Backyard Buffet

**For some reason that I can't explain this post got moved to the front of the pile. I originally posted this back in early spring, like in March or April. I have no idea why this happened and it doesn't seem like a problem I can fix. I swear I'm not some crazy lady. If you want to get back to my current posting just bypass this one. I swear I know it's Halloween today. My blog just has a sick sense of humor.



It happened. I took down the Christmas tree. I was afraid that with these strong spring winds soon all that would have been left was a trunk and some twigs with some yarn on them. Besides the tree kept getting blown over. I read someone else who did this say that in the fall they put a stake in the ground to tie the tree to so it doesn't get blown over. I'll try that next year.
But just because the tree is down doesn't mean the birds are gone. I moved the small globe bird feeders that I had to the surrounding lilac bushes and the birds have been happily continuing to feed. We have even had a few new visitors!

Carolina Wren

The first newbie was a Carolina Wren. They are beautiful birds and I hope I can get them to stick around through the warmer months. They are more roundish then anything else but their patterning is gorgeous.

European Starling

The next to come were the Starlings. Although they are pretty they are not my favorite bird. It is due to the Starlings having been brought over from Europe that the Northeastern United States has lost the majority of it's Bluebird population. The Starlings have this nasty habit of building their nests on top of Bluebird nests killing the eggs. Hence the decline in the Bluebird population. So while they may be pretty, when I look at them I can't help thinking that they should be Bluebirds.

American Robin

The last bird to appear was the Robin. Nothing says spring is coming like a Robin in your yard. I was fine with winter till we got those couple of days flirting with the 70's. After that I was ready for spring.

Before spring is really here and I am outside prepping the garden for all my little seedlings there was one thing I had wanted to do for Lily to round up  our winter of birdwatching from the kitchen window. I had thought of an idea to make a memory card game out of all the birds we had been able to identify. The other day both her and Jude were sick and napping, and I finally had the time to make the cards.

All I did was print out pairs of  pictures with the different birds onto card stock. You could stop here if you wanted to and just cut them into squares and play the memory game. I decided that I wanted to make it last more then one season so I went and got some pretty paper for the backs of the cards. I just used a glue stick to paste them together. Then I got some self laminating paper an office supply store and laminated each card. They came out looking really nice.

Lily had so much fun playing the game. She's asked to play it everyday since. It reminds her of what we've done this winter and I think it's more fun for her because she knows these birds so it makes her feel confident. Plus it works on building her memorization skills. She's really good at it too.
You could easily make up any type of memory game cards. I had a friend do one with family members. Or you could do pictures from a vacation you took. The possibilities are endless.  I like endless possibilities.



Halloween!

I love Halloween. Well, I guess I love the Holidays as a general rule of thumb when I really think about it because it gives me a break from the day to day. I throw the chores aside to carve pumpkins or make snowmen. This year we got to do both in the same weekend which was different from the norm in my little corner of the world. We'll get to that in a bit but first I wanted to do the costume reveals.

For some reason where we live they don't have trick-or-treating on Halloween night. It irked me for years but I've since learned to just let it go. It has something to do with a belief that if trick-or-treat night is on a school night and limited from 6-8pm that somehow there will be less mischief. Your guess is as good as mine really. So the Thursday before Halloween is when the kids go trick-or-treating here.

Lily had decided this year that she wanted to repeat her costume from last year and be Ladybug Girl again. It's one of her favorite stories. Ladybug Girl is a small book series. Ladybug Girl is about a  little girl who finds herself afraid of normal things. But, when she puts on her ladybug girl costume her personality is transformed into this sort of super-girl mentality. Ladybug Girl can do anything! I read them to Lily constantly. So her costume was easy since we still had most of the parts from last year.

Jude was a garden gnome. I loved the idea because #1: he is the perfect height to be a garden gnome, #2 The costume called for things he could wear all winter; a hat (which I knitted), a coat, a pair of pants, a belt, and a pair of boots. How great is that?

I already shared the mask I made for Naiya this year. I promised to share the rest of her costume when it was done. I had wanted to make her a cape to go with it. She was totally on board. After a trip to get some fabric and a pattern we headed home. Now here's the kicker. I am many a thing, but I am not a seamstress. Yeah, I took home-ec back in middle school. I rocked at the cooking part and sucked at the sewing part. I remember making a pair of shorts. One leg was tighter than the other and one leg was shorter than the other. Hey, I'm not Marry Poppins over here ya know.

So I sat down, read over the pattern, pinned the material, and cut the pieces out. This is about when things started to go wrong. Nothing was what it should have been. Pieces weren't fitting together, the instructions may as well have been written in Greek, I was getting upset. It was a cape. The pattern consisted of 10 pieces. This should have been easy. The family was disappearing to other areas of the house to escape the black cloud that was hovering over me in the living room. I had to get the stupid cape done. I also had to get my Charcutepalooza project done. Why do I let so many things pile on at once?

