Testing, Testing

I'm in the thick of a kind of over-the-top rush recipe-testing job, but I wanted to give some sense of the kinds of things happening here lately. Before I started the testing last week, I went ahead and made b'stilla, because I'd been craving it for some reason.

Buttery phyllo dough pie filled with shredded chicken thigh meat (traditionally squab), egg, almonds, cinnamon, parsley, onion, and topped with powdered sugar and cinnamon.

I haven't been able to take pictures of everything I've been testing, but in the first week I've been called on to poach an entire rack of lamb by submerging it in duck fat (three-plus pounds thereof); make sausages out of scallops, shrimp, and sea bass and grill them with a sweet chili glaze; thinly slice raw beef and roll each slice around a watercress leaf and homemade lemon mayonnaise and fried capers, set it in a Chinese soup spoon with a bit of broth made from the trimmings of two to five pounds of shiitake mushrooms, and top it with parsley sauce and a flatbread chip (this is a one-bite hors d'oeuvre); and do spherification to make coffee "caviar" as a topping for chocolate mousse:

I got everyone to try the syringing, and Mr. Chalmers (above) and my dad were by far the best at it. Most of my eggs had a little tail. This was just coffee and a bit of sugar mixed with sodium alginate, heated and cooled, dropped into a calcium chloride solution, then rinsed.

The spherification worked very well, but I would've liked a more intense coffee flavor. Some of the balls, probably the ones that spent less time in the calcium chloride solution, did have a little burst of liquid in the center. You can see what was probably one of my tadpole-shaped balls in the front.

Two dishes so far are tied for most difficult: (1) the duck breasts cooked sous vide, thinly sliced and place atop sautéed wild mushrooms with shallot and foie gras, in a truffle-scented foamed broth; (2) a three-part dessert for eighteen consisting of pastry puffs filled with lemon-thyme custard and decorated with white and bittersweet chocolate, paper-thin slices of mango wrapped around pillows of coconut-milk-cooked tapioca with cilantro and spices and placed on top of a pumpkin seed "gelee," and shots of cold hot chocolate layered over mango puree and diced strawberries and topped with cayenne-cinnamon whipped cream and shaved chocolate.

Even with a lot of help in the kitchen from my mom, I only had the energy to plate up about four servings of this, and couldn't be bothered to find matching platters or glasses or take a really nice picture.

The dessert took me all day Sunday to make, and it was our supper. Mr. Chalmers had grilled a bunch of hot dogs—with buns and everything!—for lunch, and it was the most comforting and satisfying thing I've eaten in seven days.

Makeshift Teepee

Is there any other kind? Not today there isn't. It was gorgeous outside—low-seventies, sunny, breezy—and my latest knitting project is on the skids (don't even ask about the knee-high slippers I was trying to design and knit), so I made a little tent out in the yard for the bug. It's especially fun when the train goes by and makes it seem even more like the wild west out here. I cut down four straight-growing privet bushes, trimmed the poles up, and tied them at the top with some twine, then covered them with four lengths of fabric basted together. I didn't want to cut the fabric so I could use it again for other purposes—it's all material my folks brought home from Thailand and/or Singapore and/or Suriname—like a more polished version of the teepee pictured here. So: branches, some cloth, a little thread, four safety pins, and three bricks (the breeze occasionally turns to wind) . . .

A while back I made a couple of dining room chair cushions, but I don't like them very much so I tied them back to back and the bug uses it as a pallet, sometimes propping one half up on a wall and sitting on it like a chair.

Finished Quilt

On a foggy morning, shot through a peanut butter–smeared camera lens, it doesn't look too bad:

Fall

Fall's here at last. My amazing husband Mr. Chalmers gave me a haircut out on the front steps, and I like it a lot better than any haircut I've had in the last three years. It took him three minutes, and he cut about four inches off (in places). Here it is after much blow-drying and ironing:

Along the main road to our house today, between the road and the railroad tracks were drifts of ragweed or goldenrod (I don't know which is which) interspersed with the fire red of turning sumac leaves. There were dark storm clouds and bright sun, and it was windy. Mr. Chalmers made an excellent tri tip, Santa Maria–style, and I made the traditional salsa to go with it (the salsa includes celery, oregano, and Worcestershire sauce, among other things). More on that tomorrow, I hope—we plan to grill another one.

