Saturday cooking

Saturday cooking has become a habit with me—sometimes for company, sometimes planning ahead for Sunday supper, and sometimes just because I want to. Today I started with what’s called an “herbal quiche.” You put medallions of goat cheese in the crust before you pour in the herb/egg/half and half mixture. In the picture I saw, those medallions rose magically to the top, and the finished quiche had a nicely browned crust with white globes dotting the surface. Why do we always think food has to look like the picture? The goat cheese in my quiche stayed solidly in the bottom of the crust.

It’s for brunch tomorrow, but you know how the first piece always comes out of the pan so badly? I sacrificed and ate that first piece for supper tonight. Good, needs a bit more salt, and the goat cheese makes it really rich. We’ll see after church tomorrow.

I picked out some recipes for Sunday supper and submitted them to Christian, via Jordan. He chose two—miso chicken or Irish coddle. I made Jordan choose between the two, and she chose the coddle, I think because it has ring sausage in it and Jacob loves that. It is not a light summery dish.

Tonight, I got a running start on it and, of course, played around with the recipe. It called for one lb. sausage, but Jordan pointed out Jacob eats almost that much by himself, so we bought two. Accordingly, I cut down from a pound of bacon to a half pound You’re supposed to cook the diced bacon, brown the ring sausage and then cut into chunks, then layer with onion, potato, bay leaves, salt and pepper, etc. Well, it dawned on me that chunking up the sausage before browning it would give it more good braised flavor, and if you’re doing that, why not caramelize the onions? I don’t like to pre-cut onions hours or a day before cooking them—they take on an odor and flavor that I find objectionable.

So after some preliminary browning and figuring out what I wanted to do, I now have a bowl of bacon bits, sausage chunks, and caramelized onions ready to layer with potatoes, etc., tomorrow and then stick it in the oven. Forgot: you make a sauce out of the drippings with one Tbsp. flour and a bottle of stout. Pretty thin sauce, but that is done too.

Tomorrow, a report on the Irish coddle. Tonight, I’m going to read. Finished the Anne Hillerman novel, Cave of Bones, and truly enjoyed it, with its focus on the female character that her father, Tony Hillerman, introduced and then almost ignored. Anne brings Bernadette Manuelito front and center, with great success.

And my new phone arrived today. Setting it up baffled me but was a piece of cake for Christian. It said to line the circles on the old and new phones up, so I put them face to face—it looked like my phones were mating. Gave the me giggles. He laid them side by side, and it worked fine. Some kind of AT&T magic jumps the info from the old phone onto the new one.

Now if someone would teach me how to use Skype—quick! Before Wednesday.