I "may" have called my mom and complained that she never taught me to sew. Why?! Why hadn't she ever taught me to sew?! I "may" have threatened to never cook for her again. She "may" have been insanely kind and amazing and drove down the next day to bail my sorry butt out. Who knows what really happened. It's not important. What is important is that the cape and the charcuterie got done. And Naiya looked fabulous.

I mean really, really fabulous. The cape will be kept for future costumes. I can see a vampire or a witch in its future. Thanks mom, you're the best and I love you :)

Then something very unusual happened. No, not the snow. We'll get there. I went out to the garden to give a neighbor a cabbage and I looked at my strawberry plants. I had started them from seed this spring, and I wasn't expecting to get anything this year. Then about a month ago I noticed some berries forming. I really didn't think anything of it. However when I was giving my neighbor the cabbage we started to talk about the strawberry plants. I had gotten an heirloom variety that produced yellow strawberries, the ones on the plant looked more white then yellow. I bent over to pluck off one of the unripened berries to show him and low-and- behold it was ripe! So I got to harvest a handful of yellow strawberries at the end of fall.

The next day it snowed. It was beautiful and surreal with most of the leaves still on the trees. We went for a walk over to the park to enjoy it.

The kids waited impatiently for the snow to get deep enough to make some snowmen. We had decided to make our snowmen a little different...



Trick? or Treat?

You gotta love your jack-o-snowman.

The last thing I wanted to share was a little treat my mom used to make for me when I was a kid. I thought it was appropriate given that it is Halloween. And really, wouldn't it be a little starnge not to have a recipe mixed in with all of this?



Flour Tortilla Pumpkins

Ingredients:

• flour tortillas
• butter; softened
• powdered sugar

Directions:

1. Cut a face into a flour tortilla. Rub softened butter over both sides of the tortilla.
2. Place tortilla in a skillet that has been heated over medium heat. Cook tortilla until browned and a little puffy on both sides.
3. Remove from heat and serve with powdered sugar dusted on top.

Notes: You can also dust it with cinnamon sugar. Another Idea is to make a cheese quesadilla instead. Using two tortillas layer cheese on one, cut the face out of the other and cook until the cheese is melted. Just make sure that the cheese is clear of the facial features so it doesn't make a big mess.



The kids loved them as much as I remember loving them when I was their age. They even got the Lily stamp of approval. Since she's my pickiest eater that is really saying something.

This weekend was great and exactly the break I needed from the day to day routine. I think we all had a lot of fun.

Happy Halloween!

Holiday Cookie Time

Today is rainy and cold. It seems there has been a lot of that lately. The cold crops in the garden are loving it but us living things with legs get a little stir crazy when the weather lasts like this for too long. So today felt like a good day for cookies and pumpkin carving. The kiddos were excited.

After we ran out to the store to get some sugar, it was aprons on and down to business in the kitchen. We have a lot of really good cookie recipes that we turn to when it's cookie time. However, I had decided to do something special. This time I pulled out the green notebook which was given to me by my mother at my wedding shower. This notebook contains all of our family recipes that she had collected and saved. It is probably the most sentimentally valuable thing that I own. I had leafed through the notebook last night and decided upon two recipes. One was for Old Fashioned Sour Cream Cookies that my great grandmother on my mom's side of the family used to make, and the other was for some Coconut Jumbles that my grandmother on my dad's side of the family used to make every Christmas. The recipe for the Coconut Jumbles was my great grandmother's on my dad's side of the family but I remember my grandmother making them for us.

Quickish side story:

This is a picture of my great grandmother Minnie Frederick. She's the woman on the right. That's my mom with her finger in her mouth in front of her. My Aunt is the little girl holding the cat down in front. The Lady on the left is my other great grandmother Maude. We'll get to Maude another time I'm sure. She was quite the character.

There is one story I always have been told about my great grandmother Minnie. Whenever my mom and my aunt would visit great grandma Minnie would always make them cookies. Not just "hey lets have a snack cookies" or "here are some cookies for dessert" cookies. No, she made them cookies for breakfast. How awesome was she? Every visit she would make two types of cookies; her Chocolate Chip Cookies and her Old Fashioned Sour Cream Cookies.

I've been eating the chocolate chip cookies as long as I can remember but I had never had the sour cream ones before so that is the first cookie we made today.

