I’m still feeling moderately crappy, so I decided it was time to pull out the big guns.

I picked up fresh organic strawberries today, I have whipping cream, and I just prepared (minus the baking) molten lava chocolate cakes.
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Came home to discover that my new mixer had arrived!

It’s so shiny and pretty!

New mixer next to the old mixer. Poor old mixer.

Look at the beautiful color!

The mixer settled into it’s new space.

Now I feel like I should make cookies or something.

Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter. YUM! Best on whole wheat toast or toasted English muffins.

And I got a good one today… Potato Flour from Anne!

Now I can try Jim’s pizza crust recipe and see if it compares to the one I’ve been using. Hopefully next weekend. (Michael’s in Canton OH today, and then tomorrow we’ll be in MD for the viewing.) I’ll try to remember to take pictures–and hope everything turns out well!

But really, the best part was seeing an unexpected package. That truly made my day!

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Time for the local Ramp Festivals!

April 19th is the Richwood Ramp Festival. (The website is painful, but does have some interesting information.)
April 26th is the Randolph County Ramp Festival.

And before you ask, not I’m not going to any Ramp festivals. I’m not THAT nuts.

The following conversation happened as we were coming home from the grocery store. Note of importance: My grandmother is very Catholic.

Michelle: What are you making for lunch?
Michael: I dunno.
Michelle: What are you making for lunch that that’s fish or vegetarian?
Michael: Oh. I don’t know.
Michelle: We could get take-out from Flying Fish.
Michael: YES! And I could get hush puppies! They’re vegetarian!
Michelle: No they’re not! THEY’RE MADE FROM PUPPIES!

For some reason, everyone seems to be in the mood for biscotti. So here’s the recipe I use. These make very crisp crunchy biscotti that are best dunked in hot coffee, tea, or chocolate.

Almond Chocolate Biscotti

Recipe calls for almonds; I almost never have almonds, so use walnuts. I usually make half a without nuts for my grandmother.

3 eggs
1 cup sugar
½ tsp vanilla
1 ¼ cup toasted almonds, coarsely chopped
2 ½ cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
7 oz bittersweet chocolate chopped into chunks (I used 1 ½ cups Ghiradelli semi-sweet chips)

Preheat oven 350 F

Whip the eggs, sugar and vanilla until the mixture thickens (It says it should hold its shape. Mine didn’t and were fine.)

Sift together flour, baking powder, add to egg mixture. Stir in nuts and chocolate.

Line baking sheet with parchment paper (my silicone baking sheets were perfect for this.) Form dough into two logs ~3” wide and almost the length of the baking sheet. Dampen hands and smooth each log.

Bake 25 minutes. Remove from oven and lower oven temperature to 300 F. Let biscotti logs cool a few minutes.

Remove logs from pan. With serrated knife (bread knife works best I think) slice the logs diagonally into ½ inch slices.

Place sliced cookies flat on baking sheets (you’ll need two) and bake 20 more minutes. Cool and store in an airtight container for up to a week. Biscotti also freeze extremely well.

from Room for Dessert by David Lebovitz

I found the following article in response to a question that just came up.

Soy Carbohydrates: The Flatulence Factor

And now you know too.

Got the apple butter today!

Here are some pictures hot off the digital camera!

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And not just any baking mind you, but yeasty baking.

There’s been a lot of talk around these parts about pizza. And after reading Jim‘s post about different types of pizza crust, I decided that I needed to make pizza for dinner.

As I was unable to find Jim’s recommended potato flour, I decided to delve into my new cookbook, A Passion for Baking (Christmas gift from my Aunt & Uncle) and see if it had a good recipe for pizza dough. “The World’s Best Pizza Dough” recipe caught my eye, so I decided to try it. Instead of Jim’s potato flour, it called for Semolina flour OR cornmeal, and as I HAVE cornmeal, that made it a win.

The interesting thing this recipe called for was to roll out the dough after the first rise, add the toppings, and then have a second rise. Since I use a pizza stone, I wasn’t sure how well that was going to work, so I compromised. I rolled out the dough after the second rise, and then placed it on a sheet of parchment paper, where I let the dough rise again. Then when I went to bake the pizza, I slid parchment paper and all onto the hot stone, and everything was perfect.

