I wish I could report that we’ve made progress in renovating the Red House but unfortunately at this stage in the game (meaning the complicated stuff), we’re very dependent on our contractor to finish our upstairs bathroom. This means while most of the plumbing has been installed, the insulation needs to be put in the walls before the sheetrock and then tile are applied. As you can see not much has changed in this room since the last time I photographed it!

Apparently since our contractor has a lot of outdoor jobs that he’s scrambling to get finished before the weather takes a turn for the worse, I do have to give him some slack. He has assured me that I’m #1 on the top of his list when he finishes with everyone else. Being me (frighteningly straightforward and to the point), I also reminded him that last winter he complained that he couldn’t get into the house without shoveling a path to the door because of all the snow. (I don’t have anyone who plows for us and don’t intend to incur that expense either!)  I also suggested since he obviously didn’t want to spend half of his day shoveling when he could be inside working on a room, he may need to speed things up a bit.

I would also love to start working on the dining room. But since all the materials he needs to complete the bathroom are sitting in the dining room, this room, too, has to wait.

While the leaves are turning, the marigolds seems to be thriving in the garden, the weeds even more so and with all the asparagus ferns cropping up, I’m thinking I’ll have a very nice asparagus harvest in the spring indeed. I’ve decided however, after planting two seasons of garlic in the fall, I’m going to wait until the spring to do it this year and see how that turns out. Reason being: Lynn is busy trying to finish our master bedroom (that means even though he took off all the moulding around the room and put everything back up, there is still a lot of patching that needs to be done as well as taping, spackling and finally painting.

To pull him away from this to get out the tiller (I’m afraid of the tiller it kind of drags me across the field) to plant some garlic seemed dumb. So the garlic will wait until the spring to be planted along with whatever else we can manage to grow in hopes that the deer, rabbits, squirrels and even a local cat or two won’t devour everything we’ve planted.

What is particularly nice about living up here especially in the fall are all the farmer’s markets as well as field after field filled with pumpkins in lovely shades of orange.

Last year I was lucky enough to grow a couple of pumpkins. This year I had to buy one.

Since the weather is turning colder (it was barely 55 degrees when we arrived this Columbus Day weekend), I’m also thinking of food that will warm us. That would be soups (pea and lentil), stews (goulash and chicken paprikash in particular) and lots of carbs like mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese! And while I do try to stay away from sweets as much as possible – I have been thinking of making cinnamon rolls (no, not the kind you bang out from those icky cardboard containers in the refrigerated section of the supermarket) but cinnamon rolls made from scratch.

For those readers who have children or other instances where your household size shrinks from 4 to 1 or 2, I can say that I’ve finally mastered cooking for just the two of us without a huge amount of leftovers. And if we do have have leftovers, it’s because I’m usually trying to make sure at least one of us has something to take to work for lunch the next day.  The problem with this cooking for 2 instead of 4 (or more) thing though is that there are simply dishes (particularly desserts) that just don’t get made anymore. Why bake a batch of brownies or oatmeal raisin cookies if there aren’t any teenagers around to eat them all in a single sitting? Did I mention I’ve been craving cinnamon rolls?

In the meantime, I picked the last of the tomatoes (still green) from the Red House garden.

And admired not only the meadow but how pretty the marigolds still looked in the garden.

And since it was rather chilly, I also decided to make some Braciole stuffing the meat with slices of mozzarella and some smokey ham.

I managed to find a few (albeit slightly bruised) leaves of basil still growing in the garden and found a bag of potato gnocchi we buy at a little Italian deli near the Red House for under $3 a bag that was still in the freezer from the summer.

Did I mention even as I was cooking the gnocchi and Braciole I was craving cinnamon rolls?

On a completely different note. We have a neighborhood cat who shows up like clockwork between 5 and 5:30 on the weekends we are here. He or she slowly meanders to the back of the property seemingly looking around for maybe a tasty little mouse or some other morsel to eat. Now, this cat is really the slowest cat I’ve ever seen so it was particularly funny when I tried to take a picture of the cat and suddenly the cat took off at an amazingly fast pace.

I followed the cat as it walked the length of the property and found myself staring at the stainless steel rolling cart we’ve been using in the kitchen as a table/work counter since we still don’t have countertops for the kitchen cabinets. Wouldn’t that surface be just fine for rolling out dough?

Since I also don’t have any cookbooks up at the Red House (I know that’s old school but I still use them!), I dragged out my laptop and followed a recipe from the Pioneer Woman for Cinnamon Rolls 101 online.

