked in ginger syrup, then a ginger-fig filling, then a boiled sugar frosting, then another layer of pumpkin cake, a layer of whipped cream, and a little miniature bundt cake top. It was kind of over the top, but it worked OK. Too bad I was totally stuffed from eating an entire turkey drumstick before we got to that course.

And by popular demand, I made Charlotte's peanut butter cup cookies, all six dozen of which were devoured or squirreled off by the other diners (and since we have two cake's worth of trimmed pumpkin cake bits to eat, this was not a problem).

Of the three things we made, I was most impressed by how fun it was to pipe potatoes.

This week I will make the mincemeat filling for our Christmas pie. We're having friends over and baking a ham (or two). There may be piped potatoes involved.

The jelly I made over Christmas turned out very hard; it becomes more liquid on heating, but is really a candy rather than a jelly. I know what I did wrong, next time it will be better, yadda yadda, but I still find the world of jelly-making much harder than jams. Everything is so much more delicate and complicated. It's fascinating, in much the same way that methodically reducing recipes used to be fascinating. (Plus, I have like 30 jars of the stuff to deal with now.)

I won't have a chance to do anything about it until our next fruit crop comes in, which will be midsummer sometime. Until then I have bought a new book on jellying to study. When I'm not studying for my professional exams, that is.

In the meantime, we took a trip out to Japantown yesterday and bought a ridiculously complicated rice maker. Noel immediately loaded it up with brown rice, and we had brown rice for dinner last night, then lunch today. It's safe to say that the rice maker is a win. It certainly makes a better brown rice than we do.

We had piles and piles of winter greens in the fridge over the holidays, and were just unable to keep up with the supply from our CSA box. And a bunch went bad or marginal when we were away over Christmas. So last week Noel declared greens bankruptcy and fed them to the chickens (who have eaten quite a bit of them but still prefer grass for reasons of their own); what doesn't get eaten there gets composted, so it's all good. Of course, on Friday there was a box full of even more greens, and we're right back on the downward spiral.

Technorati Tags: cooking, food, jelly

It's notable that on our recent jaunt through the cold parts of the United States, I took three photos, and all of them were of cases of food. Although one is actually a photo of the case itself, rather than the food (which was unexceptional).

A brief tour? Certainly. Here we have the Philadelphia airport, F Terminal, after a red-eye to Pittsburgh, a one-hour layover, and a quick hop to Philly. F Terminal is where you go when you are going to fly into Ithaca, so at the holidays it is usually packed with people I've known since childhood. I don't know if any of them were there this time, because I was so tired I could hardly see. I did see this, though:

The brilliance of this design may not be obvious. Let me describe it. I am standing outside the store (Au Bon Pain, for those who must know). From the outside you can see the pastries, and their little nametags, and their prices. But you can't choose anything, so if you can't make up your mind you can stand there and gape without blocking the way of somebody who is ready to choose something. Or without being blocked by some simpleton who must stand in front of the case blocking the view for everybody else.

Even better, you can see whether you want to haul your pile of luggage into the store to get a pastry at all. The window case makes a million kinds of sense in a high-traffic, high obstruction environment like an airport. Now they just need to put one at the pre-made sandwich counter at the lunch place near my office.

From Ithaca, we went on to Minneapolis (via a bumped partway through our three-leg trip, so we spent much of the day in Philadelphia airport drinking wine at Vino Volo). From Minneapolis there was nothing to do but drive three hours up to New York Mills, MN, to see family. And when one goes to Mills, one must stop at Motley to visit Morey's for stinky fish of all sorts.

We bypassed the lutefisk (we'll be enjoying its flavourless, textureless jelliness at a smorgasbord this weekend).

Instead, Noel got some smoked whitefish (because I like it better than salmon) and a little tub of something terrible involving herring that I don't want to think about. His parents got a package of frozen salmon burgers that we had for dinner that night (they were very good, tasting of smoked salmon with a bit less slippery a texture than you usually get in a whole-fish product).

Then it was back to San Francisco, and a quick drive out to Sacramento to pick up the sausagesdogs from Dog Camp, and we were able to collapse in a little pile. Seven days and seven cities (Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Ithaca, Minneapolis, New York Mills (OK, not really a "city"), Denver, Sacramento).

I have spent much of this week in a jelly-making frenzy. We had this large bucket of quince left over from the annual quince harvest, you see, and it needed to be made into jelly. Or something.

So now I will give you a guided tour through the first stages of jelly-making.

OK, so let's just admit that this blog has become less a regular thing and more a periodic thing. That's fine: I spend a lot of time and energy on the work on Casa Decrepit these days, which pretty much uses up my blogging energy. But I did some non-house things this weekend! Look!

For example, on Saturday we went to a big Open House and Holiday Gift Sale at The Crucible. The Crucible is awesome because a) it is right next door in Oakland, so it is convenient, as opposed to Techshop, which requires what can be a two hour commute and b) it has a ceramics studio. I got into a good conversation about slipcasting with one of their ceramics people; I'd like to be able to find a nice studio to work in since plaster mold making is pretty messy. We shall see what will come of it.

Also, despite the fact that it poured rain on us while we were hauling the tree and decorations out of the basement, we got the tree up and decorated. Yay, us. And on the pink Sunday of Advent, too, which is pretty good for not having really planned it.