The days are still a bit warm, but the mornings are chilly, so we put the big wool quilt on the bed, and last night I finished up a little quilt—my first real quilt—to curl up on the couch with. It's just four-inch squares, and I was so careful about cutting them all the same size and keeping my seam allowances even and uniform, but somehow they got all off-track as I sewed the strips of squares together. It was only toward the very end of the process that I realized that stitching with the new strip, the one I was attaching, on top made the seams line up, while putting the new strip on the bottom made them shift. And while I'm not a fan of machine-sewn binding, the hand sewing was taking me much too long, so I just ran it through the old Bernina, prettiness be damned. So it's not well constructed, but I think it looks okay, plus it was cheap to make (all of scraps and some leftover muslin, though I did use a good cotton-poly batting), easy to work on in short batches, and just what I needed for fall in a drafty old house. Here's a picture of it in progress:

Drafty, as it turns out, isn't the half of it. When it rained hard last week the water was coming in the bedroom ceiling like there was no ceiling there at all to slow it down. The floor afterward looked like someone had poured a couple gallon jugs of water on it. The next day, I went out and did an inspection, and just for the heck of it I cleaned off the leaves and pecans that had collected in the valley over the leak. Sure enough: hard rain that evening, and no leaking. How do you learn about things like leaves on the roof and that they need to be cleaned off? It probably hasn't caused too much damage, given that our walls are so drafty—they must dry out fairly quickly.

In other home maintenance news, I learned how to glaze a window. We have these old wood six-over-six windows with (mostly) original (or at least very old) glass, and two panes broke recently. I replaced one, but haven't gotten to the second because it's high up and I need to do it while on a ladder, and I've been waiting for a long nap from the bug to tackle that one.

And speaking of the bug, she just finished her third week at daycare! She goes two days a week to a place in the next county over, where they have a shrine to GWB and Jesus in the lobby and they sing a blessing before every meal. We've all had colds of varying degrees ever since her very first day, but otherwise it's working out well and allowing me to do a lot of freelance work I would not have been able to even consider doing before. She has not learned to talk in any meaningful way yet; so far she's only learned two things from daycare that we know of: when she waves now, she doesn't just flop her arm around, but rather holds her hand up and opens and closes it; and she shakes her head "no"—emphatically—when she doesn't want something.

Because she's gone two days a week, the days she and I have together now are more relaxed, and I don't find myself worrying about work I'm not doing or trying to work and not doing it well. We do things like make bread and messes. The other day I gave her her own bowl and put some ingredients in it and let her do whatever she wanted. She really tried to stir and knead the way she saw me doing it, and didn't let me touch her ball of dough. It turned out really well. Future posts will be more informative, perhaps with recipes and everything, but for now here's the bug making bread:

The bug mixing up her dough, standing on the window seat as usual.

The bug kneading her dough.

I helped shape it into a ball, and we let it rise.

We put it in a pan and into a cold oven.

It's still hot, but she wants to try it right away. She says "Hot" when she touches it.

Impromptu Chicken Tour

On Friday we were, as Mr. Chalmers would say, staring down the barrel of a long, hot weekend without Internet access, and we needed to get out of town. So we boarded the dogs last-minute and took off before dawn on Saturday, heading in the general directions of north and west, and not sure how far we'd get (the bug has been somewhat terrible in the car lately, because it's hard for her to fall asleep in her very upright front-facing car seat, she can't get comfortable, she wants to be driving or something, and all of this makes her angry). She did get a few good naps in, though:

On a whim, we splurged on tickets for the Chattanooga aquarium thinking it'd be dull but maybe fun for the bug, but it was much better than we'd anticipated. I guess the elder Chalmerses hadn't been to an aquarium in a while, because the sharks and penguins and jellyfish and whatnot were really impressive. And of course the bug got a kick out of it.

Our first food stop was in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the Slick Pig. I'd never had their famous smoked chicken wings before, and Mr. Chalmers wanted us to try them. Here they are:

They were remarkably similar to his re-creation of them, but they seemed to have been smoked a bit longer and there was something slightly spicy in the marinade—maybe just a little black pepper? Anyway, they were great, and the bug was happy with that slice of garlic toast and a few bites of intensely flavorful chicken—we'd been feeding her car-trip snacks to keep her calm (-ish) on the road: steamed zucchini chunks, rice cakes, graham crackers, oyster crackers, grapes.

