Scones with FRESH blueberries ... yum!

I may be the last person in the world to discover Cooks Illustrated's fresh blueberry scones. When I googled the recipe I found lots of posts reproducing it. I have a little recipe website that I use for sharing my recipes with folks who've attended events I've cooked for, separate from this blog, so I won't reproduce the recipe here. But I will tell you that these scones are breathtakingly almost perfect ... perfected, IMHO, by the additon of a teensy amount of extra sugar. After you bite through the crisp crust, they just melt in your mouth. And then to put big delicious fresh blueberries in them ... it's just the most perfect combination ever. Honest. Try 'em. I dare you to eat just one.

Cooks Illustrated's Fresh Blueberry Scones as adapted by yours truly.

Splendid Table's Ginger Scallion Shrimp

If you haven't already done so, visit The Splendid Table's website and sign up for their weekly email. I've gotten pretty selective about adding recipes to my "to try" pile but about 2 out of 3 recipes from this email make it onto the pile. Lynn Rosette Kasper is one of those people who seem so generous, fun, and gracious that you'd just love to sit down with her for a cup of coffee and laugh and gossip for hours.

I've searched their website to see if they've posted this recipe online so I could give them some link love directly to the recipe, but I can't find it there, so I'll reproduce the entire recipe right here.

You may already know that there are health and environmental concerns about farmed and imported shrimp, which is what is generally sold cheaply in chain supermarkets and elsewhere. The source of the shrimp is now required to be listed on the label in the US, so look for wild shrimp or at least shrimp that is farmed in the US. Of particular concern are shrimp farmed in southeast Asia. There may be some healthily farmed shrimp from there, but it's impossible to disinguish them from the unhealthy ones, so I avoid those. I'd rather eat shrimp less frequently and buy them healthy than ingest heavy metals, etc.

Anyway, getting off my soapbox now, this recipe is one that has made us very happy more than once. It's a rare recipe that I don't tinker with at least a little, but I haven't found a need to change this one bit. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Ginger-Scallion Shrimp

Lynne Rossetto Kasper
Serves 4 generously
This recipe has a favorite brining technique, which is worth filing away. Keep it for other seafood, and for poultry and meats. Spoon the shrimp over rice noodles and scatter with fresh basil and mint leaves.

Brine:

• 1/2 cup salt (kosher or sea salt, not iodized)
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup medium hot pure chile powder
• 2 quarts cold water
• 1 1/2 pounds large raw shrimp, in or out of their shells

Stir-Fry:

• 4 tablespoons canola oil
• 2 large cloves garlic, thin sliced
• 3-inch piece new ginger root, peeled and cut into long, thin strips
• 3 whole scallions, cut into 1-inch pieces
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper
• Salt to taste

1. Brine the shrimp 20 minutes by blending in a medium stainless or glass bowl the salt, sugar and chile in the water. Drop in the shrimp and let stand at room temperature 20 minutes, no more. Drain, shell if necessary, and pat dry.
2. Have everything cut and ready to cook. Drain the shrimp, peel off shells if necessary, and pat them dry. Heat a wok or 12-inch straight-sided sauté pan over high. Once the pan is hot, swirl in the oil.
3. Immediately stir in the garlic, ginger, and scallion. Cook until fragrant (a few seconds), stirring all the time. Add the shrimp, sprinkling them with the sugar and black pepper. Stir-fry 2 minutes, or until they are turning pink and are barely firm. Turn them into a serving bowl. Season to taste, and serve with rice or rice noodles.

LYNNE'S TIPS

• Shrimp are sold by count — the number of shrimp in a pound. The larger the shrimp, the lower the count, and the higher the price. Large shrimp are those labeled 20-30 per pound.
• Choose fresh ginger root that is firm with a thin shiny skin. Those that look dry or shriveled are past their prime.
• To store fresh ginger root, blot away any surface moisture, wrap airtight and refrigerate for up to 10 days. For longer storage, peel the root, slice, wrap airtight and freeze. No need to thaw before using — just break off what you need and return the rest to the freezer.
• Sprinkle coarsely chopped fresh coriander leaves over each serving as a garnish.

