King Cakes / Long time no blog

Why?
Long Story!
But here I am back again, and life is going on.
Let’s talk about KING CAKES!

Here’s a nice recipe for two small king cakes – very very basic, and a person who enjoys sweets may want to make it… well… sweeter…

1/2 C warm water;
1 package active dry yeast;1/2 C milk;
1/2 C sugar plus a little more for proofing;
little bit o salt;
6 T butter, real butter please, plus MORE for filling;
2 eggs;
4-5 C flour;
Cinnamon and sugar for the filling.

See, it’s just a bread dough:
Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and sprinkle on a little sugar to get it started proofing.
Scald the milk in a little pan, add the butter to melt it, and the sugar and salt. Let it cool so that it’s not scalding hot – don’t want to kill the yeast! – and mix it with the yeast mixture.
Add the eggs.
Then add the flour, a cup at a time, until it begins to hold together.
Knead it until it gets satiny with an even texture and air bubbles throughout; then put it into an oiled bowl in a warmish location and let rise until doubled in bulk – more or less.
I used the rising time as an opportunity to go look for a plastic baby to hide in the king cake – unfortunately, not easy to find in Seattle. I almost settled for a plastic dinosaur – but ultimately concluded it’d be better not to have anything.
A shame, really.
BUT
it all turned out OK:

Take the risen dough and divide it in two.
Take one of the two and spread/roll/finagle it into a rectangle, 9×14 inches or so (I spread mine until it compeltely covered a small baking sheet.

Then spread it with softened butter – as much as you like – and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar – again, as much as you like. The more you use, of course, the more sweet it will be.

Roll it like a jelly roll – that is, like a ho-ho – and moisten the edge to seal it; then moisten the ends and stick them together to form a ring.
Really, though, you could leave the edge unsealed, and then use it to do something fancy: I snipped mine into a blunt short fringe with kitchen shears, and then twisted the little fringey bits to make the king cake look a little like a crown. Surely there are other fun embellishments to try…

Repeat this with the other half of the dough. You can also add fillings – though I’m not sure how that affects the cooking time, and I prefer the plain cinnamon types, myself.

Then let the formed king cakes rise again, for as long as you can stand – in the meanwhile, preheat the oven to 375.
Spread them with beaten egg, if you’d like them to have a nice shiny brown surface – though you’ll be likely covering that surface with frosting or sugar anyways -

Bake. Give them ten minutes or so at 375, then turn it down to 350 and keep an eye on them. Baking will probably take 30 minutes… maybe more, maybe less, depending on how thick they are. Leaving a nice open hole in the center of the ring will help them bake more quickly and evenly, of course…

When done, let them cool a bit and then ice them! An easy icing can be made with nothing but powdered sugar and lemon juice – just enough lemon juice to make the sugar drizzly. It takes surprisingly little.
You can either frost with white icing and then sprinkle with purple, gold, and green sugar,
OR,
you can divide the icing into three, dye it purple (red + blue, that is), gold, and green, and decorate it thus.
Colored sugar is probably more exciting, but in Seattle, at least, it is very expensive – food coloring much more affordable.
And the effect is not bad, either!

Announcement from Northwest.

After several flying adventures this week, imagine my delight when I found the following in my inbox:

      Happy Holidays from Northwest

With the Holiday season upon us already, Northwest is pleased to extend our season’s greetings with this new, remarkable offer: From now until January 10, you don’t have to buy a ticket to enjoy the same benefits as our confirmed, ticketed passengers.

That’s right - Now you can enjoy not flying on the Northwest flight of your choice without even paying for it! This service is absolutely free - with hundreds of destinations to choose from, the only thing you will need to do is decide where not to go! Simply select the flight of your choice, and then rest assured that you will reach your destination just as quickly as our regular, ticketed passengers. Plus, you can do it from the comfort of your own home – no more hassle with check-in or airport security! But don’t keep this great offer to yourself: Northwest is happy to extend this offer to everyone this holiday season, so be sure to tell your family and friends!