Old Fashioned Sour Cream Cookies

From my great grandmother Minnie Frederick

(Makes about 6 dozen)

Ingredients for cookies:

• 1/2 cup of butter; softened
• 2 cups of sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. of vanilla extract
• 3 cups of flour
• 1 tsp. of salt
• 1 tsp. of baking powder
• 1 tsp. of baking soda
• 1 cup of sour cream
• 1 cup of walnuts; chopped very finely

Ingredients for icing:

• 1 1/2 cups of confectioners sugar
• 1 tsp. of vanilla extract
• Pinch of salt
• 1 Tbs. of butter; softened
• 2 heaping Tbs. of sour cream
• 1/2 cup of walnuts; chopped finely for sprinkling on top of the icing (optional)

Directions:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.
2. In a large mixing bowl cream the butter and the sugar together. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well. Add the vanilla and mix until fluffy.
3. In a separate bowl mix together the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.
4. Add the flour  mixture to the butter mixture alternating with the sour cream. Begin and end with the flour.
5. Add in the walnuts and mix until combined.
6. Drop by the teaspoonful onto a greased cookie sheet or a cookie sheet lined with Silpat. Space them well apart as they will spread (I did 9 cookies per sheet and they were spaced well).
7. Bake for 10 minutes until they are a golden color.
8. While the cookies are baking mix all of the frosting ingredients in a bowl.
9. While the cookies are still warm spread a little frosting on each cookie and top with the chopped walnuts.

*Get a printable version of this recipe here*



These cookies are really quite nice. They have a crisp edge but hold together nicely. They are not a crumbly cookie. The taste of the nut comes through with out being overpowering. And even though I am not a huge fan of icing it really works well for these cookies.

Then there was some waiting for the rest of the cookies to get done. Six dozen cookies is a lot to get through.

While we waited we carved some pumpkins. Carving pumpkins is a great way to pass time while waiting for cookies to bake and cool off, because that takes foooorevvver. Don't believe me? Just ask any toddler.



After the pumpkin was carved and the sour cream cookies were done there was still some time before lunch so we started to make my great grandma Copeland's Coconut Jumbles. Can I just tell you, I haven't had these cookies in somewhere around 20 years, but I still remember these cookies. My great grandmother gave the recipe to my grandma and she made them for us. Grandma knew what she was doing. Here is a picture of my grandma Copeland. I'm the short little thing standing next to her.



Every Christmas when we were at my grandma and grandpa's house she would have plates of Christmas cookies. It felt like we could never run out no matter how many we ate. I can't fathom the hours she spent baking all of her cookies in the days before we came. I wish I could talk to her about it now that I'm all grown up and making cookies for my family. Everyone had their favorites and these Coconut Jumbles were at the top of my list.

Coconut Jumbles

From my great grandma Copeland

(makes about 90)

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of sugar
• 1/2 lb. of butter; softened
• 3 eggs
• 1 bag of moist coconut (14-16 oz)
• 1 1/2- 2 cups of flour

Directions:

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a large mixing bowl cream the sugar and butter. Add in the eggs one at a time. Then add in the coconut and the flour. Only add enough flour to "stiffen" the dough. It will be somewhere between the 1 1/2- 2 cups.
3. Drop by the teaspoonful onto a well greased or Silpat lined cookie sheet. **This is important: You really have to be a stickler about the teaspoonful thing. If you do heaping teaspoons your cookies will melt together into a big mess and it will take forever to cook. It's not pretty, don't make that mistake. Also, space them well apart. I fit 9 cookies per sheet and that worked well for me.
4. Bake for 13 minutes until the edges are browned and the centers are golden.

*Get a printable version of this recipe here*

I had forgotten just how much I loved these cookies. These cookies are thin and wafer-like. The edges are crisp and crunchy. The middle is chewy and a little sticky. I am so glad I have the recipe so I can make them for my family. 

So the kids are wiped out and napping and I get to sit and reflect on some of the wonderful women that preceded me. I am thankful for recipes that tie you to your past and that you know will be carried on into the future. 

A Year in Booze Experimentation

Lately if you look into my cupboards or closet you will stumble upon a jar of booze. I'm not sure what this says about me. I'm a far cry from being a booze hound. Really what it boils down to is that I like infusing things and alcohol lends itself very nicely to that. I've been making my own vanilla extract going on two years now. It will blow anything store bought out of the water. So maybe I'm just stepping a little further out into the land of infusions and alchol experimentation.

I guess in a post like this it helps to start and the beginning. So that is what I'll do, I'll start and the beginning and when I get to the end I'll stop.

Almost a year ago (have I really been blogging for almost a year?!), I decided to have a little fruitcake showdown. I wanted to pin my grandmother's fruitcake against someone else's. I called it "The Battle of the Fruitcakes". I pinned my grandmothers recipe against Alton Brown's recipe. It ended up being a four post series, which you can read about here, here, and the final showdown here. We had a lot of fun with it. So much fun in fact, that I decided to take the winner from last years showdown and put it up against a new recipe this year. I am on the hunt for the best fruitcake in the world. If you know of an awesome recipe let me know.