A new favorite cookie recipe: chocolate peanut butter mini sandwich cookies

Each Christmas, my contribution to the festivities (outside of my sparkling smile and sardonic wit) is a platter of assorted home-baked treats. Last year, I brought dark chocolate buttercrunch (see most recent post for recipe), a triple layered tea cookie with peppermint icing and chocolate drizzle, something else I can't remember, and chocolate PB mini sandwich cookies.

I was betting on the peppermint cookies for favoritude, so imagine my surprise when everyone, including yours truly, decided the Choco PBs were the best! They're peanut butter cookies with a peanut buttery filling, drizzled with dark chocolate and sprinkled with chopped dry roasted peanuts. The recipe is courtesy of Better Homes & Gardens, and you can find it on their site here. But I don't ever trust public sites to keep those recipes around, and in fact if you just go to bhg.com and search for it, you won't find the recipe. So I always take favorites and write them up either here or on my recipe website. This time I decided to put it on my site, which you can find here.

By the way, those of you who used to pay attention to this blog have probably mostly disappeared, and who can blame you, for who pays attention to one who pays no attention back? I've not been adding much to the blog for a couple of years now, since life got busy work and acting-wise. But work has slowed down, and acting isn't all-consuming, so I do hope to pick back up a bit. If you're still out there listening, will you leave me a comment for encouragement? That's a good soul. Thanks.

Dark Chocolate Buttercrunch

If you like Heath Bar candy bars, you'll love this homemade candy. Don't be intimidated by all the steps. If you follow them fairly carefully, you'll be surprised how easily this comes together. (A hit for our family Christmas '08. Great for holiday gifts.)

Dark Chocolate Buttercrunch

1 c (2 sticks, 1 lb) salted butter
1 ½ c (12 oz) sugar
1 T corn syrup
3 T water
2 c (8 oz) diced pecans or slivered almonds, toasted
1 lb semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

• In a large, deep saucepan, melt the butter. Stir in the sugar, water and corn syrup, and bring the mixture to a boil.
• Boil gently, over medium heat, until the mixture reaches hard-crack stage (300°F on an instant-read or candy thermometer), about 20 minutes. The syrup will seem to take a long time to come to the hard-crack stage, but be patient; all of a sudden it will darken, and at that point you need to take its temperature and see if it's ready. (If you don’t have a thermometer, test a dollop in ice water; it should immediately harden to a brittleness sufficient that you'll be able to snap it in two, without any bending or softness). If you stop too soon, you'll have candy that sticks vehemently to your teeth. Too long, and the syrup will burn and you'll need to start over.
• While the sugar mixture is gently bubbling, spread half of the toasted nuts, in a fairly closely packed, even, single layer, on a lightly greased baking sheet. Don't crowd the nuts too closely, just spread them thinly but evenly. Too closely = small platform for buttercrunch = too thick buttercrunch.
• Top the layer of nuts with half the chocolate. Just drizzle it over; no need to spread it.
• When the syrup is ready, pour it quickly and evenly over the nuts and chocolate. Immediately top with the remaining chocolate, then the remaining nuts.
• Wait several minutes, then gently, using the back of a spatula, press down on the chocolate-nut layer to spread the chocolate around evenly.
• While the candy is still slightly warm,use a spatula to loosen it from the baking sheet.
• When cool, break it into uneven chunks. Catch any slivers and powdery bits & use as ice cream topping.

Print the recipe from here

When I was a kid, I didn't much like turkey. I've always preferred nice moist dark poultry meat, and turkey is so much drier than chicken that it just wasn't a favorite of anyone in my family when I was growing up. So we stopped serving turkey for holidays when I was a kid, and alternated between duck and goose instead. Now that's flavorful meat!

But duck and goose are expensive and not always available, and lately I've begun to appreciate turkey for its distinctive flavor, more interesting than chicken by far. We don't traditionally have Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner at our house, so we don't get turkey leftovers that way. But hey, who says you can only cook turkeys for holidays? Our local coop has locally-raised turkeys, and sells some of it fresh in packaged pieces, so I picked up some thighs the other day and baked them. After we enjoyed a meal of turkey meat, I used the leftovers for this tart. We both liked it. It has a nice blend of flavors and textures, and the sour cream makes a smooth, satisfying sauce without making it heavy.

