Not even Krupnik is safe

Burning Maple Forest

12oz maple syrup
2/3 Cup brewed smokey tea, hot (I used one that I dubbed "Burning Village," an uncomplicated, Chinese smokey black tea)
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 green cardamom pod
4 sticks cinnamon
lemon and orange zest (about 2 strips of each)
2 Cups cheap vodka

empty bottle
no fuss double boiler (pyrex measuring cup in a saucepan of hot water)

Don't use good vodka. If you buy something in a 750ml bottle and have an extra bottle of equal size, make a double batch. It will use everything perfectly. You won't need to measure the vodka. Just pour half of the full bottle into the empty one.

Pour the vodka into an empty bottle. Start steeping your tea. (1 tsp of leaves in 190F water)

Using a double boiler method, warm the maple syrup. (Heat a saucepan with enough water to make a bath for the glass measuring cup, no deeper than 3/4 the height of the cup deep.) Add the nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, and zest. Allow to infuse on low heat for 5 minutes.

Carefully remove the measuring cup from your saucepan. Pour the warm maple syrup infusion into the bottle with the vodka. Pop the citrus zest and cinnamon into the bottle, but do not add the cardamom pods. (It should not age with the cardamom in it.) Pour your brewed tea into the measuring cup, then add to the bottle. If there is any space left, top off with hot tea.

Cap. Do not touch for at least 2 weeks. It will improve if left longer.

This is a variation on Krupnik, which uses honey, plain water, 2 whole cloves, no cardamom, double the cinnamon, and one whole vanilla bean, split lengthwise (or 1 tsp vanilla extract).

Roasted Parsnip Soup

It started with this recipe for spicy parsnip soup: Jamie Oliver's soup.

Tired of the repetitious paring of coconut milk with curry seasoning and appalled by a recipe that makes enough soup to swim in, I restructured the whole thing. It becomes vegan very easily.

2 parsnips
2 TBL butter or high-heat oil (suggestion: sunflower oil)
1/4 tsp salt

1 TBL olive oil
1 Cup Vegetable stock (homemade)
1 can (15 oz) Coconut milk (Trader Joe's light coconut milk)
1 small red onion (about 1 Cup, chopped)
1/4 C celery
2 cloves of garlic (at least), chopped
1/2 a carrot
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
1/2 tsp dried sage
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp fresh parsley


Onion, garlic, and herbs are to taste. Feel free to use fresh herbs if you have them on hand.

Preheat your oven to 425F. Peel your parsnips (you don't have to, but it will make the soup prettier) and slice into thin (1/4") circles. Cut each circle again into 4. The faster way to do this is to cut each parsnip in half, then split the half lengthwise, then cut two longs at a time as if you were cutting half-circles. You want an end result of confetti sized pieces that will roast quickly.

A 9"x12", 1" deep pan is the perfect roasting pan size. Put butter and parsnip confetti into the pan and into the oven for 2 to 5 minutes, until the butter is melted. If using oil, skip to the next step. Remove, and stir the parsnips around so that they get a good coating of butter. Sprinkle with salt. Set a timer for 20 minutes and let those beauties roast. Give them another stir up during the roasting if you like. They should be tender but should not be soft; think "al dente".

Chop your onions, garlic, and parsley. Slice the celery. Cut the carrot into thin (1/8") coins. Half a carrot is plenty; just eat the rest! Proceed when the parsnips are roasted.

In a medium saucepan, saute the onions & celery in oil until the onions start to become clear. Add your garlic, and saute one more minute. Lower heat. Add your roasted parsnips. Add your sage, rosemary, thyme, and carrot. (If you are using dry or frozen parsley, add it now.) Add with vegetable stock and coconut milk. Stir.

Cover and allow to simmer for 20 minutes (already on the timer, how convenient!). Check your parsnips for tenderness. If they are not soft enough for your taste, allow another 10 minutes of cooking on low heat.

Sprinkle with parsley before serving.

From Food

This photo does not do this soup justice. Peeling and roasting the parsnips makes the soup a creamy golden tone, and the carrot coins create accent points of color without being flavor bullies.

The Pastry Crust that Works

Here is the pastry crust recipe from Great American Home Baking: Chicken Pot Pie. It's usually successful when made exactly to recipe. I think it would also work with shortening instead of butter. It can be made several days ahead as long as it is well sealed in the refrigerator against air.

