December 2005 Archives

1.) 2005 was the year I began using vermouth for something other than martinis. I've always had it around owing to my preference to gin, not too dry, up with a twist, but due to an occasional reluctance to open a bottle of wine for a mere quarter cup, I started subbing it in recipes. Since vermouth is just wine fortified and flavored with herbs and spices, it's an easy substitute for many recipes asking for a splash of dry white. It has a long shelf life, which makes it a useful cabinet staple, and its bright flavor and herbal perfume means it compliments dishes with fish, tomatoes, or other vegetables. Plus, it is essential for a mean martini.

2.) This was also the year I discovered homemade spice mixes. I made curry power, dry rubs, cajun seasoning, ras-el-hanout, and I recieved a very special portion of Tejal's grandmother's garam masala. The pre-mixed stuff is for weenies, I sayeth.

I also finally organized my spices. I ordered tins online for about 70 cents apiece, attached strips of velcro down the side of one cabinet and to the bottoms of the tins, and, voila, a cheap and easy spice rack. Everthing is accessible, easy to find, and it doesn't clutter up my limited cabinet space.

3.) I moved to California, where oranges and avocados are cheap, where you can get organic everything and heirloom tomatoes are available as late as November.

4.) Speaking of California, 2005 was the year I first went to the Ferry Building, my Mecca, my heaven, one of the tastiest places on earth.

5.) Wait, one more California thing. This year, I had my first real dim sum, specifically, I had my first taste of the almost mythic Beijing-style soup dumpling. It's a delicate skin containing a savory meatball and a rush of hot, fragrant broth. You dip it in black vinegar, eat it with a big spoon, sigh.

6.) Sorry, I'm a liar. Last California thing. I went wine tasting lots and lots. I heart Sonoma. I've sipped and swirled, and I can honestly notice my palate expanding and becoming more sensitive.

7.) But, most importantly, Tejal and I finally committed to being the 2 Tasty Ladies. It's been such a blast to write and eat together with each other and all of you.

And, some food resolutions:

1.) I resolve to roast more happy organic chickens and fewer supermarket chickens.

2.) I resolve to continue organizing and pumping up this site.

3.) I resolve to make more pizzas myself (instead of ordering them).

So, let me wish a Happy (and Tasty) New Year's to all our friends and fellow eaters. See ya'll in 2006.

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The last few days, it's rained and howled something fierce. The weather has been so dreary, it almost felt like I was in Boston again. The cumulative effect of so many gray days so late in December has been to make me feel quite festive. All I've felt like doing is cuddling by the tree with Stephen, eating warm foods and sipping warm drinks. I've mulled so much cider that I may never get the cinammon and allspice smell out of my kitchen; right now, it blends so well with the fir tree smell that I don't particularly mind.

Tonight I simmered chunks of pork shoulder with white beans and kale in broth with orange juice, cumin, and my delightful new smoked paprika. The smoky aspect was nicely subtle. It added depth and richness, smoothing the bitterness of the kale and infusing the tender meat with a flavor just barely reminiscent of low and slow pork barbecue.

We ate it bathed in the glow of 1,725 individual bulbs (I come from a seriously Christmas light-intensive family). Everything is more romantic in that warm light, surrounded by the smells of evergreen and sweet spices, pork and paprika. It was all I could do not to spin some Bing Crosby on the stereo and go out to rustle up some chestnuts to roast.

Ooh, toasted nuts. I bet that would smell great.

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One of the treats I brought home from my recent pilgrimage to the Ferry Building was two ounces of brick red pimenton de la Vera from Boulette's Larder. It is lovely; it has a color so rich, I can already picture it in stews and a smoky aroma that literally makes my mouth water. All morning, I've been nipping over and taking a heady sniff.

