Ham Sandwich Indicted!

True to form (and compulsion), Ham Sandwich and family kept it on the foodie tip this Christmas, with several days of festive food and drink. We started off on Christmas Eve with our now-traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes. This year's menu included: Garlic-butter glazed salmon (caught by H.S's brother, up in Michigan) Lemon and herb stuffed whole trout (also caught by said brother) Prociutto-wrapped scallops Sardines in Salsa Verde recipe here , with sardines instead of anchovies Crab cakes Shrimp cocktail Crab salad Salmon dip Farfalle pasta with tomato sauce Assorted cheeses, olives, and breads We also experimented with cocktails from Imbibe! a book of old-tyme drink recipes. And maybe the folks of 1862 had a different idea of what tastes good, but I would argue that Hot Buttered Rum is not very delicious. However, the Vanilla Punch we made on Christmas Day (with brandy, sugar, lemon, and vanilla extract), was quite enjoyable. For Christmas Day dinner, we went with a...

Sometimes, the only thing to do on a rainy Sunday night is to bust out a new cookbook and make something that you've never made before. In this case, it was the Golden Book of Baking that my sister-in-law gave me for my birthday (thanks, Eva!) and the recipe was Apple Kuchen Crumble. This was the recipe of choice for a couple of reasons: 1) I had 3 pounds of frozen, sliced apples in my freezer that needed to get used, and 2) I was actually home for the several hours required for raising and proofing the dough. For those of you that didn't grow up with off-the-boat German grandmothers for whom baking was a part of life and not something to blog home about, apple kuchen (cake) is a German pastry with a bread-dough like base that's topped with sliced apples and a crumb topping or maybe a light glaze. It's not overly sweet, as the focus is on the fruit, and it was the de rigeur dessert at many of our family holiday dinners. The thing that was great about my Grandma Ber...

A good therapist can run you about $100 an hour, while a bag of chocolate chips, some flour, sugar, butter, and eggs will cost about $7, and at the end of 60 minutes you'll have delicious chocolate chip cookies... ...If that's not a reason to get in the kitchen when you're stressed/angry/depressed/frustrated, I don't know what is. I remember that I first started baking as a means to relaxation while I was in grad school. Mixing together cookies and brownies was a good way to take a break from paper writing, allow some thoughts to distill and sort themselves out, and, when everything was out of the oven, a little sugar boost was very helpful in pushing through those last few hours of a late night. In law school, baking kept me sane--anchoring me to a former (better?) self that wasn't obsessed with tort cases, legal writing, and journal notes. There's something comforting in the process of mixing disparate ingredients into a cohesive, delicious dough--you may n...