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January 01, 2007
New Year's Beets
I'm ambivalent about New Year's. I think it's my least favorite holiday. I dislike the New Year's Eve part for some reason, so I was a bit mopey and pathetic yesterday. Still, champagne and company cheered me up and we had a good time celebrating. Today, we rang in the new year with a great deal of cooking, which put me in a better mood.
We pickled beets! They look lovely, and the pickling liquid smelled quite potent, so I can't wait to try them. We have to let them do their thing in the jars for three weeks. I have a good emergency backup pickle fix, though. If I put freshly cooked beets in the pickling liquid left over from the Wheelhouse jar and leave it in the fridge for a few hours, the beets pick up enough of the flavor to be good pickle stand-ins.
I also finally managed to make good meringues, now that I have an electric mixer. They came out like Mom's, which is a great improvement over my sad experiments with the whisk. It's amazing what a little power can do to a recipe. What's wonderful about this batch of meringues is that I made them from the egg whites left over from hollandaise we made yesterday (I was trying to improve my mood with extravagant side dishes -- we had it over broccolini). I hate throwing out egg whites.
We took Jeff's cue and made corned beef a few days ago (it was really wonderful with cabbage) and then made it into Red Flannel Hash today. I couldn't resist the addition of a poached egg on top, although I'm not sure poaching it in the purple water left over from boiling many beets was a great idea (it made them a sort of pink, but it was hard to see what was going on in the dark liquid). I'd post a picture, but I know runny eggs are a bit scandalous and I don't want any runny-egg-phobes to get queasy.
Finally, I made two loaves of Anadama bread from the bread book I discovered upstate this summer: Bread in Time: Breadbaking Without Angst. I like the approach used by the author, Stuart Silverstein. He coaches you along, explaining that it's not an exact science, and peppers his advice with stories about bread gone awry. The recipes produce a denser bread than what I was going for, but the flavor is good and it works well for sandwiches.
On a more general note, this blog seems to have morphed into a food blog again. I'm not sure if this is good or bad. Any opinions?
I also haven't been too excited about posting lately. It hasn't seemed as fun, and I can't think of funny things to post, so I feel like I'm in a safer, regurgitate-the-day mode, which can't be fun for y'all. Sorry. Hopefully I'll discover some better blogging karma in 2007.
Posted by csageday at January 1, 2007 11:45 PM