The on-going chronicle of all things related to the George and Laura Roediger House (c. 1905) in the historic Holly Avenue Neighborhood of downtown Winston-Salem, NC. More info and pictures can be found at RoedigerHouse.com. [Mobile users: CLICK TO SEARCH the blog.]
With a fair portion of leftover sous vide chicken breast from last weekend's Peruvian-spiced chicken breast dinner, it seemed like a smart move to whip up a batch of chicken salad for sandwiches. I fancied it up just a bit, adding in walnuts and Granny Smith apples. If my normal error is to over-dress the chicken salad, this time I might have underdone it. Was it still pretty tasty this past Tuesday evening? Sure enough!
As is sometimes the case, I find myself caught with a supply of milk that is approaching its expiration and have to get busy with it in some form or fashion. Thus, there was a sad batch of vanilla pudding a few days ago, and there was also a new container of homemade ice cream, heavy on the whole milk and perched on the vanilla-spiked mountaintop. I managed to keep it mostly in reserve in anticipation of last Sunday night's gathering of the Roediger House regulars
According to the blog, I've only made Margaret Lasater's delightful apple pie one other time since I started keeping a Roediger House blog: in celebration of Independence Day back in 2016. In the early 2000s, though, I think I made it quite a bit for my students at Wake Forest or when I'd have folks over for simple suppers in my old kitchen. By the way, it is a wonderful streusel crumb-topped apple pie, and the recipe is credited to Margaret Lasater. Who is Margaret Lasater? Well, two of the most wonderful gentle good souls in the church where I grew up were Gene and Lucy Lasater, and Margaret was the wife of Gene's cousin Dick. It was from another Memorial Baptist Church member in Buies Creek named Mary-Margaret McKnight who shared this recipe with me back in 2000, upon my request!
Apple Pie by Margaret Lasater; recipe shared with me by Mary-Margaret McKnight of Buies Creek, NC, in 2000.
"Sweet Milk Ice Cream," a recipe from King Arthur Baking that is no longer available online.
Last Sunday night was a gathering of the most regular Roediger House crew, and the evening's menu was selected in part because of advantages to be found in a good slow cooker recipe. When dinnertime came, I served up Country Captain Chicken, over brown rice from the rice cooker, and it had terrific flavor and just enough heat to it to make it interesting. This recipe came from good friends in New Jersey, and it is always so delicious that I wonder why it's not on the menu more often. The last time I made it was almost three years ago, for pete's sake.
"Country Captain Chicken," a recipe shared by David Wald (Princeton, NJ), May 2009.
This past Saturday night was feeling all right at the Roediger House. At suppertime, we might say the joys of the evening were pumped up by the particularly good grub on the dinner plates: Peruvian-spiced chicken breasts, cooked perfectly in the sous vide set-up, with roasted Brussels sprouts and roasted spiced cauliflower. Everything was just especially good that evening. That might explain why I could not allow any of the remaining vegetables in the pans to be neglected or merely tossed into doggie bags: before clean-up, I just ate everything that was left.
While I have recently encountered issues with my vanilla pudding properly setting up (and rescuing it with additional tinkering itself has had mixed results), I nonetheless persevered with a big batch of it last Wednesday night. Repair efforts continued into Friday before it seemed somewhat presentable but still imperfect. Not that I needed to have the temptation around, because, well, vanilla pudding is really outstanding even when it's a bit soupy, no?
"Vanilla Pudding," from the Food Network Kitchens.
For dinner this past Thursday, after the slip for pre-cooked/vacuum-sealed/frozen/sous-vided Italian sausage was drawn from the lottery jar, I reached into the clippings of my pasta recipe notebook and drew forth an easy one: sausage, basil, and mustard pasta shells. It comes together quickly and satisfies readily.
"Pasta with Sausage, Basil, and Mustard," by Nigel Slater and published in Food & Wine, September 2002.