Of course, for our loyal customers, we will continue to sell tickets for acutal money during the holiday season, which will guarantee you the same lack of service and indifference to your needs that you have come to expect from us here at Northwest.

And if you haven’t enrolled yet, our Frequent Flyer program has just gotten better – we now offer Frequent non-Flyer miles on selected flights. Now, when your plane doesn’t take off, we’ll give you more miles towards a future cancelled or delayed flight. One loyal customer writes, “with 1000 to 2500 miles for every delayed or cancelled flight, I rack up miles more quickly by not flying than by flying! I don’t fly very often, but I fly even less when I’m flying Northwest. I’m cashing in on a free ticket already – and maybe this one will be cancelled, too! Thanks, Northwest!”

Simply visit our website or call an agent for more details.

Oh, if only I’d known earlier!

Comforts of home.

Sometimes I’m just lucky.

Today I woke up at my parents’ house, here in time for Christmas after travelling many many hours and failing, a few times, to catch a plane that actually flew.

Yesterday I set out from Seattle at 1 am, and arrived only a little late to the next stop, to find that my next flight had been cancelled “because it had no flight crew.”

“It wouldn’t have gotten far without one, anyways!” I joked with the gate agent, and then asked for a “snack voucher” while I waited for Northwest to sort out their stuff.

Normally I just don’t eat airport food – it’s always overpriced and underwhelming. Think eight dollars for udon that feels like pink pearl erasers in your mouth, or for a slice of pizza that doesn’t even rival what they serve in high school cafeterias.

No thanks!

But being stranded, for an indeterminate time, with a cancelled flight and nothing but a meal voucher for consolation (and even THAT little, they wouldn’t have given me if it had been a weather delay), makes the situation a leeeetle different. I could at least get a sandwich and a cup of coffee to fortify for further adventure. The coffee was fine – they can’t mess that up to badly - and the “italian”-style sandwich was nourishing, I believe, although it had almost no flavor and a texture like moist old socks. I could only get through half.

So how happy I was! when the gate agent told me that, after two days of not being where I had planned to be, of all the multitude crowding to get the last spot on the probable last-for-the-day flight to my destination, I was the lucky one who would be flying away. And although I was a bit sorry for those left behind, I reasoned that their time would come. Eventually. Maybe when they had also been waiting two days.

Poor souls.

And now I must close, because coffee is getting cold, biscuits are in the oven and eggs in the pan.
Comforts of home, indeed!

New product spotted: Baconnaise?

I happened to run across this website, and I’m not sure what to think. My random reactions in no particular order:

• That’s disgusting! But I am intrigued…
• If it tastes like bacon but isn’t bacon, it’s not real food.
• How nice that our Jewish friends can now experience the flavor of bacon! I wonder if it can be made halaal as well?
• Anyways, any action taken on the premise that ”everything should taste like bacon” can’t have a completely bad result. Everything should taste like bacon.
• But if I want something to taste like bacon, I’ll include real bacon or bacon fat.
• Their “bacon salt” has NO calories. Bacon has tons of calories. Is it really possible to enjoy the taste of bacon without the calories? Is this a perversion of nature, or a modern miracle?
• But… but… if it’s that good – and contains no meat – it might mean that it’s possible to be happil vegetarian again and not worry about missing, well, bacon. Maybe even NBB could be convinced to start down the vegetable path…

In the end? I don’t think I would buy it if I saw it in the stores – because I’d just buy bacon instead – and this just isn’t real food. And if it IS as delicious as they are claiming it is… there could be trouble. I imagine buying this stuff by the case and pouring cups of it into every recipe… Bad, bad!

This is a question that goes deeper than simply what you put in your mouth – it’s about how you live, how you relate to reality, who you trust, what you rely on. Is it a good idea to become dependent on a food product that you don’t fully understand and over the contents of which you have no control? Of course not! For the sake of your health and  your budget, isn’t it better to avoid that, as much as possible?

