Kitchen Wench

Tonight’s menu, courtesy of moi:

• Garlic Herb Lamb Chops with Mint Jelly, modified slightly from this recipe in Bon Appetit. I used Herbs de Provence instead of rosemary and pan seared and then oven roasted the chops, rather than broiling. Oh, and I used about 4x as much garlic, which was totally worth it because it cooks up crispy and delicious in the pan drippings.


• Sour Cream and Chive Mashed Red Potatoes. Roughly, 1.75 lb red potatoes, 2 tbsp butter, 4 tbsp light sour cream, and 1 tbsp chopped fresh chives, plus salt and pepper to taste.
• Romaine Salad with homemade Green Goddess yogurt dressing using an herb base from Penzey’s Spices.
• Warm Plum Torte with a dollop of whipped cream.

After biting into his lamb chop, my dad proclaimed, “Well, Alicia, you are going to make some guy very fat someday.” Personally, I advocate portion control, not flavor control.

My version is modified slightly from the original recipe, which appeared in the New York Times and in the Cooking for Comfort cookbook. This torte is incredibly easy to make, not too sweet, and is a great way to use up extra or overripe fruit. The original recipe called for Italian prune plums, but I used little red plums instead and it worked out just beautifully. This torte would also be great using other stone fruit, such as peaches or cherries, and it would be easy to add a different flavoring or liquer to the cake for endless possibilities.

Ingredients

• 3/4 cup PLUS 2 tablespoons sugar
• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour, sifted
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• Pinch salt
• 24 halves pitted small plums OR 6 regular plums, sliced
• 1 -2 teaspoons ground cinnamon (depending on your taste)

Directions

1. Arrange a rack in the lower third of the oven. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. Grease the bottom and sides of a 9-10 inch springform pan. (If you don’t have a springform, a regular baking pan would probably be fine, but you wouldn’t be able to unmold and present it as nicely.)
3. In an electric mixer, cream the 3/4 cup sugar and butter. Add eggs and vanilla, then the flour, baking powder, and salt and beat to mix well. Batter will be quite thick. Spread into greased pan.
4. Mix remaining sugar and cinnamon. Sprinkle half of the cinnamon sugar over the top of the batter. Then cover with the plums, skin side down. Don’t worry about overlapping, as the fruit will shrink as it bakes. Sprinkle the plums with the remaining cinnamon sugar.
5. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, until the center tests done with a toothpick. Remove and cool to room temperature or serve warm. Serve plain or with vanilla ice cream.

Makes 8 servings.

Storage Note: The torte may be refrigerated or frozen for several months, well wrapped. To serve, return to room temperature and reheat at 300°F until warm.

The setting: An unseasonably cool and comfortable evening in August, throngs of fat and/or badly dressed Midwesterners, and fried food as far as the eye can see. The scent of grease, sugar, and live stock mingles in the air. Above the chatter and hum of fair goers, someone is belting out a painful version of “If I were a Rich Man” at the amatuer talent contest. To the left are rows and rows of shiny green John Deer riding lawn mowers. To the right, candy colored amusement rides spin, twist, and launch screaming people into orbit. Just as I’m thinking it can’t get any better, my friend Danielle turns to me and says, “Do you smell donuts?”

Most of the year, I try to be health-concious. Most of the year, you could safely say I’m a food snob. But once a year, I become extremely excited by the prospect of stuffing my face with fried foods on a stick. Yes, there’s other stuff at the fair… like concerts, stomach-turning rides, corn art, 4-H contests, and butter sculptures, but I know why we’re all really at the Great Minnesota Get Together: to eat.

Eating at the Fair is not for the faint of heart. It’s kind of like a marathon–you really ought to train for it in advance. Things my friends and I managed to eat yesterday:

• Hot dog
• Bratwurst
• Deep-fried cheese curds from the Mouth Trap
• Dippin’ Dots Ice Cream in 3 flavors
• A bag of mini-donuts
• Falafel
• Garlic Chicken gyro
• Lemonade
• Roasted cinnamon almonds

I’m afraid my eating stamina simply isn’t quite up to par… There were still corn dogs, fudge puppies, frozen mocha on a stick, calzones, cheeseburger wontons, spaghetti and meatball on a stick, fried pickles, fried Twinkies, and porkchops on a stick to be had. But after wandering through the aisles of award-winning cakes, breads, pies, and home-brewed beers in the Arts and Crafts building, we could feel ourselves wavering. “I think I’m sugared out,” Gina frowned, while Danielle contemplated whether the fiery feeling in her chest was heartburn. Me? Well, my stomach shrunk. Losing 15 lbs can do that to you. But, I’m telling you, give me another day and a dose of stomache enzymes, and I’ll shine with the best of them. State Fair, you haven’t seen the last of me.

I have finally broken. I just could not do it anymore. I could not bring myself to eat another sandwich made of processed, over-salted lunch meat.

Whenever I’m working at John’s, I am welcome to eat any of the food in their house. While this seems like a nice offer, whenever I open a cabinet or refridgerator door, it’s like entering into the twilight zone of processed, pre-packaged, pre-seasoned, pre-cut “food”. I say “food” because real cheese, in my estimatation, is not bright orange and individually wrapped in plastic. Real meat doesn’t come already pre-marinated in a plastic bag. And real fruits and vegetables are not pre-cut while still unripe and then hermetically sealed in a little plastic container with accompaning dip. And let’s not even get started with the junk food… cheesy poofs… Krispy Kremes… For some reason, all things in the Fats food group cannot have grammatically or phonetically correct names.