After a couple of days of work in northern Virginia, it was nice to once again be home and in my kitchen. This past Wednesday night, those efforts resulted in plates of not-so-creamy chicken marsala (I rushed the sauce a bit, I think) with pan-seared chicken breast cutlets, delicious sautéed mushrooms with garlic, on a bed of linguine and accompanied by roasted garlicky whole green beans. It was a necessarily-filling meal after limited eating while out of town.
Based on "Chicken Marsala with Gorgonzola," by Jill Anderson (Sleepy Eye, MN). In Taste of Home, February/March 2012, p. 34-35.
I had to head up to Virginia for a couple of days of work to start off this past week. Before leaving Sunday, I made a mid-day meal that was pretty delicious: southwestern Caesar salad with grilled sliced chicken breasts. Topped with corn, onion, and black beans, it was a bowl of satisfying goodness and held me in good stead when I had to take off on my nearly six-hour journey up to northern Virginia.
And can I mention that I'm pretty glad that I've mostly figured out how to properly grill chicken breasts so that they are flavorful, juicy, and cooked just to the right temperature?
Southwestern Caesar Dressing was my creation but was based on:
It was a brisk 44°F in the bright sunshine of early morning this past Sunday, with coffee in hand and an amazing pooch starting his day with his typical sniffing excursions. I paused at the front of the house to take in how gorgeous a morning it was, with a brilliant blue sky and still a most marvelous house to call my own.
Ah, but it seems also to be a season of death and dying around the yard. On either side of the front steps, both of my dwarf mugo pine bushes are giving up the ghost.
One has lost all its needles, and the other is about half-way there.
Before summer was quite over, I saw my japonica bush had also expired, although I'm suspicious that it lost the fight for water and nutrients with the monkey grass that had crowded around it.
Over on the south property line, in the narrow region beside the driveway that I simply call "The Azaleas," three of those shrubs down towards the front have all perished. I'm pretty sure it's the continuing issue of some pesky invasive root system that I've not yet dug up enough of.
And I don't think I can prevent it from coming back so I'll have to come up with an alternative plan next spring for a best use of that small sloped area so close to the sidewalk and passersby.
Finally, I'm utterly flummoxed about the new yard that I worked so hard to establish, because most of the grass I had planted has died off and disappeared and in its place is a clumping invasive grass. I mean: all of my expensive mail-order-seeded grass that was so lush in the spring is completely gone! I've got sizable bare spots on each side of the front lawn. It's a bit late in the season now, but I have spread fresh grass seed and reset the regular irrigation routine in hopes I can get new grass established before winter invades. It's as much to control for clover and weeds as it is to be sure that I don't end up having washed out topsoil and such.
For the last little while I've been trying to operate with a measure of discipline in the sweets realm. I'm able to be only so good about that but there has been a recent stretch of heightened restrictive success. Last Saturday night, though, following a late lunch of salmon and cauliflower, I felt like I'd created a good opening for a batch of amazing large sugar cookies for an evening sweet treat. Oh, lordy, were they buttery and tender and all three I ate that night were incomparable.
"Mardi Gras Sugar Cookies," from Kelly of AmericanCupcakeAbroad.com. [Published 20 February 2012]
Confession: I'm a fan of farm-raised salmon, over and above wild-caught Atlantic or Alaskan salmon. But when the sale price and the slab of fillet that looked good combine, it can tilt my grocery decision-making in an occasionally varied direction. But then I eat it and regret it because it does not suit my palate as well. That's what happened last Saturday, frankly. I enjoyed the spiced roasted cauliflower but the salmon? Not so much.
Quite a while back, I took a package of ground beef and turned it into a hearty batch of taco meat, that I then prepped and vacuum-sealed to toss into the freezer for later use. That particular slip was finally drawn last Thursday morning, from the lottery jar, so I used it to make sheet pan beef nachos that night. And they were all the better for having a fresh batch of lime crema, extra garlicky, to go with it.