We made our way to Nashville, walked around downtown in the incredible heat awhile, then drove around trying to decide what to do. Of course there was only one thing we could do, and that was make a stop at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack—none of us had been there before, but we'd read plenty about Nashville's hot chicken. This was some weird stuff:

For the life of me I can't figure out how it's done. It's fried chicken—very expertly fried chicken, crisp outside and moist inside, freshly made and probably not in a deep-fryer—but it's got these spices . . . sort of attached to it. Some of the spice mixture is in the dredge or batter, but most of it seems to be added after the chicken is fried, which results not in a sauce exactly but in a spicy, hot paste all over the crust. Served on top of white bread and topped with pickle slices. The woman behind the counter insisted we get "medium" spiciness on our first visit, and move up to hot or extra-hot the next time we came. The medium was not too spicy, but it was good anyway. I would've liked more salt in the spice mixture, though, which I think would have brought out the actual flavor of the chiles rather than just the heat. It was a bizarre experience all around: grim strip mall, no air-conditioning (it was about 108 degrees out that late-afternoon, and the sun was streaming in the front window), a guy sitting next to the garbage can for no apparent reason other than to make sure you got all your bones and paper plates in the can, and there were two hipsters (for lack of a newer word) heading in as we were leaving.

We stayed in Clarkesville, Tennessee, had a couple of beers on the patio of a strange Korean-Chinese restaurant across a vacant lot from the motel, and I have a question for any parents who might be reading this: How on earth do you get kids to fall asleep in a motel room? The bug eventually did, while watching my new favorite show, Ice Road Truckers, but her four hours of sleep came at great cost and we were up at 3 a.m. Central Time, before anyone in Clarkesville makes coffee to sell to travelers like us.

We took the mountainous small-windy-road route on the way home yesterday, stopping for lunch at the Hole in the Wall diner, in Blairsville.

The bug's dress is buttoned up like that so that the car seat strap wouldn't irritate her neck. Her dad had the special catfish, which was fried, of course, but in a dark-brown caramelized batter rather than the usual (in Georgia) cornmeal crust. The waitress specifically recommended the Reuben, and since I'm a fan of the sandwich I had to order it. Fantastic. The perfect Reuben, you might even say: good corned beef (I'd prefer to save pastrami for a plain old pastrami sandwich on rye with mustard), super-tangy sauerkraut, Swiss, old-fashioned Russian dressing, and buttered toasted rye. It wasn't overstuffed, either, so it was all too easy to eat.

We stopped for a death march—excuse me, short hike—at De Soto Falls, and the bug liked running along the trails so much that I've been fantasizing about taking her on a real hike sometime soon. When fall comes.

As it should be with all vacations, we're glad to be home and glad we left.

Moussaka, at Last

I made a really good moussaka once when I lived in Astoria, the Greek neighborhood in Queens, and I haven't made it again because I couldn't remember what recipe I used (if any) and none of the ones in my books seemed right. I got a gorgeous eggplant from the tomato-and-corn farm the other day, so I tried to re-create the 1996 version from memory. This was close, but I'm not sure what it needs to make it just like the other one, so I'll post the recipe here for future reference. Still, it's pretty good. The bug sure liked it as a third course for her lunch today following an entire ear of corn that she ate off the cob all by herself and a bowl of brown rice cereal, plums, and blackberries that she ate with a spoon—she refuses to let us feed her anymore, and to be fair she doesn't really need our help getting food in her mouth: today she crawled into the back of a cupboard and found a half box of crackers and proceeded to eat them (and she gave the dogs a few).

There are three parts to moussaka: sliced vegetables (here eggplant and potato, but you can also use zucchini or yellow squash, or any combination), a tomato sauce (here with lamb, but you could certainly use beef or venison or leave the meat out altogether), and a béchamel. I had leftover cooked lamb that I'd food-processed and frozen, but you could use fresh ground lamb or beef: cook it in the skillet before you cook the onions, and drain off the excess fat; add the onions and garlic, and proceed with the sauce.

Moussaka

4 tablespoons olive oil
1 large eggplant
Salt and black pepper
1 1/2 onions, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
About 2 cups finely shredded cooked lamb
2 (14.5-ounce) cans tomatoes, pureed in a food processor
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
Handful of fresh mint, parsley, and oregano, chopped
2 large baking potatoes
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
1 egg
Freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup grated firm cheese, such as Gruyère (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Use 2 tablespoons of the oil to generously oil two baking sheets. Peel the eggplant and thinly slice it into rounds. Arrange the slices on the baking sheets, then flip them over so that both sides of the slices have a bit of oil on them. Sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. Roast for about 10 minutes, until light golden brown and soft. Set aside.

Make the meat sauce: Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large skillet over medium heat and add the onions and garlic. Sauté for a few minutes, until soft but not browned. Add the lamb, tomatoes, cinnamon, cloves, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for 30 minutes. Taste and add more salt and pepper if necessary—it should be well seasoned. Stir in the herbs and remove from the heat.

