Pie for Breakfast

The best thing about Thanksgiving is the leftovers. Especially the pie.

I'm in the middle of a murder trial, and even though I'm not the lead attorney, it is a bit distracting. So our Thanksgiving was a simple one. And I like every part about that except--not enough leftovers!

(About being a lawyer. I've always hated responsibility, and I still don't like that part. But I remember from all the crap jobs I've had how demoralizing it was to screw up at things that weren't supposed to be that hard. Like here I am with my Master of Fine Arts cleaning the shit off the walls of the group home for retarded girls--and I'm doing a shitty job at this shitty job. So I went to law school, and if I do screw up at least it's at something hard. And I try really hard not to.)

Back to our Thanksgiving. I made the Jim Lahey bread the night before and cooked turkey thighs in the slow cooker overnight. Enzo and I made Welsh Tea cakes with dried cranberries instead of currants. We used my beautiful lard and my beautiful griddle. So we had a picnic of turkey sandwiches, grandma's stuffed celery, Lay's potato chips (a food that can't be improved on--I marvel at them every time), sparkling cranapple juice, and cranberry tea cakes. I also got a bottle of slightly nicer than usual red wine. We were at the park by ten, played till lunchtime, and I did not get arrested for my open container. (Discretion is key, as I constantly try to explain to my clients.)

When we got home, Enzo and Teresa took naps and I made apple pie. And my dear, I can lie down in my grave with some degree of complacency. I have done it. It was the perfect crust--you know it by the shattering of the top crust at first slice.

Here is my annoying half weight, half volume recipe. (From the cookbook Fat.)

500 g flour
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/3 tsp salt
125 g unsalted cold butter
125 g. leaf lard
2/3 c ice water.

Cut the butter into the flour first, then the lard. Use pastry cutter and/or cold fingers. You know the rest. And if you don't, go read Fanny Farmer. This makes three very generous crusts, or four skimpy ones.

So I've been eating pie for breakfast, and now it's almost gone. Normal life looms.

I want to include the recipe for Cousin Jack Cookies, which my mom emailed to me when she knew I had lard. My mom said she got the recipe from a neighbor, and then when grandma Clara tried them, she said, "Cousin Jack Cookies!" (Cousin Jack is lang for Cornish--or maybe Welsh--who knows.)

1/2 c lard
1/2 cup butter (probably salted)
1/2 c sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 egg, beated
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
currants (or finely chopped raisins?) (or dried cranberries? adds Kate)

Sift together the flour, salt, spice. Cream lard, butter, sugar. Add beaten egg to fat/sugar. Blend in the flour mixture and the currents.Roll 3/8 inch thick and cut out with a round (scalloped is nice) cutter. Cook on a dry griddle-both sides until toasty looking. (Works better with baking parchment on the griddle, adds Kate.)














Getting By:

Pie Postmortem & Other Matters

The lard pie crust turned out great--tender, flaky, tasty, and pretty easy to work with too. I made pumpkin pie. Enzo helped with the whipped cream. He likes using the hand mixer. To him it's just a fabulous power tool that you get to lick afterward.

Of course no pie postmortem would be complete without some cavil, which is that the flavor wasn't quite as good as butter. Next time I'm going to try half butter half lard. Also, I want to make a pie with a top crust, so there's more crust to enjoy--apple, I think. It's all just a reason to make another pie.

I brought a piece of pie to my lard guy today. He called me a beautiful lady. I think we might have crushes on each other. I read online that he once fired an employee for yelling at the pigs and slapping them. Don't you just love him? He is semi-famous, it turns out.

I owed him $16 from last time, and I reminded him of that but pretended that I didn't remember the amount. He said just to give him $5. I should add that I gave him the pie after money part. It wasn't a pie bribe. It was a pie thank you. We bought a lamb chop. I am thinking about buying a steer.

The steer. Right. My plan goes like this: Buy high speed scanner. Scan all the closed case files that now fill our basement making it impossible to move or find anything. Buy deep freeze and put in basement. Buy steer and put in deep freeze. (Have steer slaughtered first for ease of insertion in deep freeze.)

