heliopsis

I've had a busy weekend.

Saturday, Frankin and I went to his gym. That sentence feels so strange to me: That I have a boyfriend who goes to the gym. That I went with him. That, unspoken, I have my own gym, which is different. I have become one of those people who goes to the gym. I'm mostly glad of this, though there are times when it feels like I'd rather do something else... Anyway, after a gentle yoga class, some weights, a swim, a soak in the whirlpool, a shower and a sauna, we were starving. We picked up some lamb chops and mushrooms and went back to my place. Frankin cleaned the mushrooms while I washed farmshare broccoli; then I made herb oil (garlic, cumin, black pepper and a little salt in olive oil) and applied it to the chops. Sautéed the mushrooms with onion, garlic and parsley, steamed the broccoli and grilled the lamb. It was delicious. Dessert was apple crisp, with apples picked fresh last weekend, and honey whipped cream.

Oh yeah, I got my first harvest of honey from my hives. 17 pounds of honey! It's delicious. I've used almost a whole pound already.

Back to the honey whipped cream: I thought this would be tasty, and it was; but I discovered something else, too. The honey stabilized the whipped cream. Usually when you make whipped cream, it separates after a few minutes. You can whisk the water phase back in a couple times, but it's just not so nice. But the honey whipped cream doesn't separate. I have some leftover in the fridge from yesterday evening, and even 24h later, it's still fluffy and delicious.

Today was the day for planting perennials at the church, which took until two. Then home to tackle a couple projects. I had a bunch of tomatoes to make one last batch of tomato sauce, so I put that together and into the oven. I also had a chicken that needed to be roasted, so I seasoned it and then let it rest on the counter while the sauce cooked. I use Alton Brown's tomato sauce recipe, which involves roasting the tomatoes in a hot oven--too hot for the chicken. While the tomatoes were roasting, I assembled an apple bread pudding from the heels of three loaves of bread, eggs, brown sugar, soymilk, cinnamon and a little butter.

Pulled the tomatoes out of the oven and turned down the heat, then put the chicken and pudding in. I remembered I had a roasted acorn squash that needed to be used up, so I made a batch of squash dumplings. I kind of follow Alton Brown's recipe, except not: he uses as much potato as squash, and I don't use any potato; I also leave out the nutmeg, because I like to be able to choose how I sauce my dumplings, and nutmeg feels constraining.

While the tomato sauce cooled, I formed the dumplings and put most of them in the freezer; I kept about a sixth of them out for my dinner. Then I ran the roasted tomatoes through my food mill to make sauce, and reserved a bit of the sauce for my dinner. I added some leftover lamb and chicken to the sauce and simmered it while I brought some water for the dumplings to the boil. The rest of the sauce went into the freezer so that, some winter day I can thaw out a bit of summer.

I remembered I had some pancetta in the fridge, which Frankin had bought a while ago, and which was in danger of spoiling; so I laid it out in a pan and roasted it in the oven to make it nice and crisp. (I have also, it seems, become a person who has leftover pancetta.) Now I have crisp pancetta in the fridge to use as a garnish.

The sauce and dumplings were delicious, and the bread pudding was, too--especially with the leftover whipped cream. The chicken is done now, and cooling; I plan to take the meat off the bones and enjoy it later in the week. But right now, I need to clean up the kitchen and go to bed.