And is it right to eat one thing because it tastes like something it isn’t? I don’t think so. There’s a fundamental dishonesty in there somehow – dishonesty towards yourself and your food. If they made “celebrity salt” that you could sprinkle on your boyfriend to make him look like Hugh Jackman before letting him kiss you, would that be OK?

Ehhh?

Am I being too old-fashioned here? Maybe this is just part of the new morality of the 21st century. Everything is just more casual than it used to be – relationships, courtrooms, TV decency guidelines, journalistic standards, public education, office attire… food identities? People drive replica cars, hang replica art on their walls, and have no shame in carrying around replica Louis Vuitton or Prada handbags. Replica Bacon Flavor must be a much lesser offense… except that you actually eat it. But then again, the frozen section of any grocer now stocks a number of products that look and taste similar to meat, but aren’t meat - and I’ve tried many and even enjoyed some. And long before fake meat came on the scene, we accepted such contradictions as decaf coffee, dairy-free butter and sugar-free sweetener without a murmur.

So, why not meat-free bacon flavor?

I don’t know.

It still weirds me out.

Still, I think these guys are onto something. Definitely, more things should taste like bacon. Maybe it’s not a bad idea to try making a mayonnaise-like substance using bacon fat rather than oil. Of course, that could never be kosher… but it could be delicious…

Eight-hour leap (of faith).

I was a vegetarian, until moving to New Orleans, where some corrupting influence who shall remain nameless took me to Texas Bar-B-Que in Metairie and bade me try the ribs. Thanksgiving turkey, crown roast at Christmas, bacon, hamburgers, filet mignon etc., etc.:  I had successfully resisted them ALL - but one bite, just one bite of unctuous, smoky, tangy-sweet, charred around the edges, melt-in-your-mouth and get-all-over-your-face  ribs and there was no turning back.

Ever.

But few, if any, other barbecue restaurants make ribs so good. Why not? I have no concrete evidence, but I suspect it is because most chefs lack the time, the patience, and the temperature control to coax every bit of velvet tenderness out of their ribs. It seems they just throw them in the oven (or the smoker) for a couple of hours and call it good. But it’s not good – not that good.

Fortunately, yesterday (the Snow Day) provided NBB and me with time aplenty – patience we already had, and temperature control was supplied by the knob at the top of the oven. In short, it was the perfect opportunity to try to make ribs at home, made more perfect with a “manager’s special” at the next-door grocery store, on ribs that were almost past date.

Without actually looking at rib recipes, I had an idea of how to go about it – I remember when I was maybe 13 years old, my aunt and uncle and their 3 kids flew in from California, and the aunt made ribs. I remember being so surprised that she could make them in a regular oven – but she did it with tin foil. All I really remembered was the tin foil. But the ribs were delicious, and now she and my uncle own two rib restaurants in the Bay area – so, others seem to agree that she was onto something!

Tin foil, and a “slow oven” – these must be the ingredients to good ribs at home - plus barbecue sauce*. The rest was just a lucky guess and a leap of faith – that ten hours after saying “let’s make ribs!” we’d actually sit down to eat dinner, and not starve with an inedible  (bloody or carbonized) lump of meat and bone.

Thus, the rib adventure began:

We don’t own a vessel large enough to brine ribs – and we didn’t really have time – but I sprinkled the ribs all over, both sides, with table salt while we ate lunch and drank egg nog plus. After an hour or so, I rinsed the ribs, patted them dry, and gave them a liberal coating of Cajun spice mixture (the best $6 ever spent at Sam’s Club!). Then the ribs got sealed up in tinfoil with a couple of diced onions -the idea being that they would “melt” over time and baste the meat with onion juice throughout the whole long slow cooking process - and then set the whole tinfoil package on a big cookie sheet inside a “slow oven.”

I somehow got it into my head that heat is the enemy of tender ribs – so I started with the oven at 200 degrees. I realized pretty quickly that this was too cold - I put my hand in the oven and didn’t even feel uncomfortable – so I cranked it up to 225.

