Vicious killer dog...

Stop taking pictures of me!!!

Do you have food?

Hmmm, a yawn??

Angel face (*cough cough*)

Shoe leather , so tasty. Only, it isn't really real leather. What is fake leather anyway?

Chicken Something-er-Other

It would seem that we live in the kitchen around here (well, we kind of do actually....) ANYway, we had chicken the other night. And this is good chicken, no matter what you do with it. Because it was raised on a green pasture, and allowed to scratch around and eat bugs. Sadly, we don't have any pasture here in the city so we had to find someone who did and actually had chickens on it. We did, and we are so glad , because raising broilers in the swimming pool was , ummm, interesting and a heck of a lot of work . (No , the water wasn't in it..) At least I knew what went into my bird and I knew how it was killed and how clean it was,(because we did it). Anyhow, we've had to outsource, which is okay, it supports a local (ha ha ha... yeah well, local for us, sort of ) farmer. Okay, back to the chicken. It had to be dismembered. Elly May is really good at that. I used to be really good at that but then I taught her and now she does all the dismembering. She can do it really fast too. She has the whole thing cut up and ready in 2 minutes. You can see Mr. Gramaphone over there on the left keeping an eye on things...

I'm the seasoning mistress (meaning I have to come up with the ideas, Elly May gets to do most of the work now, part of home ec ;-) ). We had sage , rosemary and thyme growing and I love them , so we used that. First off though, you need to dry brine your chicken. Basically, that is just salting it well and leaving it to sit for at least an hour (you can put it back in the fridge ) . The salt pulls all the juices to the surface, then because the equilibrium or pressure has become uneven, all the liquid then goes back in but it pulls the salt with it into the rest of the meat, thus seasoning it through and through instead of just on the surface.

There was fresh black pepper too , and red pepper flakes , because they are pretty. The person dumping those seasonings on is rather sensitive to spicy things and didn't realize what I was having her put on and she was a little over exuberant in her application. Fine by me . But this time she couldn't blame me for the spicyness.. I used to (and still do when I can catch him) love to watch Jacques Pepin and he was always saying add black paper to things and I was trying to figure out what the heck you'd want black paper for , on anything. I don't know how long it took me to realize he was saying black pepper. Duh. I knew that.

This all gets placed in a very hot heavy bottomed pan (this here is my favorite favorite pan, I love it to pieces , I'd say I want to be buried with it but then it couldn't cook anything and I already promised it to Elly May in my will....) with olive oil . You could add some butter if you were feeling adventurous and didn't mind dairy. Wait until the oil is just smoking to add meat to the pan. It browns on contact and you'll have less trouble with sticking. Of course it would work brilliantly in a nonstick pan but who wants to cook with that poison? Death to all teflon!!!

Okay, it doesn't look too appetizing , (I should have added something green like parsley) but you just can't smell it, thats all. After browing the chicken on both sides, add sliced onions on top, cover , turn down to medium and let it sweat out juices and finish cooking. It this case , unlike what Felix Ungar said, the gravy does sort of come with the meat. Remove chicken pieces, thicken with arrowroot powder, test seasoning , add some broth if too salty (or water) , some wine. I used plum vinegar . The acidity combined with the fat from the chicken was really really nice. And bon appetite!

Random Foodie pics

A sort of poached egg on toast , heavy on the toppings... Peppers from the garden. Egg from the girls..

More of those lovely lovely figs, just like the ones that were made into jam earlier that I never got a picture of. They are lucious.

Lavender blue dilly dilly lavender green..... beans ..

Dilly beans. Or pickled beans. Ball Bluebook has a great recipe. I was doing these for a friend. They taste just like kosher dills... well, sort of , and the fact that they are beans and not cukes kind of makes a difference. But anyway. We made them. I love that with pickling , you can do things in a water bath canner that otherwise would require a pressure canner... like green beans.
Put them beans in the jars... along with the garlic and dill head and red peppers. The recipe calls for cayenne powder but I think these look prettier. They are arbol chili peppers I think... I can't remember. Anyway, they are red, and hot.

Isn't everything pretty?

I love the color before they get canned and cooked and look puke green.

All ready for the canner with their brine solution (1/2 AC vinegar and 1/2 water with salt..)

All done. Yayness.

Ouch

Before the ouch... well, after one ouch and before another one. Okay, if you are squeamish don't go farther than this one. ..
Don't flash that light at me!

Owie. Does he look like a punk rocker now? Fitting that he is Punker Man. Two more weeks with this lovely jewelry until they figure out whether he needs yet another surgery to correct the still possibly present entropion . Lovely . Poor baby!

To put the second batch (he already had one taken out) of staples in they were just going to put him under a local anesthesia. Well, being that he is a nervous wreck in that place and one solid bundle of muscle, they couldn't hold him down for the procedure (even with a tech laying on top of him) and came back and said they had to knock him all the way out again. *sigh* . Oh the trauma.

