Shoppin' with the Easter Bunny

Resident Kid is becoming a little old for the traditional Easter basket and paraphernalia, but I indulged myself in a little frivolous shopping to celebrate the day this year.  Apparently, in my off-hand way, I hit on a fun thing for Kid.  The prize had been shown off for a few days and jealously guarded from the Mimsical creature, when one day, while lolling on the bed, Resident Kid asked where I had done my Easter shopping. 

Outraged, I sputtered that I did not do Easter shopping, that was the Easter Bunny's job.  Slight pause, then Resident Kid asked, "OK, so, where does the Easter Bunny shop?"

Merry Christmas to all - 2010

Twas the night before Christmas
And just like a louse,
I sneak open my laptop
and grab for the mouse.

A merry hot fire is
crackling and popping
on the screen of my TV
so it won’t be stopping

As I ponder the evening
with tired brain and eyes
I think of my folks
that are spread far and wide

So here’s cheers to you all
on a night merry and bright
Happy Christmas to all
and (YAWN) good night!

Hercule’s Love’s Labors Not Lost

Should I have worried when my mother laughed?  Perhaps, but I was undertaking a task that seemed to me of Herculean proportions, and she concurred by saying, “Well, that will be a challenge.”  When I told Resident Spouse of the exchange and the subject, the result was a laugh as well, then the comment, “Well, she’s acknowledging the challenge.”

So what was the cause of all this hilarity?  Baklava.  That ambrosia of the Greeks that I enjoy hugely, but that I've been disappointed with in its commercial form.  And yes, I call it Greek, although they, of that ubiquitous they, say that it is of Turkish origin, I call it Greek, because in the fashion of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” I would have been pilloried in a previous life if I had tried to point to historical evidence that it stemmed from any other culture.  But the analogy of Hercule’s labors is apt.

I have long been intimidated by phyllo dough and the dishes that are made with it.  They seem so delicate and intricate - not two words that can typically be applied to my culinary endeavors.  I am also particularly fond of brie, and when I encountered a phyllo wrapped baked brie accompanied by fresh grapes, apple and crusty bread, I was in heaven.  But this particular delicacy was spendy in restaurants and didn’t fit the budget of a single-income family where one major wage earner was no longer employed.

I hemmed and hawed for many a month, but the wheel of brie found its way into my basket at Costco not long after I had found phyllo dough in the freezer section at the neighborhood grocery.  I figured if I could pull this off, I would have my gourmet experience for a tiny fraction of the cost of my favorite restaurant version (which was made even more spendy by virtue of being in Wyoming with a view of the Tetons at sunset adding to the culinary fireworks).

In short, the baked brie was quite the success, especially when paired with crisp, tart red grapes, pomegranate pearls and a crackly crusted artisan bread.  A full meal deal for less than $10 for the three of us.

But the unexpected star of this story is the baklava.  I used about a quarter of the dough for the brie, but had enough of the package remaining to make a respectable baklava.  And so I set about preparing for my task.

In hindsight there were two things I should have done first: (1) take the dough out of the freezer earlier, and (2) turn up the furnace.  The first, obviously, to ensure the dough was completely defrosted before trying to work with it.  Nothing feels worse than cracking a roll of sheets because you were too impatient to wait.  The second, because, while the packaging said “NO TRANS FATS - NO CHOLESTEROL” the preparation of all things phyllo is with large quantities of melted butter, as in “brush each sheet with melted butter.”  And what difference does the furnace make?  Well, in short, when the house is at 66 degrees F, the melted butter solidifies more quickly than is productive.

So, after separating little strips of broken dough and shredding a few more sheets with a butter brush that was not conveying a liquid, I managed to cover at least the top half of the baking dish with whole or almost whole sheets of dough to camouflage the earlier missteps.

The result?  It turns out that phyllo is much more fun and much more forgiving than I expected.  And my first attempt at baklava was, using my mom’s word, “Beautiful!”

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PS

I used the recipe from About.com by Diana Rattray which is inexplicably in their "Southern Food" section along with bourbon balls.  Resident Spouse thinks this makes sense because it does come from the southern Mediterranean.  I added a whole clove in the center of each piece before baking.  Next time I think I will add more lemon.  For phyllo, I used Athens Regular (Thin) phyllo.