If I had a steer in my basement, I would fear nothing. Except maybe power failures.

Lard Balls

I wasn't sure how much lard the lard man intended to bring me. It seemed presumptuous to ask for a lot, since he was giving it to me for free. I could bring a five quart Tupperware, but what if he only brought me a couple of cups of lard? It would look as if I'd been expecting more. An ungracious beginning.

So I brought a large ziplock bag and Enzo's old insulated lunch box to keep it cold. When we got there, the lard man heaved this giant thick plastic bag over the table, filled with strangely folded white stuff. It looked like a brain--perhaps a whale brain. Fifteen pounds of of pure pork fat, the good stuff from around the kidneys, which apparently is called leaf lard, even though you still have to render it to make usable lard. He charge me for it too--ten bucks, which is fine. He also, I couldn't help noticing, did not render the lard. Also fine. Better in fact. I think.

The only trouble was that we happen to have the smallest refrigerator you can buy. Our house has an adorable alcove in the kitchen for the icebox, which is what people had when the house was built. Only one fridge at Sears fits in our alcove. It is very small.

Normally I adore being deprived of all choice. I hate standing in the toothpaste aisle frozen by the pros and cons of hydrogen peroxide and baking soda; wondering if my teeth qualify as sensitive or if they're just crappy; longing to live in a nice old-time communist block country with ONE fucking toothpaste. Given choice, I feel I have to make the right choice, and it's just a burden.

Buying our fridge was easy--only one option, hurrah, and it was the cheapest one too. But it is a tad small. This lard would fill the entire freezer or most of the big bottom shelf of the fridge. And I already knew Teresa would be totally grossed out. I was a little nonplussed myself. It was just so...animal. There was no denying the slaughterhouse. And so fat.

When we got home I heaved the bag onto the counter and cut it open. The folds of fat opened slightly, and the whole thing looked bigger than ever. If anyone needs motivation to lose fifteen pounds, try looking eye to eye with fifteen pounds of pure pork fat. It's a LOT. Clearly I would need a cauldron.

I read the Fat cookbook that I got from the library on how to render lard. You can do it on the stove top or in the oven. They key is low heat. Well obviously I would use the slow cooker. I started cutting the fat into one inch cubes. It took a very long time. I ended up freezing about ten pounds of cubed fat in ziplock bags. (It took up a lot less room once it was cubed and squeezed together in a ziplocks.) And I put three pounds of fat in the slow cooker with one cup of water on low for four hours. And I threw some of the fat away. I was weary of the whole project.

The fat warmed and melted. The smell was faintly industrial, yet animal--repulsive, in fact. And I don't repulse easily. Next time I'll run an extension cord and put the slow cooker outside. (My mom's suggestion for the slow cooker onion-eyes problem.)

But it did work. I strained it and cooled it, and now I think all my friends and family are getting lard for Christmas. I could use a melon-baller and give everyone exquisite little boxes of lard balls--waxy, white, slightly iridescent--a pearl among fats.

How to Julienne the Baby

Annie and Todd and Emmet visited for Halloween, and Annie showed me how you can fix the feed tube of the Cuisinart to julienne the baby. Hurrah! I take it all back about the narrow feed tube. (See blog entry of November 8, 2008.) Now all I can think about are various large objects that might need grating. A pound-plus dark chocolate bar from Trader Joe's, for instance. Or large russet potatoes for potato pancakes. Or a loaf of cheese.

Does this mean I can't let Enzo run the food processor by himself anymore? Oh, it'll be fine! Is he really likely to figure out how to change the feed tube if I didn't figure it out in the five years that I've had the Cuisinart? And I used to sell Cuisinarts, when I worked at Jordano's, the great cooking store, now defunct. I didn't do very well there, and we see why.