1 1/2 Cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 Cup chilled butter, cut into pieces
1 large egg
2-3 Tablespoons ice water

To prepare pastry, in a medium bowl, mix together flour and salt. Using a pastry blender or 2 knives, cut butter into flour until course crumbs form.

In a small bowl, beat together egg and water. Add to the flour mixture. Mix lightly until a soft dough forms. Shape into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour.

On a lightly floured surface, using a lightly floured rolling pin, roll out the pastry to fit your dish. Bake at 400 F. (This is from a pot pie recipe with a 25-30 minute bake time.)

No Mayo Hot (or Cold) Spinach Artichoke Dip

Nearly all the recipes for hot artichoke dip have the same components of mayonnaise and cream cheese. Take those ingredients and the cheese into account, and no amount of but-it-has-green-vegetables justification can spin artichoke dip as anything but a high-fat treat. The only thing wrong with a high-fat food is that you may not want to eat much of it for health reasons, but you do want to eat lots of it because it's so very nom-worthy.

Replacing the cream cheese with neufchatel or using sour cream (lowfat or regular, but never, ever non-fat if you still want your dip to taste like something you want to eat) is one way to dial down the fat and calories. That still leaves the mayo. I have the kind of relationship with mayo that I've had with an ex-fiance: I quit it, then came back to it, decided that it was still good for something, then packed all my belongings and moved to another state. No, really. I stopped eating mayonnaise all together when I lived in California, and it wasn't until I moved to Washington that I started eating it again. I've had good mayonnaise and bad. The reason why I have a jar of store-brand mayo in my refrigerator is an effort to quit mayonnaise again. (If I buy the good stuff, the aioli or lemonaise or organic all-natural mayo, I may never quit.) The reason I didn't want to make my artichoke dip tonight with mayo is because I the mayo that I have in my refrigerator is terrible. It makes me think of glue or play-dough. Because I can't throw away food, there it stays.

What is mayonnaise anyway in its purest state, except 1)oil, 2)egg, 3)vinegar, and 4)salt. My mother used to make aioli to go with a particular dinner that she would make. I have watched the magic first hand: a slow, thin, steady stream of virgin olive oil falling into the beating blades of a hand mixer, creating the thick, glossy condiment. I'll tell the truth; I didn't like my mom's aioli either. It was too rich with egg yolk and heavy oil. Until I discovered fresh-within-a-day eggs from Bett's farm -- a story for another day -- I never knew there were real eggs that I liked.

I made my dip instead with regular olive oil, a splash of cider vinegar, and quark. This was only my second time trying quark. Although it had not made a strongly positive first impression, I purchased it because it was on sale for half the usual price. I'm not sure if its less-than-delicious, slightly metallic, bland flavor by itself is because it's short dated. I sort of remember that I didn't love it the first time for a similar assessment of its flavor. However, quark seems to do fine when stronger flavors are mixed in to it.

I mixed everything into the food processor. Then I scooped it out into a saucepan to make it into hot dip. Since there was nothing in it that needed to be cooked to prevent food-born illness, I'm sure this would also be fine as a cold dip. The flavor was bright and fresh. The following ingredients are what I happened to have on hand.

No Mayo Hot (or Cold) Spinach Artichoke Dip

1 Cup washed baby spinach leaves
1 can (13 oz) whole artichoke hearts (not seasoned or marinated, and quarters would work fine)
1/4 C olive oil
2 tsp apple cider vinegar (the good kind, Bragg's, that has mother-of-vinegar)
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp garlic powder
2/3 C shredded parmesian cheese (I used 1/3 mystery hard leftover-from-party parmesian-like cheese and 1/3 C actual parmesian)
1/4 C quark

Assemble everything in the order listed into a food processor set up with the chopping blade. Pulse until you have small pieces but still a chunky consistency. Move to a saucepan and heat 3 to 5 minutes on low flame, stirring constantly. It will boil, so really, keep stirring until you turn off the heat. Serve with pita chips or bread item of choice.

I don't see any reason why you can't do this in a bowl, but if you don't have a mezzaluna to do the chopping, you may want to cut the artichoke hearts and spinach into small pieces before mixing everything up. The key to a really tasty artichoke dip is vegetable pieces that are confetti sized, to get an orchestra of flavor.

I served this accompanied by smoked salmon, sliced tomato, rosemary bread, and iced black tea. It was fantastic with the smoked salmon. I do not advise heating this in the oven as is. For a bubbly, goopy oven dip I think it needs at least 4 oz of cream cheese (or neufchatel) and a soft, rich cheese such as gouda.

