Drink Pretty Creature

Like many couples, Brainiac and enjoy the occasional evening out sans offspring. Happy hour, with its drink specials and snacky bites, is a particular favorite and we are quite devoted to 25-cent wing nights. Yes, it's true - I of the homemade pickles and organic peach jam can be bought at the low, low cost of a glass of sauvignon blanc and a plate of extra-hot Buffalo wings. I'd be hard pressed to even pretend shame so let's not bother.

Anyway, our recent cocktail culture habits have given rise to a new obsession: bar snacks. In case you lead a completely upstanding life and are unaware, it's not uncommon for bars to put out little bowls of this or that nibble, a salty lagniappe designed to encourage the purchase of yet another refreshing adult beverage. Alert drinkers might notice pretzels or nuts or the like and, in the best establishments, these are not stale (I sometimes suspect the purchase of vast warehouses of, say, bagel chips and have believed on occasion that a snack dating to Ronald Reagan's first term in office is being thrust in my direction. This practice must be discouraged by taking one's custom elsewhere. Life is too short, friends.)

Even when the bar snacks are up to code, we may not be heading out as often as we'd like (see also: the new frugality), preferring to stay in and have pals in for a drink and a bite. The drinks part is easy because, honestly, people just aren't that picky no matter what they claim to the contrary but when it comes to the accompaniments, standards must be kept. The ideal bar snack should 1) be able to be prepared ahead, 2) be served without need of cutlery or, heck, even a napkin, 3) enhance the taste of a wide variety of drinksies and 4) taste great. Hitting all four points is harder than you might expect but by gosh I try.

As I type I'm roasting chick peas seasoned with cayenne, adobo, black pepper and chili powder. The smell is fantastic but early taste tests are not promising. I remain convinced that the method will work, however. Open cans, drain and dry the chick peas, spread in a sprayed, rimmed cookie sheet and roast away at 450 degrees, having sprinkled very generously with whatever flavor seems like it might work. Next try: garam masala and amchuur powder.

I've got a cocktail bug for okra, too. Sliced and dry roasted with similarly prepared hot peppers...I don't know. In my mind it's crispy and blisteringly spiced and completely absent the okra slime factor. Maybe covered in cornmeal? I don't want to mess with frying and being stuck in the kitchen, though, not when I'm supposed to be perched perkily on an ottoman listening to my friend J. hold forth about her very disastrous, painful, and hysterically funny honeymoon (it's o.k., they're still married).

One of my favorite restaurants here nearby the homestead pretty much serves only meat. I know, its insane. Great, though, and I refuse to bend my mind toward even possibly thinking otherwise. This place serves bacon as an appetizer, and it is awesome - thick cut and slow roasted and just as full of umami as you could want. Another restaurant I enjoy sells house-cut bacon cured to order and I might see my way clear to trying to replicate such a snack at home. I've seen variations of brown-sugar bacon or bacon wrapped around whatnot but I think when it's all said and done, the sugar and the whatnots (scallops, artichoke hearts, water chestnuts) are really just excuses to eat bacon and wherever possible I advocate for the elimination of excuses. This, I feel, has promise as a drinks go-along.

Finally, I've also been messing around with papdum, which have the great advantage of being very quick to prepare even though you must fry them. They're so fast that you can cook up an enormous tower of papdum - I like the black pepper and chili varieties - and still have time wipe the counter and change your shirt before the doorbell rings. They stay crispy and are as whispy as angel's breath even has they pack a huge flavorful punch. You can serve them with chutneys but it's not necessary.

None of these snacks costs much - less than a dollar per snacker for very generous portions - or requires much in the way of effort, but all add so much to the experience of sitting and enjoying a laugh with good pals. At the very least you will have spared your friends yet another bowl of chips and salsa. Or, goodness forbid, Reagan-era bagel chips.

Old and Full of Days

I am tired. Like, seriously tired. I could point to any number of reasons why this is so, but I think I'll bump up the most pleasant right to the top of the list: I am tired because I am having too much darn fun. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. To the rest of the possible reasons for my tiredness (work, stress, money, health, diet, schedule, etc., etc., etc.), thank you for your application but the position has already been filled.

Looking at the calendar I can see not a single moment from now until well after New Year's Day when I cannot tell you right now where I will be and what I'll be doing, more or less. I don't mind this terribly much. Surprises and spontaneity are increasingly unpleasant experiences and I am pleased to be able to look ahead a few weeks and know that I need a box of Legos, a rubber frog, pink glitter, a roasted hunk o' beef, a blue t-shirt, a bottle of chocolate stout, or a football-themed sheet cake, and also precisely on which days these are true. Predictability is the order of the day.

