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.

My two minutes of fame

I was flattered some time ago to be asked by interviewer Dan Schneider to be part of a program he planned on the life and work of the late Elmer Kelton, Texas novelist who transformed the western genre. TCU Press was fortunate enough to reprint many of his books, and I had the privilege of working with him on those reprints as well as a nonfiction title and writing a literary biography--which came out before its time because he went on to write many more books. Elmer died in 2009, but his legacy and his literature live on. Literary critic Jon Tuska called his The Time It Never Rained  "one of the dozen or so best novels by an American author in the twentieth century." He raked in honors--Best Western Author, chosen by Western Writers of America, Inc., Spur Awards, Western Heritage Awards, Lifetime Achievements Awards, even from the Texas Institute of Letters, which usually doesn't recognize westerns. He was simply a great writer, one who transformed genre writing into literary achievement. But he was always absolutely humble about the recognition he earned.
He was also a nice guy, cowboy throughout though he would tell you he never made a hand. But he retained that courtly politeness of the cowboy. A gentle man. And a terrific story teller. Those of us who heard him talk often grew to know his stories by heart, but we never tired of hearing them again. I was delighted to consider him a friend and to think that he considered me one.
We taped the show Saturday morning--after my mistakenly thinking it was Friday morning and sitting around waiting for the call that never came. On Skype with me were Steve Kelton, Elmer's son, Joyce Roach, my good friend and a fast friend of Elmer's, and Dan Schneider, the interviewer. Let's say I was a bit nervous--okay more than that. I was afraid of not getting Skype to work, afraid of relying on my memory--but what could I study? There wasn't time to review all of Elmer's work nor even my paltry book on him. So I winged it. But I did get Skype to work.
Joyce did not, so we have an hour and ten minutes of her with her hand on the nose of a horse. But her comments were spot on and revealed a deep knowledge of Elmer's sixty-some books as well as his personality. Afterward, Steve said hers was the most patient horse he'd ever seen--any he'd ever had would have knocked his block off by then. Schneider was well prepared to lead the discussion.
I thought we would only be visible when we were on camera--not so. You can see me scratching, checking something else, eyes wandering. But it was okay. I didn't realize how jowly I've become--my father's daughter. But all in all I was proud to be part of it and hope I held up my end of the discussion well. IF you want to watch it in bits and pieces--it's an hour and ten minutes--you can find it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muhWkrEPquU or

https://vimeo.com/125382848. Dan Schneider Video Interview #14.

Steve Kelton summed it up best when he said, "It's strange to talk of Dad in the past tense. He's still with us." And through his books, he still is and always will be. Like many others, I think Kelton's work will easily stand the test of time.

There's a postscript to this story. I showed the video to Jacob this morning, and he went wild. "You talked to Dan Schneider? He interviewed you?" He went whooping and hollering about the house, stopping occasionally to give me unprecedented hugs and showers of affection. I had really gone up in his estimation. Turns out there are two Dan Schneiders--the one I talked to and one who writes for Nickelodeon productions. "My" Dan Schneider said the other one is richer and more famous, but he's the smart good-looking one. So there went my two minutes of fame.