Cozy November Days Indoors

Nashville had its first hard freeze last night, which makes it even cozier to stay inside.

The Estate Sale Diaries-November 23 and 24, 2012

This photo is from the Patterson Estate Sales website, and it shows some of what was for sale yesterday at a moving sale in West Meade. I went to the sale, which I thought had a whiff of New England about it. No Nashville Plantation Style here. Everything in the plain style. Braided rugs. Grandma Moses like primitive paintings. Simple furniture and lots of stoneware. Antique quilts that attracted a crowd. There were few books,only a handful of ladies'club ring binder cookbooks, but some real finds in the kitchenware department. For a few bucks I bought these. When I saw them I was no longer a 62 year old woman, but an 8 year old in my mother's Southington, Connecticut kitchen squeezing butter ccokie dough onto baking sheets. My mother had the same set. The press I bought yesterday had to have been at least 50 years old. The cake decorating set looks even older. I would guess it dates from the forties. No zip codes on the boxes and "cookie" spelled "cooky". Made in America, as well, back when America made things.

I also found this set of blue and gold glasses, with their elegant diamond and gilt motif-

And this decorative lidded pot-

And this stoneware baker in an unusual shape.

The second sale I went to was in senior housing near the neighborhood Catholic church. Despite finding a handsome Berndes 7 inch sauce pan (retail $99) for three dollars I found this a dispiriting sale for the house had the worst kitchen I have ever seen.It was as though the builders put up the house, then looked around and noticed they had forgotten the kitchen. "Oh, well",they must have said "We'll just stick it over here in this closet".
Cramped and windowless. An insult to food, to life ,and to the old person who lived there . Why do old people need to cook anyway was what this miserable little space seemed to say. They are just waiting around to die.
I could not get out of this sad place with its evil faux kitchen fast enough.
How heartbreaking these senior ghettos are-

Here is the saucepan-

My Thanksgiving Chicken

This recipe, from the incomparable"The Old World Kitchen-The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cooking", by Elisabeth Luard, is a classic of French country cooking. It is simple. Simple enough for any novice. Indeed if some young person wanted to invite friends for dinner but found herself fearful of her skills, she would find this foolproof. Luard's recipe calls for a whole chicken cut up and cooked for an hour at 350 degrees in a tightly covered casserole or Dutch oven. The chicken keeps company for that hour with some sprigs of rosemary, a few shakes of Herbes de Provence, a wine glass of olive oil, and twenty cloves of unpeeled garlic.

I did not use a whole chicken. I used the drumsticks of three chickens, a half cup of olive oil, 10 garlic cloves, and the herbs already described, and then added salt to taste. Then I drizzled a little more oil over the chicken. And in an hour, it was done. I fished the chicken out with a slotted spoon, then looked down into a golden pool of olive oil suffused with herbs and garlic and chicken fat.

I needed a side, so out came the chef's knife and potato peeler and into the Dutch oven went three Yukon gold potatoes, sliced. An hour later they were done. Had I had a bigger Dutch oven, I could have added the potatoes in the beginning for a one pot meal. Nor would carrots have been a mistake, had I decided to add them.

One fire. One pot. One meal. That is how the peasantry ate. No eight burner twenty thousand dollar stoves, no Ruffoni or All-Clad cookware.

Luard collected classic recipes and tramped around in places such as the Carpathian Mountains talking to shepherds' wives about their chicken in sour cream recipes. The book's geography spans Scandinavia all the way to the Balkan states once threatened by the Ottoman Empire. It is history, culture, ethnography. In short-it is literature, which 99.9 percent of cookery books are not.

And as for Garlic Chicken, kings could not eat better.

Necessity is the Mother of Breakfast

An exotic sunrise led to an interesting breakfast made from a lone banana and 2 ounces of canned green diced leftover chiles I wanted to use up. I decided to make a frittata.

A frittata starts as an omelette, then ends up in the oven.My cast iron skillet can cook on stovetop and in the oven, so I used it for this dish.

Had I added more eggs my frittata would have been fatter, but I was satisfied with my results with two eggs. This was very easy to make, with most of the work done by the food processor. And it was delicious.

