Batter-Splattered

Hey look!

Me and my mocha cupcakes are this month's Cupcake Hero! Yay me! Me and my cupcakes are so very pleased. Thanks, Laurie and Jaos!

Oh and play this fun word game to help end world hunger, why dontcha.

Ice Fishing 101

Single digit temperatures, clear skies, gale force winds...

That was the weather forecast for the day of our ice fishing workshop. Would they cancel? Should we cancel? But if you cancel outdoor activities because of bad weather here, you might never get to see the outdoors except from your living room window. So we soldiered on down to the lake and I pulled up next to Nikole's truck knowing that the first words out of her mouth would be blame, blame, blame for the high winds and low temperatures. She's been watching the forecast all week and leveling sarcasm at me because I was the one who suggested the class.

Open car door.

Nikole: "REAL NICE day you picked here, Molly!"

We could see the instructors setting up out in the middle of the lake but weren't sure if we were supposed to park our cars out there on the ice or in the parking lot. Angie offered to walk her dog out there and ask. Right after she left, a Fish and Game employee pulled up in a pickup and was telling us we could drive out if we had a pickup but be careful not to get stuck in any snowdrifts and --

"Oh my god! Is she WALKING out there?" the fish and game girl asked imploringly, pointing at Angie as she leaned into the wind, about halfway to the instructor's trucks, her dog dancing around her merrily.

The fish and game girl was in awe of Angie's mental and physical fortitude in the eye of the high winds and the biting snow being whipped up off the lake.

"That's a die-hard!" Fish and Game gal cried out, waving a fist in the air with approval.

We all huddled inside the instructor's rv, sipping coffee and getting cool free stuff like rods and starter tackle boxes, learning some basic knots, trying to avoid melting our outer layer of clothing on the portable heater, and hearing about all the fish that were stocked by the thousands in the lake beneath us. Arctic char, rainbow trout, landlocked king salmon, some too big to fit through the eight inch holes in the ice we would be augering ourselves.

My mouth watered at the thought of our full ice chests. Did I have enough freezer space at home to hold my haul? We headed out into the winter weather and got to fishing and...

Nothing!

Not a bite. But this woman was funnny:

She kept peering down into her hole, orange ice ladle in hand. If you blocked the sunlight you could see the fish swimming around down there in the drink. Notice her in the background of this photo too:

We fished for two hours with nary a nibble then went back inside for some bison chili and moose and lentil stew. Oh and a few shots of adult beverages. God bless you, Sailor Jerry. God bless you and your rum.

A wildlife officer stopped checking fishing licenses long enough to have some chili with us and I listened in horror as one of the women told him a joke involving a cop, a donut, and a monkey. Someone take the Sailor Jerry's away from her. She's had enough.

Then we figured out our tackle might be too large so we all switched to smaller hooks and lures and that's when people really started reeling them in. Well, everyone except me. After two hours out in that blustery cold I'd had enough and the fish that were being caught were just too small to excite my interest. I needed to see at least one HUGE fish be caught before I could muster up the strength to pick up my pole again and try to melt the ice off the line, so thick it looked like icy little jewels.

We parked all the cars to block out at least a little of the wind and there was one ice fishing tent people were taking turns in, shown in the background of this photo:

Notice that that woman is still face-down in her ice-hole, like her face is frozen to the ice. She might have had a few fish in that ice chest next to her if she'd done a little more fishing and a little less peering.

I never actually got a turn inside the tent. Whenever I went over to ask to get inside, it was always full of women who were very very reluctant to leave. They'd unzip a small corner of the door, peer out, and assure me they were almost done. Then I'd lose interest while waiting for them to emerge. Bitches.

Angie got inside at one point though and she came out telling tales about how wonderfully warm it was inside. Everyone had their gloves off and their coats unzipped. No wonder no one wanted to come out. If I'd gotten inside I would have had to have been dragged out by my hair.