What does fruitcake have to do with booze you ask? Everything. Booze is the cornerstone to fruitcake. Without booze fruitcake would not have the shelf life that it has or half the flavor. In my research of different types of fruitcakes I decided my new contender would be what is called a Trinidad Black cake. This is the Jamaican version of fruitcake. It is served at Christmas and weddings. After perusing many different recipes I settled on this recipe for a Trinidad Black Cake shared by Sarina on trinigourmet.com.

In Sarina's recipe she said she would spring for Bailey's when she wanted it to be "really special". Of course I had no other option than to go with the Bailey's. The fruits have been commingling with the brandy and the Bailey's for a couple of weeks now in a 1/2 gallon jar in my cupboard and I'll keep the updates coming as I get closer to "The Battle of the Fruitcakes Round 2".

The next thing to discuss in my chronological tale of booziness is eggnog. Tell me you haven't started to look for it on the shelves in the grocery store. Or is that just a me thing? Don't tell me, I don't want to know. Well the truth is I last year I came up with my own version of eggnog. You see, my husband has a special place in his heart for Turkey Hill's Eggnog. I on the other hand was on the fence about it. I thought I could come up with something better than store bought. I laugh at store bought! I came up with a Dulce de Leche Eggnog recipe and pinned it against the Turkey Hill's Eggnog. My husband is now the one on the fence and I have chosen my side. Dulce de Leche eggnog is now my go to... I want to go make some right now... seriously.

After my little eggnog throw down I came across a blog post by The Bitten Word. They had made an eggnog, let it sit for a year, and then drank it. To be honest it still sparks my curiosity and gives me a case of the hibbity jibbities all at the same time. I posted about it here. Curiosity won me over as it usually does and I made up a 1/2 batch of the recipe they used. It has been sitting in the back recesses of my refrigerator where it will remain until the end of the year when I will cross my fingers, hope for the best, and dink some down. Um yeah... So that's the booze in the fridge.

Next up in my year of booze is rumtoph also known as confiture de vieux garcon or bachelor's jam. At the beginning of summer a dear friend of mine tagged me in a post on Facebook asking me if I knew what Bachelor's jam was. I didn't, and asked her what it was. Her response was , "It's your next project". She was right.  A few good friends and family will be getting a jar of this boozey concoction for Christmas. I've been layering fruits and sugar, adding rum to cover, all summer long. Now those jars are stashed, waiting, in the back of my closet for Christmas to come. I believe that a woman's closet should have a good shoes: booze ratio.

Were getting closer to the end here I promise.

Around the same time that I started my rumtopf, Punk Domestics shared a link to a blog called Imperfect Urban Farm who had just posted a recipe for Nocino,  a green-walnut infused liquor. If you haven't figured it out by now when something intrigues me I will somehow manage to squeeze it into my life. This was no exception. After reading the post I was on a hunt for green walnuts. Lucky me on the way to church I spotted a tree on the side of the road. The tree had some low hanging branches with Green walnuts on them. True story: In our Sunday best we stopped on the way home to pick those green walnuts. That liquor will be ready on Halloween, which seems like a fitting time for it given it's dark green sinister coloring.

Finally (There had to be an end to this you know), the last thing going on in my year of booze is bitters. I got myself into this mess through Twitter. Lets just say that some people started tweeting about bitters. They wanted to make bitters and thought it would be cool if other people did it too. Maybe we could even share with each other. They even started a hash tag for it: #bandofbitters. I remember saying something like "Hey, that sounds a lot like the name of my husband's blog". Someone said, "Well, then one of you has to do this". That was how I got involved in this.

Bitters are an infused liquor that is used in small amounts in a variety of cocktails. The most famous of these being the Manhattan. It's one of those liquors you add "just a splash" of. Right away I ran into a problem. Bitters require a high proof liquor..like *coughing into my hand* 151 proof. Most of the recipes I found for homemade bitters called for Everclear. Here in PA and in other states too you need a chemists license to be able to acquire Everclear. I am many a thing but I am no chemist. So unless I was willing to travel for booze (which I'm not) any recipe calling for Everclear was out. 

But do I give up? No, never!! Well sometimes, but it's rare trust me. I happened upon a recipe called "in bloom bitters" from Imbibe magazine's website. It called for lavender, rose, sage, star anise, grapefruit, lemon, gentian root, and...151 proof rum. Now get this, while I may not be able to buy Everclear here in PA I can get 151 proof rum, go figure. I wasn't going to ask questions though, I bought my bottle of 151 proof rum and headed home to make my bitters. I pulled the bottle out of it's brown paper bag and it was then that I noticed something, well a few things...