Now, the Huz doesn't care for blue cheeses of any variety, even mild gorgonzola. So I had to make half the tart with another cheese, in this case some shredded Swiss I had on hand. Just like a half-and-half pizza, I split the ingredients in two and added Swiss to one half of the mixture, gorgonzola to the other, and carefully piled them in separate halves of the tart. It worked out great!

Here's the recipe, adapted from CooksCountry.com.

Turkey & pear tart

1 9-inch round pie crust (prepared is OK, although I made my own tonight)
2 c leftover turkey meat, cut into bite-size pieces
¾ c crumbled cheese (gorgonzola, blue, swiss), divided
3 large or 4 medium firm pears, peeled, cored, and diced
¼ c pecans, toasted and chopped
¼ c dried cranberries (I used dried cherries and would have liked more)
1 c light sour cream
3 T light cream
1 T minced fresh thyme
salt & pepper

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 425 degrees.
   
2. Gently press pie crust into 9-inch tart pan and trim excess dough with knife. Prick bottom of dough all over with tines of fork. Bake until lightly browned, about 15 minutes. Cool on wire rack.
3. Combine turkey, 1/2 c cheese, pears, cranberries, sour cream, cream, and thyme in large bowl. Season with salt & pepper. Transfer mixture to cooled pie crust, then sprinkle with remaining cheese.
4. Bake until crust is golden brown and cheese is melted, about 20 minutes. Let cool up to 20 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.
   

The tart can be refrigerated for 24 hours. Bring to room temperature before serving.

where it's happenin'

My acting resume

With all the acting & working going on, this sad little blog has been very lonesome lately. (Not nearly as lonesome as my virtual pet on Facebook, but let's not go there.)

I did recently update my acting resume, and am frankly putting a post here about it in hopes of getting some search engine love. So you can follow the link or not, totally up to you, and no hard feelings if your answer is "Feh!" Recent updates include a page with photos and some anonymized comments from others ... kind of fun for ME to read if nobody else! :o)

Give peace a chance

Whether or not you agree with the views expressed, this animation is fabulous.

Wow.

Some fun at rehearsal

Whenever a show runs just on weekends, there's always something called a "pickup rehearsal" mid-week, so the actors aren't coming into the first night's performance cold. Sometimes it's a full rehearsal without costumes, other times we just "run lines," which means we sit around with each person saying their lines, no movements. Often if it's running lines, it becomes something of a race, with everyone saying their lines from memory as fast as they can, with little inflection, just really running the lines.

Earlier in the rehearsal schedule, if I was having trouble remembering a line, I would use some sort of trick. My second favorite one was when Annie says, "... her mind is like a mousetrap." My next line isn't responding to that one, it's referring back to something she'd said earlier. It's a little harder to remember lines like that. My line starts, "But after a child hears how many words, Miss Annie?" So the trick that I used for that one was to envision a cartoon mouse with his butt sticking out of a mousetrap ("mousetrap." "But") and then to envision a child's bare butt ("But after a child") and that got me to remember the next line.

That was one of the more elaborate ones, but it worked, and now I don't have to use the trick any more, I just remember the line!

But my hands-down favorite trick led to some fun at last night's pickup rehearsal, which was of the running lines variety. I have a line that goes, "We're off to meet the train, Captain." For some reason, I couldn't get that exactly right. I knew I needed to tell him we were leaving to pick up Annie at the train, but I couldn't get those exact words stuck in my head. So while I was saying them over & over again, I began to hear, "We're OFF to meet the wizard! The wonderful wizard of Oz!" That did it for me, but then of course my mind began running to who we're really off to meet, Miss Annie, and before you know it I'd composed a silly little takeoff on the song.

So I began conspiring, whispering, telling the other actors (but not Annie or the director) that at the pickup rehearsal when we came to that point, I was going to signal with a "Hmmmmmm" setting the first note, and we'd all burst into song. So we did:

We're off to meet the wizard!
The wonderful wizard of Ann.
She is, she is a teaching whiz
Because of her flappin' hands!

