Yesterday we had a feast. It was all about timing, and I did spend the better part of the day preparing food. Luckily, I realized, in the nick of time, that the pies would need to be baked before the chickens. Kevin's sister helped whenever she passed through the kitchen--mashing potatoes, extracting cooked pumpkin from its shell, et cetera. But as evening approached, I began to panic that the children would, in their hunger and impatience, literally climb the living-room walls, waiting for the chickens to reach optimum cooking temperature. Chickens surpassed expectation, thermometer rose, and we had dinner on the table at six o'clock sharp. Baby CJ got to try mashed pumpkin (a so-so review, I'd say). The chicken was succulent; the stuffing delicious; the brussel sprouts edible (Kevin's mom loved them, but I must say they could have been better--perhaps parboiled or roasted a tad longer); the salad of local bitter greens with honey-balsamic dressing and chopped apples and seeds stunning (am I allowed to say this about food I've prepared myself?), and the smashed potatoes with garlic very yummy indeed. Yams snuck onto the menu all by themselves--they were in amongst the potatoes from our CSA box, and were pale in colour, white when uncooked and a delicate yellow cooked, and I assumed them to be odd-shaped potatoes, overgrown fingerlings, and only upon chopping them realized they must be something else. Good old yams. At the last minute, I scrounged up a bag of frozen cranberries and cooked that down into a quick sauce with sugar and water. So easy, but it added the finishing touch--tang and colour.
Sitting down before this feast, I realized that my cooking is best described as "rustic" or "plain." The sauces are never smooth. Nothing is perfectly whipped. Food tastes like the simple ingredients from which it is made. The pumpkin pie, for example, was made with pumpkin scraped out of the shell (roasting it whole worked wonderfully), mixed as was with the other ingredients, and poured into the crust to bake. The resulting pies were not pudding-like or pureed in texture, but you could taste pumpkin. You knew you were eating pumpkin. This is also the food I like to eat.
Labels: local food