*

Annie and I went to see my lard guy. He didn't have it. Apparently it burned in the rendering process. I suggested that I just buy the pork fat and render it myself, but he was out of pork fat. I bought three vegan pork chops for eleven dollars, and we agreed to try again next week. Technically it's the pigs that are vegan, not the pork. Vegan in pig land, means no corn. Human vegans can eat corn, but pig vegans can't. It's complicated.

*

Annie and I made enchiladas together with sauteed onions and butternut squash and corn and cheese. No cumin because I only had whole cumin seeds, but no mortar and pestle and no spice grinder. Because I may actually be retarded.

The enchiladas turned out great, mostly because Annie brought about five dozen amazing fresh corn tortillas from the tortilleria in her town. She described how you buy them still warm, and you can eat them just like that, without anything else. And I can imagine hugging five dozen tortillas, warm and fresh and compact as a tightly swaddled baby. (A baby on a good day--say an easygoing three-month-old.) I'm sure we have something like this in Sacramento. I must find it.

*

Tonight for dinner we're having an actual meal. (As opposed to last night, when we had canned sardines, canned olives, avocado and watermelon.) Tonight: vegan, liberally educated pork chops; chunky apple and pear sauce (I make it with no water and lots of butter and just a little maple syrup and Trader Joe's pumpkin pie spice, which is really good, with cardamom and a bit of lemon peel; potato and parsnip pancakes--grated in the new, large feed tube. Because I can.

Unidentified Fishy Objects

By the time I’m done cultivating my lard connection I’ll have spent so much on organic grass-fed, grass-finished meat that it would have been cheaper to have the lard airlifted to my doorstep in tank of liquid nitrogen (sort of like how we got Enzo).

We went to the Farmer’s Market, and I talked to my lard guy. Did he get my message last week that I had the flu? No, but someone else took the lard. No harm done. Will he take me back? Can I call him again? Of course. So we’re set for next Sunday. I call Wednesday to confirm.

Then I was so flustered and grateful that I spent twelve dollars on two lamb chops. I was scanning the price list desperately for something I could afford, nothing, nothing, and it was all lamb. So I asked for the lamb chops, and then I saw the separate price list for pork. But I was too flummoxed to make the change.

We also bought tiny fish that may be sardines and may be anchovies. And shell fish that look like tiny conch. I have no idea who to cook any of this. I think I’ll start by chopping off the fish heads and taking out their guts. As for the conch, I’ll steam and hope and dip them in melted butter with garlic, and that covers a multitude of sins.

*

Last week when I was sick I had no interest in food. Is this how men feel when they stop thinking about sex all the time? It was liberating--and boring.

I didn’t even want chocolate. Ordinarily, for me, chocolate in the house is an itch unscratched. Enzo can carry around two M & M’s all afternoon and not eat them. He puts them in the back of a dump truck, picks them up again, carries them around, puts them on a train, carries them around again. And I feel like prying them out of his plump little fists and devouring them on the spot.

While I was sick, I read like a Turk—Survival In Auschwitz, The Drowned and the Saved, The Reawakening, all in a row. I was going to write that it’s hard to feel too sorry for yourself while you’re reading about the holocaust. But I didn’t have any trouble. Sensation is sensation. Misery is misery. Some is worse than others. The flu was mine. And mixed in with the flu misery was the intense pleasure of reading those books again.

Enzo was almost named Primo after Primo Levi—but we concluded that most people would think of the Mexican beer, not the Italian writer. So we stopped ourselves in time. Not that there’s anything wrong with Mexican beer—god forbid.

*

Post script on the fish drama. Definitely anchovies. I picked their finicky little guts out. The bones came out easily, spine and all. I sauteed them very quickly in butter and garlic and parsley—lemon at the end. And they were okay—but very, very fishy. I like fish. But this was a bit much. They needed capers or more lemon or good rough bread with lots of butter. Or maybe just a large pizza underneath them.

The conch were sweet and briny--and a bit rubbery, but in a good way.

Tomorrow, lamb chops.

Triscuits & Tapwater

We are brought low.

