Occupy Christmas

I have a rule: no Christmas decorations before December. Tomorrow I'll go a little nutty with red and gold and glittery things. All symbolic, for some reason, of the holiday.
Another symbol of the season is the tent. I think we can all agree that Occupy Wall Street pretty well established that icon to represent the movement.
I support OWS, and the other day I said to Cranky, "We should peg a tent in the front yard. The neighbors would hate it, though."
(Note: I don't care if they hate it. I am a neighborly neighbor, but I have a wild streak.)
Well! I figured out how to put a tent in the yard and not offend any of the 1% on my street. (I jest! They're not the 1%; just Republicans.) I would decorate the tent with Christmas ornaments, maybe a string of lights powered by a bicycle generator. Who could object?
I went searching for the perfect tent, and I found it. It's Christmas tree shaped, in shades of green. And it even comes with its own angel on top.
Power to the people, right Santa? All I want for Christmas.

Gratitude

It wasn't stuffing, because there was no bird to stuff.
So we decided to call it bread pudding, and gussy it up with milk and an egg. Slices of Kabocha squash. Mushrooms and onions. And that milk? It was deeply perfumed with garlic and bay leaf.
The kind of thing you could eat all season long. Because there was no sage in it to whiplash you into a pilgrim state of mind.
That's my kind of religious freedom.

Beans, Beans, Go Away

See this? Pretty, comforty, colorful. Perfect autumn noshing.
It's root vegetables with green beans, baked slowly and lovingly, dolloped with butter and a little chicken stock. What could be better?
Turnips, beets, carrots, potatoes, radishes, rutabagas, parsnips. Plus onion and leek. (They're kinda rooty.) Oh, and the green beans. An afterthought.
A mistake, if you can believe it.
Beans aren't rooty, but we didn't think that would be a problem. They're green and pretty and taste good. But they didn't taste good here.
Who knew? It seems like magical thinking, to believe that root vegetables only go with root vegetables. It's true, though. The beans seemed woody and strange and uncomforty.
Learning.

His Name Is Lt. John Pike

Just so you know, every word I write here today is pulled, burning and screaming, from my relentless memory loop of the UC Davis kids getting pepper sprayed. The chief of UCD police claimed his men were surrounded! By peaceful kids sitting on the ground.
Anyway, this cheese sandwich post is filled with good feelings, and was a good, temporary antidote to the image of that bastard squirting students in the face as casually as if he were watering his roses.
The idea came from Ilva, who posted a dish of peas mixed with pancetta, topped with an egg, and baked. It looked awesome, but I just sort of gagged at the idea of baked peas. I would substitute white beans. I looove white beans. We are a white bean household.
First, you have to get your white beans cooked. It is good to be prepared. I was relieved, upon seeing still photos of the UC Davis atrocity, that most of the kids turned their faces away from the stream of capsaicin. Be prepared! OK, once your beans are ready (and a little soupiness is fine), stir in a judicious amount of minced ham. Then get out your canning funnel. This thing is a certain Mr. C.'s new favorite gadget.
How to proceed. Keep calm, and humiliate the police officers. Shout "Shame on you! Shame on you!" I saw one cop without a riot helmet; he looked so mortified. The rest of the squad was sort of nudging the miscreant with the hot sauce away from the kids. "We done wrong." Oh, OK, just settle the canning funnel into the little cocottes of beans, and spoon out some from within the funnel. Now, crack an egg in this indentation, remove the funnel, and spoon the spare beans back over your dish.
Fifteen minutes in a 350F oven, and I got a nice, semiliquid yolk! This was wonderful, and so nutritious. A happy ending.
No, I'll tell you the happy ending. It was when those arrogant thugs gained a shred of decency. They acted as if they actually believed they were in danger, but they began to move away from the students and cluster in an embarrassed huddle. They stepped away like a flock of penguins, or the Burghers of Calais. Clip-clop, clip-clop, those fat dicks shuffled off.

