I guess I should seek help….

Cutest little house ever

Madame Laveau’s- “House of Voodoo”

The use of color is exceptional in that city

Hidden oasis

Lafayette Number 1

We will now return to our regularly scheduled discussion of yummy things…..

oooooh!  what’s that, you say?  It’s the shrimp po’ boy that I had for lunch yesterday at K Paul’s in the French Quarter….along with some delicious gumbo!

Excuse me, can I get some shrimp on my shrimp? 

I will be eating seafood until I can no longer swallow…..

More updates to come from the Big Easy…..once I dust the powdered sugar from the beignets off my laptop.

My younger brother is a whore for peanut butter cookies. 

Honestly, if it came down to you or him, he would push you out into oncoming traffic to get these cookies.

Luckily, I happen to have the recipe right here.  No traffic fatalities necessary.

Roo’s Favorite Peanut Butter Cookies

12 Tablespoons (1&1/2 sticks) butter, soft

½ cup peanut butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 ¼ cups AP flour

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoons salt

1 cup dark chocolate chips (we use Ghirardelli 60% cacoa)

1 cup white chocolate chips

1/3 cup chopped roasted unsalted peanuts

Large scoops on to cookie tray lined with parchment paper.

Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes until golden brown.

Cool and hide immediately.

If, when baking these, a large, lumberjack-looking guy shows up at your door, give him a cookie and send him home. 

Bigfoots need cookies, too.

As you can see above, it’s possible that I didn’t have the most conventional childhood. 

My folks were hippies.  Not commune living hippies, free-love kinds of hippies. 

They were more the back to the land type. 

Build it yourself, make it yourself, grow it yourself  (which applied to fruits and vegetables, as well as other “agricultural” pursuits.)

Our little house in the apple orchard was a busy one; always building, or rebuilding, cooking, preserving, baking.  My folks certainly didn’t have a lot of money back then, but I never knew it. 

What on earth could money have bought that was better than the rocking horse my dad made by hand?  Or that tasted better than the bread my mom made us every week?

For many years, my mom made our bread weekly….and I loved it.  From start to finish.  I loved the smell of the proofing yeast….then the beer-like smell that the rising bread gave off.

And then the baking smell….OH!  the baking smell.

Prior to school, I thought this was the norm for everyone.  I thought everyone’s parents did these things….spent all their time sewing clothes, or making strawberry jam. 

Oh, how foolish I was.

Early on in my kindergarten year, I started to catch hell for my homemade lunches. From 5 year olds!

Pretty soon, I caught on.  Look what I was missing!  Essentials like Wonder Bread, bologna, and Cheese Puffs were out of my grasp.  And I knew it.

I went home and begged, pleaded, even cried!  And to this day I thank my mother for saying no. 

She said no to processed food then, and I’m glad to be doing the same for the DOF now.

A little over 4 months ago, I said no to store bought bread.  And we haven’t looked back. 

So if you’re near my neighborhood and you smell baking bread, you’ll know it’s me.  Investing my time in something that really matters to me and that keep us all a little bit healthier, and certainly a lot happier.

Sweet Wheat Bread

1 1/4 cups lukewarm water

1 heaping tablespoon agave syrup (or honey)

1 tablespoon instant yeast

1 3/4 teaspoons salt

2 tablespoons soft butter

3 cups unbleached AP flour

½ cup King Arthur white whole wheat flour

½ cup oat flour

1/3 cup dried buttermilk powder

In mixer, add water, yeast and agave. 

Give a quick stir with a wire whisk and then add remaining ingredients in the above order. 

Attach dough hook and mix until incorporated, then let the mixer go for 6-8 minutes to knead bread.  Dough should be smooth and supple. 

Move to a lightly greased bowl and place in a draft-free area covered with a dish towel until dough doubles in size.

Punch down dough and divide evenly.   Press out and shape into loaves and place each piece into a lightly sprayed bread pan.  Put pans, lightly covered, back into a draft-free area until it has filled the pans, or just over.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

When bread has crested the top of the pan, move pans to the oven and bake for 35-40 minutes.  Top should be golden brown.  Turn out of bread pans onto a cooling rack and let cool. 

You’ll be hard pressed to ever buy bread at the store again.

Today- Carmine, A Little More Red by Melissa Sweet

Oh!  The artwork….GORGEOUS!  The colors are enchanting and I love that she’s done this with watercolors.  This book is also sweetly clever and a big draw for the DOF because Carmine is an artist! 

