Baked ham

Now that I've finished my Paris recap, I thought I should go back and update on how Easter brunch went. According to SP's final count, we served brunch to 63 adults and children, followed by stories, a massive Easter egg hunt, and various other shenanigans. As far as I could tell from the middle of the kitchen whirlwind, a good time was had by all, including me. Serving food to 63 people is a new record for me, and, as always, my worries about undercatering turned out to be ridiculously unfounded.

Baked ham with a sweet and spicy glaze
I concocted this recipe to glaze about 25 lbs worth of ham (in 3 large pieces), so you might want to scale back accordingly--1 cup of liquid total is probably fine for one regular ham.

1 cup wholegrain mustard
1 cup blood orange juice
1/2-1 cup maple syrup
1-2 Tbsp dry mustard
1 tsp cayenne pepper
3 hams, each weighing around 8 lbs*

Mix the first three ingredients in a small saucepan and bring just to a boil, then let simmer and thicken slightly. Taste before adding dry mustard and cayenne to see if the sweet/tart/spicy balance is to your taste; I like mine more on the tart/spicy side, which is why I started with less maple syrup. (I ended up using about 1 cup of it in the end, proportional to the other ingredients.)

When glaze components are balanced to your liking and you are ready to bake your ham, preheat the oven to 275F and place the ham in a roasting pan with the fat side up. Pour glaze over the entire ham, using a pastry brush or similar to coat the whole surface and lifting ham up so that some of the glaze is in the pan underneath.

Cover ham with foil and put in the oven to heat through according to packaging instructions. (I usually estimate 10-15 minutes per lb.)

Slice and serve warm, pouring some of the glaze from the pan over the meat.

Serves a crowd, with leftovers.

* These instructions are for American baked hams, which are purchased already cured and cooked. Adjustments to cooking times will be required for uncooked meat.

Easter prep

Yikes! It's been too long since I put up a post. There's a lot going on at the moment. In addition to a last-minute solo trip back to Boston over last weekend, I also find myself having agreed to prepare Easter brunch for a scarily large number of people (ie more than 50(!)). And it's not even at my house! So there'll be more on that later. For now, here's a list of what I'm making:

- baked ham with a sweet and spicy glaze
- deviled eggs (something like this, but not as chunky)
- Neapolitan Easter pizza chiena
- lots and lots of scones
- a selection of homemade jams (including this and this)
- Italian Easter tarrale
- chocolate-coconut nests with jordan almond eggs (working off this coconut cluster recipe)
- sea breeze mimosas
- bloody marys
- shandy punch

Updates and photos to follow; in the meantime, I wish my fellow celebrants a very happy Easter, Chag Sameach to those celebrating Passover, and a lovely weekend to everyone else!

Frugal redecorating

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned on Twitter that I was taking a Friday afternoon off from my usual work and/or cooking projects to focus on repurposing items around my house. Here’s why:

That’s a ‘before’ picture of my front hall. It has looked like that, give or take packing boxes, random piles of stuff, cat toys, and cartons of Girl Scout cookies, since we moved in more than 18 months ago. Not exactly the most welcoming feel for your arriving guests, is it?

Well, I finally got fed up with it. DP had another onslaught of guest lecturers coming in, several of whom were invited for dinner, and I just couldn’t face the thought of opening the front door one more time with that void behind me. Something had to be done.

And lo, my exasperation became my inspiration when, lying awake one night, I worked out how to pull something reasonable together out of various things that I had stashed here and there, waiting to find a permanent location in the home decor.

Here’s what I came up with:

What do you think? I think it looks pretty good. I don’t expect any calls from House Beautiful any time soon, but at least the front hall no longer gives the impression that the house is inhabited by squatters, as one of our more frequent visitors so lovingly expressed it. And the best part is that I spent a grand total of $20.00 - for the lamp base. Everything else you see was stuff that I either already had, or that SP contributed from her renovation stash (namely the Ikea embroidered lamp shade) to fill a gap. SP also contributed an afternoon of elbow grease, after I called her in a tizzy when I couldn’t find the hardware to assemble that piece of furniture: she came over with her professional drill and put it together using hardware from her collection and sheer force of will.

So overall, I feel pretty happy and thrifty. I think I’m going to keep fiddling with the details, though. Suggestions from people who are more designer-y than me are most welcome.