With that in mind, the advanced date reminds me that it's time for my annual rant on gift-giving, homemade-edness and celebrations. Or, we can skip it and go for the following instead, my favorite sources and resources for holiday crafting and gifting fun (please note this SPOILER ALERT in the event that you are related and/or are in a gift giving relationship with me):

- Sew Mama Sew has launched its annual Handmade Holidays series of tutorials gathered from all corners of the web. Wonderful inspiration for homemade gifts for nearly any interest or need of which you can think and for just about any skill level. Don't forget to peruse the archives of previous years' series. My nieces and nephews are (probably; see also having lots of fun and near miss on complaining about the calendar) receiving keyrings made of fabric tied (ha!) to their interests and personalities, a project posted two years ago, I think. I'd like to make them the "Don't Get Out of Bed" pants from this year's collection, but I don't think my skills are up to it (yet).

- I am also making up a number of jars of Cowgirl Cookies, except mine won't be Cowgirl Cookies. Follow? What I mean is that I'm making Buffalo Sabres cookies (blue and yellow candies), Dalmatian cookies (black and white candies), UB Bulls cookies (blue and white candies) and so on. That I have a brand spanking new Wegmans grocery at hand, what with their 99 cent 5-lb. bags of flour and bulk candy section makes this fun, easy and inexpensive. I cannot WAIT for my Sabres-obsessed nephew to open his cookie jar and start bugging my sister to bake 'em up right away. That's the kind of aunt I am.

- I have rediscovered ShrinkyDinks, a craft of my childhood. They're back! Who knew? Well, my five-year old knew and now announces with great regularity that she'd like to "shrink some dinks". For holiday gift giving of the aforementioned cookie mixes or jams or spiced honey or dipping sauce, I'll be making little Shrinky Dink tags that can then be saved or put on a tree or whatever. A small tangible reminder of the consumable gift, you know? A search through Microsoft Powerpoint or via Google Images for whatever key word one seeks (Buffalo Sabres, Dumpling, or Honey, for example) will likely yield an embarrassment of traceable riches for coloring and subsequent shrinking (remember, this method is NOT for commercial application, let's not take food off of designers' plates or run regrettably afoul of licensing laws, yes?). I'm no artist and if my tags work out o.k., I'll post some pictures.*

- For your baking pleasure, please see my friend Susie J at Christmas Baking. Every year I say it but it bears repeating: the gingerbread recipe is super-plus fantastic and should all the seasonal merriment makes you sleepy you could do worse than whip up a batch of mokka in response.

- If, like me, you need a gift-giving back up plan and you'd rather it didn't involve traffic, lines, or, heck, even bothering to dress I recommend Etsy and Artfire. I bought a number of gifts from Etsy last year (and in the time since) and have been pleased with each and every one. It can be hard to find what you need or want, and judicious application of key words goes a long way.

- Finally, don't forget YouTube as a source for wildly inventive tutorials on everything from knitting to making candy wreaths to gingerbread house hacks. Expanding my use of the site from nostalgic explorations of both teen-dream and more recent crushes (!) I can profess a legit educational application the type of which I'd heard about but not quite endorsed. I may set my children to work making smaller candy wreaths for their teachers (or at least as much of the wreaths as they will before a ravenous desire for the candy supplies and/or more complaining than I am willing to tolerate set in).

This weekend is the elementary school fund raising auction. Brainiac is feeling very competitive that our contribution of a Scotch-and-Cigar basket (designed to tempt the men away from the spa outings and girls-night-out packages) raises lots of money. For my part, I'm just looking forward to the first event of the rest of the year. With wine.

* Regular readers know better than to count on this. I'm always promising pictures and rarely deliver. Sorry.

Take Note

Take one youth football season (with it's thrice weekly practices and twice weekly games) and throw in with it a long-gestated corporate acquisition the scale of which will haunt me for years, four weeks of some kind of odd, exhausting respiratory illness for three-quarters of the domicile's inhabitants, and the further destructive machinations of another company that I never really did like all that much and what you get is a home cook that just hasn't been feeling it.

My name is Marsha (hello, Marsha) and my kids are eating an awful lot of hot dogs. Sure, they're local, nitrate-free hoity-toity dogs but that only gets you so far when they're on the menu as much as has been recently. Life hasn't been so terribly bad, I don't think, after all it's not as if they haven't been treated to a (swanky)PB&(homemade)J now and then. On bread that has 4 grams of fiber per slice! So there is that. (This is just between us, right?)