Random shots

Yarrow tincture before pressing..

After pressing... I love my press!!!

Poached egg (home laid of course) with bread toasted in butter, topped with sauteed onions, peppers and collard greens (homegrown.. except the onions , grown by a friend) with a dash of plum vinegar (homemade... I really don't think you can buy it. )

Garden bounty

Cinnamon Rolls... with coconut oil

If I could figure out how to shrink my photos more.. I could cram more in here, but alas, this will have to do for now. These are from a Cook's recipe. I can't remember which book but it is online somewhere I'm sure. These have always been a favorite around here for those who can actually consume sugar (leaves me out *sniff*) . Elly May is really the baker around here. She replaced all the butter and dairy with either coconut milk or coconut oil (milk for the milk replacement ... well duh.. and coconut oil for the butter) . They turned out just fine.

They sure smelled good!

Fig Jam

Of course I forgot to get a picture of the figs before they all got cut up.... They were so pretty too. There were about 5lbs of them, well, before I started eating them. About 5 of them didn't end up as jam. I used to hate figs actually. It wasn't the taste. It was the texture. The insides... they were like , like, a bunch of maggots (sorry for that word picture) to my ignorant and immature way of thinking. I have since grown out of that and I think they are the bomb. And fig jam is hard to beat. This was a late evening canning session because the day had been full of other things and I just I had to get them done because they had been a gift and if they went bad I'd feel awful. Elly May was gracious enough to lend a very helpful hand and we got it all done.
The recipe (good ole' Ball Bluebook of canning) called for 6 cups of sugar to go with those 8 cups of figs. To my way of thinking, that is an insane amount of sugar and I would much rather taste the fig than their cloyingly sweet version. So I only used 3 cups of sugar and it came out just fine.
Here they are all chopped up and combined with sugar.

Cook 'em down down down... and stir of course, or it will burn.

These Weck jars look cute but being European... I guess they have different measurements and there aren't any canning funnels that will fit... It barely sits on top there, which is better than nothing I suppose. Isn't it purdie?

All ready to go in the canner. Those metal clips are a pain to get on and they also chip the glass a bit as they go on. Other than all these complaints, they are okay. Usually I use Ball or Kerr but I had these available , and they are cute.. so I used them.

Ta da! I had one extra 1/2 pint that I didn't can and we're just eating it now.

Gifts From the Road

One of us here (Elly May) is really into taxidermy. Yes, some people love to skin dead animals and stuff them in their free time. Road kill takes on a whole new persona to such persons. What a bit of luck!! There was that time with the skunk...... that was a bit of a mistake. You see, skunk must (and everyone else may already know this but we didn't at the time) does NOT go away in the freezer. You just end up with a bunch of skunky chickens (or whatever else you have in there... not a good thing) . ANYway, after that whole fiasco and the aftermath, (ever try burying a frozen skunk in a whole too small to fit it? You have to stomp on it) skunks were totally off the list of potential collection projects. Coons however are a totally different matter.
Our brother Buck came home at a rather late (or early... technically it was morning) hour a few weeks ago and came and dragged Elly May out of bed for a special roadkill surprise . There was a freshly hit (it wasn't Buck!!) coon out there , sadly surrounded by eight of its family, mourning its departure. She debated the merits of collecting it fresh in the wee hours of the morning or just waiting until daylight (it weren't a goin ' anywhere...) . But the adventure of it all was too much to pass up so she hauled her pajama clad carcas out there and scooped it up in a trash bag and headed for her freezer. Yes, she has her own freezer for road kill. Doesn't everyone? Her birthday song was (to the tune of My Fair Lady's "Wouldn't it be Lovely" ) "All I want is a Frigidaire, 15 feet of the cubic square... with one enoooourmous bear Oh WOULDN"T it be loverly???" . Yeah, well, it is only 8 cubic feet. so there. No bear in there. Anyway, I'm so glad she has her own freezer because before she was using space in mine and I wasn't too keen on having the fish and random squirrel hanging out with my grass-fed short ribs and chuck roast.
Okay, heading to the freezer, sending Buck up front to catch all the spider webs (isn't summer lovely? you haven't lived until you've walked smack dab into an orb weaver web in the middle of the night with the dear orb weaver right in the middle.. don't scream, you'll wake the neighbors)
Buck is nice like that. Either that or he wasn't thinking. Anyway, coon is in the freezer awaiting some spare time in Elly May's busy schedule.
Her most recent project was a choker out of a rattler skin. It was donated by a friend who is generous that way. People comment on it and seem to like it until they find out what it is. Then they either think it is really cool or they step back in horror like it still had a head and rattle on and was going to stike right then and there. People are funny about snakes that way.
And before I get hate mail about how horrible and cruel we are, let me remind everyone we are only recycling what would go to waste. They did not die in vain. Besides, ever see what a coon can do to a chicken?