If ever, oh ever a whiz there was,
The wizard of Ann's a whiz because,
Because, because, because, because, beCAUSE!
Because of the wonderful signs she does!

[doo doo, doo doo, do doo, do dooo!]

We're off to meet the wizard!
The wonderful wizard of Ann!

We all had a good laugh, and now Annie's worried that when she hears that line as she sits stage right in the "train station" that she'll be unable to keep from smiling!

Very fun. What a good cast we have, to indulge me in such silliness ... and to enjoy it with me!

Quick show update

I'm thrilled to tell you that our first weekend of The Miracle Worker was a raging success. By Sunday, word of mouth had swelled the audience to 3/4 of the theater (and I've played shows there with only 20 people in the seats, so this is definitely a commentary on the show). It's a physically demanding show, especially for the young women who are playing Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller (if you've ever seen the movie you know what I mean). They are doing a bang-up job of those action sequences. When we started rehearsing I was pretty sure it was going to look like a couple of girls pretending to fight with each other but Man! It surely does not!

The role I play, as Helen's mom, is a gem. Even though it's not a lead part, in my opinion Kate Keller really is the beating heart of the story (or am I prejudiced?). She loves her daughter fiercely, and even though she's a proper Southern belle, she is willing to stand up to an overbearing husband, a sniping stepson, and anyone else who tries to get in the way of getting Helen the help she needs. She is gracious, smart, and loving. She loves, jokes, smiles, struggles, cries, and offers emotional support to everyone in her family at one time or another. She's just a gem, and I'm privileged to play her.

The play is structured so that I'm on stage most of the time, even though the lead roles are Annie and Helen. I so much prefer being on stage a lot during a performance. It helps me stay in character; there's often a lot of goofing around going on backstage that can be distracting.

My costumes are drop-dead GORGEOUS! Here's a snapshot the Huz snapped. I'll have more at some point, as the costumer intends to offer them for rental on a website. They're completely authentic right down to the corset & chemise, and completely beautiful. She chose lovely fabrics for mine. In this picture you also see, from left to right, a blind girl, Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller, and a second blind girl. Click on the picture to see it a bit larger.

Saturday night for the first time in all my performances I had the heartwarming experience of hearing the audience clap louder when I came on stage. ("You like me, you really like me!") It happened again for the Sunday matinee, and the crowd held the applause for so long that we had a second bow.

I'm on cloud 9! (That little speck in the picture is me ;-)

Bear sign

Sneaky bear ... what were you after? And was it really necessary to leave a huge pile of your ... ahem ... leftovers on our lawn?

We have our birdfeeders so well protected that the bears haven't been able to reach them, which is good for our feeders but really limits our bear sightings for the most part. They're still coming through the yard, to be sure, but they're so silent about it most of the time, we don't ever know it. This planter was knocked over in the middle of the night, though, so we heard him. But didn't see him. Too sleepy to hop to the window for a peek.

The Huz walked up our driveway the other day and decided to detour into the front yard to check the veggie garden and spotted a big bear streaking away into the woods, spooked. I'd been upstairs working the whole time and never knew he was out there.

I miss seeing them, but really this is the way it's supposed to be. No bird feeder depradation, no bear interactions ... it's what's best for them and for us. I guess I'll be a grownup about it. Sigh.

Pictures of local black bears in our yard in previous years

I'm a Miracle Worker!

... or, a little more accurately and a lot more humbly, I've gotten a role in the classic play The Miracle Worker! As Helen Keller's mother. It's not the lead, to be sure, but the lead needs someone who looks like she's twenty, and they found someone MUCH closer to that age to play Annie Sullivan. But Kate, Helen's mom, is a complex character and on stage a great deal of the time, and I'm delighted at the opportunity.

I don't mind not being the lead as long as I'm not spending most of the night backstage, twiddling my thumbs and waiting to go on. It's not a comfortable sort of waiting for me. If I relax too much, I risk not getting on stage on time or falling so far out of character that my acting suffers. If I keep my energies / nerves too revved up, I'm either hyper or exhausted when I finally do get on stage. Best to just be on stage, in character, all night long, as far as I'm concerned!

