Accidental General Gao's

When I set out to make venison meatballs today, I did not intend to make them sweet. I looked up a recipe online and started to follow it, only to realize I didn't have all the correct ingredients. So I improvised, but what we ended up with was a surprise.

Here are the meatballs:

1.5 pounds ground venison

1/2 cup bulgur wheat

salt and pepper

dried basil (about 1 tsp)

dried parsley (about 2 tsp)

3 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 sweet onion, minced

dash of nutmeg

1 egg

These were mixed and then allowed to rest for a bit so the bulgur wheat could moisten. Later I rolled this mixture into meatballs, it made 17. I baked them in the oven at 350˚F for 30 minutes and then added them to the sauce to simmer.

Here's the sauce, and considering I hardly ever have tomato jam it's unlikely I'll ever make it exactly this way again:

1/2 sweet onion, diced

3 ribs celery, diced

olive oil

4 oz. tomato jam

4 oz. port

8 oz. tomato sauce

salt and pepper

dried parsley (about 1 T.)

Sauté the onion and celery in the oil. Add the jam and heat until the onions are soft. Pour in the port and then the tomato sauce and let it boil down for about 10 minutes. Add the parsley, salt and pepper. Simmer on low until you add the meatballs and then continue to simmer for about an hour. 

The sauce ended up very sweet, with a taste similar to General Gao's chicken. The meatballs lost their gaminess in the process of being cooked for so long. We served them over egg noodles and they were excellent. I suppose that in the future I could just go all the way down that road and toss some sesame seeds on them.

Finally Coming Out From Under it All

We're all finally feeling better and I'm starting to get my energy back to do some baking. I've had this particular cake on my agenda for a while. I've made chocolate zucchini bread, which is essentially cake, and golden beet cake. I knew I had a recipe for chocolate cake with red beets and I've been saving some beets from the farm share just for it. So a few days ago, I made it. The recipe is for "Secret Chocolate Cake" from Simply in Season.

The youngerchild was immediately suspicious. "You never JUST make cake. What vegetable is in this one?" Even after knowing there were beets in it, after a big sigh, the youngerchild ate two pieces. But the next day, a chocolate glaze was requested for the rest of the cake. I made a quick glaze with butter, chocolate, powdered sugar and boiling water. The youngerchild was happier.

Another observation is that the beet flavor becomes less obvious the older the cake is. So on the third day, it was definitely more chocolate than beet. 

I will point out that there is a list of cakes the youngerchild wants me to make: the chocolate mousse raspberry cake from my culinary classes, a Brasilian carrot cake like I did for that fundraiser. There's also baked apples, similar to what we had at a B&B in Vermont. I'll have to get baking.

The Never Ending Cycle of Illness

At least, that's how it feels.

Now that my husband has recovered from his head injury, while we were getting dumped on by a blizzard and he had to clear out the driveway four times he developed a fever and cough. I'm still coughing from whatever it is that I got, but I'm hoping not to get what he has so I'm keeping my distance. The youngerchild is recovering from pneumonia, the olderchild has a cold but is recovering, and I made chicken soup.

This is one of the things I tend to keep in the freezer - one bag with the carcass of some bird (today I used the chicken, but there is a turkey and a goose in there, too) and a separate bag of leftover meat. What I didn't have on hand was celery, and it took me an hour and a half to get some. First I went to the Whole Foods with their tiny parking lot that was backed up because people we waiting in line to park. I figured I did not need to wait in line for overpriced celery so I left and went to the market in the next town. By the time I got home, I'd spent 90 minutes running that particular errand.

The rest was easy - make a stock with the bones, thaw the meat, separately sauté the mirepoix and then put it all together with salt, pepper, thyme, and egg noodles.

Hopefully it makes everyone get better sooner!

Happy New Year - Highlights and Lowlights From the Last Few Weeks

The holiday season is always busy, and this one was no different. We had our share of joy and chaos and food. Where to begin?

My brother-in-law out in Ohio has taken up hunting and, for Christmas, sent me a box with 2 venison roasts, 2 pounds of ground venison, 2 pheasants, 2 partridges, venison snack sticks, a venison summer sausage, and 4 goose breasts. Since two of the goose breasts were starting to thaw (even though the food was packed on dry ice, it was supposed to be an overnight delivery but it took 3 days and, yes, they got their money back for the shipping costs) we had them the night they arrived. My husband grilled them and I made an elderberry-cranberry-port reduction. Most of us thought they were lovely. The youngerchild apparently doesn't like meat that's a little "gamey." I have plans for some of the rest, like maybe venison meatballs or venison lasagna or something.

There was a quick run up to Christmas eve, in which the youngerchild was sick with a bad cold and I worked all the way through the 23rd. We had our first Christmas with my parents a week early. We had our second Christmas, with just the four of us, on the 22nd. On the morning of the 24th we flew to Denver to spend Christmas with my family out there and then go skiing. This is where the chaos set in.

We've done this ski trip thing for many years, right? We have it down to a science. We know how much food to get (as long as my husband doesn't go off script at the grocery store) and what meals we can easily cook in a small and not perfectly stocked kitchen. We have not, in the past, had to deal with illness. What happened was this - the youngerchild suddenly developed a fever and didn't want to get out of bed. We spent Christmas afternoon at an urgent care, with a negative flu test but a tentative diagnosis of pneumonia. Antibiotics were started. I asked the doctor if we could go to the altitude where our rental condo was; he assured me all would be fine.

Nope.

Up at altitude the fevers did not go away. After a day where the youngerchild did not ski and one of our friends did not ski but the rest of us did, in the night things seemed to be worse: breathing fast and really hot. The next morning we went to the urgent care on the mountain where it was quickly demonstrated that my youngerchild needed oxygen. A chest X ray showed a pneumonia but on the opposite side of where the original doctor thought. A different antibiotic was started and the options were to stay at altitude with oxygen or go down to a lower altitude and it was likely oxygen wasn't going to be needed. In my opinion there was no choice so the youngerchild and I left, leaving my husband, the elderchild, and our friends to stay and ski. I got a home oxygen saturation monitor and checked frequently, the first day was a little dicey but then things got better quickly. So we hung out with my sister and waited for the rest of the crew to finish the trip.

The original plan was this: we had the rental condo until 1/1, everyone was supposed to ski 4 out of 5 days, finishing up on 12/31. However, it was really warm up there (apparently the only part of the country that was) and after 3 days everyone decided to return their skis, book a snowboarding lesson for 12/31, and then come down a day early so we could be together for New Year's Eve. But then another event happened which threw that into disarray as well: they decided to go ice skating. Yeah. Suddenly I get a call on 12/30 that my husband had fallen, hit his head and, "there's a lot of blood." My friends sounded nervous, so I made them put him on the phone. He sounded fine. I had them take him to the same urgent care where he apparently started repeating himself. As I'm trying not to panic too much, thinking about concussions, head bleeds, CT scans and how to delay our flights and the fact that the kids have to be back at school on 1/2 and how am I going to get him down to where I was and whether he'd be safe to fly I eventually get another call that he's looking and sounding better and his head is getting stitched up. They get the intern on the phone with me so we can chat and we decide that he can be watched by our friends and then come down tomorrow. Snowboarding lessons were cancelled, everything else that had been planned was cancelled, and early on 12/31 they packed up and came down to Denver. Thankfully by then he just had a headache and we were able to go to the movies.

With regards to the cooking, I managed to get chickens roasted on the first day, the leftovers were turned into soup the next day. After that, the rest of the gang were on their own, and they seem to have fed themselves just fine.

Now we're all home, and we all feel as though we need a vacation from our vacation!