Pimenton de la Vera has been produced in Extremadura, in the Southwest of Spain, since about the 16th Century. It is made from pimento chiles dried over fires and ground and is the ancestor of the shameful, flavorless dust we call paprika. It has a Denomination of Origin, meaning that it is a protected product, certified by the Regulating Council in Spain. I'm in love with the whole idea of certifying and protecting important regional foods. It shows a reverence both for tradition and uniqueness of taste that I wish we had in the United States. For more about this excellent product, check out chocolateandzucchini.com. Clotide had an excellent piece about it in September.

I think it will be excellent in braises with pork and hearty greens. I'm going to pair it with shellfish and garlicky olive oil. I may even use it to make some very devilish deviled eggs.

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First, allow me to introduce myself. I am Whitney, a longtime friend of Tasty Lady Martha, and a slightlyshortertime friend of Tasty Lady Tejal. I am a lady and I also cook, so you can just call me the Rogue Tasty Lady. Tasty Lady Freelance. Since Tejal is on vacation, I will also accept "Substitute Tasty Lady". ...You can just call me Whitney.

But let's get down to business.

Are you ready to be let on on a secret? Something that has been kept within my family for generations? Come on, everyone loves a good secret recipe, kept on stained index cards and battered notebooks for generations, given loving tweaks each decade. It is time for you, dear reader, to enter the world of the Noodles.

Noodles have been a part of my holiday meals since as long as I could remember. They're so ingrained in my family's culinary workings that I'm not even sure which side they were passed down from (I have a suspicion it's the half that's from western Pennsylvania, because there's something suspiciously Amish about the whole rigamarole). Every Thanksgiving and every Christmas, they are the part of the meal I look forward to the most, and my favorite leftover; they're what neighbors and friends beg to try, and what the unintiated are foolishly suspicious of. If they're so wonderful, you might ask, why not make them more than twice a year? Ah, read on, and you shall see.

But let's get down to brass tacks: the ingredients for these noodles.

12 egg yolks
6 tbs melted butter
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp baking powder

Just simple egg noodles is all they are. This Thankgiving, when I supped away from home (and with the Ladies), it fell to me to make the noodles all by myself for the first time in my life. I had family honor riding on this. If I failed, I could never go home again, and would live my life in shame.

On the day before Thanksgiving, I began by separating all of the yolks from the whites, in a long and messy process that I screwed up at least once, by distractedly dumping the separated yolk directly into the tub of egg whites. Shame upon my family! Twelve egg yolks in a bowl, all pressing against each other but staying in their own little cellular worlds, are sort of beautiful. But it cannot last!

I first became convinced that I had ruined the noodles, shamed my family, and entirely ruined Thanksgiving for everyone roughly ten seconds after I dumped the butter that I had melted in the microwave into the eggs. "Oh no," I thought. "How hot was that? Is that going to scramble the eggs?" I mixed everything together with a fork, whimpering in vague terror at any lumps and wondering if anyone would notice if I just dumped out an entire dozen's worth of eggs and started over. Shame upon my family! Fortunately for all, the butter was not hot enough to cause any damage. But, to save the honor of my family, should you try this, I'd suggest a slow addition of the butter.

Once the cream, salt, and baking powder were mixed in, I began the hard part: adding those four cups of flour, 1/2 cup at a time. I went at it with my tiny fork until it seemed like a mere utensil was no longer man enough for the job. At about two cups mixed in, I thought perhaps it would be safe to switch to a more manual method, and stuck my little hand in there... and was rewarded with a big ol' mess of club hand. Shame upon my family! I tormented Stephen a little bit with it before washing my hand of and going back to a method of struggling to get that massive amount of dry into that tiny amount of wet with fork and spatula.

Finally the mixture had become solid and doughy enough to require me to really get in there and work the flour directly in with my hands. I tell you, I nearly killed myself kneading and kneading and kneading, and had visions of grandmothers and great grandmothers and sturdy Pennsylvania Dutch women with hefty forearms. "You can do it, Whitney!" the visions said to me. "Don't bring shame upon your family!" I wiped the sweat from my brow with a now Popeye-like forearm and beat the crap out of that dough.