Peel and thinly slice the potatoes into rounds. With the remaining oil, oil a 9-by-13-inch baking dish (I used an 8 1/2-by-11-inch dish and had stuff leftover to half-fill a 9-inch square pan). Arrange a layer of potatoes in the bottom of the dish and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover with a thick layer of meat sauce, then a layer of roasted eggplant, followed by a thin layer of meat sauce, then potatoes, and so on, ending with a layer of eggplant. Set the casserole aside.

Make the béchamel: In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. Stir in the flour and cook for about 3 minutes, until smooth and very light golden. Remove from the heat and immediately pour in the milk, whisking constantly. Return to the heat and cook, whisking constantly, until the sauce is thick and smooth. Remove from the heat and whisk in the egg. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and stir in the cheese, if using (I used some leftover grated mozzarella—or mootzadell, as they say on the show we're watching now while we wait impatiently for season 4 of The Wire to be released on DVD—but a Swiss-type cheese would be better).

Pour the béchamel over the top of the casserole, to completely cover it. Bake for I forget how long—maybe an hour or so, until lightly browned on top and the potatoes are soft. Let the moussaka sit for a while before scooping out squares of it. I made this in the morning, let it cool, stuck it in the fridge, then reheated it in the evening, and it didn't suffer too much. Cover with foil, put in the oven, set the oven temperature to 350 degrees, and heat for about 45 minutes, uncovering for the last 15.

This afternoon we set up a new pool in the yard (the first one was punctured, probably by the neighbors' cat, which I saw draped over one side of it). The bug had a grand time. The city pools are closed or on much-reduced hours now that it's August, but it sure feels like summer to me.

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Here she was meticulously putting sunscreen (and rubbing it in) on each magnolia leaf.

Dress

While the bug napped, I made a dress to go with the Wisp shawl thing (basically finished except for the hem and some finishing. I tried to copy a cotton slip from Banana Republic, but somehow it ended up more fitted, so I changed the shape of it a little. I think I'll make regular straps, maybe double-stranded, rather than tying them at the back, which is a look I like on other people but not me. I probably should've put a zipper in the side seam, but it works okay without one.

Curry Leaves

The bug and I went to an Indian-food potluck last night at Courtney's house, and for the occasion I learned to make one of my favorite (New York) Indian restaurant dishes, Mangalorean chicken, a southern Indian coconut-milk curry. I first made it last week, sticking close to this recipe, which is, I think, from the L.A. Times. After a little tweaking, here's what I came up with:

Mangalorean chicken

For the potluck, I used half thighs and half breast meat, adding the latter with the coconut milk so it didn't overcook and dry out. If you're only making enough for two or three large servings, though, just use thighs.

1 (1-inch) piece of ginger, peeled
3 cloves garlic
1 medium-size onion, roughly chopped
About 2 teaspoons ghee
2 medium-size tomatoes, halved and grated, skins discarded
2 cinnamon sticks
1 tablespoon green or white cardamom pods
1 tablespoon whole cloves
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs, trimmed and cut into large chunks
1 small (5.6-ounce) can coconut milk
1 1/2 teaspoons mustard seeds (black or yellow)
4 or 5 dried red chiles, stems removed
About 20 fresh curry leaves

Put the ginger and garlic in a mini food processor and finely mince them. Add the onion and process until finely diced but not pureed. Heat a little bit of the ghee in a large skillet over medium-high heat and add the onion mixture, tomatoes, cinnamon sticks, cardamom, cloves, cumin, coriander, turmeric, cayenne, and salt. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, for 15 to 20 minutes, until somewhat thickened.

Add the chicken and simmer over medium heat, uncovered, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Add the coconut milk and continue to simmer for about 5 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through.

Put the remaining ghee, the mustard seeds, chiles, and curry leaves in a small skillet over high heat. Cook, stirring constantly and pressing down on the chiles, for about 3 minutes, until the seeds begin to pop out of the pan and the chiles are blackened in spots. Scrape the ghee mixture into the chicken and stir to combine. Cook for 3 minutes longer, then serve. This is a picture of my earlier attempt; the revised dish looks the same except the sauce is thicker and smoother.

I also made a tindora dish that I think worked pretty well. You could probably use sliced okra or zucchini or yellow squash instead of tindora. Did not take a picture, but the tindora was very pretty and colorful—green skin, turmeric-yellow coconut flakes, and flecks of red pepper.