Mac & Cheese

Elbow Mac & Cheese

This is for tonight. It's a too-much-work recipe that is also one of my defaults (i.e. something I eat more often than is heart-wise). I start with a variation on a Cooking Light recipe that came from my sister, where the cream sauce base is made on the stove top. I like to finish it in the oven for the crispy top, so I have mutated the recipe to be more like the all-oven ones, sans egg. Also, I usually use twice the cheese asked for in most recipes, closer to a full pound. Cheeeeeeeese...

I tends to look a lot like the photo above. Today I will be using a chedder-gruyere hybrid from Trader Joe's that is a pretty good sandwich cheese, but not one I want for cheese-and-crackers snacking. The texture is crumbly like the manchego or the goat milk cheddar to which I've recently taken a shine. I have whole milk in my refrigerator from making a shrimp & peas cream sauce the other night.

2 Tbl butter
4 Tbl flour
1/2 tsp dry mustard
pinch salt (omitted because I have salted butter)
pepper (white pepper would be ideal, black pepper is more robust)
2 C whole milk

In a small saucepan, melt butter over low heat. Add flour, mustard, and pepper until blended. (Make a roux.) Pour in milk, stirring constantly. Increase heat to high; bring to a boil 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat.

8 ounces of cooked pasta (macaroni, shells, or penne)
up to 16 ounces of shredded cheeses (a little smoked cheese in the mix is very tasty, but don't make it with only that)
smoked paprika

Layer the pasta, cheese, and cream sauce in a casserole dish, as if making lasagna. Finish with sauce covering all the pasta and cheese as the top layer. Garnish with a sprinkle of paprika, if desired. Bake in a 450 oven for 15 minutes or until bubbling on top with a nicely browned layer. This works best with cheddar or mozzarella in the mix.

This is ready to eat hot. I have doubled the sauce from the original recipes because the sauce is my favorite part. This is a dish with a queso fundido quality, great if you are a bread lover. As leftovers, there is more sauce than the pasta can suck up, so it reheats pretty well. Tell yourself this when you are reaching for your 3rd serving.

Mayonnaise Chocolate Cookies

I don't think I've made the Tollhouse recipe for chocolate chip cookies as written in decades. Really. It's a good jumping off point, and can be found on the back of any Nestle morsels package:

2 1/4 Cup flour
1 C (2 Sticks) of butter
3/4 C brown sugar
3/4 C white sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 C chocolate morsels
1 C chopped nuts

Which is too much sugar and too much salt, even when using unsalted butter. Bleh. It's a recipe to cover up the inferior quality of Nestle chocolate chips. Like all too-many-tools recipes, it asks you to cream the butter with a mixer, yada yada. Too many bowls.

In its most primitive state, this is a One Bowl recipe that can be made with a spoon or hard spatula, half the sugar, and allowed to wild forage for other goodies in your pantry.

Today I almost stuck to the recipe. I was intending to make it to spec. Nevertheless, as I was setting out the ingredients, I noticed the cocoa powder. As I was getting out the beater I found myself thinking about how the mayonnaise in mayo chocolate cake is, because of the vinegar, supposed to bring out the chocolate. (I was recently reading mayo cake recipes because I have a store brand -- Kroger -- mayonnaise that is just awful. It is not, as intended, putting me off mayo so much as making me want the good stuff.)

You might guess what happened next. No? I substituted half the butter, one stick, for 1/2 C of mayo. I reduced the eggs to 1. I added 1/2 C of cocoa. I reduced the sugar to 1/2 C white + 3/4 C brown sugar. I reduced the salt to 1/2 tsp, but I should have left it out altogether because my butter and mayo both had salt. I forgot about the salt in the mayonnaise.

The chocolate, chocolate chip, pecan and white chip cookies came out well. They were slightly drier than ideal; that can be fixed by reducing the flour by that 1/4 C, making the dry 2 C flour + 1/2 cocoa. The dough was very nice, fluffy, not too sticky but with good cohesiveness. The slightly over-salted flavor of the raw dough baked out so it was fine in cookie form. Warm from the oven, they had a brownie-like flavor but were cookie-firm. Cooled, they are an almost perfect cookie. The dryness promotes enjoyment with a glass of milk.

Mayonnaise for the win -- who knew?

This nom...