And yes, I already did have all the ingredients on hand so this was a really easy recipe.  I mixed everything together and tried to follow the instructions but the dough just seemed a little bit too wet so I added more flour than called for. The dough rose, I rolled it out, layered it with melted butter, sprinkled on some sugar and lots of cinnamon just like the picture online.

Except I wanted to add some apples to my cinnamon rolls so I did just that.

Really, doesn’t this just look yummy?

I rolled the dough into a log shape, cut the log into slices, and arranged them in a pie pan. The dough seemed a bit wetter than it probably should have been but I figured it would “correct” itself when baking.

I’ve always had a problem with every oven I’ve ever owned and this one is no different. I read a recipe and it suggests a cooking time of say 15-18 minutes and when I peek at what I’m baking, 9 times out of 10 I need double the amount of baking time indicated. Since I was convinced that the thermostat in this new oven wasn’t working properly, I actually went out and bought an oven thermometer. I’d like to say the oven was off, but actually the temperature was exactly what it was supposed to be.

So back to the cinnamon rolls. The recipe called for adding “maple flavoring” to make the frosting. Ha Ha Ha. Living in Upstate New York, I don’t need “maple flavoring,” I can use the real stuff. So I did, mixing maple syrup together with some powdered sugar and milk.

The rolls came out of the oven, I frosted them, and here’s what they looked like.

Yes, they looked delicious but when we ate them in the morning for breakfast (after sticking them back in the oven to warm up a bit), they were a tad too gooey inside! So even after following the recipe and adjusting the baking time and having for the first time ever a second thermometer inside my oven to make sure the temperature was correct – these rolls needed to be baked a bit longer. (We ate most of them anyway, no worries!) So like the cat that prowls our property looking for tasty tidbits, I got mine too this weekend.

Finally, knowing that winter is literally around the corner up here, it’s awesome to drive a mere 5 minutes from the Red House and see the leaves changing, some late summer flowers still blooming and the water in the creek flowing so beautifully. What we’ve learned up here the last 4.5 years is to enjoy every minute of it.

I said goodbye to 2012 realizing that there are quite a few dishes I never used to eat but do now (herring and sardines for example), things I shouldn’t be eating, but crave (chocolate, cheese, bread and pasta), and certain dishes I’d like to simply forget (dry chicken and grilled pizza).

Here though is my year end wrap up of what I think I liked the most.  Remember though, since I have no working kitchen, the following pictures show what I had to work with, namely my “stove,” my “dishwasher” and my “oven.”

2012 saw us eating: Fondue, Fried Green Tomatoes, Farmer’s Market Orange Beets with Jones Family Farm Goat Cheese, Peach Tart, Carbonara(!), Soft Shell Crab, Lobster Claws, Homemade Rosemary Bread, Crepes (both savory and sweet), Shrimp in Green Sauce, French Toast, Burrata, and lots and lots of tomatoes.

Reviewing this list, I realized we did eat chicken and duck and hamburgers and an occasional steak or two but they simply didn’t photograph well. The chicken often looked burnt and the hamburgers misshapen and greasy. This, I think, will please my vegetarian and vegan readers.

If you’re not hungry after looking at these photographs, you should be! Happy New Year!

So after making the dough, I heated up a pizza stone on the grill, then gently put the dough on top, waited for it to cook a bit on one side, and then actually flipped it like a crepe.  Only after that did I spoon on some sauce, basil from the garden, and this funky log of mozzarella that when I sliced it, it was in the shape of a ring.

A Funky Grilled Pizza

Because I flipped the pizza this time around, it had more of a rustic-look to it which I liked.  What I didn’t like was there was way too much sauce on the pie.  Guess what, we ate it anyway, and it was pretty good.

Since the pizza was technically our appetizer, I took it off the grill and we nibbled at it with a couple of cocktails and then I  got down to the business of cooking Cornish hens.  Now, I know Cornish hens are a bit of an old school kind of dish and frankly I actually had trouble finding a supermarket that still carried them but eventually I did find two small birds.

I stuffed the cavities with fresh celery leaves from the garden and then sprinkled the hens with fresh rosemary and a bunch of dried spices (notably oregano and paprika),  gave them a good dose of olive oil,  and put them on the grill.  Since I didn’t want these babies to char right away, yet be raw inside, I turned the flame down fairly low and spent the next 30 minutes or so moving them around.

While they looked pretty, the reality is they were completely tasteless! ( Sigh, so much for my Cornish hen fantasy.)  Luckily, the lovely roasted beet and arugula salad (with red onion and tomato, too!) I made to accompany those ucky hens saved the day.  In hindsight, sticking with the pizza and the salad would have been a much better option.