Curried tindora

This is similar to a recipe on Mahanandi. Next time I'd add some slivered onions. Look here for many more ideas for using tindora. I got them at the enormous upscale Super H Mart grocery outside Atlanta. H Mart is like an Asian Whole Foods, but cheap. It has sample tables that would put Costco to shame, Asian fast food counters where you can get sushi or noodles or dumplings or whatever, all the usual snacks and sauces and noodles and Asian ingredients (there's a whole section of several dozen different kinds of fresh kimchee—H Mart is primarily Korean, I believe), beautifully stacked produce, fresh fish, and reasonably priced meat.

1 teaspoon ghee
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 cloves garlic, sliced
About 1 pound tindora, trimmed and cut lengthwise into quarters
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
Large pinch of hot red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon dried unsweetened coconut
Salt to taste

In a skillet, combine the ghee, mustard seeds, cumin, and garlic and cook over high heat, stirring constantly, for about 3 minutes, until the mustard seeds start to pop out of the pan. Add the tindora and a tablespoon of water and cook, stirring frequently, until the tindora is softened but still crisp, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle in the remaining ingredients, tossing and stirring to coat the tindora evenly, and cook for 1 minute. Serve hot or at room temperature.

And here's one of my favorite little sweet treats, and probably the easiest thing you'll ever make. Pretty much straight out of Yamuna Devi's Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking. Some people said it reminded them of those Danish shortbread cookies that come in big round blue tins, or fudge, or real shortbread. They're buttery and toasty-nutty, and very delicate-textured.

Besan ladoo

3/4 cup ghee (see this post about how to make a large batch of ghee)
2 cups besan (chickpea flour; use the finest grind you can get)
2 tablespoons finely chopped walnuts
2 tablespoons dried unsweetened coconut
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
3/4 cup light brown sugar (Devi suggests maple sugar as an option)

In a heavy skillet over low heat, combine the ghee, besan, walnuts, coconut, and nutmeg. Cook, stirring constantly, for 5 to 7 minutes, until the mixture turns just a shade darker. Add the brown sugar and cook, stirring constantly, over low to medium-low heat, for about 5 minutes, until the mixture is the color of dark brown sugar. Be careful not to let the mixture burn, and keep stirring it from the bottom. Immediately scrape the mixture into a square baking pan and spread it evenly in the bottom so it's about 1/2 inch deep (this amount will half-fill a 9-inch square pan; just smush it into one side of the bottom of the pan), smoothing the top. Put in the refrigerator until firm, about 30 minutes, or let it cool and firm up at room temperature. Cut into tiny squares (a little goes a long way) in the pan, and lift them out carefully (they're a bit fragile). Keep refrigerated until an hour or so before serving time if the weather's hot.

Finished Wisp, and a Dumb Knitting Question

I finished the Wisp shawl thing from Knitty yesterday, and used about six hundred pins to wet block it on a cardboard sewing mat covered with some cloth and black plastic—satisfyingly, it dried in no time, so I could get on to the fun part: choosing buttons. I found some old shell buttons in my "vintage" button collection, but they seem a little too heavy still, so my mom is sending along some other options from the, er, mother lode of buttons. One group is apparently honey-colored antique plastic, which I think would look great.

I'm quite happy with my first lace attempt; I am especially happy that I had to use only one skein of Kidsilk Haze and even had a bit leftover—I did accidentally skip a row here or there, which probably helped. I didn't make eyelets in the button end of the rectangle—didn't see any point.

So here's a dumb question: How do you weave in ends so that they don't work their way out with wear? I take the yarn all different directions, and really try to get it woven in well, and stretch the material a bit to simulate how it stretches when the thing's worn, but I usually end up with little tufts. For example, on the Fetching fingerless gloves, of which I've made two pairs (yes, I just make whatever Cheryl Niamath tells me to; she puts me in mind of the architect turned fashion designer with like thirteen kids who was a runner-up on Project Runway), I get all sorts of ends coming out at the thumbs, even though I thought I was doing a really thorough weaving-in job. Does blocking help?

Tomato-Basil Jam

UPDATE 8/3/10: See the even better, less sweet, no-commercial-pectin version of this jam in my new book, Canning for a New Generation.

Tomato-Basil Jam

About 3 1/2 pounds tomatoes, peeled, cored, seeded, and diced
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1/4 cup torn fresh basil leaves
4 cups sugar
1 (1.75-ounce) packet powdered pectin such as Sure-Jell

Sterilize 5 half-pint jars (in boiling water for at least 10 minutes). Simmer the tomatoes, covered, in a heavy 6-quart pot for 10 minutes. Measure 3 1/2 cups tomatoes and juices and return them to the pot. Add the lemon juice, zest, and basil. Combine 1/4 cup of the sugar with the pectin and stir it into the tomato mixture. Bring to a full rolling boil over high heat, stirring constantly. Immediately stir in the remaining sugar. Return to a full rolling boil that cannot be stirred down, then boil hard, stirring constantly, for 1 minute. Skim off the foam with a metal spoon. Ladle hot into hot jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace; adjust the lids and process in a boiling-water bath for 5 minutes. Makes 5 half-pint jars.

