DAVE (apropos of nothing): You’re sweet.
ME: What do you mean?
DAVE: I mean your brain is full of cherries.
(I think I will blog again soon, lots of treats have been made and I want to show off the house once all is in its proper place…or at least once some is in its proper place.)
I’ve been making and doing but not getting my act together enough to be posting. I’ve made a skirt and a dress – sewing clothes is finally within my grasp! I’ll post them soon. I’ll be taking a quilt arts class at the Fleisher starting next Wednesday along with my friend Holly. I’m excited to learn some basics like applique.
The weather was perfect for capelet wearing a few weeks ago, so I finally got to get dolled up. Fairmount Park has been sorely underused by me in my five years in Philadelphia, and I am looking to remedy that starting this summer.
Sometimes I am upstairs minding my own business and then Dave brings me fancy desserts.
(Baked ricotta cake with berry sauce.)
We listened to a lot of Neutral Milk Hotel last night – how is it so good? Dave said it brought to mind the Hemingway idea (based in his journalism training) that every word has to count. So many amazing images on In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, and so many connecting movie reels in my head when I am listening.
We stayed at home and cooked up something fancy this Valentines Day, as we are wont to do. We joined the Greensgrow Farm Winter CSA, which has been great so far. It’s pricey, yes, but everything has been excellent quality, exciting to receive, and local. Especially with the economy the way it is now, supporting local farmers and artisans is key and really not that hard to do around Philly where there is a ton of awesome food. So this week we got a dozen oysters, locally made ricotta and chocolate, applesauce and sun-dried tomatoes from Greensgrow, local milk and Amish roll butter (amazing. It’s salty in the best of ways), spring mix greens due to the pleasant weather we’ve had, and fresh pasta.
So we made oysters rockefeller last night. It was simple but time consuming, and definitely worth it. We received the oysters live, which was kind of intimidating but we ended up just steaming them in 1/2 inch of boiling water for 6 minutes until they opened up. And yes, I looked on the internets to see if this was cruel and everything reassured us that they don’t feel pain. Then we followed this recipe from Gourmet Magazine:
Oysters Rockefeller
from Gourmet Magazine
Ingredients:
3/4 cup firmly packed watercress sprigs,
finely chopped
1 1/3 cups firmly packed baby spinach,
finely chopped
3 tablespoons finely chopped scallion greens
1 tablespoon finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
2 teaspoons minced celery 3 tablespoons coarse fresh bread crumbs (preferably from a day-old baguette)
3 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon Pernod or anise-flavored liquor
Pinch of cayenne
3 bacon slices
About 10 cups kosher salt for baking and serving
20 small oysters on the half shell, oysters picked over for shell fragments and shells scrubbed well
Preparation:
1. Toss together watercress, spinach, scallion greens, parsley, celery, and 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon bread crumbs in a bowl. Melt butter in a 10-inch heavy skillet over moderate heat, then add watercress mixture and cook, stirring, until spinach is wilted, 1 to 2 minutes. Stir in Pernod, cayenne, and salt and pepper to taste, then transfer mixture to a bowl and chill, covered, until cold, about 1 hour.
Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 450°F.
2. While watercress mixture chills, cook bacon in cleaned skillet over moderate heat, turning, until crisp, then drain on paper towels and finely crumble.
Spread 5 cups kosher salt in a large shallow baking pan (1 inch deep) and nestle oysters (in shells) in it. Spoon watercress mixture evenly over oysters, then top with bacon and sprinkle with remaining tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons bread crumbs. Bake oysters until edges of oysters begin to curl and bread crumbs are golden! , about 10 minutes.
3. Serve warm oysters in shells, nestled in kosher salt (about 5 cups), on a platter.
A few changes – we couldn’t find watercress this time of year and just used extra spinach; we also forgot to get the Pernod and substituted Galliano which seemed to do the trick; and, we cooked and served them in the same tray so we wound up using one whole box of kosher salt instead of two (!). They seriously were amazing, and even the greens/bacon topping was somehow especially delicious. Definitely worth it if you want to impress someone or just have a nice treat.
