Baking: Thanksgiving

We do Thanksgiving... big. This entails inviting everyone who doesn't have their own friends/family thing to go to. This year was only 16 people, so smaller than other years (and larger than others), but we'll still take it. Besides the normal turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, greens, and so on, my bragging rights really come after dinner. Here's part of the reason I haven't been sewing:

The pear-pomegranate pie in front is mine. The next is a friend's pumpkin cheesecake, a bowl of fresh persimmons, another friend's pumpkin whoopie pies, and my (boring but requisite and tasty) pumpkin pie. Besides the amazing tastiness of the pear pie (it went away quickly!), a lot of people commented on the lattice top. I've never had a problem with doing a lattice (although parts of me want to do fancy braiding things with skinnier strings of dough... wonder if kumihimo is a possibility). I always wonder how people do the dough leaf-cut-out things, because mine never look like leaves, even if I follow a pattern.

You'd think that the plethora of orange food would have brought out our inner Oompa Loompas... fortunately no.

New kitchen lesser deity

In addition to my previous list of Kitchen Gods, I've recently re-discovered this blog: The Homesick Texan, who's happily stuck in New York City but missing the food of the South. While I haven't actually made anything from this scrumptious-looking site (I keep promising myself to make biscuits... arg!), the pictures and stories to go with the pictures are fantastic and drool-worthy (I'm sure she'd be horrified to hear "drool-worthy" as a descriptor of her blog).

Now, let me explain: I am a Northern girl. Very much so. I've never even been through Texas on road trips. I have no idea what Texan cuisine is all about. I do, however, have some idea of Southern cooking, having lived in Atlanta for three years. Not a lot, but some. I'm quite relieved to be back above the Mason-Dixon line, and don't intend on returning south except for friends' weddings or somesuch. But some of that Southern cooking really can be good for the soul (but not often for the waistline... eh... sacrifices). I'm not so hot on grits, but I'll take any variety of barbecue, stew, or cornbread.

Baking: More End of Summer

Even though the La Nina off the coast is determining otherwise, there was one last outing to the u-pick blueberry farm for jam ingredients. (Yeah, sometimes it's just hard to let go.) End of season berries still make good stuff:

The color of the contents of the jars are actually more like that of the top jar. If you look at them in the light (or with camera flash), they appear strangely pinky, like the bottom jars. Eh.

Now having made three kinds of preserved fruit goodness, here's the weird thing: I don't eat that much jam. What to do...

Preserving Someone Else's Harvest

Here's the first round of pretties: strawberry-raspberry preserves and apricot jam.

As mentioned before, I live for the summer farmer's markets. There's two stands in particular that we always visit first, before running through the rest of the booths. One booth is a berry farm (current produce is blackberries, blueberries, and end-of-season raspberries), and the other is a great family farm that's known for its cherries, apples, peppers and squash, but they also have some stone fruit, eggplant, melons...

The problem with going to the farmer's markets before breakfast is that I get a lot of fruit. Far more than I can eat, even in my mid-summer fruit bonanza. I'm not sure why it's sooooo cool to buy an entire flat of raspberries, but it is. It just is. Maybe it's because you actually know what to do with several pounds of delicate summer goodness. Or you have a household of teenage boys (do they eat fruit, or just eat in general?)

I've wanted to try canning for a while, but I don't think of it as something you get into casually. You need the jars and the timei to make the stuff and the giant boiling water pots and... well, then you also need someone to eat the stuff. My mom never canned, but I remember Grandma's red wine jelly every winter. The grocery store down the street was closing, so the jars were 25% off... opportunity knocked!

Kitchen Gods

I love food. While my eating habits should be supplemented with a little more exercise, there's very little better than cooking and baking and sharing a good meal with friends.

I'm not a religious person, but I really do appreciate a good explanation into how things work. For this reason, I have a list of Kitchen Gods, each useful in their own way, and I know they'll help me fix whatever mess I've gotten my food into. I also have a list of Lesser Kitchen Deities, to whom I look for guidance and recipes. I get recipes from all over (lots of cookbooks, and periodic web searches), but there are a few I go to consistently.

Here are my Kitchen Gods:

• Alton Brown. C'mon. He's funny. He's informed. He makes me forget how much I hated living in Atlanta. He has food anthropologists and food historians on his show. And sock puppets. And he's on tv. What more could you ask for?
  
• Harold McGee. The guy who wrote THE book on how food works. It's not a cook book, it's literally how food works. Not a quick read, but definitely an informative one, backed up with peer-reviewed scientific papers on the history of dairy products, possible health benefits, and protein denaturing.
  
• Joe Schwarcz. While not strictly a Kitchen God, he has some great but why? books out there. As one of the head honchos at McGill University's Office of Science and Society, he gives talks and has a call-in radio show that tries to explain current scientific knowledge to anyone who asks about anything. I met him once and was almost fan-girl speechless. Sad. But Dr. Joe is awesome.
  

And the Lesser Kitchen Deities:

• Seriously Good. KD Weeks is a Tennessee-turned-Oregon-turned-Tennessee chef and all-around experimenter with foods and stuff. He's got interesting recipes with everyday materials, especially when the farmers' markets are in full-swing.
  
• Chocolate and Zucchini. Clotilde is a French woman who loves to cook and bake. She messes with recipes and gets delicious results, especially her desserts. Besides her eloquently-worded stories to the recipes, the pictures are scrumptious.
  
• Manjula's Kitchen. I found her while looking online for Indian recipes. I can't get enough of her delicious vegetarian tasties! And watching Manjula make bread doughs on her YouTube stream is like magic.
  
• Herbivoracious. He's vegetarian and into haute cuisine, like super-fancy amuse bouche and molecular gastronomy. I've never made any of his recipes, but the mixes of flavors is intriguing.
  
• Post Punk Kitchen. Found while trying to to figure out how to eliminate eggs from various recipes (and yes, they tell you how). They also have some suggestions for other dietary limitations.
  
• Epicurious. A great search engine for looking up recipes. Following the user reviews is pretty reliable, although there aren't many people who are adventurous eaters.
  

Who are your Kitchen Gods?