Lovely Roasted Yellow Beets, Arugula, Tomatoes

I can’t. My colander does many things. I use it as a bowl when I’m picking fresh produce from the garden, as a strainer to drain potatoes or pasta, and when I’m done prepping, to carry whatever fruit or vegetable peelings I’m left with out to the compost bin.  My other absolute must-haves when grilling and cooking outdoors are a few decent knifes, a cutting board, and pans that can double for many uses.

The Colander I Can't Live Without

The one thing we both agree on, however, is that while getting the food and prepping might be cumbersome when you’re camping outdoors, the real problem is when you are relying on a grill (or any kind of outdoor flame for that matter) to cook your food, it takes a really, really long time.

Consequently, if I add up the time spent trying to put breakfast, lunch and dinner on the table at the Red  House, you’ll understand why the renovation is taking so long. (Because I’m cooking, not hammering!)

Breakfast:

My husband never had a steak for breakfast in his life until he met my Dad and my brother.  The family ritual was to have steak and eggs on Christmas morning.  Maybe it was a guy thing, since I’ll take some smoked salmon and a hard boiled egg with a fruit salad chaser over a steak any day.  Up at the Red House, though, steak and eggs just sounded like a really good breakfast to have if you were facing a grueling day of sanding a wall or two followed by a few coats of primer.

Thing is the grill we have kind of slants to one side (even after moving it around to different parts of the driveway), and instead of fussing with it, we just lived with the fact that everything we put on the grill pan always slides to the left.  Now, perhaps in certain circles this might have some sort of political connotation — at the Red House it simply means we have to fix the driveway!

See how the steak and eggs just cozy up to one another?  I love it. And yes, they were tasty, too.

Real Steak and Eggs

Lunch:

Remember the scene in The Company Men where Kevin Costner tells Ben Affleck to pick up two pieces of sheetrock the next time he’s carrying something into the house they are renovating?  Well, that’s kind of how I’m feeling about this house renovation right now; we need to both work harder and faster. Consequently, I feel that if Lynn and I are both doing a fairly decent amount of physical labor (he more than me, I will confess), it at least justifies eating hearty meals.  Well, sort of.  This probably explains why my husband didn’t even blink when I suggested we have pasta with broccoli rabe followed by barbequed chicken AND country-style pork ribs for lunch.

However, to make the broccoli rabe, I needed to put up a pan of water on the grill’s side burner about an hour before I wanted to eat.  After about half an hour of waiting for the water to boil (it never did; there were simply a few bubbles and a lot of steam emitting from the pan), I simply threw the macaroni in and stirred it a couple of times.  But here’s the thing, pasta that sits in warm but not boiling water like this and desperately tries to get itself  “cooked,” has a slightly different, kind of gummy taste.

Brings New Meaning To Cooking Outdoors

When I figured it was done enough, I strained the pasta into my beloved colander, then sauteed the broccoli rabe with some olive oil and threw the pasta on top of it.  I had forgotten to buy garlic but did have some red pepper flakes and a chunk of real parmesan cheese to grate on top so it wasn’t a total disaster.

Elbow Macaroni with Broccoli Rabe

Chicken and Ribs

Any sane person eating this much food for lunch (with a couple of bottles of Canadian beer no less) should have taken a nap.  I went out to weed the garden and Lynn got on the Troy Bilt to mow the lawn!

Dinner:

Well, I confess, I did cheat a little since I brought our first course from downstate — lovely balls of burrata that I plated with some grape tomatoes (store-bought, sorry!) but with fresh basil from the garden.

I do need to segue just a tad here for two reasons.  #1 I love burrata and when I’m feeling particularly flush (which is hardly ever), I buy the real stuff that comes in little plastic bags and is flown in daily from Italy.  The key word in that sentence, so you have an idea how outrageously expensive authentic burrata is, is ‘flown.” (As in there are lots of darling little burratas flying first class on Alitalia.)  Better option: Trader Joe’s makes a decent product  for under $5 that I’ve become slightly addicted to.  #2 I love burrata so much that when I read Gabrielle Hamilton’s book, Blood, Bones & Butter, and she talks about digging spoons into a big platter of lovely rounds of burrata instead of a boring old wedding cake, I thought what a brilliant idea!