Flavor infusions

A while back I came across a throwaway line in, I think, a Melissa Clark cookbook, about how making your own flavored salts was easy and so much cheaper than those pricey ones you see in fancy grocery stores.

Well, where I live there aren’t too many fancy grocery stores within an hour’s drive. I have more than once referred to the KC Northland, where I live, as a “cheese desert”. And I had never heard of or seen flavored salts until I stumbled across them in a cookbook written in New York City, like a message in a bottle from a faraway land.

It’s the kind of kitchen project I like best though: you invest a few minutes of time and energy, use a few ingredients that are readily to hand, and produce something that will sit quietly on a shelf, getting better and better, and opening new vistas of flavor experimentation in your food and cooking.

Following Melissa’s example, I made sage salt first, using a few precious leaves plucked from a small but hardy plant that had survived a hellishly hot summer in my backyard herb patch and then flourished in the long, mild autumn that followed. I had been reluctant to use its few available leaves, wanting to save them for something really special; but mincing them into a jar and mixing them with kosher salt meant that they could give their flavor to dozens of dishes. And they have: I’ve gone from being a very occasional user of sage to someone who sprinkles its essence into all sorts of savory dishes. It’s not always distinctive, but it adds something elusive. It makes the food more complex and interesting, even if in a subtle way.

It didn’t take long to recognize that, next to the sage plant, I had rosemary that was not only surviving but flourishing well into an unusually temperate Missouri winter. A jar of rosemary salt soon found a place on the shelf, and I’ve opened up to rosemary in a whole new way. I’ve sprinkled rosemary salt on roast chicken and into batches of applesauce. The other day I used it to season a bowl of Savory Cheddar Oatmeal, an experiment I will definitely be repeating. I would never have thought to add rosemary sprigs to all the things I add a dash of rosemary salt to. It’s easier to be daring somehow when it’s just a sprinkle of salt with a little something extra.

It has grown from there. It’s not even just salt anymore. I’m zesting nearly every piece of citrus that passes through my kitchen: I’ve got homemade lemon extract steeping in the pantry, right next to the homemade vanilla, and I’ve got a jar of tangelo sugar (see photo) whose fragrance could knock your socks off. On a whim, I used it to sweeten a recent batch of raspberry jam that SP described as “like fireworks in my mouth.”

What to try next? I’m thinking Thai chili pepper salt and lime sugar. Suggestions on what to make, or more ways to use these concoctions in other dishes? Send them along to RL Infusion Central. I’d love to hear more.

Tiny omelettes

Like millions (billions?) of other people, many of whom you’ve probably encountered on the internet in the past few weeks, I annually buy into the whole ‘January-Fresh-Start’ mentality. On top of the general zeitgeist, my birthday is in January, so this month is the start of my personal New Year as well as the one indicated on the Gregorian calendar in widespread use worldwide.

I don’t make resolutions as such, but in the few weeks that elapse between January 1 and my birthday, I try to give some thought to the things I want to focus on in the coming year to make the most of my time. These usually boil down to living more mindfully in various ways: working on replacing sloppy or unhealthy practice with good practice, focusing on habits I want to develop, eliminating various kinds of physical (and mental) clutter, and so on. Some of this is directed toward food, generally with a view to making the most of what I’m eating while practicing moderation. I told SP last year that my personal food philosophy is “make every mouthful count”. One of the ways in which I do this is to eat a variety of different foods, since when I fall into eating ruts I am more likely to lapse into unrestrained and mindless snacking. So I’ve been working on coming up with different things to eat for breakfast, and ideally to develop a schedule where I eat a different thing for breakfast every day of the week, which to me is the ideal combination of repetition and variety.

Paradoxically, my latest addition was inspired by reading a blog post where its maker talked about eating it for breakfast every day for the last several months as part of a weight-loss program: an egg-and-cheese omelette that clocked in at a mere 220 calories. But what caught my attention about this was her note that it was a 2-egg omelette. Revelation! Omelettes don’t have to be made with 3 eggs, the way they are in restaurants. I could even make one with just 1 egg, add a little filling, have a bit of starch alongside, and still not break the caloric bank.

One-egg omelette
Eggs, in addition to being a pretty reasonably-priced source of protein (even if you buy the free-range, no-chemical, gold-plated kind), are filling, tasty, and versatile. Probably the reason why most cuisines offer some variation on the omelette.