I was rewarded for all of this effort, after about thirty minutes of intense, exhausting kneading (I eventually broke the dough into two halves to make it easier on my tired hands, and also to facilitate rolling) with a big ol' wad of shiny yellow dough. I looked at it and felt for the first time in the process that I was doing this all right, that I was not shaming my family. I took Martha's (vaguely underpowered, if I may say; I'm used to a heavy-duty marble pin) rolling pin and rolled the dough out on a floured table until it was about 1/8-1/4 inch in thickness, and then used a pizza cutter (many years of trial and error with paring knives, noodle cutters, and other apparati have revealed the pizza cutter to be the best tool for this task) to slice the dough into noodles of varying widths, each about an inch to an inch and a half in length.

The end product looks a little bit like french fries. I spread them out on cookie sheets and wax paper to dry out and harden overnight. Honestly, I don't know why this is a vital step in the noodle process, but it just is. Also, out of habit, I covered them with wax paper. This is entirely unnecessary, but in my household, the noodle making ritual is never complete without the dance of Oh God Keep The Cat From Sitting On The Noodles.

I was safely able to forget about the noodles until Thanksgiving itself, about 45-30 minutes before when the bird comes out of the oven--game time, as it were. Cooking the noodles is a bit of last minute artistry, and the noodles being done has almost always been the signal for the feasting to begin.

I began by bringing to a boil in a large pot an... uncertain amount of turkey stock. I had made many calls home to get some exact information on how to cook the noodles, but reports were vague. All I knew is that they had to be boiled in some form of stock or broth (our usual version involve store-bought chicken broth). Martha had fortunately made a ridiculous amount of turkey stock earlier that week (much of which I had thawed in the shower earlier), so we threw some in the pot and got it hot. When it started to bubble, the noodles went in. My brother had advised about an inch of liquid over the noodles, and our starting amount turned out to be perfect.

Then the stirring began. The noodles require nearly constant stirring as they cook and thicken the liquid around them. Fortunately my forearms were strong from the kneading the previous day, and I had many helpful assistants willing to have a claim that they helped cook the noodles. If the liquid had reduced almost entirely and the noodles were still a little too chewy and not quite cooked, I could have safely added more broth, but I lucked out. My ancestors were smiling at me. Now it came time for the secret touch, the reason the noodles are twice-a-year delicacies... the turkey juice.

Straight from the pan the turkey roasted in into the noodle pot, enough juice as you think you can spare without making the whole cauldron too greasy. This is another place where measurements are too mundane, where it all falls to magic and genetic instinct. Since my family has started brining and roasting our turkeys, we've gotten more amounts of incredibly flavorful juice. Thank you, Alton Brown, for making our family recipe even better.

The final result is just a little chewy, with the stock and juice reduced to a very thick gravy. Tasting is definitely required, because depending on the quality of the stock and juice, you may need to add some salt (rarely a problem with store-bought broth, but Martha's was not naturally sodium-heavy.) The noodles are fine eaten on their own, or on top of mashed potatoes, or smothered with turkey gravy, or even cold out of a tupperware container at midnight.

The noodles were loved by all. I had succeeded in an important right of passage. I had not shamed my family. And, most importantly of all, I got to EAT THE NOODLES! Now I just begin the countdown until Christmas dinner...

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Stephen and I don't have many days off together, and when we do, we usually spend them pursuing such wildly romantic activities like the laundry and cleaning the bathroom. We've both been working our butts off lately and decided we need a day of total pleasure. With that in mind, we spent all of the afternoon (not to mention most of our money) tasting our way around the Ferry Building this afternoon.

I ought to mention that I utterly love the Ferry Building. If I'm a good girl, when I die and go to heaven, it will be just like the Ferry Building. It feels like a sacred space with its vaulted ceiling and worshipful devotion to a single subject. When I first stepped foot inside, it put into perspective many of the reasons I moved to Northern California in the first place. So it was an obvious choice for a few hours of delicious indulgence.