I also have signed up for a weekend-long acting workshop in mid-June, and am currently reading the text book, "The Power of an Actor" by Ivana Chubbuck. Good stuff. She has twelve steps (doesn't everybody?) that you apply as you prepare for a role, and while I'm waiting to learn what scene I'll be applying them to for the purposes of the workshop (I know it will be from "The Secret of My Success" but I haven't gotten the script yet), I've been trying to analyze the MW role. It's a whole new way to approach acting for me; up till now it's been pretty much acting by instinct ... and that only gets you so far. I feel like I'm stretching my acting muscles and so far it feels pretty good!

Anyway, the show goes up late July, rehearsals don't start till about 5 weeks beforehand. And more good news, friend Betsy has accepted a small role in the play, so we can commute to rehearsals together! Betsy is famous for being a scene-saver. If someone "goes up on" (forgets) their lines, Betsy is so quick-witted that she'll figure out a way to help them get back on track. An extremely valuable person to have around! We acted together in my first acting experience two years ago ... look for pictures of Nurse Ilsa here.

Train station memories

When you head out on a trip like our 3-weeker across the country, you have no idea what you're going to see and what's going to strike you as memorable. One thing that surprised me was the absolute elegance of some of the old train stations that we saw as we went along. We also saw a few that were plain and serviceable. One, the Salt Lake City train station, was a complete disgrace to the city so there will be no pictures of that here! But many were so beautiful that I found myself snapping picture after picture of the details.

Below are some of my favorites.

Above left: The Huz and his sister brazenly defying the "No Loitering" sign at our starting point, the train station in New London, Connecticut. Right: an unusual bay window at the station, and a view past the train tracks to the ocean just beneath it.

As noted in a previous post, Seattle's King Street Station (above) is absolutely stunning inside. It is being restored to its 1906 glory, full of marble and ornamentation. The architects were part of the team that designed Grand Central station, a gorgeous building if ever there was one, but this one is a small-scale rival.

The photos above show restored sections. Below is a shot of the beautiful ceiling that's been hidden for years behind an ugly drop ceiling. Restoration work started in 2003 and continues today. It will be quite a sight when it's all finished!

I took some very fun shots of Denver's Union Station, but do you think I can find them? The two highlights of the station for me (besides the absolutely crack-up train station attendant who complained that I was keeping him awake when I "hallo"ed to get him to come to the window) were the fabulous tall-backed benches with built-in reading lights running the length over your head (see a picture here), and a retro sign on the outside of the station that urged, "Travel by Train". You can see a picture of it here.

Update! Found my photos! A couple of shots of the gorgeous exterior, one of the Huz lingering anonymously on those fabulous benches, and a beautiful hallway that you walk through from the train into the station proper.

And, of course, there's Chicago's Union Station, the granddaddy of all train stations west of New York.

The beauty of this station just cannot be overstated, although there's a tacky new section that's not so cool. But you can get any kind of food you want here, there's a whole section that's like a shopping mall, and just look at this staircase (below left) and great hall (below right). Fabulous.

Sacramento, the Delta King, and traveling by train

The Huz and I spent a few hours walking around Sacramento this afternoon, working off our yummy Greek lunch purchased at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant (the best kind, in our opinion!) from a woman whose Greek accent was so thick you could spread tzatziki on it. Yesterday we'd prowled Old Sacramento pretty thoroughly, taking a ride on a formerly steam engine train completely surrounded by 3rd - 5th graders, and then just walking up & down this very touristy but fun section of the city. I found a cool little place called Shiny Objects, with the owner behind the counter and scads of fascinating glittery dichroic glass pendants. Picked up a couple, one for myself and one for friend Robin. I liked them so much that I went back today to buy some more for gifts, but unfortunately by 3:00 he was already closed. Bummer! Oh well, it gives me an excuse to find something unique for them at one of our next stops (Salt Lake City and Denver).

Below are some pics showing the charm of the Delta King, where we're nesting for a couple of days. We're trying to stay at locally-owned venues whenever possible, and we've loved our stay here.

