I decided I am going to get some and I am baking some damned Xmas cookies. Where am I and when did I turn into Martha Stewart’s inept cousin from Indiana?
Monthly Archive for November, 2009
The recipe is from one of those ancient wire-bound cookbooks in my mom’s collection that is covered in splatters of sauce from holidays past. This stuff has reached legendary status in my mind as part of my mom’s culinary repertoire, the one thing I can never get enough of, and the one thing I will fight for at the dinner table once the cheese grits are eaten and gone. Now that I reflect on it, this is probably the most passive-aggressive of holiday dishes, in that if you resent your family you can just feed them cornbread stuffing until their arteries harden.
I made it this year since Mom was down and out after knee surgery and my sister was kid-wrangling most of the morning, and frankly, because I wanted to claim ownership of the dish this year. It was the one piece of Lauren’s Thanksgiving Bake-Off that was successful this week, wherein FOR WHATEVER REASON I peeled pearl onions instead of buying them canned*, crafted a batch of yeast rolls that cooked up hard and tasteless**, cooked up some cheese grits that while pretty didn’t manage to set***, and forgot all about green food on the Thanksgiving table. But the stuffing: it was good.
First you bake off a large slab of unsweetened cornbread, think a 9×12 dish. Melt ONE STICK OF BUTTER in a Dutch oven. Fry up about one half pound of sausage and one pound of ground beef in the butter. Dump in a chopped onion, several cloves of chopped garlic, and a couple sticks of chopped celery, and cook them with the meat and butter mixture until they’re tender. Then add ANOTHER STICK OF BUTTER, 12-ish ounces of chicken broth, and a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, and let this simmer for a little under two hours. Crumble up the cornbread into this mixture gradually while stirring, and season with salt, black pepper, red pepper, chili powder and paprika to taste. If it looks a little dry add more chicken broth to moisten the mixture. SERVE.
So basically, make a meat and butter soup and add cornbread. It’s ridiculous. And delicious.
____________
* I’m going to do this more often since I love onions so much. Buy a little bag of fresh pearl onions and boil them in water for about 3-5 minutes. Strain them and wait until they’re cool, then you can cut off the root end and squeeze the edibles out the bottom. So good sauteed.
** I don’t know what I did wrong, especially since the dough itself was perfect.
*** Two eggs, not one. Next time remember to bring the recipe.
I don’t know what my problem is, but I’m recently obsessed with baking things. The cooking blogs, they don’t help, with their delicious cookies, the chocolates, the gingers, the vanilla beans, the glistening sugars, icings piped along the edges of pastel petit fours. I pass special edition, holiday-themed cookie baking magazines in the grocery store and have to stop myself. No, Lauren, it’s just another fancier version of the same old sugar cookie, you can buy those decorative silver balls anywhere, stop it.
I’m refraining from making yeast rolls tonight. Maybe.
Because my mom isn’t feeling well, my sister and I are taking on the Thanksgiving cooking at Mom’s house this year. I put myself in charge of the stuffing (my family’s cajun cornbread stuffing, I die) and cheese grits, and made the executive decision to pass up on a brick of green bean casserole in favor of sauteed green beans. Green bean casserole is the asshole of the dinner table.
Most substantial blogging is going on at Feministe, or rather, Feministe in Exile, while we figure out the database issues from this autumn’s hack.
The holiday season is coming on, which means many of our weekends are full of parties, some of which Chef has to work. Tonight, a private charity dinner at Kokoro for local players which I’m only invited to because I married the help. Soon, Beaujolais.
I’ve recommitted myself to exercise, for the first time seriously since I graduated from college. I used to be a runner, way back when, and I was a relatively solid athlete for most of my youth. I think I just got so used to the decadence of really great food and wine available at arm’s length that I forgot that if I’m going to regularly indulge myself I’d better balance it with a more active lifestyle. I’ve been at it for about a month, and already my clothes fit better and I’m sleeping well for the first time in about five years. I’m still not buying a scale.
This is probably the last nice weekend we’re going to have this year, weather-wise. I’m set on enjoying my Sunday.
Recent Comments