We started out with cheeseburgers at Taylor's Automatic Refresher. The Boy and I are devoted to the art of the cheeseburger, and this one was a quality example. It had a juicy, full-flavored patty that wasn't too finely ground or greasy and a really excellent, eggy, almost brioche-style bun. Only the addition of onions would have made it trancendent. We skipped the tempting fries and milkshakes because pacing is crucial if one is committed to an entire afternoon of eating.

Next we strolled down to the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant for a flight of three unusual staff favorite wines. We tasted the Sawyer sauvignon blanc from Rutherford, Napa that, as the lovely lady who poured for us pointed out, was reminiscent of pesto. We moved on to the Flying Goat Cellars pinot noir from the Dierberg Vineyard in the Santa Maria Valley smack in the middle of Sideways country that tasted like currants and was super silky with very low tannins. We finished with the Craggy Range Winery Merlot from the Gimblett Gravels Vineyard that started out like caramel, moved into tobacco and finished with bright fruit.

After all this thoughtful tasting, Stephen and I were ready for a snack. At the Hog Island Oyster Company, Charles shucked us (sorry, that just sounds wrong) an assortment of truly excellent oysters. They were served with a yummy variation on the classic mignonette sauce. In addition to the wine vinegar, shallots, and pepper, this one had minced cilantro.

Mignonette is my favorite oyster condiment. The sharpness both tempers the saltiness of the oysters and enhances it. In this case, the cilantro added a freshnness and herbal perfume to the expected taste of the sea.

Because clearly something so salty required a compliment in something sweet, we moved on to Miette, a bakery specializing in cakes made in the French tradition made with local and organic ingredients. Stephen had the classic cupcake; it was super-moist chocolate cake with pillowy marshmallow frosting. Feeling festive, I chose a gingerbread cupcake made with dark stout beer and topped with cream cheese frosting.

By this point, Stephen and I were stuffed as full as plump, fresh sausages and as relaxed as melted chocolate. Our last stop was to Boulette's Larder. Even though our tummy's were full then, we knew it would only be a few hours before dinner time. Boulette's is a fabulous combination of restaurant, takeout place, and exotic food store. You can have lunch, buy dinner, and pick up some pimenton de la vera and rendered duck fat all at one place. We bought pork cooked with French lentils and some Moroccan greens cooked with olives and preserved lemon that came highly recommended by Aileen, the lovely woman behind the counter. Both were ready to be heated up whenever we got hungry again.

And thus ended our lovely day. Stephen and I drove home contented. We didn't think about laundry once.

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Once all the hard work was done, we could fix our plates and get down to eating. One of the ways you know it's Thanksgiving is that all your food touches.

Can't pose. Chewing.

After the feast, it is traditional to lie very still so as not to be crushed under the weight of one's own stomach. With the starchy goodness of mashed potatoes, butternut squash, homemade egg noodles, and dressing weighing us down, we did this for quite a while. Later, when we could move, we had a little more starch in the form of pumpkin pie and upside-down pear cake.

And now, I'll finish up this very drawn out Thanksgiving coverage with some embarrasing pictures:

I'm from Tennessee. In Tennessee, it is acceptable to pronounce the word "pie" as "piaaahhhh." When you've been drinking wine for a couple of hours and you say the word "piaaahhhh" in a comically exaggerated fashion, it looks like that.

Is she trembling in fear or shaking with joy? The world may never know.

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I've always been picky about breakfast. I think this is because I'm just picky about the whole waking up process, and breakfast combines something I love (eating) with something I loathe (getting out of bed) to unusual ends.

I don't come from a "spring out of bed and face the possibilities of this bright new day" kind of family. I come from a "curse at the alarm them drag oneself in a shuffly, Night of the Living Dead-fashion toward the coffee pot while moaning copiously" kind of family. I wake up slowly, even if I got a really good night's sleep, and with a general achy, cranky, impossible to please sort of demeanor. If I don't have to do anything that uses my brain that morning, I don't bother with breakfast, but whenever school or work is a necessity, I need a caloric boost to get the ol' noggin going.