1 tsp olive oil
1 egg
~2 teaspoons filling of your choice*
salt & pepper

Heat the olive oil over medium-low heat in a small frying pan.** Meanwhile, break the egg into a small bowl and beat the yolk into the white until consistently mixed.

Pour egg into hot pan and allow mixture to cook for 30-45 seconds or until the edges are just starting to set. Sprinkle over fillings, then season with salt & pepper. Using your preferred spatula, gently flip one half of the omelet over the other half. Allow to cook for 1-2 minutes more, then slide out onto a plate.

Serves 1. Tastes great with a toasted whole wheat and olive oil biscuit alongside (if you've still got some calorie allowance left).

* I have been using chopped bacon and shreds of cheddar cheese.
** I have a 4-inch cast iron that’s perfect for a tiny omelet, but you can use whatever you have that's good for cooking eggs. The omelet won’t look as neat in a bigger pan, but will still be fine.

Failing Christmas

The RL Christmas tree--a gift from SP

On Friday night, worn out from a week of frantic prep (hampered by houseguests and leftover exhaustion from finishing my job) and nowhere near ready for the big day, I told a friend over dinner that I had failed Christmas this year. As of December 23, I had just mailed my first batch of cards; not yet started to decorate my tree (or finished decorating my house); completed less than half of the baking I had planned to do; and not even tackled the enormous pile of mail-order boxes in my front hall, let alone wrapped anything.

And not only failing as a human being and all-around domestic goddess, but also as a blogger: over the course of the past week I managed to prepare/consume/share/give away the following without ever taking a picture:

- an entire batch of pizzelles (I know I promised a post about these; it will be slightly delayed)

- ditto cardamom snowballs (adapted from a recipe in this month’s Bon Appetit)

- a bacon-cheddar-peppadew cheese ball (adapted from Homesick Texan via Dinner with Julie)

- Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinners in their entirety

- carefully assembled dessert trays for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinners

And yet, last night, as DP and I sat flopped on the couch together, watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (me with one of my new cookbooks on my lap), I said to DP, “You know, in spite of all my angsting about what a crappy job I was doing at managing things this year, it turned out to be a really nice Christmas.”

“Yes, it was,” he agreed in his usual no-nonsense fashion. “So why don’t you write that down and remember it, so maybe you won’t be so hard on yourself next year.”

Done. And after that, all that’s left to do is to wish you all a peaceful and relaxing holiday season.


Welcome, Christmas, bring your cheer.
Cheer to all Whos far and near.
Christmas Day is in our grasp, so long as we have hands to clasp.
Christmas Day will always be just as long as we have we.

- Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

Education/training

I was on the phone with SP the other night while she was trying to cook following a recipe, and cursing freely while she did so. I asked her a bunch of questions to find out why she was so frustrated, and ended up explaining why she was doing several of the steps the recipe specified. This (although I think it helped in the end) frustrated her even more. “Why doesn’t the recipe tell me that?” she fumed. “What would happen if I didn’t have someone around that I could ask?”

I think that this question touches upon a basic issue in cooking, which is that recipes don’t actually teach you how to cook. They will tell how you how to construct one particular item (training), but it’s a long process to extract from one recipe (or even a lot of recipes) how the principles of cooking work (education). I speak from experience, since that’s largely how I’ve learned to cook: I started knowing out how to make a couple of things, tried a lot of different recipes, and through trial and error and just cooking, day after day, week after week, started to connect the dots and understand the principles underlying all these seemingly unconnected sets of instructions. It took a long time before I felt like I was getting it. And I was interested in the process, and interested in learning more; I pored over cookbooks, read food blogs by the dozen, started my own eventually, and generally paid close attention to what was happening. I wasn’t fearless, but I wasn’t thoroughly intimidated either. I was also lucky enough to have some foundation to build on, from having grown up in a house where home-cooked food was provided on a daily basis. But what if I hadn’t been? How do people do it?