How did it turn out? Well, Grandmom raved about the pizza through dinner, and then came back in later and said it was the best pizza I’d made and the best she’d had. So, I’d say that’s a win.

And since I had already made a mess, while the pizza dough was on it’s first rise, I started dough fr sweet rolls. I’ve used several different recipes for sweet rolls over the year, but the one I like best makes way too many at once, and even a half recipe is ridiculous, so I decided to use the dough recipe from the The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion, and improvise the filling on the fly.

So we just got finished rolling out the dough (despite the long rise, the dough was still difficult to roll, and I took a couple short breaks to let the dough relax while rolling it out. (Also, if you care about such things, I adore my French rolling pin I never thought the kind of rolling pin would make a difference, but this is the best pin I’ve ever used, and makes even pie crusts a joy to make.)

Anyway, sugar/cinnamon/butter (with a dash of nutmeg) and crasins and walnuts (except on Grandmom’s portion) were spread onto the dough, then the dough was rolled and sliced, and now one pan is in the fridge to bake for breakfast tomorrow morning, and the other is in the freezer for some other morning.

Now I get to look out the window at the snow, enjoy the heat from the wood stove in the basemnt, curl up with a book, and know I’ve got breakfast for tomorrow.

How awesome a Saturday is that?

I’ve been thinking a lot food recently. OK, I’ve been reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma, which hasn’t helped, but my ruminations do predate picking up the book.

Let’s go back a bit.

I haven’t eaten red meat–or any kind of mammal–since I was 21. (That’d be 17 years for those of you counting along at home.) And I didn’t eat a lot of meat in the three years before that either, so it’s getting close to half my life I haven’t eaten mammals. I don’t eat much poultry either, and when I do buy chicken or turkey, I try to make sure it’s organic, which means not just the diet but also the living conditions under which the animals are kept.

Why? To be blunt, because I think that the food industry in the US is highly unethical and immoral. Feed lots disturb me terribly, as does the idea of cutting off the beak of a chicken and sticking it in a tiny cage for the entirety of it’s life.

But before you get your panties in a bunch thinking I care more about animals than I do humans, I am even more horrified by the working conditions of humans in slaughter houses, and the way farmers are corralled into a lose-lose situation, and the way workers at most fast food restaurants are treated. In fact I have hardly set foot in a fast food restaurant after my own food service experiences and reading Fast Food Nation, and tend to eat at restaurants that are local, or else chains that have a reputation for treating their employees well, and providing them with benefits. (If you’re not sure about a restaurant’s reputation, look for a place where the waitresses have been there for years. Employees won’t stick around for long at a place that treats them like crap.)

So, long story short, I don’t eat mammals, and I don’t patronize restaurants that treat their employees badly.

So I do try to consider the whole picture when I made these decisions about what I would and would not eat. And as Michael and I slowly make more money, I try to make more and more food choices that are organic and/or fair trade. Often I fail in this, but it seems to me my only choice is to try. And of course it’s even hard to make these choices with my grandmother living and eating with us, because her diet is restricted by her health problems and her medications (she’s on coumadin, has dairy problems, and has high blood pressure; each has it’s own dietary restrictions.) But it’s still worth the effort, because things that are important are rarely easy.

But things have in fact become easier in recent years, as organic products have expanded from co-ops to regular grocery stores. There are three grocery stores within a few miles of my house that have relatively large organic sections. And one sells a variety of organic meats and poultry in addition to the veggies and dairy etc.

Which leads me to my current quandary.

Quiet obviously, ethical food is important to me. So would it not behoove me to start eating organic and ethically raised meat, so that I can support the farmers who put in the extra work and effort to raise their animals in a more healthy and moral manner?

To further complicate matters, the reason it was easy for me to stop eating meat, is because I never cared one way or the other for it. Excluding family get togethers, and some restaurants in the early 90s, it’s never been a problem for me, and, excluding going to the Jewish Deli in Baltimore near where my grandmother lived and getting fresh corned beef (oh, I do miss Attmans; turkey pastrami just isn’t the same), I haven’t missed eating meat in the slightest.