The problem is, in my ultra-sensitive morning mood, certain textures and flavors are simply unacceptable. I can't tolerate anything to cold or crunchy, so cereal is out. I don't like mushy, so no oatmeal, eggs, or yogurt. I can't bear overly sweet things, so no pancakes, waffles or pastries. I enjoy all these foods at other times of day, but in the morning they make my stomach seize up. Some mornings, I can get by with a hunk of baguette and jam, as long as it's good jam and not too sugary. However, that doesn't contain any protein and rarely holds me over until lunch.

So, throughout my life, I've gotten by with a number of unusual breakfast alternatives. Anything left of from dinner the night before will work, as will grilled cheese sandwiches, canned soup, ham and cheese melted on a bagel, tuna sandwiches, Hot Pockets (which are repulsive any other time of the day), ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese from a box.

In recent weeks, I've been eating a lot of Spaghetti Carbonara for late night dinners and fast lunches, so it was just a matter of time before it snuck into the first meal of the day. It's a great dish, simple and filling, creamy but not too heavy. It's kind of like what I always wanted alfredo to taste like but it never did. And with it's bacon and eggs, it constitutes the closest thing to a traditional breakfast I've had in a long time.

Spaghetti Carbonara for One
(adapted from Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and my own experiments)

1/4 pound spaghetti
2 strips of bacon ( like thick-sliced) or 2 thin slices pancetta, cut into strips
1 egg
about 1/4 cup parmesan, finely grated with a microplane (use less if you have a less feathery grate)
1 tablespoon heavy cream
1 generous handful frozen peas (optional, but the veggies make me feel less guilty about all the eggs, cheese and cream)
2 tablespoons vermouth or white wine
salt, pepper and nutmeg

Put the spaghetti on to boil and begin cooking the bacon over medium heat, stirring frequently. In a small bowl, whisk together the egg, cream and parmesan and season this with numerous grinds of fresh pepper and a pinch of nutmeg.

When the bacon is crisp, blot out some of the excess fat with a paper towel (or don't, if you feel brave) and pour in the vermouth. Let is bubble a minute to deglaze the pan and mix with the remaining bacon fat, then set it aside if the spaghetti isn't finished.

Throw the peas into the spaghetti pot for last 30 seconds or so. Drain the spaghetti and peas, reserving a little of the cooking water. Back over medium heat, toss the pasta and peas with the bacon until everything is glossy and coated, but don't let the pan get too hot or it might scramble the eggs in the next step.

Remove the pan from the heat and pour over the egg and parmesan mixture. Begin tossing immediately and keep tossing vigorously until the sauce becomes creamy and clings to the spaghetti. Add a little of the reserved pasta water if it gets too thick. Taste and season with salt or pepper if necessary.

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I second the sentiments of T-Dawg.

Seriously, it embarrasses me, but why not give us a a couple of little wee nominations for best new food blog at www. accidentalhedonist.com.

We won't win, but if it diverted a few people this way it would bring shiny, rosy-cheeked grins of pleasure to two ladies I know.

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It seems fitting after an inspiring morning of reading about precisions that I should have so much trouble making the simplest of things at work that I've made a thousand times before: pate de fruit. Pate de fruit seems like a natural evolution from early fruit and sugar preserves, jams, and jellies, the most basic of French confections--I remember buying them as a treat from our Saturday markets in La Ferte along with candied orange peels and coffee macaroons, and eating them in the backseat on the ride home.

They're often served as a petit four after the meal--a fruit puree sweetened and set with pectin so that it has a slight, soft chew, like a piece of firm jam, then cut or moulded and covered in granulated sugar. We make all sorts of flavours at work: litchi, quince, lime, raspberry, apricot, but it was a strawberry recipe I attempted--and failed.