Lovely Burrata

Meanwhile, back on the range (literally),  I had a fire going under some lamb chops topped with fresh mint from the garden.  In fairness, it looked pretty as it was cooking, but imparted absolutely no mint flavor whatsoever, which was actually perfectly fine with me since I’m not a big mint fan anyway.

Lamb Chops with Fresh Mint from the Garden

Earlier in the day (when I was weeding the garden actually), I had picked some yellow squash to eat with the lamb chops as well as some lettuce.

Freshly Picked Squash

Amazing Lettuce

I felt lucky that I was able to put together a few side dishes courtesy of my new garden but it did make me pause and think about the Red House and what it was like as a working farm a hundred years ago.  What were the people who were living here cooking, growing, and ultimately eating?  I’d love to know.  One thing I’m absolutely positive about, even 150 years later, we were both washing dishes at the end of every meal the old fashioned way — by hand!

Old School Dishwashing

That elicited this response from her. “No , I’m serious!” she was practically shrieking.

“OMG,” I said, which since the Oxford English Dictionary now includes as a “real” word, I felt I could justifiably use to counter her statement.  What I really wanted to say was “WTF!”  Why exactly wasn’t there a “food writer” category on the college application?

Instead, I countered with,”Well, how about writer?” I asked.

Apparently, that wasn’t an option either.  My choices were to be  classified as a business owner, self-employed, management, middle management, or laborer. Further down on the form, she was then asked to identify the field in which I was employed, with the good old standby choices of accounting, medical, or education. Luckily, there was also a category for non-profit which considering the amount of money I’m making as a food writer these days, I figured would be the appropriate box to check.

This conversation left me in a particularly wicked mood and the only thing that was going to improve it was to make my favorite dish.  Pasta Carbonara.  Since this is also the perfect dish to make and eat up at the Red House, (one pan, easy ingredients) I did just that.

But since I really wanted an appetizer (also known as the “Vorspeise,” the thing you eat before the meal, for those who speak German), I made my own version of tuna nicoise — searing a piece of tuna on the grill pan and plating it with some tomatoes, arugula, and of course, green beans with lots of freshly ground pepper.  I won’t reveal how much I paid for said piece of tuna but I figure if I’m looking at paying tuition again soon (she’s my second child), I better splurge now while I still have a couple of nickels left in my wallet.

Tuna Nicoise

After that I made the carbonara.  What I like to refer to as an “adult” carbonara because I threw in lots of pancetta, mushrooms, eggs, an ENTIRE container of cream, freshly grated parmesan and some arugula. Dare I mention I mixed it all together in a Wok because that’s the biggest pot I have up at the Red House.  Yes, and it was delicious!

Adult Carbonara

BLUEBERRY PANCAKES

Once I got back to Long Island though, all I could think about was the food I wanted to make up at the Red House.  To compensate, I’ve gone into a super duper baking and cooking mode.  It helps that the holiday season is upon us and that the weather has suddenly gotten much colder.  Consequently, I’ve been making lots of “comfort food” type meals with a few fish dishes thrown in for good measure.

Here’s some of the meals I’ve been making and hope to recreate up at the Red House…. some day.

October

Roast pork loin with some white carrots that I picked up at the local farmers market with cippolini onions and leeks.  (Lynn likes roast pork so much he could eat this dish every night.  My bigger problem is that no matter how big the roast pork, if I want any “leftovers,” I have to cut pieces off the pork and hide them prior to serving.)

PORK ROAST, CARROTS, ONIONS, LEEKS

Paella with clams, calamari, shrimp and chicken.  I think it’s decent.  (I try to persuade Lynn to at least eat all the fish knowing it’s not a good thing to “brown bag” for lunch next day, but he ignores me. Because he ignores me I tell him not to call me if he gets sick. If nothing else, after 31+ years with this guy, I’ve perfected the Bitch Factor.)

MY VERSION OF PAELLA

Roast chicken with peppers and eggplant and onions.  (I’ve tried to get him to just cut the chicken in half and eat it like the Italians do “mezzo pollo” but he’s big on hacking the bird into pieces. It’s ultimately just as good.)

PEPPERS, ONIONS, EGGPLANT AND CHICKEN, TOO!

Another roast chicken this one from Jones Family Farms. The chicken was leaner and gamier (which I like) but also bloodier than I was used to so it seemed to take a tad longer to cook. It also looks a bit well, sexual in this photograph — maybe I overstuffed it with the parsley?  (I think Lynn liked the chicken, but I’m sure he liked the potatoes that went with it better.)

