JanerBlog

Guilty pleasures

I have a guilty-pleasure confession: I love chicken wings. Love them. I love the tactile pleasure of getting every last bit of meat off the bones, and as such, I rarely eat them in public (I have the exact same problem with rib tips, my preferred form of barbecue) because I am such an embarrassing, gnawing carnivore. It's a bit like that scene in Splash, where Madison eats the lobster (sorry, no clip -- The Youtubes have failed me).

So I tend to eat my wings at home. Which brings me to the problem.

There is something in chicken wings that drives our pets completely insane. They will not leave us alone when we eat them. The cats swarm, leaping into laps. The dog shoves her snout directly into the bowl. We cook meat all the time, and nothing has ever produced a reaction like this -- all other meals are ignored as though they don't exist (okay, except for our older cat, who loves yogurt).

So I literally have to throw all the animals out of the room and shut all the doors to eat my wings, unless I want sauce-sticky fingers covered in pet hair from shooing them away. And as soon as I carry the bones to the garbage, they're on top of me again.

The wings are sizzling now -- off to start the kitty-viction.

Recipe for venison chili

Soak three cups of kidney beans overnight.
Go to basement and find two quarts of jealously guarded, organic, home-grown, home-canned tomato sauce.
Wash crock pot. Add beans and soak-water.
Dump in both quarts of tomato sauce.
Fill jars half full with water to remove every last molecule of sauce. Slosh around, prepare to add rinse-water to crockpot.
Notice with horror that there is a crack running the entire length of one jar.
Pause to consider. Both jars still had seal.
Haul out colander. Think about trying to save beans. Rinse beans.
Realize there's no way to get the beans all the way clean. Consider boiling beans. Think about tiny shards of broken glass.
Chuck beans. Wash crockpot thoroughly.
Return to basement, find two more quarts of jealously guarded, organic, home-grown, home-canned tomato sauce. Carefully inspect jars. Thump seal on both. Return to kitchen.
Dump in both quarts of tomato sauce.
Fill jars half full with water to remove every last molecule of sauce. Slosh around, prepare to add rinse-water to crockpot.
Notice with horror that there are multiple small cracks, previously invisible, around the bottom of one jar.
Invent new swear words. Dump sauce down drain. Wash crockpot again, this time with bleach and boiling water, just to be sure.

Send up a prayer of thanks that this little kitchen nightmare constitutes only an inconvenience, and not a financial disaster. Remember times when losing so much food would have meant cadging dinner from friends. Remember thousands of other families who would go hungry, or make different choices based on fewer options.

Return to basement. Stare mournfully at four empty slots on shelf. Count remaining jars, heave sigh of dejection. Select two more quarts of jealously guarded, organic, home-grown, home-canned tomato sauce. Carefully inspect jars. Thump seal on both. Return to kitchen.
Find black turtle beans that do not require pre-soaking. Rinse, add to crockpot.
Obsessively check quart jars. Thump seals again.
Dump in both quarts of sauce. Add rinse-water. Sigh with relief when both jars are sound.
Fry pound of ground venison until dark brown and add to pot.
Scavenge fridge. Chop and add celery, onion, garlic, sweet corn, green bell peppers.
Add cumin and chili powder to taste, along with fresh-ground black pepper and healthy dollop of Rooster sauce.
Cook in crockpot for five hours.

Makes five quarts; serve with side of gratitude.

I should clean out the fridge more often.

I just made one of the best leftover recipes I've ever eaten. As I mentioned in the last post, we've got about a hundred pounds of doe meat headed for the freezer, so I made up one of our chuck roasts from last year to make room for it. I was out of pretty much everything that goes with chuck roasts, like celery and carrots and mushrooms, but I *did* have a frozen bag of leftover cranberry sauce from Thanksgiving.

So I cooked the potroast with it. Potroast with cranberry-red-wine-balsamic sauce, served with roasted sweet potatoes. No recipe, just eyeballed it. And holy crap, was it good.

Meat harvest!

Looks like we're not going to have to buy a beef share this year -- my dad lets a bunch of guys hunt on his land, and they just brought him a nice young doe. I've paid for processing, an we'll have venison all year long. Yay!

Makin' Bakin'

Finished the holiday baking today. I skipped out on the annual German Pretzels for the first time in four years; I was feeling too exhausted to go through the whole process, so I opted for more smaller recipes instead -- which, ironically, turned out to be pretty much the same amount of work.

I'd been feeling like trying some new recipes, and so I decided to have a look at a cookbook my mom gave me for Christmas last year (*cough*Martha Stewart*cough*). This year's roundup included:

• Peanut butter cookies with peanuts and chocolate chips


• Butter rum cookies


• Gingersnaps


• Dark chocolate-orange-espresso cookies (I think these were the best of the bunch, by far)


• Tart cherry liqueur truffles

I scored some cute little tins this year, and all I have left to do is pack them up and deliver them. Yay, baking.

Naughty tomatoes

A few years ago, Neil Gaiman found a Satanic Tomato in his garden.

This year, I got him beat. I had two Satanic Tomatoes.

Well, they're satanic until you turn them upside down. Then, they're naughty tomatoes.

I wish I'd been able to capture the 180-degree twist in the longer one's... er... protuberance. Unfortunately, it wasn't a very cosmetic tomato. Almost all of my plants got hit by fusarium wilt, and a lot of the fruits got spotted as well.

Once I shaved off its spotty hide, though, it sure was tasty. Dunno about the evil, though.

Rotten little jerks

While I was away this weekend, the birds ate every single one of my ripe cherries. Every. Single. One.

Cures scurvy, the common cold, and lazy shoggoths

So I finally figured out what was wrong with my sourdough starter, also known as Olmer the Shoggoth. For the last year, it's been turning out these sad, flat loaves. They taste just fine, but they're really uninspired, with a dense, clammy crumb. Lately I've been forced to spike the dough with a pinch of storebought yeast to achieve the leavening I wanted -- which ticks me off, because frankly, that's cheating and defeats the whole purpose of having a sourdough starter.

After a bit of googling, I discovered that starter bacteria require a pretty acidic enavironment to grow and multiply properly. Our water is very, very hard -- to the point where I have to actually scrape off calcium deposits from the sinks and fixtures. Turns out that I'd been slowly alkalizing my bacteria! One website suggested that I crush up a Vitamin C tablet and add that to the starter at feeding time. I was skeptical, but I tried it anyway. Three days later when I opened the jar to check on it, Olmer was happy and bubbling and percolating again, so I immediately split him in half and started baking.

Here's the results:

Pretty, huh? All I use is flour, water, salt and shoggoth.