 

This is apparently some serious stuff, and they want you to know that and treat it as such. This is NOT liquor you pour over a dessert to set it on fire. You need to respect this alcohol's authority. Message received.

The bitters are currently tucked away on a top shelf in my kitchen cabinet. It will be ready in a couple more weeks. The bitters smell really good though, I'm excited to try them and send a bottle off to a friend.

I'll keep the updates coming as each boozey experiment wraps up for the year. It's funny how it all adds up after awhile and all of a sudden there are little jars of alcoholic creations stacking up in every nook and cranny around the house.

And that's the end so here I will stop.

Lavender Vanilla Applesauce

I finished canning the bushel of apple seconds I had gotten from a local orchard at the end of last week. Fingers crossed it will be enough to hold us through the year. We didn't have enough last year so I doubled the amount I made this time around. When all was done and canned I had just over 2 lbs. of apples remaining. I had a couple of ideas but then when I was out in my herb garden I was struck by some inspiration.

Lavender. I love lavender so much. It's one of the herbs that I am constantly running between my fingers when I walk past it in my garden. I add the essential oil to the bucket of water I wash my kitchen floors with. I put a few drops of the oil on a cloth and throw it in the drier with my clothing. It is a scent I love to be around. It's like a dear friend.

I wanted to see what would happen if I combined the flavors of lavender, vanilla, and apples. In my mind it tasted really good. Besides I had to use up the rest of those apples.

Lavender Vanilla Applesauce

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs. of apples; peeled and cored
• 1/4-1/3 cup of apple cider
• Juice from 1/2 a lemon
• 1 vanilla bean
• 1/2 Tbs. of fresh lavender blossoms (or 1/2 a tsp. of dried lavender blossoms)
• 1 tsp. of honey

Directions:

1. Place the apples, the cider (enough to cover the bottom of the pan), and the lemon juice in a medium saucepan over medium- high heat. Bring to a boil.
2. Split the vanilla bean with a knife. Using the back of the knife scrape out the seeds and add them to the pot. Tie the lavender flowers into a bundle and add them to the pot as well. Make sure to push the blossoms to the bottom of the pot so they infuse into the cider and lemon juices.
3. Lower the heat to medium-low and stirring occasionally, simmer the apples until they are soft and falling apart. This will take about 20 minutes.
4.  Remove the lavender bundle. Using an immersion blender (or a potato masher if you like chunkier applesauce), blend until sauce is smooth.
5. Add in the honey. Stir to combine. Check for sweetness and add more honey if you like.
6. Cool completely.

*Get a printable version of this recipe here*

For me, when I put a bite in my mouth I am hit immediately with the lavender, next I taste the tartness of the apple, and the last thing I taste is the vanilla. It is the most unique applesauce I've ever had. If you like floral notes in your food you will love this applesauce.

Savory Roasted Apples

True story: I love apples. I eat one everyday. I especially love them with peanut butter. If I ever come to visit and am there for a breakfast don't worry about going to a whole bunch of fuss to put together a meal. I'm quite content with a cup of coffee and an apple with peanut butter. Seriously.

Therefore it should come as no surprise that when apple season rolls around I am an especially happy camper. The farmers markets are flooded around here with so many different varieties. At the market closest to my house they will have at least 20 different varieties in peak season. My absolute favorite variety is called the Nittany apple, which is a cross between a golden delicious and a York apple. It's flesh is crisp and has just the right balance of sweet and tart. The Nittany's are a mid-late season apple and are really only around for the month of October. I eat as many as I can.

OK so now we know, I like apples. Time to move on. One of my favorite things to do with apples is to core them and stuff them with some sort of  oat, fruit, and nut mixture, and then bake the whole thing till it's soft and yummy. I can eat apples this way for dessert or breakfast depending on what I stuff them with. This year I had a thought...what if instead of stuffing them with a sweet stuffing I made a savory stuffing? Then I could serve them for dinner too.

This brings us to the another fall food that I love...stuffing. I love bread in all forms and stuffing definitely makes the cut for the top 10. Although I have a love of all stuffing of the non boxed variety, my favorite is a sausage cornbread stuffing. It makes me gleek when I think about it. Just so you don't think that gleeking is some risque sort of a thing here is the definition:

Gleek (according to the Urban Dictionary):

Building up saliva in the salivary glands using some stimulus, like sour food or yawning, and then pressing the tongue upon the glands, causing the saliva to shoot out, usually at an impressive distance.

I bet you didn't know there was a term for that did you?? OK maybe you did, moving on...