I think it must be like me trying to do any kind of home repair or maintenance. Neither of my parents is particularly handy, so anything of that sort was either attended to with a lot of cursing and stress, or else a professional was called in. That was the model I grew up with, and I haven’t had the inclination to change it much. I have figured out how to do some minor things by following instructions (ie training), but I’m chagrined to acknowledge sometimes how little I understand about how my house works as a system (ie education). But most of the time (touch wood) that doesn’t affect my daily life in the way that food does. I mean, everyone has to eat, and for most people, that is a three-times-a-day occurrence. Throw a few small children into the mix, and it’s more like five times. How frustrating must it be to be confronted, day after day, with something you don’t feel knowledgeable about, and yet need in order to survive and function? And that’s without even getting into the complicated emotional issues that are always, always tied up with food and eating.

So what’s the point of all this? I don’t know, but I think it ties in to a lot of bigger issues—to do with food, to do with education, to do with how things work generally. What do you think?

Chocolate-pumpkin tartlets

Okay, I think I've recovered. I ate leftover Thai food for lunch today, always a sign that my appetite is fully operational. So, on to my last catering recipe: pumpkin-chocolate tartlets.

These were almost my downfall. I started off following this recipe from Delicious Dishings, but something went horribly wrong with my chocolate sablé crust, possibly because I made it in the food processor instead of a stand mixer as recommended. (This is what happens when you don't own a stand mixer. Chocolate sablé crust isn't happening with a hand mixer.) Whatever the reason, I could not roll the crust out; first, it was too crumbly, and then it kind of melted under pressure. I scraped it onto a parchment-lined baking tray, figuring I could bake it in a sheet and then cut out the bases that way, but this too was a non-starter: after only a brief bake in the oven, the dough went right back to being crumbly, and nearly every disk I managed to cut out promptly fell apart.

At 1:00 am on Sunday, I gave up in despair and went to bed, grateful that at least I could swap some other dessert in if necessary and no one (except SP) would ever know. But when I awoke six hours later, my subconscious had provided a solution to my dilemma: make the chocolate base out of brownies instead.

So I did. I made up a basic brownie batter, plopped it into a piping bag, and piped it into mini muffin cups. I underbaked them slightly, and as they came out of the oven I pressed down the center of each one to make a well for the pumpkin pastry cream filling. I finished assembling them at SP's house, using the same piping-bag trick to make the pastry cream look pretty, and topped them with a garnish of grated dark chocolate, as the original recipe intended.

I'd never eaten pumpkin and chocolate together before, but learned from these that it's a pretty great combination. I think the guests agreed; SP told me that she was upstairs with a group of guests when another guest came charging upstairs holding one. He burst into the room and exclaimed to one of her group, "Have you tried these? You have to try these!"

That's my kind of customer appreciation.

Saturday digest

Some random thoughts about what’s happening here at the end of a busy Saturday:

- DP has flitted off for a few days on a work jaunt with a colleague; we dropped him off at the airport late this morning. Given that we are used to him being gone for 4-6 weeks at a stretch, a 5-day absence seems like no big deal. Let’s hope that that is in fact the case!

- Miss B is in transports of joy because she left out a significant haul of candy for the Candy Fairy, and received a stuffed unicorn in return. Is this a post-Halloween thing where you are? I had never heard of it until we moved to the Midwest, but we’ve done it the last two years--even though, to quote Suburban Matron, it brings on one of those “moments when you don't just suspect, you KNOW that you are raising some of the most indulged creatures on earth, at any time, ever.” So very true, but mitigated somewhat by the fact that that little critter makes her so very happy.

- My friend SP is hosting a meeting of the local Vintage Homes Society at her house tomorrow (Sunday). She and her husband have been painstakingly renovating their early 20th century house for the last 2+ years, doing most of the work themselves, and this is their chance to show it off to some people who can really appreciate it. I offered to help with the food, knowing that SP loathes cooking, and as a result I am essentially doing a full-on catering job. It’s providing some useful practical experience and learning for me, since as much as I love to cook, I’ve never attempted to do it in any kind of professional capacity. More on all that later.

- After one serious rainstorm this week, we’ve gone from full-blown autumn color to naked trees everywhere. It looks like the bleak midwinter out there, but daytime temperatures are still in the 60s F (15ish C). Since some of my friends and relatives on the East Coast are still coping with the aftermath of last week’s freak October snowstorm, I’ve got no complaints to offer about the weather.

- I’m planning to take advantage of tonight’s time change extra hour to stay up, roll out pie crust, and watch Saturday Night Live (all at the same time!). It ends at midnight Central time, which tonight is like 11pm! Do I know how to party or what?