That’s all.

The ribs stayed in there from 2:00 in the afternoon until 10:00 at night – no poking, no looking, no cheating, just pure blind faith that magical things were happening inside of that tin-foil envelope.

Well…

They were!

At 10 – having been tormented with the aroma of slow-cooking pork and onions all afternoon – we peeled back the foil and found the ribs inside thorughly cooked, moist-looking and fragrant with the meat just pulling back from the bone. To finish them off, I slathered the top with barbecue sauce and put them under the broiler (without even taking them off of the cookie sheet) until they began to char.

So easy,

so tender.

Such a reward for the faithful!

 

* A Note on Barbecue sauce: as far as I have been able to find out, Luling City Market Barbecue Sauce is the best barbecue sauce in the world. But if you’re not in Houston - or don’t feel like paying for shipping – you’re stuck with something else. Some day I will explore homemade barbecue sauce - in the meantime, we used Bullseye brand original barbecue sauce, which is spicy, inoffensive, a little sweet (it contains molasses) – nicey enough, and cheap.

Snowy day, hot drink

A day that started extremely rough has morphed into a wonderful quiet afternoon at home.

This morning I was to catch a 9:00 flight out of Sea-tac. This shouldn’t have been a problem, but sometime last night the everpresent Seattle drizzle began to freeze, and laid down a blanket of slick ice before turning into a snowstorm, complete with thunder and lightning. So, while NBB was valiantly driving me to the airport over the truly horrible roads? The plane I was scheduled to board was, yes, getting hit by lightning.

After a few hours’ uncertainty, the Powers that Be determined that the plane’s passengers should look for other flights. I found one for the day after tomorrow, and caught a cab to NBB’s workplace. The cab driver explained that several highways had been closed due to the weather (vehicles disabled by it), or had just been blocked by disabled vehicles. Fortunately for me, he had a true cab driver’s knack  for finding the only open road to my destination, and I arrived there in record time. Along the way we saw abandoned vehicles, jacknifed commuter busses, and inches – inches! - of snow right on the highway.

Not a day to go out again if it could possibly be avoided.

When I arrived at NBB’s workplace, his boss told him to go home – the roads were so bad that the city had essentially shut down, and nobody else had showed up at the office anyways. NBB was happy to comply, promised to do some research at home, and skedaddled with me.

Now, with an unexpected free afternoon that absolutely forbade any air travel, stepping out, Christmas shopping, running errands, changing oil, or even walking in the park – an afternoon in which the wind howled and shook the apartment windows and turned the air opaque with snow – an afternoon of joyful reprieve from the respective miseries of waiting at the airport for a delayed flight, and an empty cold office – what to do but turn on some Christmas tunes and embark on an afternoon of hot and warming (if you know what I mean) seasonal drinks?

Mulled Wine: It really IS as good as you think it must be. Start with a bottle of wine that is cheap and on the sweet side – I use Yellowtail’s Shiraz-Grenache (with the shocking pink label). Pour the whole bottle into a saucepan, and add: 2 cups sweet vermouth, 2 tsp (or so) orange zest, 1 or 2 tsp cloves, 3 tsp ground cinnamon (or cinnamon chips, or a couple cinnamon sticks would be nice), 3 tsp whole allspice (or maybe 1.5 tsp ground allspice); and 3/8 cup honey. All of these measurments are approximate, of course, and the whole thing should be done according to taste. Bring it to a simmer and leave it for 20 minutes, then enjoy. If you are concerned that the heat may have removed some of the (warming effects of the) alcohol, you can top it with a shot of whatever you have on hand – whisky or bourbon.

