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OMG! Sugar!

So. Is everybody thankful? I am thankful to be home for a nice, long holiday weekend. The trains were running on time Wednesday night too, so getting here wasn't nearly the ordeal that I feared.

Yesterday was all cooking. Cranberry sauce, buttermilk pie, turkey breast with cornbread stuffing, sweet potato casserole, and broccoli sautéed with pine nuts and currants.

Oz normally wants the cranberry tower (or cranberry log, once the can-shaped mass of cranberry jelly falls over). This year I pleaded for actual cranberries, seeing as how they have actual flavor and cranberry sauce is really easy to make. He obliged me with a couple packages of cranberries and I prepared this recipe (check out the discussion of variations in the comments). I substituted dark brown sugar for the sugar, and apple juice for the water. After the cranberries broke up and simmered down a bit, I added a half cup of chopped pecans and a quarter cup or so of currants. The sauce thickened up into what is basically cranberry jam. It's good on everything. I'm already planning experiments (less sugar, blackstrap molasses, citrus fruits, etc.) for the next holiday.

Since I was not in town to do my usual sweet potato preparations for pie and soufflé, I asked Oz to pick up some large cans of yams so I could make the sweet potato casserole which is de rigeur for the Ohio branch of the family. I have a dot matrix printout of their recipe for "Kims Sweet Potatoes". I will publish it here for backup in case I lose the paper. I will also correct the punctuation. And I have no idea who Kim is.

Kim's Sweet Potatoes

2 large (40 oz.) cans sweet potatoes or yams
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1/2 to 2/3 cup melted butter (one stick of butter is fine, but feel free to add more if you're not getting enough butter in your holiday diet)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 cup bourbon (optional, but, hey, you might not be getting enough bourbon either)

Topping:
1 cup brown sugar
6 tablespoons flour
6 tablespoons butter, softened
1 cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9x13 inch baking dish.

Drain the cans of sweet potatoes and place the sweet potatoes in a large bowl. Pick off any coarse strings (those would be rootlets), unless you're fond of stringy textures (in which case, you can eat and floss at the same time). Mash the sweet potatoes to the desired level of smoothness.

In another bowl, beat together the eggs and sugar, then add the butter, salt, vanilla, and bourbon. Mix well, then stir into the sweet potatoes until well blended. Pour the sweet potato mixture into the baking dish and spread it out evenly.

For the topping, mix together the sugar and flour, then cut in the butter. Mix in the pecans. Sprinkle the topping onto the sweet potatoes.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes.

The sweet potatoes actually taste better after they've cooled off a bit. In the event that you have any leftovers (my horde of Ohio relatives never do), they taste even better eaten cold from the refrigerator the next day. They are also pretty damn good with that cranberry sauce on the side.

Now my burning question is, how long till my buddy Jon shows up and says that his family makes the exact same thing, only with chocolate chips?

Dismember the gourd

Behold, we have news:

Oz is a grandpa. He kept checking the blog back around that last weekend in October, but I am a bad blogger anymore. Not that he needed me to tell him, he just wanted to read what I had to say about it.

And I say, The baby is cute. And when he got fussy, Oz handed him back to his parents and we cleared out. Not having had any kids myself, I feel like I've totally cheated, skipping straight to grandparenthood like this. And I get to keep my figure too, as my neighbor pointed out.

I am still employed and I'm coming to you from Real Job Land, aka Alexandria. How long can this last? This evening, on the train from Richmond, an attack of paranoia about convinced me that they'll be firing me any day now. We've finished the most intensive part of the training and now we're working. It's okay so far. I'm wondering if I'll get bored with it once I get good at it. In the meantime, the steady paycheck thing is pretty cool.

Due to time constraints, my main creative outlet these days is cooking. I make up lunches to take to work. Since I discovered the amazing benefits of a high protein lunch (You can stay awake all afternoon!), I have been experimenting with beans and rice. How many different ways can I prepare it? Quite a lot, I'm finding.

This weekend I got to flex some different culinary muscles. At the natural food store we found a Japanese gourd (kabocha) and a huge pile of end-of-season sweet Italian peppers in all the beautiful colors: red, orange, yellow, green, and all the variations therebetween. We made kabocha simmered in dashi, sake, and a bit of soy sauce. I don't think we got quite the flavor that I recall from Japan, partly because the American kabocha was somewhat thinner-walled than the Japanese kabocha we enjoyed on our last trip, and probably also because our broth is missing some secret ingredient (like a vastly greater quantity of sodium). Still, it's about as good as I'm going to get on this side of the Pacific. Then I cooked the peppers into a sweet summery pasta sauce with herbs, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and marsala. So delicious and probably the last we'll get of that till next August.

Of late, I have not had enough time to goof off with my camera. I'd probably get put on a terror watch list for photographing the area where I work. It's dark by the time I get home. I don't have that much stuff in my apartment to photograph.

I suppose I should further explore the modeling potential in the produce section and the gutters of my neighborhood.