My friend and family managed to catch quite a few fish. The fruits of their labors:

A frosty, frosty catch of little king salmon.  The fish would freeze solid almost as soon as they were hauled out of the water. My mom was all for feeding them to the dogs as a snack but fortunately, Angie insisted that they'd be excellent pan-fried in a little breading so we headed on back to my house to fry up some fish.

They were really, really good.

Fisherman's Stew

My cousin emailed me this recipe with a simple directive: Try this.

I did and I emailed her back the next day to give her a simple directive of my own: send me more recipes.

All you have to do to create something wonderful out of this recipe is throw the first 10 ingredients together in a pot. I couldn't believe how good it tasted at that early stage. It was all I could do to stop myself from eating big spoonfuls of it straight from the pot. The white wine and the tomatoes and shallots all come together wonderously.

My cousin says that although the fish can make this stew a bit expensive, it's easy and fast and yummy. It's pretty versatile. She used orange roughy. I used halibut. We both used shrimp instead of mussels. Neither of us had fresh parsley so we skipped the 'sprinkle with' step at the end.

None of the photos I took were quite right because of our lack of daylight (so I'll throw in a photo of an old stepstool -- my cousin and I both have one) so you'll just have to trust me when we say:

Try this.

Fisherman's Stew

Serves three if it is your only dish, about five if it is just a little cuppa.

2 T olive oil

1/2 c minced shallots

1/2 c finely chopped red bell pepper

3/4 c dry white wine

1/2 t salt

1/2 t dried basil

1/2 t black pepper

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes, undrained

1 bay leaf

1 lb grouper or other firm whitefish cut into 5 pieces

1.5 lbs. mussels (scrubbed and debearded) or 1/2 lb shrimp (peeled and cleaned)

2 T chopped fresh parsley

Heat oil in a large dutch oven  over medium heat. Add shallots and bell pepper. Cook for 5 minutes. Add wine and next 6 ingredients. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat. Simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Nestle the fish into the tomato mixture then top with mussels, or if you're using shrimp, nestle them in with the fish. Cover and cook for 8 minutes. Shake the pan twice to stir but do not uncover the pot until after the 8 minute mark passes.

Check that the fish flakes easily -- cook a little longer if you need to. I did. Discard any unopened mussels. Discard bay leaf. Serve with a sprinkle of parsley.

Thrift store scores, culinary and not-so culinary

On Saturday afternoon I wasn't planning on going on an extended thrift store jaunt. It just sort of happened that way. I went to one. And I found such good junk that the spirit moved me to go to another. And then another. I was snapping up the bargains left and right.

I got kitschy souvenir bamboo coasters from my home state...

...still in their kitschy packaging (mind you, I only paid 75 cents for these because everything in the store was half off):

I found a new-in-the-box circa 1991 Sassafras Superstone La Cloche baker!

Oh, the bread I'll bake in that baby.

Four tall and slim brown mugs (although they look more short and squat in my photo than they are in real life). They're some sort of restaurantware, sturdy with a caramel glaze. I think these would be the perfect thing to hold hot chocolate or some chocolate pudding with whipped cream and chocolate shavings on top:

A white teapot with an angular handle, made in Italy:

...to add to my collection of white stuff on top of one of the kitchen cupboards.

And I found this U.S. Senate lidded mug that tickles me silly for some reason, made of 100% corn plastic and advertising Uncle Ted:

I dropped it on the tile floor of the thrift store and both pieces went bouncing and spinning across the floor with nary a scratch. That corn plastic's some sturdy stuff.

And  I got a funny little painting (for a buck-fifty!) of a log cabin, birch trees, and an orange sky (sunrise or sunset?) just like the skies we see lots of this time of year.