Mulled Ale:`Very well sung, boys!’ cried the Rat heartily. `And now come along in, all of you, and warm yourselves by the fire, and have something hot!’ … It did not take long to prepare the brew and thrust the tin heater well into the red heart of the fire; and soon every field-mouse was sipping and coughing and choking (for a little mulled ale goes a long way) and wiping his eyes and laughing and forgetting he had ever been cold in all his life. For all that, the mulled ale was not as popular as the mulled Wine, but I personally liked it. For this (so-called) recipe use a brew on the malty side, because the heat seems to accentuate the bitterness of hops – we tried this with a “balanced” brew, and it came out hoppier than was quite right. So, pour two bottles of your brew of choice into saucepan, and bring to a simmer while adding a teaspoon allspice and a couple teaspoons cinnamon, a half teaspoon vanilla and any other spices you think nice. Add 3/8 cup brown sugar, stirring to dissolve the sugar. The beer will be foaming like crazy, especially after the sugar, but you can calm it down by dropping in 3 or 4 tablespoons butter. Let the whole simmer for a bit (10-20 minutes), taste, and adjust (of course you will want more sugar or more spices depending on the brew you start with), and enjoy.

Egg nog plus: You don’t really need a recipe for this perennial favorite: store-bought egg nog, thinned 3:1 with milk, heated, with a shot or two of rum or bourbon (again, whatever you have on hand). We stirred in a little orgeat, which made it extra nicey – a drop of almond or vanilla extract would be pleasant, too.

Sillycake

In anticipation of birthday events – and knowing that the grocery store always inflates the prices of things like cookware - I went to a nearby big-box home goods shop and purchased a cake pan for $8. Later, at the grocery store, I realized I would need two cake pans and found a second one, right there in the spice aisle, for only $5. Which just goes to show that economy isn’t always where you expect to find it.

As for the first cake pan, behind the label I found an intriguing recipe: Take a box of chocolate cake mix and throw in some malted milk powder. Chocolate-malt cake!

Chocolate malt cake, however, wasn’t on the birthday menu this time. Toffee Bar Cake was. The idea – as I imagined it, inspired as I was by Chocolate Malt Cake – would be to crush up a Heath Bar, make a batch of regular chocolate cake batter, mix the two together, and enjoy. I proposed this one to NBB and, while he generally approved of the scheme, he pointed out that the chocolate might be too overpowering. Yellow cake instead, perhaps?

I had to agree with that.

So, a few hours later, I was at the grocery store weighing the relative merits of a box of yellow cake mix, and a box of cake flour. Pros of cake mix: easy, cheap, and you don’t end up with a box of cake flour that sits in the cupboard forever. Cons? Just not as honest – not “real food,” I think my mom would say. Pros of cake flour plus sugar, eggs, etc.? Well, it  IS undeniably real food… but that’s about it.

But that counts for a lot.

Not enough, as it turns out  – In the end, I went with Duncan Hines French Vanilla Cake Mix. I imagined that the “french”-ness of it meant that it contained some special extra ingredient (not just yellow dye) to make it wonderful. I had also looked at their “butter recipe” cake – but to my dismay, found no butter in the ingredient list. The philistines!

So French Vanilla box cake recipe it was, and to add to the convenience? I bought pre-crumbled Heath bars – with which, I suppose, the road to Hell is mostly paved.

The rest, of course, is easy: cake mix goes according to directions. Though the mix directions asked for 1/3 c. oil, while I went for 1/2 c. butter (that same spirit of defiance that refuses the blindfold at the firing squad, right?) and dropped in some heavy cream to ensure that it would be moist. Then mixed in half the Heath crumbles (they come in a bag, just like chocolate chips), divvied the batter up into the two cake pans, and sprinkled the rest of the toffee bits on top. If I were to do this again, I’d wait until the cooking was partway finished before taking this last step – I think that the toffee on top before cooking made the cakes rise unevenly.

All in all, the results were tasty, if not particularly attractive, and (surprisingly) not too sweet. Topped with whipped cream and accompanied by coffee, it was a nice morning snack – chicken salad having left no room for dessert the night before. For, what benefit a man to enjoy a birthday salad, but miss out on birthday cake?

Incidentally,  the cake pan that cost 60% more? Did not perform 60% better. In fact, both pans performed about the same.

Go figure.