It's not only embarrassing when one fails at simple things--I was glad that the kitchen was quiet and there was barely anyone to witness my mess--but it's a complete waste of prep time before service. I made two attempts, making two different mistakes.

First batch: I whisked constantly, but allowed the gas flame to curve around the back of the pot and lick the edge. And so the edge of the pot burned. If this happens, don't worry, just change pots quickly before you start to scrape the burned fruit into your mix, and turn down the flame so it's just under the pot and not around it. This batch is O.K, though I lost a little mass in the first pot, which meant it wouldn't quite fill the frame I'd set up for it. This means I'm not yielding as many pieces as I should be, that's bad. Note, an induction stove, if you have one, is a good safe way to cook the pate de fruit.

Second batch: I added the sugar in small amounts. But not small enough. The mixture cooled down too fast and started to set in the pot. By the time I "poured" it onto my framed silpat, it was strange and lumpy and needed to spread with a palette knife to smoothen out. Needless to say, that batch was trash.

So, even the simplest of experiments can feel something like wearing a pair wings glued together with wax.

There are many pate de fruit recipes--some use thermometers, some use time, and some use a sugar concentration measurer-but the basic format of all the recipes I've followed is generally the same: one begins with either fresh fruit, cooked down and passed through a tamis, or frozen puree, melted down. To this, a combination of pectin and sugar is added. And finally, some lemon juice or citric acid, and maybe some booze.

Harold McGee lists three things to set a pectin when making a jam: add a large dose of sugar, whose molecules attract water molecules to themselves, thus pulling the water away from the pectin chains and leaving them more exposed to reattaching to each other. Second, boil the mixture to evaporate water and bring pectin chains even closer together. Third, increase acidity, which neutralises electrical charge and allows the aloof pectin chains to bond to each other into a gel. Most pate de fruit recipes involve all three steps but use commercial powdered pectin. Pectins vary, as does the acidity of the fresh or frozen fruit, so keep this in mind when changing fruits or pectins or acid and using the same recipe. Boiron, who makes a lot of high-end fruit purees, has a great chart of pate de fruit recipes for all of their fruits.

Once the pectin is added to the fruit mixture, it's important to keep it above 80 degrees and moving so that it doesn't start to set too early. This means adding the rest of the sugar in your recipe in small additions and giving the mixture time to get hot again before adding more--adding it in too large of batches will cause the temperature of the whole mass to drop quickly, setting the pectin in lumps that will not melt back down again even if you get the mixture boiling.

Once the mass comes to temperature, or time, or sugar concentration, acid is usually added and the whole thing is poured out and allowed to set overnight. A thin coating of granulated sugar will make the surface less sticky and easier to work with. At work we cut it on a guitar, a clever set of wires that cuts anything of the right texture into perfect strips or squares, but a knife will work too, or pouring them into heatproof moulds to begin with and then just popping them out the following day. Or just forget about the whole thing, break your piggy bank, and order them on-line from Fauchon...

Alas, no pictures (I forgot because I was worn out from Christmas tree decorating), but my ras-el-hanout tomato sauce was a rousing success, and it suggested a super quick supper that was just perfect after a long day of festivity.

The recipes, more or less:

Ras-El-Hanout
(closely adapted from epicurious.com)

2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground coriander
3/4 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom

Mix well and store in a sealed container. Makes about 1/4 cup.

Cod with Moroccon Tomato Sauce and Feta
(With no real measurements, this is a quick supper after all.)

French one small onion and fry gently in olive oil until soft but not colored. Add two cloves of garlic minced, cook until fragrant. Add 1 generous tablespoon tomato paste, the zest from one lemon and one tablespoon ras-el-hanout. Stir until you smell the spices and deglaze with aboutg half a cup of white wine. Add 1 can of whole tomatoes crushed up with your fingers, all the juice and about half a cup of water. Simmer vigorously until the sauce thickens (this took me about 15 minutes).

