Cooking up a storm

It's a stormy winter weekend here in the upper mid-west. And it's Stupor Bowl this Sunday, and little but college basketball otherwise. Neither one generates any interest, and if you don't know, dumping on basketball in the heartland of the USA is a sacreligous in the minds of many. Sorry, but us hockey guys never understood how a game without sticks where hitting is against the rules could be called a sport. So what do gardeners do? Well, you cook up a storm. A dinner party for 6 close friends had the Phactors roasting a marinated leg of lamb (raan) with a potato-cauliflower stir-fry, a cucumber raita (yogurt), flatbreads (naan), a vegetable (kohlrabi, carrot, parsnip) mulligatawny soup (dynamite!), some spicy shrimp in coconut milk sauce, and a passion fruit mousse (neither of us like Indian desserts) to finish things off. Today TPP made a roasted potato soup for Mrs. Phactor's womens' group coming for din-dins tomorrow and pizza dough and sauce for our own dinner tonight (saving the left over lamb later in the week). Wow, how did so many pots, pans, and dishes manage to get dirty?  How did so many bottle of win manage to get empty? OK, if you knew our friends you could answer that one. Needless to say, the Phactors spend a great deal of time in their kitchen, which is also the room in our house with the best view of out gardens, now re-cloked in white as this storm moves through. A cold blast will follow this front, so that potato soup will be darned comforting 24 hrs from now.  

Cooking something up

Today, the Sunday before Christmas, made a perfect day for cooking.  So with plenty of time, and to help ward off the cold, wet weather, this was a day well-suited for Mulligatawny soup.  It took awhile to find the recipe, hand-written years ago, on a file card tucked in one of our oldest recipe files.  One of the problems with liking cook books is that you can't always remember where certain recipes are, especially like this one, from a now unknown source, and a soup that haven't been made in awhile.  It isn't a hard recipe, but working from scratch you have to cook some chicken and make a spicy soup broth.  And then quite a few ingredients get chopped up and all of that takes some time.  Mulligatawny is a chicken soup that takes a lot of its character from the Indian tradition so the primary flavoring is a curry powder as well as ginger rhizome, Indian bay leaves, and cloves.  It also includes a chopped up tart apple to add a fruity highlight.  This will make a nice hearty soup for din-dins.  But that wasn't all.  Unable to pass up a bargain, TPP bought a package of chicken gizzards for $1.35, and turned them into an escabeche, basically cooked gizzards marinated in vinegar and oil with green pepper, onion, a lot of chopped garlic, some pimento stuffed olives, and a few dashes of hot sauce.  Mrs. Phactor who missed lunch today because of charity gift wrapping is giving it a try right now with a very superior glass of rioja, a gift from a client.  Got the last few presents put together, some decorated boxes with cookies and candies for a couple of people who deserve being remembered with a gift.  The hardest part of cooking is the underfoot cats who think your only purpose in life is feeding them no matter what time it is.  Of course all of this left the kitchen a disaster, so just now TPP got time to get a cocktail and some escabeche for himself.  Ho, ho, ho.

Relief from winter doldrums: 4. Fun in the Kitchen

Yes, the Phytophactor likes to cook and make things in the kitchen having had the fortunate childhood background of parents who cooked and still did lots of "old fashioned" things like canning fruits and vegetables, making katsup, jam, & jelly, and smoking their own bacon and ham. Once you know what the real stuff is like, and have the satisfaction of having made it yourself, the commercial facsimilies seldom compare well. A surplus of red currents and cranberries long stored in the freezer were turned into a wonderful jelly. A stash of black and yellow mustard seeds and a bottle of stout that was not to my liking were combined into a stout mustard. A big pot of mulligatawny soup was made to keep us fed a couple of days during our busy week. And lastly a whole array of items were combined into a batch of home made Worchestershire sauce, and even more amazing, everything needed (tamarind concentrate, molasses, soysauce, anchovy fillet, cardomom, chile de arbol, cinnamon stick, garlic, ginger, onion, sugar, pepper corns, cloves) was in the cupboards! This amazing recipe came from Saveur magazine (Jan. 2009), and is well worth the effort, but the 3 week wait while it all steeps challenges the patience. And the frigid weekend passed without hardly a moments boredom.