hot and cold

Bittersweet and snow.

This time of year we’re saddled with a lot of cold, at least in New Jersey. And by February we’re hurling colorful expletives at the clouds, the snow, the evil godawful groundhog, the weather channel right down to the mail clerk, and Lowe’s for being out of ice scrapers during the first week of February.*

But the dauntless Pollyanna in me is here this week** to grin a freckled, wide-eyed, mildly irritating ‘Bash on, regardless,’ and caption us through her winter so far. Make with the packed pbj and let’s warm up.

I shot the ingredients of the Limoncello I concocted for my Christmas presents. Neat how I got the lemon peel to curl just so, isn’t it? It only took seven tries!

Done deal. Full of lemon peel that’s been steeped in sugar and a bunch of vodka. Served icy cold.

My friend Doug made this awesome awesome shrimp stew that we ate over polenta.

This chicken pot pie got me through theatre tech week, when I drove an hour door to door and braved Route 287 twice every day for a week. Once I got stuck behind a lady doing 40mph in a 65 zone. /Segue/ Mmm. Chicken pot pie with little tiny pearl onions. Mmmmmm.

Champagne flutes in our show. Really convincing plastic, which is good, because they played in a 65-seat house. Filled nightly with chilled ‘Champagne’ (sparkling white grape juice) served out of an ice bucket.

This is kheer, a lovely Indian dessert. It’s served chilled and tastes a lot like rice pudding, but it’s not as thick.

Deep-dish brown sugar pumpkin pie made with a layer of fruit jam at the base.

Hello world.
Two Mile Creek Specialty Foods and Johnnie Walker are the benefactors of that jam. Thanks for the 2 berry cherry!

Cornbread with oodles of butter.

Icy drop on a wild rose branch.

The Champagne bottle I painted for the show. The script calls for Perrier Jouet, and in 1969, the year in which the scene takes place, the company put out a beautiful, iconic floral label. Painting on glass is a trick. You end up feeling like you’re hydroplaning.

The author, with Devil Dog cupcakes (devil’s food cake topped with meringue) that I made for the cast party last night, plus my trusty weapon of destruction. Pollyanna needed to blow off a lil steam. And the meringue toasted up nicely 🙂

*Really, Lowe’s? Really?

**She was off on a choir retreat or something last week. Either way, she was very not here.

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eggs daffodil

Leave it to me to milk a season for all it’s worth, but I can’t help it this time around; I just discovered zucchini flowers. I torched them last time (and ate them anyway and regret NOTHING because they were insanely good). This time I did two things: I took a reader’s advice and sauteed them so I could taste them alone, without a filling of any kind, and learned they taste like very delicate zucchini. And I tried the below, another reader’s recipe, as part of my cooking project.

The recipe is second only to a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats in its simplicity. Here’s the dish as it cooks…

And here’s Lou:

I picked up the recipe from a chef talking to a patron from the same area, presumably back East at a breakfast hangout where I live. I believe it’s a classic regional possibly ethnic dish from somewhere and there is a story behind the origin as per their discussion. I reconstructed the ingredients from memory back home.

Eggs Daffodil

A very soft scramble of butter with eggs, zucchini blossoms, scallions and Comte (Gruyere) cheese

Louis Rousseau

Santa Cruz, CA

USA

I snooped around a little online to find other recipes with this title, and found quite a bit, including a vomitizing one that calls for 3/4 of a pound of Velveeta. I did not find one as luxurious as this.

For Lou’s recipe, I picked the blossoms at the organic farm and made this dish for lunch when I got home. Since I have to watch my cholesterol (ugh and whimper)*, I used organic egg whites. But I wasn’t going to exclude the Gruyere; I found an applewood variety and shaved a bit into it here and there. The flowers I rinsed gently under cold water, took out the stamens, and then with kitchen scissors snipped them into julienned strips. Snipped the scallions with scissors, too. Browned the bottom of the eggs a smidge, then added the rest of the ingredients and turned it all over just once.

This dish is ELEGANT. It’s champagne and toast points for the VP of marketing, it’s brunch for Kate and Will, it’s a cheering lunch after you’ve driven an hour out and back to the farm. The cheese lends a smoky richness, and the scallions give crunch and fragrance. Zucchini flowers really do look like daffodils here, as bright and sunny as the summer left behind.

Thanks for this, Lou!

That’s Gelbstein’s pumpernickel with sesame seeds downstage right. Wonderful and earthy with this.

*Aren’t you impressed? I’ve never had a problem with cholesterol in my life, but now that I do, I summed it up with a simple ugh and whimper and didn’t mourn as loudly and as extensively as I could have, certainly, like going on about it for miles and miles in a footnote that nobody wants to see and has nothing to do with the recipe at hand and in fact distracts from the point.

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