I particularly like the glow of the cabin's window shining on the snowbank outside:

The first time I walked past the shelf where they keep all their framed 'art,' there was nothing of interest but when I wandered past again a few minutes later, there the painting was. And how lucky is it that the painting's sky perfectly matches the orange-y peachy-ness of my newly-sewn kitchen curtains? They were meant to be together.

an ode to blackberries

Pop one blackberry in my mouth and I'm eight years old again, pushing my way through bushes as tall as I am to pluck buckets full of hot, juicy blackberries along the railroad tracks that split my little town in two, pluck, pluck, plucking, and watching out for snakes and listening warily for the buzz of beehives suspended in the brush.

You can just barely hear the waves of the Gulf of Mexico washing up on beaches full of sand trucked in from out of state -- a reef along the coast keeps out sand and shells -- so there's nary a shark's tooth to be found which, I'll think you'll agree with me, sort of ruins the appeal of going to the beach.

My elementary school is just off to my right through the trees and just on the other side of the tracks to my left is where my poorer classmates live in tiny houses with real hardwood floors, slamming screen doors, and green lawns towered over by magnolia trees and the looming branches of live oaks dripping with spanish moss.

The heat and humidity is stifling but you can smell honeysuckle and if the breeze is just right you can also catch the salty sea scent of shrimp boats at the piers. Even today, I can't peel a fresh shrimp without wanting to breathe in the aroma of the bowl of shrimp shells I'm about to discard -- others might distastefully sweep those crunchy crustacean leftovers straight into the trash can -- go ahead and wrinkle your nose, but I take a moment to savor the smell of the sea.

Berries, berries, beautiful berries and they're all ripe for the plucking in every direction, every which way, at a price too good to be true, what my friend's friend calls his favorite flavor: FREE. Today I live in a climate not at all suited to growing blackberries, but back then they were so plentiful and hot and ripe they just about fell apart in my fingers, which were so raw from the hairy thorns of the blackberry bushes I never knew if my fingertips were stained with juice or blood or both.

Nowadays, once I start picking berries I don't want to stop but back then it was just a chore, something my mom had to drag me and my brother off to do. I would have rather been off swimming in cool water or sitting on a porch reading a book. But pop one blackberry in my mouth and I'm eight years old again and I can close my eyes and hear the mockingbirds call and the screen doors slam and the breeze ruffle the leaves of oak trees.

When bad things (me) happen to good bread.

Recently I printed off All Recipes' 20 top-rated recipes (once a recipe has 1,600 reviews posted, you'd think people would stop adding their two cents but everybody's got something to say, I guess) and I thought I'd work my way through them one at a time, kicking off with Banana Sour Cream Bread because I had a bunch of bananas moldering on the kitchen counter.

Problem: the recipe is huge. It makes four small-ish loaves for gift-giving and holidays. I don't need that much banana bread no matter how good it promises to be and sure, I could have frozen a few loaves for later but stuff that goes into my freezer tends to stay in the freezer. Somewhere. I'm not really sure. I put stuff in there. It gets pushed to the back. I find it years later looking like a anciently frosty woolly mammoth ear like the ones people occasionally unearth in potato fields here.

A few of the reviewers said they cut the recipe in half and just baked one large-ish loaf and so I took my cue from them one evening after work. As I poured the batter into the pan, I thought: "I dunno this seems like alot of batter for one pan maybe I should split this into two pans..." But I soldiered on because I trust in the allrecipes reviewer and even more because the couch and my glass of wine and Dexter were calling to me to assume a horizontal position in front of the tv.

Turns out, I should have listened to my inner batter judge because:

Instead of rising into a plump loaf, the batter just kept oozing over the sides and onto the baking sheet I had the forethought to put the pan on. My husband took one look at it and delightedly whipped out his camera, having spent so much time impatiently watching me take photos of pretty food before he was allowed to touch it. I named it lava bread and we gigglingly wished we were having guests over for dinner so that we could set this monstrosity out on the table, just to see what they'd say when they saw it.

Some food bloggers would never post a photo like this but I am not like them because I have no pride.

But it should be noted that we did eat parts of the 'bread,' if you can call it that. The crispy bits on the edges were quite tasty but we avoided the jiggly middle.