I figured it would be worth a try to combine the two and see where I ended up. I already had some cornbread that was leftover from a chili I had made over the weekend, and wouldn't you know it was just the right amount for a 1/2 batch of cornbread stuffing. I really like Anne Burrell's recipe for Sausage cornbread stuffing. It's really easy to pull together and is just what I'm thinking of when it comes to cornbread stuffing. Should I say cornbread stuffing again or would that be too much?

This time around I cut her recipe in half. Then I made the following substitutions:

1. I changed the 1/2lb. of spicy sausage to 1/4lb. of Canadian bacon and 1/4lb. of good pepperoni, both with a 1/4 inch dice.
2. I changed the 1 cup of dried cranberries to 1 cup of dried cherries.

Everything else stayed the same. I only used four apples which left me with a bunch of leftover stuffing. I don't consider this to be a problem. I cooked it separately and put it aside for a dinner later on in the week.

For the apples I used four large apples. I chose varieties whose flesh was slightly crisp but would still do well for baking. I ended up with two over sized honey crisp apples and two large golden delicious.

Savory Roasted Apples

(serves four with a bunch of leftover stuffing)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 recipe of Anne Burrell's sausage cornbread stuffing
• 4 very large apples
• 1 Tbs. butter
• 1/2 cup of chicken stock
• 1/4 cup of apple cider

Directions:

1. Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Make sausage stuffing and set aside.
3. Cut a thin slice off the bottom of each apple so they are sturdy and sit up straight. Your apples need to have good posture to make it through the baking process without falling over.
4. Score once around the middle of each apple. This will limit the amount of bursting that your apple does while it's baking.
5. Slice off the very top of each apple and then core them. I find that a melon baller works best for this job. Just be careful not to go through the side or bottom of the apple. I find leaving 1/3- 1/2 and inch of flesh works the best.
6. Melt the butter in an oven-proof skillet. Add the apples stem-side down and cook them until the surface is browned. This will take 2-4 minutes.
7. Once browned flip the apples and spoon in the filling inside until it is slightly mounded. The amount of filling that you get in each apple will depend on the size of the apple.
8. Pour the chicken broth and the apple cider into the bottom of the skillet.
9. Bake for 35-45 minutes, until a skewer inserted goes in easy. Baste the apples after the first 10 minutes.
10. Pour the skillet juices over the apples and serve warm.

*Get a printable version of this recipe here*

Verdict? This meal was a success. I know this because everyone was "ummm"-ing throughout the meal. Naiya said I should blog it, so I did. I think this would also be a really cute way to serve stuffing at thanksgiving.

Happy Fall!

The Galantine, aka: The Franken-Mummy of the Chicken World

Warning: This post may be a bit capricious. You have been warned.

A little fact about me:

I am a very competitive person. Not with other people though, with myself. I have learned to balance this with the realities of life as I have gotten older, but the fact still remains that I try to be the best "me" that I can. My mom always told me there was the easy path, the hard path, and then there was the path that I took, which wasn't really a path at all, but rather a thick overgrown forest that I would happily hack my way through, machete in hand. And she's right. If you tell me I "can't" do something, I look at it as more of a challenge. I like it best when the bar is set so high that I can't even see it. I'm a sick puppy, I know. Or maybe more of an Australian Cattle dog.

Don't worry this will all tie together in a bit. 

Now onto the point of this post which is the Charcutepalooza challenge for October. I was wondering if this month the challenge would tie in with Halloween at all. After all, for July we had the opportunity to make hot dogs. After reading Mrs. Wheelbarrow's October Charcutepalooza post I realized it did. The challenge was stretching, as in "making the most of your meat and your skills in the kitchen." We were allowed to pick from rillettes, confit, a galantine, or a roulade.

I decided that I wanted to make the most of a chicken because I thought a galantine sounded the most kid-friendly of the choices I had. Let me quickly explain what a galantine is (this is the Halloween tie in, just so you don't miss it.)

First, you take a whole chicken. You remove the skin in one piece and then scrape the fat off. Next, you cut the now naked chicken into pieces, removing the meat from the bones. You take the bones and make a stock. Then you grind up the dark meat with some pig fat, turn it into a paste pate in your food processor, then fold in some extra stuff. Then, you take that pate, spread it on the chicken skin, lay the breast meat down the middle, and roll it all together...in the skin. Finally you cook the galantine in the stock you made. The next day you slice it up and call it gourmet. It's a Franken-mummy chicken.

Am I the only one who thought the first person to do this was a wee bit twisted? Not the type you'd want to run into on some dark alley in France after they'd had a bad day. Oh, and absolutely a competitive over-achiever. I decided to look into the history of this dish a little bit. It stank of something created for aristocracy. I had to know more.