Imagine!

Carmine appeals to the huge word nerd in me, AND there’s even a recipe at the end! 

What else to end an alphabet book, but alphabet soup?

It’s like the author knows me…….

And- Odd Velvet by Mary E. Whitcomb ( illus. Tara Calahan King)

The illustrations are charming, but what I really find endearing is the story itself. 

Velvet isn’t really odd, so much as she is smart, imaginative, and curious.  The kids at her school think her name is odd..and when they have show and tell, Velvet brings a milkweed pod, rather than a doll as the other girls had.

But the very best part, the part that should resonate with every kid, is that Velvet doesn’t ever think she’s odd. 

Velvet thinks she’s AWESOME! 

And she is….

 And yet, not a decent pretzel recipe among them.

I was lucky enough growing up to observe and help my mom make some of these recipes.  One such gem for me is the spaetzle. 

I believe that I have mentioned before that I have a fondness for carbohydrates….you will no longer wonder where that originated after you try these crispy pillows of starchy goodness.  I will also warn you that this recipe is an approximation, as no one ever measured, or wrote down IN ENGLISH, the ingredients or their amounts.  Luckily, you can totally wing it…it’s pretty flexible.

 Start a pot of lightly salted water to boil.

Spaetzle:

2 ½ cups AP flour

1 ½ teaspoons salt

2 large eggs

¾ cup water (to start)

freshly ground back pepper

Other additions that go nicely:

Fresh minced herbs

Fine lemon zest

Hungarian sweet paprika or smoked paprika 

I also do this all by hand….it’s very quick and not at all difficult to stir.

Mix your dry ingedients and make a well for the eggs and water.

With a sturdy large fork, begin to mix gently from the center, until the dry ingredients begin to pull in from the sides to incorporate.  If it begins to get too tough or doughy, add a bit more water. 

This should look like a cross between a dough and a batter…and it should hang on to the fork a bit.  If it’s a bit loose, a touch more flour….or too tough, more water.

I use a simple teaspoon to scrape bits up from the side of the bowl and gently submerge.  The boiling water will take the dough right off the spoon.

I like these a little thicker for some things and a little thinner for others, just gauge the size by the amount of dough you scoop up.  They will be beautifully misshapen and completely non-matchy.

When they float, take them out and keep making more until you run out of dough.

Then in a large saute pan (I like nonstick for this), add about 2 tablespoons of butter and the same of canola oil.  Heat until bubbly.

Add spaetzle in a single layer

Let it sizzle along for a few minutes and then give it a good toss.

oh. my. god.  do you see that?

Now, you can eat this right out of the pan, like I did right after this. 

Or you can use it as the underlayer for something yummy, like Chicken Paprikash.  Stay tuned for that recipe coming up this week.

Now, when I indulge in a little spaetzle, I can properly thank my Bavarian ancestors. 

But I still blame the remainder of the Eastern Europeans in my family tree for my pumpkin head.

Take this stuff and throw it in your mixer with the paddle attachment.  Or you can throw it all in a bowl and whip it up quickly yourself.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the Popeye arms though.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Focaccia:

For dough:

2 cups warm water

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

3 ¼ to 3 ½ cups all-purpose flour

1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt

1 tablespoon instant yeast

For top:

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons fresh chopped herbs

2 tablespoons kosher salt

1 tablespoon minced garlic

Turn on the mixer and let mix until dry ingredients are mixed in and then crank it up to high speed and beat for about a minute.

It should look like this when it’s done:  sticky, slack, and stringy

Then pour some olive oil into a 9×13 pan and spread it around to grease it.  Add the dough and using oiled fingers distribute dough as evenly as possible….try to push it out to the corners.

Then lightly cover the pan with a clean dishtowel, find a mildly warm spot,  and leave it alone for about 45  minutes.  When the dough has risen about halfway up the pan, drizzle with a generous amount of olive oil and make indentations with your fingers…the olive oil and good stuff will pool in these.  I should note….this is really fun.

Now, sprinkle with herbs (I’ve used rosemary here), kosher salt, and minced garlic.

Then pop it in the oven and bake until golden brown…about 40-45 minutes.

Now eat it…preferably while it’s hot.

En route to an afternoon screening of Alice in Wonderland, we passed by several chain restaurants, one of which is known for their brea…I mean wings.  I have previously discussed with the DOF, in a very frank manner, why we don’t patronize said restaurant, whose name may or may not rhyme with “Looters.”