So would a change in my diet be worth it? I simply can’t decide.

Bad news for Morgantown. One of my favorite places to eat is closing.

There was an article in the Diminishing Pest today saying that Flying Fish is tentatively scheduled to close on the 12th. The problem is not a lack of customers, but because increasing fuel prices have drive upon the cost of bringing fresh fish into Morgantown.

There is talk of moving closer to Glasshouse Grille (Flying Fish and Glasshouse Grille are run by members of the same family) or changing the nature of the of the place and possibly the location. I hope that thy managed to remain open in some manner, because we eat at there at least once a week, and I’ll be very sad if we don’t have a place to get fresh fish anymore. (Flying Fish is were I ordered Dad’s birthday crab feast last year.)

So if you’re in town, you’ll want to make sure you make it to Flying Fish as much as you can before the 12th–but keep your fingers crossed they won’t have to close at all.

Sorry. Nothing for you today but a book review over on the book blog.

Went to have a very belated Chinese New Year’s celebration with our friends Kim & Mike (their baby has been sick, so they wanted to err on the side of caution.) And the restaurant from which we wanted to order was (for an unknown reason) close. So we got our second choice restaurant, but Kim made Sesame Noodles, and I made the world’s best brownies, and we got to hang out, so it was all good.

Hope your Saturday has been enjoyable. Now I’m off to try and finish Thud.

That’s the thing about depression. It sneaks up on you when you aren’t paying attention, and just when you think that everything’s hunky dory, BAM.

Okay, it’s not quite that bad, but I’ve been in a funk for the past week that I just can’t seem to shake. Worst part is I know what’s wrong, but it’s all out of my control. Which is not such a good thing for someone with OCD.

So lemme get it all out and see that gets it off my mind.

First and foremost is the recurring issue that I’m not going to bring up in a public space. Michael and I spent a lot of time discussing this issue this evening, and I’m once again back to the mantra, “it’s not me, it’s her.”

Secondly, something I haven’t much talked about, is that several older women in my life are seriously ill and or dying. Michael’s grandmother has slowly failing kidneys, and has been refusing dialysis for the past year, so it’s only a matter of time. She’s in a nursing home, and with her physical problems, doesn’t get out of bed very much.

Then my cousin’s grandmother (I actually spent a lot of time with my cousin’s grandparents when I was younger. They were a lot of fun.) suffered a series of small strokes, and is now under hospice care in a nursing home. I was sent a picture two weeks ago, and was shocked to see how thin she has become. It’s hard, because she wants to go home, but that’s is physically impossible at this point.

The just before New Year’s, my other grandmother had a series of small strokes, and is currently in a rehab center. She is also apparently suffering from dementia, and her lucidity comes and goes.

And then there is the fact that I have a horrible phobia of nursing homes. As in, it’s so bad just the idea of going into one freaks me out (as in nausea and hyperventilating freaking out), and I haven’t set foot in one since I was eight. (Long story at an impressionable age) So: guilt and depression.

That is not to say that I’ve done nothing. I write weekly, and we send flowers regularly, to cheer up their rooms. But it’s not the same as being there. And being me, I always feel like there is more I should be doing.

Is there anything I could plausibly be doing? I don’t know. Is there anything else I should be doing? Probably not if I want to retain my sanity. Are there things I should be doing? Yeah, I need to do a better job safeguarding my own mental health. Problem is, taking care of myself feels like I’m wasting time when I could be doing something more useful for other people, even though I know I do a crappy job taking care of others when I’m depressed. (Hey! Catch 22!)

So what do I do? Take my meds. Exercise. Write my letters. Send flowers. Take care of myself. Relax.

Why are these things always easier said than done?

Anway, to cheer myself up this evening, I made a batch of Jeri’s “Ought to Be Illegal Cookies.” I don’t know if they’re quite as good as the double chocolate cookies I make with peanut butter chips (also from the Alice Medrich book.) but they are pretty darn good, and they hit the spot. And now I have something to take to work tomorrow for Mardi Gras.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I think it’s time for a hot relaxing shower, and then some time to curl up and read before bed.