Taco-Style Meat Based on "Crispy Beef Tacos," by Hilah Johnson. From HilahCooking.com.
Seasoning was based on "Taco Seasoning I," from Bill Echols on AllRecipes.com.
"Easy Lime Crema," from Lisa Bryan of DownShiftology.com. [Published 22 April 2020]
Last Wednesday night I took great delight in returning yet again to my beloved roasted salmon and roasted broccoli meal. I have become very dependent on this specific menu to help me eat healthy and to be able to do so with incredibly easy and convenient preparation. The result proves consistently satisfying even if it makes for ridiculously repetitive blog entries.
Last Wednesday morning, as I returned from setting up the coffee pot in the kitchen upon first rising, I had a bit of a start—as in, a moment of being startled. On the front porch sat a hooded stranger in the dark of the pre-dawn hour.
One option in that situation is to storm out there and tell him to get off my porch, to point out that he had to pass the No Trespassing sign in order to reach that chair. Another option is to share some of the coffee with him that I'd just made...along with two sugars.
After I set up another chair beside him, I warned him I'd be coming back out with a very friendly pooch who would take great sniffing interest in him.
His name is Alonso, and he told me from glancing in the windows of this fine house that he thought it was a museum or something and that he did not think he would be bothering anyone while he waited for the cab that he had called. He told me he'd been working the bottle ring toss game at the local Carolina Classic Fair and was preparing to head over to Raleigh for the NC State Fair. He showed me his ankle monitoring bracelet, worn as a condition for his parole from a prison term. He talked about his distrust of the COVID-19 vaccine but he'd gotten the Johnson & Johnson jab anyway before starting to work the fair. He told me of his Trinidadian lineage and we did not resolve the debate between whether all women were dangerous or if he was only interested in dangerous women.
Eventually it became the brighter light of dawn and Alonso said he'd best be heading out and letting Sumner and me get our day started.
He gave me his empty Four Loko can but kept the plastic sack and headed out into the morning, but not before asking me to make sure he had my cell number.
Following my longest ever work trip that took me out of town October 2-11, it sure was a fine thing to return to the wonderful Roediger House and begin getting back to the delightful normal routines that are so comforting on Tuesday, the next night. You know, like drawing a slip from the freezer overstock lottery jar and finding that it's time for one of the final rounds of vacuum-sealed prepped pork chops to drop into the sous vide immersion bath for about 2.5 hours. I didn't go to the store yet so I had to break out a couple of cans of green beans to go with the chop and the cubed roasted spiced roasted potatoes. I was starving again and ate the heck out of that stuff, much to my delight.
Earlier that same afternoon, when enjoying a little sitting time out in the grove, I spotted the first camelia bloom on the bush at the front wall, a gorgeous bright pink and a harbinger of things coming from that healthy bush.
As we wrapped up September, I was on another ice cream tear, and the last batch I made before departing town for an extended trip occurred Friday, October 1st. This time around it was a return to the wonderful vanilla bean ice cream that one cannot help but love.
"Vanilla Ice Cream" (p. 35-36), from Bi-Rite Creamery's Sweet Cream and Sugar Cones, by Kris Hoogerhyde, Anne Walker, and Dabney Gough. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press (2012).
In advance of leaving town for a 10-day trip to Africa, I wanted to use up some of the vegetables I had on hand. That included some delicios home-grown sweet potatoes gifted to the Roediger House from the garden of the Pilons down the street. Those I used to make cubed spiced roasted sweet potatoes, which were awesome. I also had Brussels sprouts from Costco that I'd not done anything with. Together they were just what I needed for supper on October 1st, as I checked off the last few items on my very long trip preparation list.
"Roasted Sweet Potatoes," from Chelsea Lords of ChelseasMessyApron.com. [Published 04 March 2019]
Here's a fun photo from the morning coffee time on the driveway back on September 14th: a hawk flew first into the Bradford pear tree, then jumped over to the dying cherry tree, and then perched atop the outdoor movie screen frame. His movements caught Sumner's attention, and I tried to capture that moment with my iPhone.