In what was an eye-opening explanation for Grey yesterday, the DOF proclaimed,” There are girls who wear really short shorts, I think you can even see their underpants.  And it doesn’t even have any owls in there.”  This was information that she gleaned from a friend from school, who has dined at this particular establishment….with his grandpa.  Nice.

I thought that “there endeth the lesson”, until I went to collect the laundry from her room after she had gone to school this morning and found this:

Note: those are not puffy sleeves on the waitress

Apparently, she is making discerning choices between careers involving little clothing and lounge singing.

I’m relieved to know that she’ll be headlining at the Hu Ke Lau….

Since the DOF was the BDOF (baby director of fancy), she has loved all things France.  Several factors of influence at the time included my love of France and it’s cuisine, my cousin living in Paris at that time, our closest playdates/dear friends whose mama was raising bi-lingual babies (en Francais), and Putumayo’s French Playground CD.

All that early exposure has left my 7 year-old asking to go to Paris for her birthday next year, instead of Disney. 

Not that I’m complaining….it’s certainly where I would rather go. 

And although it’s unlikely that we’ll go this fall, we need to take a more organized approach to learning the language.  I took French for many years as a kid, but certainly could use a refresher, and the DOF cannot navigate Paris with only a “Hello” and “Where is the Cheese Shop?” in her arsenal. 

OK…. she totally could, but so not the point.

We’ve been learning in dribs and drabs, a CD here, a book there, but it’s time to get down to business. 

She is otherwise totally prepared.  Her room is decorated with Eiffel Towers and photos of the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, and Montmartre.  She sings French songs and can make a croissant from scratch….FROM SCRATCH, folks!

As I was perusing some old French stuff in our iTunes library, I came upon one of my favorite groups and I thought, “hmmm, maybe this is a good place to start our reintroduction to French language….”  It could be most helpful. 

Or just side-splittingly funny.

Bon idee?

My days of hot soup are quickly coming to a most welcome end.  Not because I have been forbidden to eat it, or worse yet, thrown out of the soup store, but because the weather- it’s a changing. 

See, we have actually had a fairly mild winter here in Wisconsin’s northeast corner….sorry, D.C. 

Not really, but a girl can have a laugh, can’t she?  Anyhoo, it might actually hit the mid 40’s here by this weekend, which means grilling out, shorts, swimming….you know the drill.

Oh, what’s that?  Too cold for shorts?  Apparently, you’ve never been here. 

Of course, I’m mildly kidding about the swimming…OR AM I?

But I do have a point- I made a delicious batch of tasty tortilla soup, which is really the perfect bumper season soup.  Not too hearty, but not chilled.

I even made cute little crispy tortilla strips.  See?

And it was tasty…and filling, but not too.  And spicy, not “taste buds screaming out for relief” spicy, but I brought the heat. 

If you’re real nice, I’ll even share the recipe.

No?

Fine.  Whatever.

Tortilla Soup

2 tablespoons canola or light olive oil

½ large onion, minced

2 tsp minced garlic

26.5 oz box of diced tomatoes

1 to 2 dried pasilla chiles ( 2 makes it pretty spicy)

1 pound boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into strips or cubed

1.5 to 1.75 qts chicken stock

salt and pepper to season (you will need to taste along the way)

crispy tortilla strips:

4-6 corn tortillas

olive oil pan spray

salt

garnish: avocado cubes

              dollop of sour cream

              fresh cilantro

Start your onions, garlic, and chiles in oil over medium heat. 

Once the onions start to soften and become pale, add the tomatoes.

And about 3/4 quart of stock

Let this simmer for about 5-7 minutes, then buzz in the blender or with immersion (stick) blender, right in pot.

In a separate saute pan, lightly saute the chicken thighs until just about done.  You don’t want to overcook them since they are going into the soup and will continue to finish.

Add the cooked chicken to the soup, and the remaining chicken stock and simmer for another 15-20 minutes, making sure to taste and season as you go along.

Serve with recommended garnishes ….oh, what?  i forgot the crispy tortillas? shocking.

Cut the tortillas in half and stack one half on top of the other, and cut into thin strips

Spray baking sheet with pan spray and spread out tortillas in thin layer.  Spray tortillas lightly with pan spray and lightly salt.  Bake at 375 until golden brown,about 8-10 minutes depending on your oven.

Mmmmm, that looks good enough to eat!