This jam is best on a toasted English muffin with cream cheese.

The lemon zest really helps brighten the flavor, but my mom's original recipe doesn't call for it. Hers uses less sugar—3 cups—and low-sugar pectin, which when I tried it yielded a pretty aggressively jellied jam; it's also processed longer, for 15 minutes, but according to a very similar recipe in So Easy to Preserve a jam with the sugar–lemon juice–tomato proportions above should need only 5 minutes.

Smoke Ring

Sometimes my mom writes on Sundays and asks what we're smoking. If that question comes up this weekend I'll tell her Mr. Chalmers smoked a brisket, but did it differently this time (thank you, America's Test Kitchen, for inspiring us to load ourselves into the car and go to Hull and get a full-sized specimen—both sections, not just the pretty corned-beef part—so we could try it). Smoked with hickory for about three hours, with his spicy-salty-garlicky rub, then wrapped in foil and roasted in the oven at 300 degrees for another two. I took the drippings, defatted them as best I could, and simmered them with some sherry vinegar and ketchup (somewhere I read that Texas barbecue sauce, when they use it, is just drippings, vinegar, and ketchup), and added the quarter cup of salsa leftover from my canning session. Good sauce, but of course the meat didn't need it at all. We didn't know quite where to separate the two parts of the brisket, and ended up with three, stacked:

I'd like to show you a detail of the smoke ring on this one hunk. It's a blurry picture, but can you see that gorgeous pink?

While that was working, I canned some Uncle Lloyd's Salsa made with the great tomatoes we got at the farm on Sorrow Patterson. (I'm obsessed with this place, been there three times in the last week. It and Your Dekalb Farmer's Market are really all I need to feel like I have the world at my fingertips, as they say in that hot, deprived city up north. Today Mr. Chalmers came too, mostly, I suspect, to meet Sam the dog. It was sprinkling. The two high schoolers minding the tomatoes seemed like the most content and happy people in Madison County to me today.) This is the salsa my family has been canning for years—the vegetables are charred before being chunkily pureed in the blender and simmered till thick. It's a bit sweet, and hot. I like to stir a little into my fresh salsa of chopped tomatoes, onions, lime zest and juice, cilantro, chiles, vinegar, and granulated garlic (I know, I know: granulated garlic? But it tastes so good and metallic here, and fresh just isn't the same!).

Uncle Lloyd's Salsa

I'm just reprinting this almost verbatim from what my mom sent me, because I'm lazy about retyping recipes. My late uncle Lloyd was a little nuts when it came to spicy foods: the hotter the better. After broiling the peppers, I took the seeds out of most of them, and the salsa's plenty hot for me. (Also, the finished salsa is, well, less seedy, and nicer than it sometimes can be if you have extra-seedy jalapeños.) And I pulled off and discarded most of the tomato skins after they were broiled, leaving only the charred black bits.

15 to 20 plum tomatoes (I did not use plum tomatoes, but Mr. Chalmers glanced, or blinked—Malcom Gladwell–style, he said, he's so funny!—at the regular-tomato selection I'd laid out and said it looked like the equivalent of this many Romas to him)
15 red jalapeños (I used green)
12 cloves garlic
3 onions, cut in half
1 1/2 cups chopped green pepper (I omitted these)
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon salt

Spread all the vegetables in a large shallow pan and roast under high heat of the oven broiler. Turn the vegetables to roast evenly; some charring is necessary for best flavor. Cool to room temperature. Working in batches, chop the vegetables in a blender or food processor with 1/2 cup water, processing only until chunky. Put the vegetables in a large pot with the vinegar, sugar, and salt. Simmer over medium heat until thick, 20 to 30 minutes. Pour the salsa into hot pint jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace, wipe rims, and adjust the lids; process for 40 minutes in a boiling-water bath. This makes 3 pints plus a half-pint (I processed this for 15 minutes) a little leftover.

The other day I put up some tomato-basil jam, which tastes just like my parents' house in Viriginia in the summer when I was growing up. I'm going to rejigger the recipe a bit and if it works out I'll post it here. (The batch I made is great for my purposes, but it looks a little funny in the jars.)

