Chicken and grits

When you marry a southern boy, you find yourself introduced to all kinds of new foods.

A lot of them are sweets: Derby pie, chess pie, jam cake, buckeyes, and bourbon balls. Derby pie is a chocolate and nut candy bar in a crust. Chess pie is a gooey, brown sugar pie. Jam cake was a surprise and a revelation to me, and writing this is a reminder to me that I've always meant to make it myself. The husband's dear mother hand-wrote the recipe for me years ago and I've failed to make it yet. You might picture some kind of a layer or swirl cake, a plain-ish cake cut through with jam. Well, you'd be wrong. Jam cake is more like a spice cake with raspberry or blackberry jam stirred into the batter, giving it a pinkish hue. Then it's frosted with caramel icing.

Buckeyes are balls of peanut butter, sugar, and butter half-rolled in chocolate to look like buckeyes. Bourbon balls seem self-explanatory.

I like some of these treats, particularly the jam cake, but the southern things I've come to like best are savory, like grits.

I make grits all the time. They're quicker than polenta and go with everything. When I feel decadent, I make them with a little cream and some grated cheese: are there two more beautiful words than cheesy grits? When I feel disciplined, I make them with water or chicken broth and a little milk.

I made grits the other night to go alongside our weekly roast chicken and some kale sauteed with bacon and garlic. Now, if I were really keeping it southern, the chicken would have been fried, there would have been some cream gravy drizzled on top, and the kale would have been cooked into a grey oblivion. That's one thing I can't get behind with southern food--the need to turn all vegetables brown or grey with overcooking. I'll take my veggies green, thank you.

I like to think of this as a hybrid dinner, a little California and a little Kentucky, wrapped into one delicious package.

A very happy birthday

It's always a little bit sad when Thanksgiving is over. It's my favorite holiday, and I really look forward to it in the months leading up. But as with a birthday, wedding, or any other day you anticipate, its specialness does not make it last longer than any other day. In fact, it seems to go even faster.

One thing that always keeps me from dwelling on the 364 days standing between me and my next pumpkin chiffon pie is the fact that my birthday is right after Thanksgiving--November 30th. So, happy birthday to me!

I share this auspicious birth date with Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, and Billy Idol. And, in a funny twist of life, with my niece, who happened to be visiting from the East Coast this weekend.

To celebrate her ninth and my thirty-something, we decided to have a joint celebratory lunch at Yank Sing. Who doesn't want to spend their birthday eating dumplings?

I sat next to the other birthday girl, who has asked to be known in this blog as Mischievous Pug. Look how good she is with chopsticks!

And I sat across from Mischievous Pug's little sister, who I've decided to call Scrappy. Looks like Scrappy's plotting something.

We started off with Shanghai soup dumplings, delicate and porky.

Then on to steamed pork buns. A long time ago, I worked at Yank Sing, and I can tell you that no matter how many of these you eat, even if you are ridiculous and eat one every single day for two years straight, you do not get tired of them. You may find that you begin to resemble one, but you do not get weary of the soft and faintly sweet dough, and the perfectly salty-sweet BBQ pork filling.

And har gow, siu mai, spring rolls, vegetable dumplings, turnip cake, and many, many more. So many, in fact, that I forgot about taking pictures in my dumpling frenzy.

Later, we rolled back to our place for some birthday cake. The husband had ordered a beautiful vanilla tomboy cake, which we picked up from Miette, along with some tall skinny candles. We got nine for Mischievous Pug, with one to grow on. They looked so pretty all lit up!

The cake tasted delicious with coffee and vanilla ice cream. Oh, and see those little ballerinas? My mother dug those up from my childhood--little ballerina figures she used to always put on my cakes. Mischievous Pug and Scrappy placed them very carefully around the candles.

Amidst the cake, there were presents, Barbie clothes and a new watch for Mischievous Pug, a sparkly necklace for me from my sister, and popover pan from my mother. Expect to see the second chapter in the popover challenge very soon! And, so that you might appreciate the popovers through well-lit photographs taken from flattering angles, the husband gave me a long-coveted EGO light along with a little tripod.

Thank you to my family for a delightful birthday! I'm glad I got to spend it with the people I love most in the world.
xoxo,
Hungry Dog

Texas chili, by way of San Francisco

Last weekend, the husband got it in his head that he wanted to make some chili. But he didn't want to make it with ground beef; he wanted to do it with big chunks of steak. We'd both heard this referred to as "Texas-style," although now that I've looked at so many recipes for chili, I'm not sure that's true. In any case, on Sunday, when I set out for my afternoon with the girls, I told him he should find a good recipe and we could make it together when I got home.

He found a couple of different recipes that we sort of combined, but we stayed true to the real essence of chili, or any kind of stew, which is to make it the way you like it, and fiddle with it until you get it right. And wouldn't you know it, the husband and I like our chili just the same way.

We browned some top sirloin in a dutch oven, then set it aside, and cooked the usual aromatics--onion, garlic, and celery--along with chili powder, cumin, and marjoram. Added the beef back to the pot, along with a hefty glug of red wine, and scraped up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Then came the tomatoes, a little can of green chilies, kidney beans, worchestershire sauce, a dash of hot sauce, salt and pepper, and we were good to go. It came together in under an hour and it looked like this.

In a perfect world, I would have had some sour cream to swirl on top, but instead I just garnished my chili with grated cheddar cheese and cilantro. As you're well aware, cilantro is one of the great dividers of the world, along with religion, politics, and eggplant. We are split in this house: I like it, although I don't do much with it besides toss it on top of things like chili verde to add a fresh finish. The husband wants nothing to do with it. He also doesn't care much for sour cream or grated cheese or garnishes in general; I've noticed that he quietly pushes them aside and just digs in to what's underneath. I can't rid myself of the need to garnish things, particularly soups and stews, but I understand his skepticism of what they really add to the dish.

What I like best with chili is cornbread, but I'd used the last of my cornmeal on some blueberry corn muffins the day before. We considered cooking up some rice, but in the interest of time and hunger opted for some plain crackers crumbled over the top. It was the perfect, lazy dinner after a cool and rainy day, and provided us with lots of leftovers, that last of which we ate today for lunch.