Endless Simmer - A Food Blog

I went apple picking a few weeks back and, well, it was okay.  We had to drive over an hour away—into Virginia?!?!— and well, manually pick apples.

The snacking-before-picking was fun though.  Liza and I went to a press dinner at Urbana earlier in the week and as a parting gift got this bad ass mission fig jam, made by the chef using his family recipe.  I’m not usually a jam girl, but paired with goat cheese, spread on a baguette and eating it at an orchard—yea, I can handle a jam like that.  (Would love other suggestions for how to use up this jam.  Also, how long will it last in the fridge?)

After we stuffed ourselves (this is also where the fritattas came in) we used these lacrosse stick looking devices that had a comb thing to pull the apples off of the trees.  But every time I tried to snag one, they’d hit this inner part of the stick and tear a sliver of skin off.  And I’m not going to buy a pierced apple, so I just threw it on the ground.  That happened about 6 times before I gave up and just gossiped with El and Evo Diva (better known for her up-the-butt shenanigans) while another gaggle of girls kept pursuing the forbidden fruit.

Now for the fuck up.

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So readers, I know the pages of ES can sometimes contain an iota of whining and frustration. We are not professional chefs; avocados and pine nuts can only save so much (I kid, I kid). We of course have never made a claim that this would be a bitch-free blog.

But this time, if you read complaints from Gansie in the coming weeks about chicken pot pie, you only have yourself to blame!! If only one of you fools had switched allegiances and voted for lasagna, she wouldn’t be so stressed about cooking a dish for the first time on television! In front of a panel of judges! I am referring of course to the infamous Lasagna-Pot Pie election of 2008. The voting ended recently and chicken pot pie beat out lasagna by 1 vote, 40 to 39.

And while Gansie would have wowed the judges with her amazing eggplant/chickpea lasagna, it is going to take some real digging and testing to figure out how to make a crazy chicken pot pie. You know she won’t just cook a plain Jane version. And since we love reader participation in everything we do here, feel free to add some of your ideas for Gansie’s future chicken pot pie in the comment section.

While you all comment, I will be starting my op-research on her competitors. Those bastards fellow cooks must have some skeletons in their closets.

Photo: flickr user Travis S.

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This post is so long overdue that I’m a little embarrassed to even blog it. Way back when, I bought lavender flower as a random splurge purchase, and asked you all what the eff I could do with this stuff. You gave me a ton of good ideas, and I was all gung-ho to make lavender pork rubs and lavender chicken and lavender chocolate cream pie. For my first step, I said I would make lavender shortbread cookies, since that sounded like the easiest.

I don’t know why I thought that sounded the easiest, considering I know eff all about baking. Even gansie called me out on that one.

gansie:  WHOA!

youre going to bake?

Well, four months later I finally put down the sautee pan and got around to it. Let me tell you, even though it involves baking and sugar and flowers and other sweet things, this is not a pretty story. Follow me after the jump. It’s gonna get ugly.

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- Gansie’s upcoming televised debut is causing quit the stir, with passions flaming between the pro- and anti- pot chicken pie people:

Mike Donlon: I am going to vote regular and often (it is allowed). CHICKEN POT PIE

Not Cooking: Pot Pie is a baked-good and a poor measure of COOKING ability. Booo.

With 71 votes in, lasagna has just inched ahead of chicken pot pie, and mac ‘n’ cheese is making a strong move as well. There are 3 days left to vote, so head over to Capital Cooking Show and weigh in.

- In other voting news, it’s a dead heat between the Greek Gazpacho and the Avocado-Sesame Gazpacho in our weekly Who Cooked it Better? Meanwhile, JoeHoya points out some further craziness:

Best gazpacho of all? Poste’s version with heirloom tomatoes from their courtyard garden, a sprinkling of black salt and a dollop of dijon ice cream in the bowl - hands down.

- But the singular Comment of the Week Award has to go to ES contributor/poet laureate Maidelitala for her flowery description of gansie’s latest runny egg yolk photography:

the glistening deep-vermilion of the tomato/

the coy curl of the shaved scallions/

the erotic gooeyness of a scarcely running yoke.

That’s some haiku shit right there! Way to raise the commenting bar, Maidelitala. And while we’re at it, a very happy birthday to our favorite veggie lactard from the entire ES community.

Photo: Roland

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I know what you’re thinking:

Wow, Gansie put a fried egg on something. How fucking original. I love seeing the same thing over and over on ES.

Actually, this post is about something I baked. But 80 liked this picture best, so I had to put it on top. The picture directly below actually shows what the post is about, see top. Yes, I baked. Yes, I cheated.

I’ll explain.

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My little sister, Sherry, just turned 21. Turning 21 is like a national fucking holiday, well at least with team gansie. My mom was so nervous about her doing something stupid that she couldn’t sleep the entire weekend. We’re that serious about our *legal* drinking. So for her birthday, I knew her friends would be supplying all the alcohol she needed, so I thought I could provide some sustenance.

As we all know, I can’t bake for shit. Well, that’s actually a lie. It’s unclear (well, until you read this post) if I can bake or not. It’s not that I can’t bake for shit, I just never never never bake.

Anyway, for the love of my sister, I decided to try my hand at the oven. Last time I sent her something - rice krispie treats - they were a total pain in the ass, but turned out well (I mean, they’re pretty foolproof.) This time I really wanted to challenge myself.

I’m not really friends with many bakers, except for DAD GANSIE and Mo Green. So I asked the two of them for some suggestions. I also emailed my high school ex-boyfriend’s mom. She’s an amazing baker, and I think the last time I made chocolate chip cookies was with her, like a decade ago. I asked her to think of something I could make that was

1. easy
2. delicious
3. would travel well.

And then Mrs. A had the brilliant idea of a GIANT COOKIE! The giant cookie cake would be

1. easy, it’s just like making regular cookies
2. clearly be tasty - its a cookie!
3. stay moister than separate cookies because there would be less surface area exposed to air

She also suggested that I buy a pizza round pan to bake the cookie on and to stop by my local pizza place (if only I still lived in Jersey…) to use one of their pizza boxes to ship the cookie. Fortunately, I’m a lazy shit and never threw out the big William Sonoma box from one of my birthday presents a month earlier, so I used that instead.

Take the jump to find out about my adventures in baking.

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