For the baked brie, I picked a recipe from Cooks.com.  There are 40+ such recipes of various sorts and so there is lots of room for experimentation.  I only used about 1/4 pound of the phyllo because I was having "issues" during my first attempt at working with the stuff.  It seemed a respectable covering once baked...

Anyone Can Roast

I was always somewhat of an indifferent chicken cooker.  I was always much more comfortable doing a stir fry or some such thing with boneless bits rather than dealing with the entire beast.  The few roast chickens I'd attempted early in my cooking life were, at best, somewhat uninspired.  Then, when local markets started carrying juicy roast chickens, all bets were off.  I gave up on trying to roast my own and bought them at the store.  The one thing I didn't like was all the sodium that tended to be added to these.

One day I impulse bought, and I can't remember where, what looked like a totally funky contraption to hold a can of beer or soda over which you put your chicken to roast in the oven or the grill.  (Bayou Classic 0880-PDQ Stainless-Steel Beercan ChickCAN Rack) I tried it and the results were fabulous.  Nice moist meat and crispy skin with the fat most drained away from under the skin. And I had complete control over seasoning and actually enjoyed playing with mixes of various spices to rub on the skin.  That was a couple years ago or so and I didn't roast more than three or four chickens at the time.

About a year ago, I arrived home late one Saturday evening (probably close to 11:00) after a dance performance to see the bathroom light on.  That was odd because I expected the house to be dark at that hour.  I hauled my dance gear in the house and peeked in the bathroom to see what the deal was.  Well, not only was there a light on in the bathroom, but the light was on in the shower.  Not normal.   I slid open the shower door to be greeted by, "Peep, peep, peep!" 

I pop my head into the bedroom, "Why are there dinosaurs in the bathtub?"

The illuminating response was, "They were the last ones they had so we thought we'd better get them."  Oh...of course.

Long story short, the four baby dinosaurs grew up into lovely Wyandotte layers that provide us with gorgeous brown eggs.  Chickens had become part of our household.  We had already discovered that birds have tremendous personalities through some previous avian encounters but these chickens were better than TV.  The resident kid was totally enamored of the new additions and was having quite the blast rearing them and harvesting the eggs.

Meanwhile, I got laid off from my job and I started cooking more... partly because I had the time to enjoy it and partly to save money.  As I was poking around one day, I remembered my ChickCAN rack and thought I'd make us a nice chicken dinner with all the fixings.  As I set up the chicken and rubbed seasoning on it, I had the sudden uneasy thought that maybe the resident kid would object to eating a chicken that looked like, well, a chicken.  Once you've got the chicken on the can ready to roast with this gizmo, it looks like a naked chicken sitting there.  I thought maybe I could get it off the can and onto the plate before anyone saw it.  And into the oven it went.

I forgot about my uneasiness until I heard resident kid come in the door.  And, guess what, I'd left the oven light on.  Our oven is a wall oven and the window is at head and shoulders level for me and when the light is on, the natural response is to look in the window to see what's happening.  Well, kid dumps the stuff of the day on the floor by the door and walks towards the kitchen with the inevitable, "What's for dinner?"  I respond cautiously, "Chicken."  Kid walks in the kitchen and glances in the window at the chicken sitting on its haunches in a pan.  "Yum!"  A small cord of tension dissolves in my neck.  "You're OK with eating a chicken?"  No pause whatsoever, "I don't know that chicken."

Doppler 5

We settled into a long stretch of comfortable being with dogdom, about 4 years in all with little extraordinary in the way of happenings and events.  Doppler slowly, in the slow way only a fast dog can, slowed down a bit in terms of his frenetic puppyish chasing madly hither and yon.  A household routine took hold and everything held an even keel.

One of our first abodes in our new home town of Bend, Oregon was a minuscule rental house will all of 600 square feet.  The main attraction of this shack was that it was freestanding and it allowed dogs with relatively little fuss (in other words, you didn't have to sign away your annual income and your firstborn to have a dog in the house).  By the time we had found this place we had already accepted the fact that we would have to find a rental that would allow a dog because the alternative, giving up Doppler in order to find a place to live, was not tenable.