Two eggs

1 tablespoon of dulce de leche or just plain sweetened condensed milk

2 ounces of canned diced green chiles

1-2 teaspoons of vanilla sugar or plain sugar depending on how sweet you want it-

1 banana


Put all in a food processor and blend till foamy. Pour into a lightly buttered hot cast iron skillet and leave on medium high heat till the eggs begin to set. Then transfer to a 375 degree oven for five to eight minutes or until the frittata is set.
Remove, allow to cool slightly and garnish slices with guava jam.

Beef Stew with Fruits

When I find stew beef marked down I buy it,for I prefer my beef as a nugget in a stew rather than as a slab. I like a good conventional stew with carrots, onions, and potatoes, spiced by a little vinegar, some tomato paste and garlic, and bound together by flour, a corpulent fellow who thumbs his nose at long winters.

But this afternoon's recipe would regard flour as a fat man who tries to sit too close. This stew I think would be for cold nights in a brief winter, for it incorporates two fruits not from cold country- the pomegranate and the orange- and only one friut of the North- the apple. After that the other players are the same old crowd.

The apples go into this stew in chunks, just as the beef does. The pomegranate arrives as molasses, and the orange comes as a little juice, and some slices that some might eat, but that some cooks might discard before serving.

The ingredients list-

Four or five small red potatoes, peeled and diced

1/2 diced up yellow onion

Two carrots, peeled and cut into half moons

Two whole peeled garlic cloves

Two apples, peeled and cored and cut into chunks. I used small Jonathan apples from an economy bag and not those individual giant apples in rows with the little stickers on them as though they were prize steers at the county fair.

One tangerine or orange cut into three unpeeled slices.

One liter of chicken stock

One pound of stew beef .

Sea salt to taste

A one inch chunk of butter for the stew and a sliver to use to brown the beef in a cast iron fry pan.

A tablespoon of white wine vinegar to deglaze the cast iron pan.

A shake or two of Herbes de Provence

Three tbs of tomato paste

Two tablespoons pomegranate molasses-do not substitute pomegranate juice

Two tablespoons of orange juice

One bay leaf.


Saute the onion in butter right in the soup pot until it is soft and golden. Season with sea salt to sweat it. Remember that undercooked onions are a sin against soups and stews. Put them in raw and they will stay raw proclaiming to the world that you, the cook, are either careless or an amateur.

Brown the beef in a lightly buttered cast iron fry pan. When they are browned, and if the onions are ready add them to the soup pot. Deglaze the cast iron with the vinegar and scrape it in with the meat. Now add the chicken stock, and everything else.

Cover and simmer over over medium low heat. Do not boil this. This stew is not instant. Plan on a slowcooked two hours. Then remove the lid and allow the sauce to reduce by a third. Remove the bay leaf. Leave in the orange slices for someone, intrigued, will eat them. Add more salt to taste.

This recipe should serve four.

The Estate Sale Diaries

The needs of my aging Toyota preclude estate saleing now, but when I saw these pictures I had downloaded from the estate sale company's email to customers I decided I had to post them. The sale was last summer, and I bought my Hall Pottery mixing bowls there.

The owner had collected mixing bowls and glassware, and I think her collection was stunning.

One of the best estate sales I ever attended!

Homage to Fred Astaire

Watching a Fred Astaire movie is better for a bad mood than an anti-depression pill. His graceful style and his dancing feet and the wonderful gowns on his leading ladies. Tonight I am watching him on Turner Classic movie station in "Three Little Words". Turner Classic is a a national treasure, and we are lucky that they show films all the other channels have put on the back shelf.
There is an elegance to these older movies, to the musicals, and the old westerns  To the black ties and the polished shoes. When was Fred ever disheveled? The carnation in the pocket, the black tie were always perfect.Nothing vulgar, no entire sentences composed of four letter words .Back then"gosh" was the closest  thing to an expletive heard on the screen .
And now Mr Astaire, dressed in a cranberry colored bathrobe is reading a newspaper ,and listening  to the radio. He is talking to his wife in person, not text messaging or playing on a computer, not watching football  on a big screen TV.This movie was released in 1950, the year I was born.
Ah, the fifties. They were a different world-There will never be another Astaire.