Saucy

A few weeks ago, I saw some chatter on Twitter about the best recipe for Bolognese sauce.
I know how to make Bolognese sauce. Do you really need a recipe?
Well, the author of the recipe (I'm just gonna conceal her identity slightly) is Marbella Kazan. Everybody loves her, and they were crazy about the sauce. So I had to give it a try.
It's really simple. Very few ingredients. It just takes a little time. The sauce simmers for three hours while you watch Ellen or something. I could imagine Marbella with a wooden spoon in one hand and a tumbler of Martini & Rossi in the other, giving it a good stir before going out on the balcony of her Florida condo for a cigarette or two.
Here's the deal. This very simple recipe needed tweaking. For one thing, the ground beef was too rough, too chunky, and needed to be punished with the immersion blender. For another, we thought the ratio of tomatoes to meat was seriously low, and we added more tomatoes (oh, and the tomatoes are canned, eek). We also subbed out about a third of the beef for some ground pork, yum. Finally, we thought the sauce tasted fine, okay, but nothing special. It went into the fridge overnight.
You know what I'm going to say next. The sauce improved. Everything tastes better the next day!
It's not the bestest thing I've ever eaten, but I'm glad we made it. At least half went into plastic bags, in the freezer. That will be a nice dinner solution down the road.
Here it is with some eggplant slices, fresh mozzarella and grated Parmesan. I liked it.

Hambiguous

I have funny taste in hamburgers. I don't like to eat them at home.
When I was a kid, my dad would turn ground beef into nasty black wads on the barbecue. Around the very same time, I spent a lot of summer days at the Officer's Pool, where they also happened to have a geedunk. I don't know if I'm spelling that right, but it was a Navy term for, basically, a snack bar. I'm not sure what else they served, because I always, always got the hamburger.
A geedunk burger is thin and flimsy, good and greasy, and tastes just right. What is just right? Not too meaty.
Lacking any geedunks in my adulthood, I had to turn to fast-food joints. Really. I can't tell you how much I love a Whopper. But I can't eat them anymore. (Read Fast-Food Nation if you wonder why.)
Cranky naturally thinks that we should have wonderful hamburgers from reliable steakhouses. If we're not making our own at home.
A few days ago we were having a Bolognese adventure in the kitchen, and there was extra ground beef of good quality. He wanted a hamburger, and he knew he would have to treat me extra special to get one on my plate. He made it small, he layered it with my favorite condiments, he formed the meat patty to fit within the slider-size bun. Without thinking, though, he just used a regular-size lump of raw meat, small enough to fit the bun, but too thick.
I didn't like it. It was too meaty.
Actually, it was a perfect hamburger.
I am such a meat wuss.

In Which I Exclaim

OK. All right.
Anyway.
Ya gotta eat. I came across a recipe in the NY Times for a moussaka made without béchamel. I think that deserves an exclamation point!
Yargh, béchamel. I mean, it has its purpose here and there, but it is not a happy afterthought to food. "Wouldn't this look nice with a clammy white gloop on top?"
We had just concocted a roasted onions dish from the NYT, which was smothered in béchamel. It did not pass the happy test. Perhaps that was why we were all over the modified moussaka. And it was good.
This version is just a bit like shepherd's pie, but with fewer vegetables. The genius is that it has an egg yolk and Parmesan cheese stirred into the mashed potato topping. I could eat that every day. Oh, plus a petite grating of nutmeg.
The meat mixture called for cinnamon and cloves, which scared the crap out of me. But we soldiered on. Hm. No ground cloves in the spice treasury. Fine, allspice will do, and it did very well indeed.
Verdict: Damn yum. This is going into heavy rotation.
And the ground meat? It was goat. I think that deserves an exclamation point!

Where I've Been

No, not in Oakland. But I've been gripped by the Occupy demonstrations.
Last Tuesday, when Scott Olsen was brutalized by police for doing nothing, I got a bit emotional. Maybe even maternal. I care so much for this young man, who still can't talk and possibly faces brain surgery. It shut me down.
Today, Occupy Oakland called for a general strike, and I couldn't get reliable news on it until about noon. I was worried.
It was going well! There are some idiot Anarchists who want to smash and vandalize things, but the rest of the demonstrators have kept them at bay.
I'm just fascinated by the OWS point of view, and their viral success in getting international attention and... results. I wish them well. Please donate to them; it's going to be a cold winter.
As for Oakland, the city of my birth. Very badly done last week. Perhaps you can let these young people show you how it's done.
Best wishes for a full recovery to Scott.