The only fly in the ointment is that we needed some replacement bulbs, and when we went to a few stores to try to find them, the places were practically cleared of Christmas stuff. That's right: I bet you didn't realize Christmas is over, and the clearance sales can begin. So now if you don't plan to have all your Christmas decorations up and running by Thanksgiving, give up; you will not be able to find replacement bulbs or even a few strands of tinsel garland. This is the same logic by which it is impossible to find a bathing suit in August, or a sweater in February. If you don't plan ahead, you don't get anything.

Anyway, the tree looks a little lopsided, and we are missing lots of bulbs from one strand of lights, but it's up. And look at my fun new ornament, purchased last weekend at a women's crafts fair:

I love how it's kind of creepy and weird and also awesome. It's a partridge in a pear tree, obviously, inside of a goose egg. If I'd had infinite money, I would have bought the set of twelve. But no infinite money, and just one goose egg ornament. I guess a partridge egg would have been impossible to come by.

So that was my weekend. To make up for a relatively unproductive weekend, this morning I did some cooking:

This evening Noel and I made some quince ratafia. We used a recipe I found online, which is always a crapshoot. The idea is pretty simple: you shred some quince, stuff it in a quart mason jar, and add sugar and spices (we added cinnamon and ginger; the recipe called for mace but we didn't have any), cover with vodka or brandy and let it sit for a couple of months.

We tried a few variations on the recipe: with vodka, with brandy, one jar with both, and then finally a few jars with shredded quince and rum (leaving out the sugar and spices on the theory that rum has quite a nice flavour of its own to impart). The jars are now nestled in the fridge infusing away.

This is all in an attempt to use up the last of the quince, of course. We're really not very big drinkers, and when we do drink it's usually a glass of wine rather than hard liquor. So the fact that we have twelve quart jars full of liquor is kind of amusing.

When we got the quart jars, we also got some half-pints, so I'll be spending some time very soon making quince jelly, as well. Or anything to use up the rest of the quince, which have been sitting in a bucket in the dining room for months now.

One of my coworkers gave me a bag of "Amish Friendship Bread Starter" on Friday. This is apparently a basic sourdough starter, passed around with a truly horrendous recipe for quick bread (why one needs a sourdough starter for a quickbread recipe that also includes baking powder is beyond me) that includes an entire package of vanilla pudding mix (oh, right: that's why you need all the leavening you can get).

Now, leaving aside the ridiculous idea that the Amish give each other plastic sacks of sourdough starter, or that they cook any recipes that involve pudding mix, I have my doubts that this even a severely bastardized Amish recipe, especially given the stories I've now read about it on the Internet.

For one thing, for people living the way the Amish do, it's not very friendly to give somebody with an established household a sourdough starter. It'd be like saying they're a disorganized dolt who can't keep a starter alive. Imagine, if you will, if somebody gave you a package of yeast. That's how odd it would be. Also, the thing Amish people give in friendship is actual cooked food, not ingredients. The idea of giving somebody a kit to cook with is fine and well in an average American household, but considering that the Amish cook everything from scratch, ingredients are not quite as romantic for them. So this is clearly not an Amish tradition at all.

That aside, I accepted the starter from the coworker, and will be using it to make some bread. There are some changes I will be making to the concept, though.

So we recently joined a couple of CSA's. CSA's, for those of you who have been living under a rock, are Community Supported Agriculture. You basically buy shares in a farm and they give you produce regularly in return. Nice deal.

We joined Eatwell Farm, from which we get a box every week, and we joined Marin Sun Farms, who deliver a box of meat once a month. Last week was our first week, and we got a box from each farm. The prices are very reasonable for the amount of food we get: much cheaper than comparable quality foods from the Expensive Yuppie Market, and only slightly cheaper than the same things we can get at the nearest grocery store (and much higher quality).

First, let me tell you about the meat. We got 15lbs of meat, which is way more meat than we usually eat in a month but will allow us to have dinner parties with meat, and also we can make stock and sausages. We opted for a mix of types, with no exclusions so we'll have beef, goat, lamb, pig, and sometimes chicken (there was no choice to opt out of chicken or we would have). It comes frozen (this is good) in vacuum-sealed packages (very good). We ate a couple of pork chops that were very tasty, and then last night we had goatburgers. Yes, they sent us ground goat, which tastes, not surprisingly, remarkably like a lean ground beef. No "goaty" flavour. It was OK. I think it would have worked better in a stew or something, but it made a decent burger.

The pork chops were awesome. It's almost enough to make me really like meat, which I haven't been (see also previous rant about barbeque).

And the vegetable box. A nice-sized box of mixed stuff, including a bunch of tomatoes (nice, because we're heavy on the cherry tomatoes now with no eating tomatoes yet), from potatoes, radishes, basil, plums, some other stuff. It was pretty good. We can definitely eat all that produce in a week because we've torn through much of the box already and we don't get the next one until Friday. And this with a massive bowl of nectarines in the fridge from our own tree.

Sunday night I went to the store to pick up some stuff and it was like Dairy Week: the only thing I can't find a good CSA for is dairy (and bread, but let's be reasonable). I got some disappointing non-homogenized milk at Trader Joe's, but it was pretty old and the cream stuck to the top of the container it was in and will have to be extracted by destroying the bottle (which is plastic: 10 demerits). I may just start buying Strauss Creamery products at the Expensive Yuppie Market.

The point of this is not so much about becoming locavores, but really more about eating more kinds of food and trying new things. When we shop for ourselves we are distressingly dull, so we decided to mix it up and get a bunch of stuff that just isn't available in our grocery stores. We're enjoying the challenge of cooking from the box instead of falling back on old standbys.