Blackened Chicken

Blackened Chicken – is it Cajun? Is it Mexican? It’s hard to say.

I’ve read somewhere that blackening is not a true cajun cooking technique, and only became known as one when Paul Prudhomme started serving blackened redfish in the 1980’s. But around the time when he was doing that, Michael’s Taqueria in Monterey, CA, was becoming famous for its own blackened chicken (according to the story on their menu board)… and certainly I ate more blackened chicken in a California summer than in three years in New Orleans.

Whatever its provenance, blackening has a reputation for being messy, excessively smoky, disproportionately troublesome and not to be attempted at home. Nevertheless, the attempt had to be made once we moved away from warm places and arrived at the cold grey dark wintry Pacific Northwest, which is nicey enough, but only spicy in the east/southeast Asian sort of way.

Thus, the following recipe came into being:

• Two chicken breasts (or as many as you want,) bones and skins removed
• Four or Five of the larger cloves from a head of garlic
• 3/8 cup plain white sugar (ie, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 cup)
• 3/8 cup plain table salt (ditto^)
• Cajun Spice Mixture – I admit that I cheated here and bought the already-mixed spices. I feel justified in doing so, because 1) individual spices are terribly expensive for poor li’l ol’ me, and 2), the lady from South Louisiana who taught me to make gumbo used already-mixed spices, herself. FOR THIS RECIPE, you must use a spice mixture that does NOT include salt – for instance, do NOT use Tony’s, because the result will be inedible. The one I use, I admit, came from Sam’s Club, and is called “Tone’s.”
• Half a cup of Bacon Fat (or as much as you have on hand…)
• A cup or two of Vegetable Oil for the frying – I’ve used olive oil and canola oil and of course both are fine.

First, you prepare and brine the chicken – do this about four hours before you actually want to eat:

Get a large sturdy plastic ziplock freezer bag, put in the garlic cloves, and mash them in the bag with something flat and heavy (a wine bottle will do nicely if, like me, you don’t have anything more appropriate) until they are pulverized. Put the chicken breasts side by side in the bag, and flatten them as well (see how nicely the bag keeps the chicken juice off of your wine bottle). Get them as evenly flat as you can without beating them into a pulp – 1/2” or 3/4” – the idea is to get them even and thin so that they will cook evenly.

Take care not to puncture or beat-a-hole-into the plastic bag!

Now, drop the sugar and the salt into the bag as well – you see where this is going – and enough water to dissolve them and cover the chicken breasts. Seal up the bag and shake, shake until everything has dissolved and the garlic is well distributed, then open the bag a tiny bit and squeeze out as much air as you can. This is just a simple, simple brine which will cause the chicken meat to become moist and delicious later.

Put the bag of briny chicken into the fridge (or other cold cold place) for an hour or two. I’ve read and heard that it is possible to overbrine things – I wouldn’t leave them overnight in the brine – but a few hours don’t seem to harm anything.

Right.

Now it’s a couple of hours later and you will want to eat soon!

First, get the kitty cat and lock her in another room. You’re going to be dealing with hot, hot, hot oil here and it’s very dangerous for kitty cats, or any other small animals that tend to get underfoot at the worst possible moment.

Then, heat your oven to about 350, and put a cookie sheet inside on the middle rack.

Find a good sturdy thick-bottomed heavy pan with high sides – a so-called “chef’s pan” is especially nice, and if it has a lid, you can keep it handy in case of grease fires.

Put in the bacon fat and enough oil to get it 1/2 or 3/4 inch deep, then turn the heat on medium-medium high.

Now, take the chicken breasts out of their bag of brine. Pat them dry with clean paper towels, and remove any garlic bits that may be stuck, and cover one with a healthy coating of cajun spices – on both sides, all over, in every little chicken crevice.

When the grease is smoking hot, gently and carefully put the first chicken breast in there (use tongs).  Be very careful not to splash yourself!

Fry the chicken breast for 5 minutes on the first side, then turn it over (use tongs again) and give it 3 minutes on the other side. Take it out of the hot grease and put it on the cookie sheet in the oven.