Committing Sacrilege

We did something terrible yesterday to one of Julia Child's cake recipes. We *gasp* took out the butter . I know I know, the horror of it all. But it actually turned out fantastically better than we ever could have imagined. I (Annabelle here..) don't do too well with butter anyway and since in my view, recipes are only mere guidelines meant to be challenged and tweaked or ignored altogether , I'd been pondering a way to make a killer , moist , rich chocolate cake without the butter.
We've kind of been on a chocolate cake spree around here (special research you know, somebody has to do it) and we'd tried Julia's Queen of Sheba Cake (or so she called it on her show... it goes by a slightly different name in the book, Chocolate Almond cake or something like that) the other night and found it very good , but , alas, like most things chocolate and cake wise, a bit on the dry side. I am of the opinion that chocolate should never be fluffy or airy or light or dry. By its very nature should be dense , rich, moist , fudgy... all those things at once , or why bother? Those calories have to be worth it! Soooo, I was lying on the couch pinned under a large dog brainstorming a way to make the ultimate chocolate experience (and skip the butter) and since I've also been on sort of an avacado spree (ever try it in a smoothie? CREAMY...trust me, go try it, you'll love it.. add some salt though. oh and you are adding this to other fruit, it isn't the centerpiece of the smoothie or anything. Try some banana, orange juice, peach , honey, vanilla... oh and avacado. ) ANYway , where was I ? Oh, avacado... so I used a combo of avacado and coconut oil and loosely (very very loosely) used Julia's recipe as a sort of guide for ratios and things like that and came up with what we called Annabelle and Elly May's Kick Arse Chocolate Cake. It is GOOOOOD.
Want the recipe? Ha ha, top secret you know. J/K . If anyone ever actually reads this I'd love for them to have the joy of the ultimate chocolate experience. You will eat it and praise the maker of chocolate I promise you.
Okay, here is the recipe (as Elly May followed me around with pad and paper making notes for just such an occasion. You can thank her later.)

Preheat oven to 325 F or maybe a tad more but still below 350. Grease a 9" cake pan with coconut oil and flour it.

4oz bittersweet chocolate (use Ghiardelli!!!!)
1/4 Cup coconut oil
1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 large avacado... later if I actually weigh the amount or smash it into a measuring cup I might have a more accurate amount to give you..but for now, just go buy large..
4 egg yolks (save the whites!! though you'll only need 3 of them)
2/3 Cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt

1/3 Cup pulverized almonds

3 egg whites
2 pinches Cream of Tartar
1T sugar

1/2 Cup all purpose flour

Okay, melt the chocolate and coconut oil over a double boiler if you are picky, over medium low flame in a heavy pan if you are really impatient like me. Just stir it and you should be fine. Turn off heat, add vanilla.
Beat or whisk the 1/2 avacado, egg yolks and sugar until smooth , oh and salt. Then pour in chocolate mixture, add the almonds. You can pulverize them in a food processor or in a mortar and pestal. I was being old fashioned and did everything by hand this time around.

Now whisk your egg whites and cream of tartar until foamy, add in sugar (sprinkle it) and whisk until you have stiff but still sort of soft peaks. Does that make sense?
Okay, now add about a third or so of the egg white mixture into the chocolate mixture and fold in, sift some of the flour over , fold in, keep alternating till you use both of them up.
Pour into prepared cake pan leaving enough in the bowl to lick. That is very important. You need this after all your hard work. Especially if you whisked those egg whites by hand.

Put it in the oven and set the timer for 20min. DON'T OVER COOK IT!!! There is nothing worse than over cooked chocolate cake... Well, chocolate cake that somebody stored with garlic bread is pretty bad too.. don't do that either. A tooth pick should come out clean. But a moist clean .

Okay, cool the cake 10 min in the pan then take it out and cool completely. If you are really really impatient, sticking the whole thing in the freezer for a bit works too. Now .. the frosting..

FROSTING
1/2 large avacado (hope you saved the half of the other one!!)
2oz bittersweet chocolate
5 T coconut oil
1tsp vanilla extract
pinch or two of salt
powdered sugar.... sorry , I didn't measure , but enough to get the desired consistancy

Okay, whisk the avacado until you get most of the lumps out, Melt the chocolate and coconut oil like before . then add the vanilla. Pour into the avacado mess and whisk well. As it cools it will thicken. Sift in powdered sugar until you get it sweet enough and thick enough for your tastes. I don't make it too thick. Anyway, then spread all this on your cool cake and top with sliced almonds. It is way better the second day after it has been in the fridge overnight but if you can't wait that long I totally understand. Test some now, then have the rest tomorrow. It only gets better.
There you go. Hope you enjoy!!