I'll leave you with a picture of the bug I took a couple weeks ago, when it was much hotter than it was today. For an old house, the air conditioning in this place is pretty damn good, and she knows the best spot.

She's eating a rice cake, and that's Wagner to her left, waiting for crumbs.

Knitting Again

I'm knitting, if you can believe that. I abandoned the ridiculous Aran blanket I started back in October, and instead am doing Wisp, from the latest Knitty. Talk about pointless. It doesn't look like it'd keep one warm, or cool, or anything. It's just there. I'm doing it in Kidsilk Haze, sort of a taupe.

It's going pretty slowly; I've never used a lace yarn before, and it feels a little awkward and slippery. Still, it's nice to be knitting.

The Best Lunch Ever

I took the bug down Sorrow Patterson Road near Colbert this afternoon (can you name a more Southern-sounding road?), following a sign on the main road for tomatoes and fresh corn, and we came to this sort of family farm at the end of a winding lane, where they had tables loaded up with sweet corn and tomatoes and crookneck squash underneath an enormous shade tree. The bug fell in love with a deep-red Golden Retriever named Sam. The tomatoes are the best I've had in years, as is the corn. I asked what variety the corn is, but of course I couldn't understand a word of the response other than "Jack" (maybe) and "bicolor" (which is obvious from the context anyway). A dozen ears and two pounds of tomatoes cost four dollars:

I put a big pot of water to boil as soon as we got home, then sat out in the backyard and shucked, and the bug carried one ear around trying to take bites of it. It was a fine lunch, and if you're wondering about the lack of meat, note that for breakfast I had leftover leg of lamb that we'd spit-roasted on Saturday:

I boned a whole leg, and we stuffed whole cloves of garlic, rosemary, and oregano inside, wrapped it up and tied it (I figured it was worth finally learning how to tie a roast the proper way, and it's actually really simple and I don't know why I'd neglected to learn that all these years), rubbed it with olive oil, salt, and more herbs, and rotisseried it for maybe four or five hours. It was great with a simple yogurt and cucumber sauce, pitas, and green beans sautéed with fried onions and garlic and jalapeños.

Wild Blackberries

After the bug was in bed one evening recently I went up the road to the blackberry bramble and got as many as I could before I realized it wasn't worth the effort. It was too hot, even at dusk, too thorny, and I got too many fire ant bites to justify another round of picking. I didn't get that many, but made a sort of tart with them anyway, like I did a year ago. I think this year the berries were more bitter ("toxic," Mr. Chalmers called them, not inaccurately), but I like blackberries so much it didn't matter to me.

A few days later, I picked several handfuls of plump, very sweet wild blackberries that were growing next to the front porch, and the bug and I sat right down in the yard and ate them all, two or three at a time.

Here she is, postblackberries. I didn't look much less messy myself.

Mr. Chalmers's newly retired mom came down from New York to visit for a week, and we somehow managed to convince her to move to Athens! We took her to see houses, we kept the a/c cranked up, we kept her away from people with thick Southern accents, we gave her wine with dinner . . . But of course the real hero is the bug. This is big, since we don't have any other family nearby. Fun for the kid, fun for us, fun for her.

Grandma's last full day here was spent in the ER with the bug, who had gotten her finger crushed in the hinge side of the front door. I'd set her down on the porch while I closed the door and pushed the dogs back inside, and didn't even notice she was sticking her hand in the door until it was too late. She lost her whole fingernail, and she may or may not grow another one. (In the latter case, says Mr. Chalmers, she'll just have to stay in rural Georgia.) She was unbelieveably brave through it all, even though she was in terrible pain for a good long while. I read her stories as her grandma drove us to the hospital, and the little sweetie was trying so hard to pay attention to the story and ignore how much her finger hurt. She was also very patient as they took X-ray after X-ray, taping her hand down each time. (By the fourth or fifth one, though, she'd had about enough.) And she did really well with the hours of waiting in small rooms full of things that aren't toys. We can't keep a bandage on her finger, so we're just trying to keep it clean and Neosporined.

For the Fourth of July, Mr. Chalmers smoked brisket, chicken legs and thighs, and tofu, and I made a couple vegetables and a very good blueberry pudding cake. I tried to make a sweet potato pone from the Ebony cookbook, but something went horribly wrong. Anybody know of a better pone recipe? It should be like a sweet potato pudding, right, like in The Yearling?