This is a photo of me having a brief conversation with the gentleman who'd just engaged in public urination behind the ornamental grass behind the house, back on 17 September. Ah, downtown living!
Back on September 27th, I worked quickly to put together two different bases for ice creams. The first of those was brown sugar cinnamon, which was delicious, and the other was eggnog ice cream. You know what it was? Also delicious. Most of my batches of eggnog ice cream have followed the David Lebovitz Perfect Scoop recipe, but as September wrapped up I instead made this batch according to the directions from another awesome source: the Bi-Rite Creamery recipe book. This is now the third time making the Bi-Rite version (and the first time in four years!)
"Eggnog Ice Cream," from Bi-Rite Creamery's Sweet Cream and Sugar Cones, by Kris Hoogerhyde, Anne Walker, and Dabney Gough. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press (2012), p. 186-187.
I'm trying to get a jump on the onset of winter, for a change, with a couple of key moves. One of those was to go ahead and order a load of firewood, which was delivered on the final day of September.
I had the fellas just toss it all into a pile in the corner of the driveway. Then I was able to sort all the different cuts and qualities.
And eighteen wheelbarrow loads later, I had it all nicely and highly stacked on the firewood rack behind the chimney:
It had been three years since I last ordered firewood. A comparison of the photos from 2018 and last week suggests that the increased price was accompanied by a smaller load!
On the final day of September, with a lot going on all day, I was glad for the simplicity of the sous vide set-up for a prepped frozen protein, plus the ease with which I can roast vegetables in the oven, to make dinner happen around 5:30 pm that afternoon. One plate had a sous vide sage and garlic pork chop; the other had the last of the salmon from a couple of nights before. The vegetables were asparagus cuts and spiced cauliflower florets, and it was all pretty skipping good.
All too often of late, it seems likely that if I'm posting about having made either pudding or ice cream, you can be sure there was milk or heavy cream that needed to be used up. That's how I found myself making the bases for two different ice creams at the start of the final week of September, one of which was brown sugar cinnamon ice cream. It's a pretty delicious frozen dairy treat that, best I can tell, I've only made once before: to accompany a blue velvet layer cake. It needed no cake this time to make it amazing: it stood on its own two feet (?) quite well, disappearing rapidly from its serving cups.
"Brown Sugar Cinnamon Ice Cream," from Heather Tullos of SugarDishMe.com. [Published 11 September 2015]
Once more to the lottery drawing jar to figure out what next is to be brought out of the well-stocked freezer, leading to the reappearance of baby back pork ribs on the penultimate day of September. Because I had stocked up, and then prepped and vacuum-sealed lots of different proteins, the goal has been to whittle down that abundance in a random and fun manner. Now that we're getting to the bottom of the jar, I know there's a concentration especially of slips for pork chops and pork ribs...and I'll note that over the nearly two months that this method has been employed, only one of the ribs slips has come out.
With a rub applied before vacuum-sealing and freezing these, they were all ready to be tossed straight into the 152°F sous vide bath on Tuesday afternoon, for a good long 24-hour cook. Then they were ready to be finished off Wednesday with a nice smear of homemade barbecue sauce and slid for a few minutes under the broiler...but not too long, because I wanted that precious tenderness to be maintained!
Guidance for Pork Ribs from "Sous Vide Barbecue Pork Ribs," from J. Kenji López-Alt, former Culinary Director and current Culinary Consultant of SeriousEats.com. [Updated 27 May 2021]
Yet again the dinner feature for a recent Roediger House meal was a Caesar salad topped with roasted salmon fillet. The honest explanation for recurring appearances depends both on my love of salmon but also on a current battle to get back to my preferred weight class after an unexpected spike (which I attribute to an anti-inflammatory prescription). For a glorious final Tuesday in September, this salmon salad was the serious shizzle.
