Food

The Rumspringa of Dessert

I may or may not have spent my birthday dinner at a Medieval Times (“Dinner and Tournament!”) eating chicken legs with my fingers and wearing a paper crown that barely squeezed over my head. It was amazing. There were long-haired horses and sequined wizards and pina coladas served in glow-in-the-dark challices.

I may or may not have considered buying a commemorative place mat.

I may or may not have greedily reached directly into the path of a 10-year-old girl named Kaytlyn while attempting to grab a pink carnation mid-air shortly after it was thrown into the crowds by The Green Knight, who was, clearly, aiming that carnation in my direction. After all, it was my birthday. Okay it was her birthday too but I’m 23 years her senior which means I have 23 less years to catch pink carnations from guys on saddles. So don’t act like I didn’t have it coming, KAYTLYN.

Because it was my birthday (and if that isn’t a good excuse to eat crap, I don’t know what is) I decided to shelf any health-conscious food choices for a couple of days. Okay maybe it was four days. Ease up.

I had been looking forward to a scoop of fried ice cream from my favorite Mexican restaurant for months but it paled in comparison to the pastries and treats that paraded into my life this weekend. Using my new-found-carefree-33-year-old sense of abandonment, I happily drove a fork into each one of them.

It was Heaven. It was gluttonous. It was the rumspringa of dessert.

Sigh…

Now it’s Monday. The glow has worn off and all I want is an Alkaseltzer and a bucket of raw vegetables.

Hello salad bar.

*** For anyone (like me) who gets annoyed by people posting a excessive instagram photos of food (like me), you should read this sometime.

So who’s bringing the salsa?

by PEACHES 4 Comments

The world is divided into two different types of people:

People who buy bags of tortilla chips.
People who make their own.

The rift is wide. Deep. Controversial, you might even say.

Some folks would never dream of frying things in their home because it’s messy and gross and makes them feel like they are living in a fast food restaurant; while some folks wouldn’t be caught dead buying a six-month-old bag of chemical laden and crispified chips in the store when they can make their own with a 39cent bag of tortillas and a quality, heart healthy oil.

It’s not hard to tell which group I belong to.

Question is, who’s bringing salsa?

The Good. The Bad. The Gelatinous.

by PEACHES 6 Comments

Better Homes & Gardens Salad Book, 1958

Y’all have to see this.

A random hunt for an old Thanksgiving cardamom roll recipe sent my skipping down the catacombs of my cookbook collection. You know what I found? I’ll tell you — I found 128 pages of Straight Up Crazy.

Look at the page on the left. There are so many things wrong with this…

#1 Why is the word meat in quotation marks?

#2 If you were preparing to party down, would really want to whoop it up with meat? Much less meat in quotation marks?

#3 The photo above it on the page features ham and olive jello pâté. Seriously. Jello with ham and olives. I know food trends change, and you would probably be grossed out by some things that I find appealing, but seriously. Ham and olives in jello?

It blows my mind.

Who thinks of these things? And more important, who buys these books?

Oh, crap. I buy these books.

I don’t have a lot of warm and fuzzy memories of Thanksgivings of yore. As an adult, I have usually needed to work that weekend, and as a kid, Thanksgivings at Grandnanna’s house were usually spent locked in the basement with Orange Crush soda and a bucket of fried chicken. Don’t get me wrong, neither one is a bad way to spend the day but they are certainly a far cry from Norman Rockwell-esque images of a cozy family gathered around a lace tablecloth strewn with harvest bounty.

Thanksgiving at Grandnanna’s house was always something of a dichotomy; the adults would enjoy elegant food and football upstairs while the kids would play Chucky Cheese style in the basement. Since no adults wanted to spend their holiday supervising the basement chaos, the room had to be thoroughly “kid proofed” with tarps and duct tape. The Franklin Mint collector plates were relocated to higher ground and the gun rack was double bolted. Even the ping pong table was put away for fear someone would misuse the paddles. Little did they know Tiny Alice was always crafty enough to unbolt the table legs and use them as stilts, repeatedly bumping her head on the basement ceiling tiles until that one time when she got a clump of hair caught in an air duct…but that’s a story for another time.