A very brief, two sentence history:
According to Wikipedia The galantine was created by a chef of the marquis de Brancas. As in, Louis, marquis de Brancas, prince de Nasaro (1672- 1750).

J'avais raison.

It was decided, a galantine I would make. I looked over the recipe in Charcuterie: The craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by, Michael Rhulman and Brian Polcyn. The recipe looked good but then I had a thought. Does anyone remember those millifiori beads made out of fimo clay?

I got this picture here. It also has the directions on how to do it.

This is really how I think by the way. The designs made in these beads are accomplished by taking small rolls of the fimo clay, creating a design and then rolling it up into a larger cylinder. Then when you cut it you get the design. The galantine is essentially a meat version of a fimo bead. I wanted to play with that. I decided not to use the chicken breasts down the middle. Instead I thought I'd try cutting a pig shape out of Canadian bacon using a cookie cutter. You see, I was already raising the bar for myself. I also thought of two different ways to flavor my galantine using different fold-ins. I couldn't decide on one or the other and I wasn't going to make two galantines (that would be crazy right??), so instead of making two I decided to split the galantine in half. One side would have one filling, the other would have the second filling, and then I'd wrap it up in the skin in the traditional way and poach it in the stock (not crazy at all). It would be an epic success or an utter failure, my kind of challenge!

The first thing I did was cut the pigs out of the Canadian bacon. I needed to know I had this part right or else I was going to have to do the galantine in the traditional way and use the chicken breasts.

Mission impossible to mission success

Once I had my little piggies all in a row it was time to face the chicken. True story: I know how to piece a chicken. Fact: I have never tried to get the skin off of a chicken in one piece.

So there I was facing down my chicken with my just sharpened boning knife in hand. In my mind the chicken kept getting bigger and bigger and my knife kept getting smaller and smaller. This continued until the chicken had grown six more arms and was looming over me like some strange headless Kraken and my sharp boning knife had shrunk to the size of a pen knife. Then a voice came from the the land of twitter, "It's just a chicken". Oh yeah...it is just a chicken. Thanks Janis. The chicken returned to normal size. I removed the skin and patted myself on the back.

I followed the recipe from Rhulman and Polcyn's book with a few minor changes. The first was subbing in my Canadian bacon piggies. The second was the filling choices. I had some bacon and I wanted that to be a unifying flavor. But I had come up with two sets of flavors that both went well with bacon. 

The one combination was oregano, chive, and sun-dried tomato. The second combination was rosemary, thyme, and fig. I hesitated with the fig...fresh or dried? I was worried that fresh figs might get too jammy when the galantine was poaching and make that half fall apart. But I had all my eggs in one basket for this challenge so I ignored that annoying little voice of doubt nagging me from the back of my head and continued on.

The next challenging part for me was rolling the galantine up inside the chickens skin. I may have used twice the amount of suggested cheesecloth to insure it's safety during poaching.

 My Franken-mummy chicken creation

The cooking part went smoothly. The cooling of the galantine in the stock overnight in the fridge was a cinch. I could do that part in my sleep (hardy har har). The next day I invited over some friends for dinner to share my creation with. This was one of the most technical things I have ever done in the kitchen. I was a proud mama.

About two hours before our friends came over I decided to unwrap the galantine. I wanted to take some time photographing it in case there was a really good looking slice with that pig in the middle. That little voice in the back of my head was also pipping up again that I should check to make sure the fig side of the galantine had set properly. I really hate that little voice. Mostly because nine out of ten times it's right. This was one of those times. As I had worried, the figs had gotten too jammy and, while the sun-dried tomato half was nice and firm, the fig side fell apart as soon as I cut off the skin.

Crap.

A friend said recently that some days you grab the bull by the horns. Other days you sit in the corner eating cookies and crying. I didn't have time for cookies so I cut off the fig side, put it in a pretty white container and called it pate. Hey some might call it failure, I prefer to call it ingenuity. The other half came out beautifully so I served that to our friends with a chickpea, sausage, and kale frittata and some scalloped cabbage from my garden. Dinner was fine. Jude inhaled his slice of galantine and cried that there wasn't anymore. I even got a good shot or two.



The little piggies came out perfect. The flavor from the Canadian bacon along with the other fold ins I put in took away any blandness that the chicken might have had. I would eat this all the time if it wasn't such a lengthy process to make it.

The "pate" tasted really good. It was unbelievably moist from the figs and the herbs complimented everything else perfectly. We ate it all week with crackers for lunch. Jude couldn't have been happier.

What I learned:

1. Don't be a chicken when it comes to your chicken. It's just a chicken.
2. If your galantine doesn't work out consider pate your new best friend.
3. Cookies are great but grabbing a bull by the horns is a lot more fun.