Enzo had swine flu and came through it in a week, hearty as a little bull. But he watched a lot of TV in that week, and now he thinks that’s what his life should be like all the time. Sounds good to me.

When he was sick he fell asleep in my arms at night, just like when he was a baby. After I'd read just a couple of books his eyes would start to close, and he'd turn around and sort of nestle down against my chest and fall asleep--the most delicious feeling.

Less delicious was when I accidentally ate one of his loogeys. He was eating breakfast and gave a great sneeze. I ran for Kleenex, but then I couldn't find any snot--not on his hands, his face, or his plate. A few minutes later I took a bite of his untouched English muffin. And then I saw glistening on the buttery muffin--the loogey.

Now Teresa and I have the flu. We are old and tired. I’m hiding out in Teresa’s studio with a trial transcript and a bunch of trashy magazines. Enzo thinks I’m gone, which is the only way I can get any work done (or any trashy magazines read). I have a box of Triscuits and some water. Every few hours I heave myself up and squat over a Revere Ware saucepan to take a pee. I am a mature professional woman.

When Enzo was sick he ate almost nothing for a week. Now he looks a little thin. So I’m feeling completely miserable and also guilty that Teresa has to do the hard work while I just be a lawyer, and at the same time some part of me is thinking cheerfully, “Oh goody, maybe I’ll get thin.” And I just had a delicious fantasy about ending up in the hospital and getting all my trials continued and being extremely brave and interesting. So there are consolations.

The refrigerator is crammed full of rotting food. As far as I can tell, we have nothing to eat except fish sticks and popsicles. So this morning I dragged myself to Safeway and got the stuff to make chicken soup. Jewish Penicillin Grandma Clara called it, to everyone’s intense embarrassment. Chicken, salt, water, whole carrots and celery (don’t bother to wash, who fucking cares) an onion and a head of garlic (don’t bother to peel), put it all in the slow cooker on high for three of four hours. Ladle out some broth and chicken. Make toast.

Hubris Pie

I told Teresa, "This is going to be my best quiche yet."

I'm eating a piece right now, and it's awful. I think there are Greek myths about this, and they don't end well. The gods don't like it when you fly too close to the sun. And then there's the one about rolling the stone up the hill, and it always fucking rolls back down. And let's not forget the one about the guy who was totally hungry and thirsty--with ambrosia just out of reach.

I think those Greeks were on to something. Maybe they were trying to make butter pie crusts.

I tried to stop. I really did. But my I didn't call my lard guy in time for him to render the lard for the Sunday Farmer's Market. And then I had an idea, which I still think is a good one. The idea is: used chilled browned butter. The high water content in butter makes the crust tough. But in browned butter all the water is cooked off, and the milk solids that make butter so tasty are left and even enhanced by the browning. It's a seriously good idea.

The execution, however, was flawed. I didn't have any sweet butter, so I used salted butter but forgot to reduce the salt to compensate, so the crust came out over-salted. And it takes a lot of salt to make me say that. Also there was too much butter. And it takes a lot of butter to make me say that. Butter crusts usually call for a higher proportion of fat than lard or shortening crusts in order to compensate for the fact that butter is part water. But I cooked off all the water, so I should have reduced the fat as well. There are a lot of greasy, salty foods that I totally adore, but pie crust isn't one of them.

For those who want to try this at home--though why would you?--I followed the recipe in the most recent Fine Cooking (volume 101), substituting browned butter for regular butter.

The filling of the quiche was pretty bad too, but I don't care much about that. I warmed the egg/milk mixture in the microwave so it would cook faster. And it set up so fast that the cheese didn't have time to melt, so there are hard cheese chunks in the filling. And I decided to use almost burned onions that are so good in Middle Eastern cooking, but not so good in quiche Lorraine it turns out.

Look, it's edible. And let's face it, I'm just trying to survive.

Maybe I should make it a burnt offering. And then maybe, just maybe, next weekend when I try it all again with sweet butter and less fat I'll ascend into paradise.