In the last day or so something seems to have snapped loose and Brainiac found me last night preparing a shopping list while sitting on the sofa and nearly buried in cookbooks. Some (Bistro Cooking and and the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook) were old friends, some (Make it Fast, Cook it Slow and Modern Spice) were newer favorites. For some reason it seemed terribly important to immerse myself in print rather than bytes for, although I considered running to Epicurious or All Recipes, I couldn't quite drum up the interest in what seemed at the time to be a very sterile, almost transactional, activity. I wanted to hold those books, cross-reference, sticky-mark, note the messages I've left to my future self reminding me to up the borage or leave out the tamarind or cook for ten minutes longer than specified or whatever.

I emerged two or three hours later filled with plans for, well, not hot dogs. Pho! Agrodolce! Amanda Hesser's Pasta with Yogurt! Rice and beans! (Yes, really.) Like the cookbooks that inspired them, so of the dishes on the list are old reliables to which I'm returning after a long break while others will be new adventures. The family is always a little suspicious when I start trying to shake things up (remind me to tell you about my very project-managed midlife crisis some time). As we shopped today and the kids tripped over each other to help pull ingredients off shelves, I talked about each and what we would do with it - the red curry and the walnut oil and the ginger all have a story to tell - and they took my ideas and my list and my recipes and threw back at me their own. Can we make a focaccia or maybe a socca? What about the dolmades? Can we make our own instead of buying from the "tapas bar"?

It looks like there is, indeed, life after hot dogs (and PB&Js).

From the Back of Beyond

I admit that this doesn't look really that great. Tastes good, though, and that's pretty much what we're about Chez Hot Water Bath. These are - or will be - marinated mushrooms (sort of) à la Edon Waycott in Preserving the Taste. I tend not to add the amount of herbs Ms. Waycott recommends, preferring a more basic, and hence flexible, pickle. The idea is the same, though, and I highly recommend you get your hands on the book and mix up a batch as soon as possible. Since I'm the only person in my house who will consent to eat mushrooms of any kind for any reason (although they do occasionally eat them without their consent - I have excellent knife skills*) eight or ten half-pint jars will serve me well for the winter as long as have the willpower to refrain from opening one until at least Thanksgiving (that's the end of November for the non-U.S. among us - Hi Uzbekistan!).

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently ran one of what I've come to think of as OHMIGOSH! It's still possible to can at home! articles. I am greatly amused by the breathless tone of these pieces but cannot stop myself from reading. This one is better than most and I recommend a perusal if you've got the time. For one thing, it contains practical advise and recipes. For another, the author manages to avoid reaching for the we're-so-hip-and-retro paintbrush.

This is a holiday weekend here in the U.S., three days when we're to be honoring and thinking about the laborers who sweated and toiled in the building of the nation. Many of us celebrate by heading to the beach or the mountains or staying home with barbecue tongs in hand. For my part, I'm looking at some raspberries that are fairly crying out to be made into jam. It may not be quite what the originators of the observance had in mind, but I promise that I'll be sweating and toiling in its making.

It's good to be back. For the record, bloggy friends, AppleCare was spectacular, if a bit disorganized, in the replacing of our damaged keyboard. Would that I could place a few non-computer issues on their capable shoulders.

* There are entire books revolving around how to hide this or that dreaded ingredient in somesuch more easily acceptable dish. Generally speaking, I don't love the idea of, say, spinach puree in my brownies. That said, there are certain recipes that everyone in this house loves - bigos, for one, and my vegetarian Bolognese sauce - but would fall completely flat without a good healthy half-pound or so of mushrooms. I am unrepentant on this point.

Jezebel Cannerbel

Online mag Jezebel published a first-person essay on canning today, prompting a very long and hugely entertaining comments thread. It's hard to say where readers are coming down on canning, pro or con, after the author's unequivocal stance of anti-.

Go, read, enjoy. Then come back and share your thoughts. The most thrilling aspect of the discussion to me is that so many people had experiences to relate - either they were intimately involved in a canning project or have known and loved others who were. And, truthfully, although the stories of canning-gone-wrong made me cringe a bit (I feel a certain amount of pressure to relate only success stories but goodness knows I hear of/experience my share of failures) they're mostly pretty funny. I wonder if I'd ever gone through with the ill-conceived Orangina project if I'd make someone laugh as hard as I have reading some of these. It's almost worth trying again to find out.