Final confession: Even though the "pate" tasted really good there is a small part of me that is irked by the fact that it didn't come out the way I had intended. I know if I had used dried figs that it would have worked. I have plans to do this again to get it to come out right. Let me know if you'd like to come over for dinner that night. There might be cookies.

A Halloween Parade & Face Painting Made Easy-er

Where I live Halloween isn't a one night thing, it's a whole holiday season. I think it might have something to do with our proximity to Hershey, but really your guess is as good as mine. It started this past Tuesday with the Halloween parade. The parade is held down a few streets in our town. The local school marching bands play, local business's and animal shelters dress up cars and themselves, the Zembo Shrine mini cars make a debut, and firetrucks are dotted throughout the procession. If that wasn't enough, people who are in the parade are loaded down with bags of candy that they toss to the kids lined up along the route. So yeah, our kids love it.

Freddy Krueger made an appearance as did Elvis.

 Jude was dancing in the streets...literally. It was past his bedtime and he was sugared up beyond reason. He was falling into people and laughing. I was highly amused.

Isn't that the cutest dog you have ever seen?

The parade was great. The kids came home acting more than a little loopy. During the parade I saw Jude eat three Dum Dum's and a long tootsie roll. I don't know what else he slipped by me. Lily was keeping pace with Jude as far as the candy consumption went. It was 1 1/2 hours past their bedtime when we were finally getting them into their P.J's. I had Lily undressed when Jude came careening around the corner laughing wildly. He stopped to start smacking her on the butt yelling, "butt, butt, butt!!". Normally she would have thrown a hissy fit over that kind of thing but she was so wound up herself that she just laughed.

As I said before we are in the midst of Halloween season here. This upcoming Saturday is the Streets of Treats in our town. This is where the kids get to wear their costumes and go trick-or-treating in the downtown shops. The town also closes a block in the town center and has games and face painting for a few hours.

Hershey park also hosts a bunch of different Halloween related activities. It's a lot, but I'm not complaining. The kids love it and so do I. I've always loved Halloween. I think it's because when I was a kid my mom made my costumes every year. I would spend months running ideas by her until we came up with one that she could pull off. My favorite one that she did for me was when I got to be Max, from Where The Wild Things Are. I rumpused for days.

I mean, come on..isn't that just the coolest costume ever?

So it should come as no surprise when I tell you that I make most of my kids costumes too. I'm not a great seamstress like my mom is so it took me a bit to build up my confidence. The first one I did for Naiya when she was 8. We had been reading the Chronicles of Narnia and she decided that she wanted to be the White Witch. I made the dress, the icicle crown and the wand.

She got really into character when she put it all on. She walked around all night like she was royalty and pretended to freeze all of the other trick-or-treaters with her wand.

The next year she decided that she wanted to be a mummy. She had a specific one in mind. I have a Martha Stewart Halloween book called, Halloween: The Best Of Martha Stewart Living, it is a great book. In it there is a section with different costumes and make-up jobs with step by step instructions. That's the mummy she wanted me to do. While I'm touched that she thinks I could pull that off I knew that given the time we had from dinner to trick-or-treating and then the clean up afterwards before she went to bed was not going to allow for such a fancy make-up job. So I came up with a second solution. I made a mask.

Granted it's not quite as creepy as the one in the book, but it did the trick. Naiya loved it and she looked super creepy on Halloween that year. I was even willing to forgive the people that thought she was a zombie. I mean really...a zombie??

I won't go through all of them but I really got into the mask thing for pulling off a fancy make-up job that I wasn't going to have time for. Besides there is something about a mask that can be very eerie. This year she again chose a costume that required a fancy make-up job. Luckily I knew what to do. I still have to make the hooded cape to go with the costume but I got the mask done and I thought I would share.

I think she likes to challenge me. All I do is buy a plain mask. Then I punched holes for some ribbon so she can tie it on her head. I painted the mask white first so it had a matte finish. Then I sketched the design on in pencil. My husband walked in when I was half-way through painting on the design and asked me why I wasn't just using a sharpie. I gave him a dirty look and said that wasn't how I wanted it to look. The truth was I just didn't think of it. *sigh* But it didn't take me too too long and it came out really nice...

Masks are a really cheap and easy way to get that really cool painted face that that your kid might want. I get to take my time when I make these. The mask doesn't get itchy or wipe it's nose while I'm trying to paint it. Plus I can save the mask and if another one of my kids wants to wear it on another Halloween the work is already done.

The only drawback that I can find to the mask idea is it limits peripheral vision. Then again, I am with my kids while they go trick-or-treating so I get to be an extra set of eyes for them. I also make them take off masks when they are crossing streets to be extra safe.

Happy Halloween!