This little place, which has long since succumbed to the bulldozer, was one of three tiny houses where a variety of young wanna-be professionals/entrepreneurs lived.  We quickly made the acquaintance of our neighbors and started sharing hotted up barbecue grills and the like.  The back house had a young man living there for a short time at the beginning of our stay.  He ended up moving to Portland and left behind his cat, Pumpkin, in the care of our other neighbors until such time as he could find a place that would allow cats.  He gave them a huge jar full of change to pay for cat food and Pumpkin took to living under the houses in the crawl spaces.  As summer wore into fall, the former neighbor made contact periodically and we wondered if he ever would collect Pumpkin (who was, as you might have imagined, a very fluffy orange tabby). 

Doppler, it turned out, was very tolerant of cats.  If they ran, he would chase, but if they stood their ground and swatted, he would respect.  Pumpkin was one of the latter types and had both Doppler and the other neighbor's dog at quite the respectful distance.

Bend was a wonderful town in the mid-1990's.  It had a lot of characteristics of other towns we had traveled through on our early retirement trip (other stories to come) and we had decided to try to make a life in Bend.  I was working retail into the early evenings and Eric was working retail into even later evenings so I often found myself alone, with or without Doppler, watching TV. 

One bitterly cold night, after stoking the little woodstove into producing the 80 degree hot house that was inevitable because any stove was too big for this house, I propped open the front door to temper the heat.  After a few minutes I felt I was being watched and looked up to see an orange face peering in the screen door.  Being a total soft touch, I thought for perhaps a few moments before opening the door to let Pumpkin in.  He walked over and sat on the hearth in front of the wood stove as if he'd done that for years.  We spent a pleasant evening watching TV until Eric came home.  His words, upon entering and taking in the scene were, "So, do we have a cat now?"

Doppler - 2

Soon after Doppler decided to move in with us, we started making the rounds of the local animal shelter and the vets to see if anyone had left word they were missing him.  We dutifully left word of where to contact us in the event someone came looking and we all went home again.

Doppler himself gave us few clues about where he might have come from.  He wore a blue collar with no tags and nothing else attached but a few bits of wire and baling twine that looked like they'd been chewed through.  He was also scrawny and had some talents that indicated the scrawniness was no fault of his own.

As I'd mentioned previously, we were working at a friend's B&B.  One morning, there were leftover muffins to be had so I took them back to our apartment for a late breakfast.  Eric took his with whatever else was on the menu out to the living room while I had turned to fill my own plate and get a fork from the drawer.  When I turned back, my muffin was gone.

Feeling a little steamed, I went out to the living room and berated Eric for being a pig and taking all the muffins.  Picture the classic guy pose, mouth full, "What did I do?"  Pause.  "I didn't take your muffin."

Picture two heads turning slowly towards the quiet snarfing sounds from the other side of the coffee table where a scrawny dog was eating an orange chocolate chip muffin held gently between his front paws.  The nearest we could figure was that he, in complete silence, snagged the muffin off the counter (which had a top uncomfortably high for me to work at) and carried it into the living without either of us hearing or noticing what he was doing.

No one ever came calling to claim him.  Our best bet was that he was a Rainbow dog.  A Rainbow gathering had recently departed the nearby forest lands and we had quite the traffic moving through town for a while.   Eric says Doppler chewed through his baling twine lead and went off looking for adventure on his own.

And I was never that fond of orange chocolate chip muffins anyway.

Doppler - 1

We had the good fortune to have a friend with us for 14 years.  He was that houseguest that arrived and never left, eating our food, and sleeping in comfort while we lay awake from his snoring.

Yes, he was our dog.  And he wasn't our dog because we found him at the pet store, or a breeder or an animal shelter.  He was our dog because he chose us to be his people.

We were working odd jobs for friends in Colorado during the summer of 1995.  They owned a bed and breakfast and we were deciding whether it was a business we wanted to go into ourselves so we cooked and cleaned and did minor maintenance and generally got to know the basics.

One day, as I was taking laundry out the front door (while some late rising guests were having breakfast in the dining room) I was greeted by a skinny black and white stray.  I managed to get a hand free from the laundry so I scritched him under the chin and he gave me a loving look that soon would become familiar.  I trundled the laundry around to the back of the house to the washing machines and the skinny stray followed me around back and looked in the door as I left him behind.  I got busy with the usual day to day chores and forgot about him.

Later that day, I took a spare muffin out to my husband who was working on a truck we'd just bought at a farm auction and noticed the stray curled up under the tree next to the truck.  I probably made some comment on how cute he was.

He ended up staying with us that night because he obviously didn't want to go anywhere else.  To be honest, I don't think I wanted him to leave either.