Give the same treatment – spice, fry, turn, oven – to the other chicken breast.

Now, you have two blackened chicken breasts. Leave them in the oven for five minutes or so, then turn off the heat and let them stay in there until you have salads assembled, bread sliced, table set, wine opened, etc. Take the pan off the heat right away and leave it until tomorrow – it’s too hot to handle right now anyway.

For all the detail I’ve gone into here, this really is an easy recipe: Cover Chicken With Spice, Fry In Hot Grease. I was very worried about the hot oil and the smoke, but it did NOT set off any smoke alarms and did NOT (knock on wood) cause any injuries.  It does make a bit of a mess – it’s impossible not to splash some of the grease, and then you have to figure out how to dispose of the grease once it’s cool – but it’s cheap and tasty, which after all is what is really important.

A Note on Chicken Breasts: I said above that it’s “Cheap,” which is not exactly the case. These are the most expensive part of the chicken, for some reason, running around $6 or $7/lb in this area. But if you are patient and vigilant you’ll find a family pack with 6 or 8 chicken breasts for $4/lb. Get it, keep two out for using right away, and put the rest in the freezer individually or in sets of two.

A Note on Chicken: Of course you WANT to get the organic, free-range chicken. I want to, too. But those are never going to be the cheap ones. So, you will have to decide between Saving Money and Better (morally, ethically, environmentally, tastily) Chicken. Don’t fret about it. Life is full of choices. The chicken is dead either way.

Birthday … salad?

Yesterday was NBB’s birthday, and of course I was going to give him a birthday dinner. I offered to take him out to a steakhouse, or make steak at home, or anything he wanted – anything at all. What did he finally request?

Salad.

Blackened chicken salad (with bacon), to be fair. It is probably as unhealthy as one can get while still including uncooked leafy greens – which really just act as a vehicle to get the spices and bacony goodness from plate to mouth.

There are three main parts to this salad: the chicken, the “salad” proper, and the dressing. Bacon, naturally, appears in all three. Because blackened chicken is an adventure unto itself, I will address it in a seperate entry following:

BLACKENED CHICKEN SALAD (with BACON), aka “birthday salad”

• 2 blackened chicken breasts (see following recipe)
• 10 oz fresh leafy greens of the lettuce variety (excluding iceberg – use romaine, butter lettuce, red or green leaf lettuce, bib lettuce, etc. No strong-tasting greens, though spinach would probably be fine…)
• 4 strips cooked bacon, crumbled to bits.

For the dressing:

• 4 tablespoons bacon fat
• 3 medium-sized cloves garlic, minced very fine
• around 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• around 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

Wash and dry the lettuce and tear into bite-sized pieces and divide onto two dinner plates, then sprinkle it with the bacon, ALL the bacon or as much as you can stand.

For the dressing, melt the bacon fat in a small saucepan. Remove from heat and add the minced garlic, stirring a bit. Allow this to sit for a few minutes, garlic permeating the bacon fat, and then add the brown sugar and stir until it dissolves. Then pour in the balsamic vinegar and stir or whisk it vigorously and taste it with a clean spoon. It should be deliciously balanced between sweet, sour, bacony and garlicy – if it is too sweet, add a little more vinegar; if too sour, add more brown sugar.

Let the dressing cool a little – you don’t want to cook the salad when you dress it – but you don’t want the bacon fat to solidify. Be sure to stir it up well before it goes on the salad, because of course the fat and the vinegar will want to seperate. Don’t let them!

When you apply it to the salad, drizzle it around the outside – leave an undressed (naked) spot in the center. That is where the chicken goes.

Then, yes! You put the chicken breast in the space you left for it, and – ? You have a birthday salad, fit EVEN for a person of the non-vegetablearian persuasion. Serve it with nice warm bread and a nice red wine, if that is the kind of thing you enjoy – we had it with Erath’s pinot noir, which is nicey spicey and not too pricey.