A REAL CHICKEN

November

A Friday night dinner at home (our idea of date night) included fresh fettuccine with chanterelles and freshly grated parmesan cheese, salmon with an orange mustard glaze, and some baby spinach and pitty pat squash as a side dish.  (Lynn likes my Friday night dinners when I’m up to making them because I usually do courses or something “fancier” knowing I don’t have to get up early to go to work.  Tonight was no exception.)

FETTUCCINE WITH CHANTERELLES

SALMON ON A BED OF BABY SPINACH WITH PITTY PAT SQUASH

Goat?  I had never actually made goat chops.  It’s not normally a regular menu item in our house but we did buy one-quarter of a goat a while back from Jones Family Farms and we’ve been making our way through it.  Luckily, I also made meatballs from some of the chopped goat meat we had too since I overcooked the chops a tad and they were a little tough. (Lynn loves any kind of chopped meat so much I’ve started calling him “hamburger boy.”)

GOAT CHOPS

GOAT MEATBALLS

Finally, towards the end of November, I came up with the following dinner menu:

Italian wedding ball soup

Slow-baked tomatoes stuffed with mozzarella

Pork “Schnitzel”

Tempura onion rings

The soup

I made the Italian wedding ball soup because a) it was cold outside and unless it’s really really cold, we don’t turn on the heat in our house, we just put on another sweater and I make soup; b) see my comment above about “hamburger boy.”

I must admit that we’ve been to Italy a few times and we’ve never seen this soup on a menu.  Lynn, whose mother was born in Naples, Italy, never made this soup when he was growing up and since she’s no longer with us I can’t even ask her about it.

The tomatoes

Since I hate to throw vegetables out that are overripe, I try to find ways to use them.  Tomatoes that are too soft to use in salads I often bake or broil in the oven.  The tomato flavor is even more concentrated and stuffing the tomatoes with mozzarella is I recipe I found in Fran Warde’s Food for Friends.

BAKED TOMATOES WITH MOZZARELLA

The “Schnitzel”

Other than chicken cutlets (which when I fry up I always call chicken cutlets), everything else that gets fried in our house (namely pork or veal) gets the name “Schnitzel.”  This was the pork version.  (Lynn on the other hand likes to call everything that he fries “Milanese” and here’s why.)

Lynn and Costoletta alla Milanese

Lynn grew up with a mother, Bianca, who was born in Naples, Italy.  A war bride (World War II!), she spent the first 13 years of her marriage moving from one Air Force base to another both stateside and in Japan.  By the time Lynn was born, they had settled in upstate New York.  She had six children to feed but when cooking would rely on classics that everyone liked – veal cutlets being one of her classics.  Why Bianca would spring for the more expensive veal rather than chicken cutlets, especially when you had a family of eight to feed is beyond me but she did.  Consequently, Lynn grew up eating veal cutlets as large as your plate and always with a slice of lemon to squirt over the fried meat.  To this day, he can’t resist ordering a veal cutlet if he sees it on the menu.

(This entry is towards the end of Chapter 9 in my book, Pure Form, Pure Food: In Pursuit of Great Architecture and Wonderful Meals ©2009.)

PORK SCHNITZEL

The onions

Tempura onion rings.  This was originally a shrimp tempura recipe but I’m not particularly keen on fried shrimp but I do like the occasional onion ring.  This is a fool-proof recipe so I’ll include it.

Tempura batter

1 cup all purpose flour

½ cup cornstarch

3 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoons curry powder

8 ounces cold seltzer (add more if batter is too thick)

salt and pepper

Mix all ingredients together.

TEMPURA ONION RINGS

Last but not least my bagel issue

I think it was the sign at the bagel store that may have put me over the edge.  They wanted how much for one bagel?  Ninety-five cents with nothing on it!?  Growing up in Munich and being bagel-less for a good 10 years, we often craved bagels.  My mother attempted to make lots of things overseas that we couldn’t get in Germany (biscuits, brownies, chocolate chip cookies) but bagels weren’t in her repertoire.

I decided to attempt to make bagels on my own and started looking for a recipe in some of my “old school” cookbooks (The Fanny Farmer Cookbook, The Joy of Cooking).  I finally found a recipe in Craig Claiborne’s The New York Times Cookbook that looked pretty simple except for the fact that it required something called “malted milk powder.”  Since “malted milk powder” was nowhere to be found,  I simply omitted that ingredient.

For my first attempt, I think they came out quite nicely.  And the fact that they were gone in a day thanks to big family eaters made me even happier.

BAGEL DOUGH

BOILING THE BAGELS

AFTER BAKING

THE FINISHED PRODUCT