We also blew up a huge "kiddie" pool and stuck it in the front yard and filled it up with ice-cold water. The bug was fascinated by it until we plunked her in it and she realized the water was ice-cold. A little while ago, though, I dragged a lawn chair up to the edge of the pool, and rolled her (new!) stroller next to the chair, and we both sat and splashed our feet in the water and she liked it. I did too.

"Happy"

The bug and Mr. Chalmers and I spread out on the front walkway and did fingerpainting yesterday. Here's a painting the bug made—with lots of help—as a card for me:

"Birthday" didn't fit.

That's a Father's Day card she's working on. The bathwater afterwards was dark brown.

She and I had played with sidewalk chalk the night before. She was up unusually late, and she saw fireflies for the first time and pointed at them and laughed. She tried to catch them. I handed her one, and she carried it around for a while.

Fun Foods

We had another fun trip to Your Dekalb Farmer's Market last weekend, spending most of our time in the fish section—Mr. Chalmers showed the bug the big tanks of live catfish and carp, and they watched the workers catch them in nets for customers. We came home with a couple of Florida mullet and a bunch of butterfish. Mr. Chalmers smoked the mullet that day, with cherry wood chunks. So far it's the bug's favorite food, smoked mullet. The next day I took one of the mullets and made a spread, like they do in the bug's home state.

Smoked mullet spread: Mince 1/2 small Vidalia onion in a mini food processor. Add flesh from 1 medium-sized smoked mullet and process until finely chopped but not pureed. Stir in some mayonnaise and hot pepper sauce (a vinegary cayenne one is good, like Crystal), and season with salt to taste. Add black pepper, too, if you like. There are other, more complex recipes out there, but this one really let the smoked mullet come through.

The bug licks the spread off the cracker, then waits, thinking it'll be refilled, then finally breaks down and eats the cracker.

We also got some neat vegetables. One was tindora, which I'd never seen before—they look like finger-sized cucumbers. I just got a few, then came home and looked up what to do with them.

Tindora.

Curry leaves I got here in Athens, at the place on Baxter Street, Taj Mahal. So wonderfully fragrant!

Here's what I did, very approximately, with no amounts; it's a combination of several recipes I found online:

Sautéed tindora: Cut tindora in half lengthwise. Heat a little ghee in a saucepan or sauté pan over high heat and add some black mustard seeds, cumin seeds, and plenty of fresh curry leaves; cook, stirring, until the seeds are fragrant and start to pop out of the pan. Add a little thinly sliced onion, some minced garlic and ginger, the tindora, and a few good pinches of salt and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the onion is soft but the tindora is still crunchy and crisp. Add a very small dash of asafoetida, if you have it, at the end. Try not to burn the spices or the garlic and ginger; cover the pan during part of the cooking to keep the vegetables from scorching.

In progress.

Also that day for supper I for some reason decided to make stuffed brinjal, or Thai eggplant, based loosely on a couple recipes, including one I can't link to for some reason on Mahanandi. I toasted a bunch of stuff:

Salted pistachios, dried chiles, sesame seeds, a few peanuts, coriander seeds, and cumin seeds. Cinnamon sticks also went in after I took this picture.

Then I ground it all up, adding a few curry leaves just because, and some ground cloves; it didn't seem like a "paste" to me, so I added a tablespoon of peanut butter (whatever . . . turns out I'd forgotton to add the tamarind, which would've made it more pastelike).

Tiny Thai eggplant or brinjal.

I cut a cross shape in the bottom of each eggplant, leaving the stem ends intact, and stuffed the paste inside.

Then I heated some ghee and a little vegetable oil in a skillet with the usual mustard seeds and cumin seeds, added the rest of the paste (a bit less than half of what I used for stuffing) and a couple cups of water, a glob of tamarind concentrate, having remembered it, and about a tablespoon of palm sugar. Then just set the stuffed eggplant in the sauce, covered the skillet, and let them cook, turning them over about halfway through.

The sauce gets much darker and thicker once it's cooked for a while.

It was a good supper, with some leftover dal (with lentils, bulghur, yellow split peas, and wheatberries, plus cauliflower), paratha (frozen ones from the Indian market), and broiled chicken tikka masala skewers.

Addendum: Not only did Stringer Bell die in the "Wire" episode we watched last night (sniff), but a neighbor dog running loose through our yard got our chicken, also running loose but not as fast. Our own dogs were going nuts, and I went to see what was happening, and just caught a glimpse of the big black dog sprinting away with the bird in its mouth. As Mr. Chalmers said, chicken had a better, longer life than most of his kind here in Madison County in the heart (or maybe just at the edge) of the poultry belt. I don't know if I'll ever get over it—"The Wire" without Stringer Bell, that is.