Turn on your broiler to preheat. Cut one pound of cod (or basically any flaky white fish) roughly into inch and a half chunks. Stir it into the tomato sauce, slap on the lid and simmer until the fish is just cooked through. When the fish is cooked, add a heaping tablespoon of finely chopped cilantro and taste the sauce for seasoning. I added a squeeze of lemon for brightness and a teaspoon of brown sugar to cut the bitterness of the canned tomatoes.

Spoon the fish with tons of the sauce and onions into two oven safe bowls. Sprinkle generously with crumbled (preferably french) feta. Heat under the broiler for just a minute until the cheese softens. Drizzle the fish with good olive oil and serve with lemony couscous.

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Our turkey came out of the oven as firm and brown as if she'd been sunbathing on the Isle of Capri instead of roasting in San Francisco.

The roasting pan was covered in yucky looking but yummy tasting drippings. (Sidenote: I love that the French call the brown bits stuck to a pan "fond." It's so much more elegant sounding than "drippings.")

The turkey also yielded a large quantity of intensely flavored, amber-colored juices.

Tejal luuuuves juices.

I made a roux with the fat and drippings, added some of my 2 1/2 gallons of turkey stock, the reserved juices and some white wine to make the gravy. I also added some of the wine directly from the bottle to myself. Lucky for my reputation, no one got a picture of that.

It was Glyn's first Thanksgiving, but nevertheless, he was in charge of carving the turkey. He did an admirable job. We all told him that he had progressed far up the ladder of American Maleness with that single, classicaly macho act.

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Stephen and I are deeply attached to a Moroccan restaurant lately (which, I promise, I'll eventually write about). One of my favorite dishes is giant lima beans in ras-el-hanout tomato puree with shaved feta and olive oil. It is a simple preparation that, I think, finally gives lima beans the starring role they so deserve. The tomato puree is warmly fragrant, not exactly sweet, not exactly hot and exactly the sort of thing I'd like to make at home.

The first question I had to tackle was, what exactly is "ras-el-hanout" and how do I get my hands on it? It turns out that ras-el-hanout is a generic phrase sort of like curry powder. It's a spice blend common in Moroccan cuisine and the recipe can vary wildly. Sometimes it uses up to 26 different ingredients including everything from cumin and cayenne to rosebuds, lavender, belladonna leaves, and cantharides (a.k.a. the ground beetles that also make up the famed aphrodisiac Spanish Fly). Clearly, to even approximate the elusive taste of ras-el-hanout, I was going to have to simplify a bit.

Thankfully, epicurious.com yielded a recipe that consisted of spices more readily found in my kitchen. I mixed cumin, ginger, coriander, allspice, cayenne, cinammon, and cloves with salt, ground pepper and a pinch of cardamom in deference to some of the more authentic recipes I'd read.

Tonight I'm going to play with a tomato sauce perfumed with my new spice blend. If it smells half as great as my kitchen does right how, I may be in for a treat. Maybe I can convince Stephen to belly dance a little. . .

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Did someone say something about a Turkey?

My employers gave us all a Diestel Family Turkey Ranch Turkey as a holiday gift. Whitney and I found her slippery bulk especially amusing because it was quite early in the morning. She (I know it was a she because the packaging identified her as a hen) grew up happily, ranging free at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I requested a 12-15 lb. turkey, but she had grown to a healthy 18.26 lbs. Good because, more free turkey.

Problematic because, my small-ish roasting pan and apartment oven meant that she was just a bit cramped.

Also, she was filled with the traditional super gross bag of giblets. Which got brined, because I forgot to remove them before her soak.

After brining, she recived a full cramming of aromatics up her, um, nether end.

Then into the oven she went. The first time I tried to put her in, the oven rack was on the second to lowest position. She bumped into the top coil and sizzled a little, a distressing sound when you don't expect it. Even when I lowered the oven rack she still filled up almost every inch of oven.

Then it was time to wait.

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