My valentine:
I can’t figure out how to add this to my blog just yet, but I’m excited about the idea of Wists. It gives you a little toolbar button so when you see something you want to remember, you can add it to your Wists and have it there for future reference. I like it better than bookmarking because it lets you pick a picture (from the site where you are linking) as an icon and it’s easy to add and delete. I’m going to make two sets, one for craft projects I want to do and one for recipes I want to make. That way I can check them off by deleting them as I complete each new thing. I have so many things bookmarked in my blogs and this is a good way to clean them out a bit and have everything in viewable form.
Here’s a link to my craft Wist thus far, and a picture of one of the projects I’d like to do soon – a leaf bag from zakka life via whip up.
After reading this post from The Small Object, I did some searching around on Amazon and bought some padding compound, the glue used to hold notepads together. You just clip some pieces of paper (make sure they are the same size! Thanks, Dave, for getting us a paper cutter…) together with a cardboard backing; I used bulldog clips but you could also use a rubber band I’m sure. Then you paint a bit of the compound along the top edge with a foam sponge or paintbrush, and wait for it to dry.
The first set of notepads I made using this stamp from etsy user Corrabelle.
I think they turned out cute.
The second set I gocco’d, and made the mistake of not using the gocco high-carbon pen to trace the images. So they were a little hazy and I improvised but coloring them in with crayons. We play a lot of games in our household, so this is a scorepad with the images based on our nicknames – pants and chicken. I’ll make a cleaner one once I order some new gocco bulbs, but it’s still fun enough for now.
I cleaned up my craft room this week which will encourage me to mess it up rather quickly.
A week or so ago I made a quick bag that’s big enough to carry my books when I go to and from the library. I used this pattern from tiny happy that’s been tried and true for me, and I used this simple rosette how to. Yes, rosette, a word that is now synonymous with Angela from Project Runway [Did you know she held a rosette workshop in NYC for etsy crafters? Too good...], but seriously, I tried to be tasteful and I think they are okay embellishments at times (and we all know that the people at Anthropologie agree with me).
On the food front, I’ve been doing pretty okay at limiting processed foods, though there’s definitely been a bit of cheating here and there. Still and all, I feel like I am making a change with how I snack and how I prepare food. We’ve also eaten out less because of it. We’re doing a winter CSA/farm share and last week we received whole spelt (spelt berries). It’s a grain that you cook like rice and it is awesome – nutty and chewy and flavorful. I cooked some up and mixed in asparagus and pine nuts and topped it with lemon juice and served it as a side dish with falafel. The Kitchn made a fancier version, a recipe I’m planning to try soon.
I did, however, make cream scones tonight (yes, cheating, but we had tons of unopened heavy cream bought at the time of the Nutella mousse experiment that was going to expire if I didn’t put it to good use). Scones are seriously the lazy baker’s dream. Easiest recipe ever, and you dirty very few dishes.
CREAM SCONES
Ingredients
2 cups flour
1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp. grated orange or lemon zest
1 T baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/4 cups heavy cream
Directions
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and zest in a large bowl. Whisk together. Add cream and mix. Gather together and knead a few times on floured board. Shape into a disk about 3/4 inch thick. Paint top of disk with milk or cream, then sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Cut disk into 12 wedges (or use a biscuit cutter or glass to cut circles) and place on large, ungreased baking sheet. Bake for 15 minutes (check at 12) until tops are browned. Cool on rack.
(recipe found* here at Chowhound.)
We topped some with orange marmalade and some with lemon curd and ate them with English Breakfast tea. Perfect!
*I found the scone recipe by googling** “what do I do with leftover heavy cream?” I’m often searching for recipes for ingredients that I have on hand, and Google now has that feature where it predicts text when you’re typing in a search. So every time I type “what do I do with”, the first suggestion Google gives me is “what do I do with my life?”, apparently the most common search phrase that begins with those five words.
**Do you capitalize Googling?