I have to admit, powdered orange cheese can be pretty delicious, but every time I break down and eat the stuff, I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to down enough water to combat my excess salt bloat. I realize that a lot of people eat this way, which seems utterly baffling when it makes you feel so terrible afterwards. (As evidence, the house is littered with bottles of tropical fruit flavored Tums.) If you had the money to buy yourself fresh food, why wouldn’t you? My only guess is that after consuming a steady diet of sodium and creepy artificial flavor substitutes, people no longer realize what a body should feel like after a healthy meal.

In any event, I reached my breaking point today. I pulled open the cooler door only to be greeted by one slice of red pastrami squeezed into a deli ziploc, the wine-colored meat juice pooling into little pockets in the corners. I shook my head. Couldn’t do it. Hate pastrami anyway. So I tore through the rest of the kitchen, looking for something fresh, or at least not oversalted. Unidentifiable meat in unidentifiable sauce? Absolutely not. Pre-cut cantelope? Wilted salad in a bag? No, I wanted real produce, but the only thing I found were two very brown bananas hidden behind the coffeemaker, a large acorn squash, and two russet potatoes.

So, I ate a peanut butter sandwich, desperately scraped out the last dredges of hummus from a tupperware, and sucked a serving of cherry yogurt from a tube. (It’s called “Go-Gurt”… it’s for kids… you can eat it on the go? Yeeaahh, brilliant, I know.) The yogurt was a freakishly bright shade of pink, and, three hours later, I’m still thirsty from the hummus. *sigh* Mission failed. My tastebuds weep.

One of the perks of working in a home office is that, when I’m assigned some mindless activity like stuffing envelopes, they let me watch cable tv. Channel surfing seems like it might be pushing my good luck, so I always park the tv on the Food Network and watch the good, bad, and ugly.

In the middle of the afternoon, the Food Network features a show called Paula’s Home Cooking. The first time I experienced Paula Deen’s cooking, I nearly choked on my envelope glue-laced saliva. This is Southern cooking, oozing with more butter, eggs, and sugar than my little Yankee brain could possibly imagine. By the end of thirty minutes, I was fairly certain that one serving of her stuffed french toast could send my total cholesterol rocketing into the mid-200s. When the Food Network started rolling out the Thanksgiving-themed episodes, I watched in both horror and total fascination as Paula proceeded to deep fry an entire 10 lb turkey in the largest deep fryer I have ever seen.

Is there anything this woman can’t fry? After that episode, I was resolved–if I could find it, Paula could probably tell me how to fry it and/or smother it in butter. Today, as I built folders for a home buyers’ class, I watched Paula gleefully sample a Mexican wedding cookie and then–through a garbled mouthful of crumbs–contemplate the powdered sugar she’s just gotten all over her mouth and shirt. Paula, unlike other hosts, cannot wait until the end of the show to eat her own food. Still on camera, her eyes go wide as she takes her first bite and then gushes to the viewer with her mouth full. And yet, there’s something beautiful, and beautifully out of place, about watching Paula sandwiched between Emeril and Giada’s polished and healthful fare. Paula’s cooking is, in some ways, more authentic than anything cooked up by master chefs. It’s still educational and valuble, though maybe in a non-traditional way. (I’m sick of these shows about eating thin or low carb–I want to see how you eat fat, damnit.) Plus… I have to give props to anyone who happily talks with their face full on national tv.

For some reason, I keep getting these wrong numbers on my cell phone lately.

Yesterday I got some man who I was convinced I’d called him for door services. I mean, it wasn’t enough that I said I thought he had the wrong number, he kept at it:
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About two years ago I recieved a 3 speed “Classic” Kitchen Aid hand mixer from my parents. We have a 5 speed at home and while I was rather disappointed at how slow the “Classic” was, but it got the job done (and it was a present). However, I was infinately more disappointed when the beaters went missing from my house this spring. Did someone take them? I couldn’t find them anywhere. Who does that? I was outraged when I discovered them AWOL (though this outrage might have had something to do with the giant batch of tiramisu that I was supposed have ready that afternoon). If you want the mixer, just take the whole thing. A mixer without beaters is like a car without tires. Impossible to use and kind of sad looking.

Strangely, it is as though the Kitchen Aid gods have been conspiring against me because when I came home for the summer, one of the beaters on our 5 speed somehow got damaged and refused to lock into place. So, I beat with a 1-legged mixer. It was like a gimpy mixer, a shell of its former self, really. I’ve had good experience with the Kitchen Aid hand mixer in the past; using it with only one functional beater was almost insulting to its otherwise good nature.

The answer to my beater woes was simple, I thought. I’d just order new parts from KitchenAid.com. But, somehow, every website I went to was either out of stock or wanted to sell me dough hooks or an attachable blender blade instead. Also, they wanted 15 bucks for a new set of beaters. When I calculated the cost of 2 sets of new beaters plus shipping, it was all of 9 dollars cheaper than just buying a newly refurbished 7-speed mixer (including shipping) . Refurbished hand mixers are available at KitchenAid’s ebay store for only 45 bucks, which is an absolute steal, since the regular 7 speed costs about 80 dollar retail. So I bought the new mixer. I still don’t have any beaters… but, you know, maybe those dough hooks…

One click installation is a beautiful thing. However, my fears have been rightly confirmed: the web is littered with hideously ugly WP templates, and I am too lazy to make one totally from stratch. So, the search begins. My eyeballs hurt.