Early on in the day, the games started peacefully…Parcheesi, Yahtzee, Duck-Duck-Goose, Hungry-Hungry Hippos…by the time the food arrived we were on to Cowboys and Indians….eventually the little kids would hit their sugar crash and doze in the laundry room while the big kids would start playing dodge ball with Grandnanna’s bomb shelter supplies. Fun was had by all! Canned ham and old batteries would whiz across the room until someone, inevitably, chipped a tooth on a projectile can of fruit cocktail and the sight of blood would be enough for the door at the top of the stairs to unlock.

A stampede of kids would rush the steps and within a minute, the elegant party was overrun with sticky fingers and questions like Who is Tom Collins and why can’t I have one?

The rooms were lined with card tables displaying tall, gaudy flower arrangements clustered by colorful platters of finger foods. Blue daisies and Hawaiian themed appetizer trays were a particular household favorite, as was anything suspended in gray Jello or nestled in a ring of cheese salad. Mmm….who’s hungry?

Thanksgiving y’all – it drudges up all kinds of strange. The good. The bad. The gelatinous.

Favorite Thing: Autumn Apple Picking

by PEACHES 4 Comments

Some people say summer ends with Labor Day. Others claim it’s the Fall Equinox. In my house, autumn begins with an apple picking.

This time of year, when the light is bright and the air is crisp, there is something in me that itches to get out in the country. Places with no streetlights. Places with more tractors than people. Call it my inner farm girl, but I tell you, there is nothing more satisfying than taking in the harvest.

OK OK OK…“the harvest” was barely a bushel and it came with wine tasting and there were no combines or overalls involved…but gosh darnit, it felt great!

As a city dweller, apple picking is something of an excursion. It takes two hours to get to a decent orchard but man is it worth the trip! If you have never enjoyed what it feels like to grow your own food or to pluck it from the Earth, I suggest you start with apples. Apple orchards are pretty easy to find all over North America, and they make for a wonderful adventure. Depending on the type of apple, the arrival time will be staggered throughout the Fall, so you a re pretty much guaranteed to walk away with something great. And there is something wonderfully symbolic about apples. So beautiful. So wholesome. Fresh. Clean.

A visit to the apple orchard has become something of an annual tradition. I like to go with friends and pack a picnic. This year we went just down the road from my favorite Blueberry Farm, DeGrandcahmps, to McIntosh Orchards and Winery, in South Haven Michigan. Did you ever find someplace off the beaten path that was so special that you didn’t want to tell anyone for fear the secret would get out and ruin your special discovery? McIntosh is like that. I’m tempted to keep a lid on it, but the family that runs this place is so special and their goods are so wonderful, I feel like it’s a disservice to keep it to myself. Honestly, my standards are high. This place exceeded all expectations. If you or anyone you know lives within an hour of Chicago, I highly suggest you forward this post or this link asap. Kids and adults will enjoy themselves silly and they will thank you for it later.

McIntosh Orchard isn’t just an apple orchard, no no no, it’s a cider mill and winery. They carry lot’s of semi-dry fruit wines…blueberry, apple, peach, pear, plum…all excellent and around $10 a bottle. A bargain. As someone who saves their sommelier skills for Diet Coke tasting, I cannot claim to be an expert, however, I know a good thing when I see it: this is Good Stuff. They also sell a lovely collection of gift items, including these lovely milk bottle candles. One of those items that I saw and said “Why didn’t I think of that?!”…so easy to make, but the smell of these candles….oh how I wish the internet could convey smell! These candles where so delicious. And can you read their names? That one up front in called Barn Dance, and yes, it really does smell like a barn dance! Like fresh pine and a wood burning stove with a hint of citrus and musk.

Just a little further down the Blue Star Highway is my ALL TIME FAVORITE ANTIQUE PLACE: Sunset Antiques. It is unfair to call it antiques, really, more like a well-edited collection of eccentric rif raf, or what the call “junque” (somehow saying “junk” in semi-fake-French makes it more legit). Most of it is outdoors, shaded by a gigantic elm tree.Well over an acre. They carry everything from old restaurant signs to astronaut suits to taxidermy moose heads to wooden doors…all of it dirt cheap. I’m still kicking myself for not buying that Hurdy Gurdy!

*Sigh*

Back to life, back to reality.
I see a lot of apple baking in my future!

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