Look how short the doorways are! (The Huz is 6'2")

It's funny, much as we're enjoying this leg of our trip, we're finding people are a bit more stand-offish than many we've met earlier in our trip. I find that the memories that bring a smile to my face are the ones that include people we've talked to, like Carol in Whitefish, and this fellow who helped us with camera batteries in St Paul, and a dinner with the Huz's former fiance and her husband (surprised myself by really liking her! And him :o). And for the past couple of days there hasn't been a ton of that.

Partly it may be that we're not eating in the dining car lately, only because our trips don't coincide with meal times. Dining cars are great social experiments. Each table seats four, and because they can't afford not to have all the seats populated all the time, we've always been seated at dinner with others. It's made it very easy for us to spend leisurely time with some pretty intersting people. For example, our first dinner companions, on the trip from NY to Chicago, were a couple who'd just come over from Egypt. She was an American who's been teaching at the American University in Cairo, and he was an Egyptian lawyer. We never did entirely get the story as to why they're traveling together; they're not married and had separate sleeper compartments. They were in the US so she could undertake a grant-funded project for the city of Detroit, something to do with comparing the "spaces" that middle Eastern immigrants choose as compared to their residences back home.

Our second companion was a published author! Bob Neveldine has published a novel and is working on another one. He lives in Syracuse and writes until his money runs out, then he does contract work for Microsoft writing content for their website.

Next we dined with a newly engaged couple, Jeff and Stephanie. Both are well ensconced in the hospitality industry. She's a concierge, he advises restaurants and wealthy individual collectors on wines. Needless to say, we got some good tips from them on restaurants!

Next was a woman who's lived all her life in North Dakota and told us about the recent oil rush going on there; and another woman who is a project manager for the King County (Seattle) prison system.

Honestly, it was all just so fascinating! The Huz is great at drawing people out and we've both enjoyed being diverted from our own sort of dense togetherness on this trip ... we've been married 16 years and together for 20, so it's not that we don't have anything to talk about, but we probably don't have three solid weeks of conversation in us either!

Seattle to Sacramento

After another scenic trip on Amtrak, from Montana to Seattle (see below), we spent 3 days with the seester and her family, including Katie the Jack Russell. Katie's a love, never happier than when she's getting a tummy rub. Got my doggie fix. Shhh, don't tell Simba! We went out for some fabulous sushi at I Love Sushi with the seester, her Huz, and my Favorite Blond West Coast Niece. And really enjoyed some great music and preaching at the seester's church, Eastlake Community Church. After church, some of the seester's friends old and new joined us 4 for brunch at a local diner type place (we love those!) and the conversation was great ... wide-ranging, some personal, some about current events, just a good mix of talkers. We loved it to PIECES!

We had such a nice visit with the seester & her huz, we hated to leave, but leave we did, hopping on a train south to Sacramento. We're staying on the Delta King, a permanently moored river boat in Old Sacramento. Despite our landing in their laps at the unseemly hour of 7am, the staff gamely took in our luggage, directed us to the restaurant for a fabulous breakfast, and got us into our room by 8:30. What a blessing ... we were pretty tired from the overnight train trip. We'd gotten on the train in Seattle at around 10 am and arrived in Sacramento at 6am the next morning. If all had gone smoothly, that would have been a no-hassle way to get here, but a section of the track was out for repairs so we were on the train just to Eugene, Oregon, then got on a rather ratty bus for a 5-hour ride to Klamath Falls, Oregon, and then finally got on a train at 10pm for the final leg. We hadn't arranged for a sleeper car because we'd heard you can negotiate for the sleeper with the conductor once the train has left the station, and often get a better rate for it. So that's what we did, and it worked, but it also delayed bedtime quite a bit. And I can never just walk into the room, lie down, and go to sleep. So while the huz clambered into the top bunk and closed his eyes for the night, I played card games on my PDA till 1am, and then *still* couldn't get to sleep when I shut off the lights!

Needless to say, we took a two-hour nap right away when we got our room, and then headed out to explore Old Sacramento. More on that, and pictures of the Delta King, later!

















The Seattle train station is gorgeous. So's the Portland station, but unfortunately I didn't have my camera handy for that one.

vanilla: real? imitation?

A shout out to my cooking pals: here's an unexpected result in the real v. imitation vanilla wars!