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Monkey Monday: epic win triple play edition 28 December 2009 10:39 pm

Posted by Tracy in : baking,dessert,eating,fun,monkeys , trackback

So I’ve been home from the frozen North for almost six hours, and after a bit of relaxing I’m ready to brag about three big huge excellent gastro-culinary adventures: mince pie, figgy pudding/fruitcake, and a truly ridiculous quantity of Indian food.

1. Mince Pie!    

We pulled into Saranac Lake with two big bowls of partially-completed baking project. One was mincemeat pie filling, from the recipe in Baking Illustrated which I knew was delicious from Thanksgiving 2007 and making it last year. The contents of the other, larger, bowl were top-secret, but turned out to be an ideal companion for the mince pie, about which I will now gloat, before explaining that cryptic companion business. I gloated on Xmas Eve, too:

Holy cats rolling out pie dough on wax/parchment paper FTW. So much easier to lift into the pan! #bearwithmebakingisnotmyforte

11:38 PM Dec 24th from web

and long story short: Holy monkey gods, readers! I made pie! My best pie ever, by far! To give credit where it’s due: Peter mixed the crust, based on the Cook’s Illustrated recipe Greg kindly emailed to me that morning. We had to make some stuff up with extra butter and peanut oil since there wasn’t any shortening, but it worked out! Despite the fact that I’d forgotten to bring the recipe and had to get ingredients via email from Greg, AND I needed to look up the rest of the steps online (thanks, Cookie Chick!) I successfully managed to roll out the crust between two sheets of wax paper, which—holy cats!—makes it possible for even klutzy ol’ me to get a layer of crust of relatively even thickness into a pie pan! So awesome!

2. Figgy Pudding! (Fruitcake!)

Even more awesome, however, was the fact that staying up late to bake mince pie provided, as previously discussed, a perfect, fantastic excuse/cover story/source of plausible deniability/diversionary tactic for the figgy pudding/fruitcake formerly known as the Super-Secret XMas Baking Project 2009. (I keep saying “figgy pudding” because “pudding” is Brit for “dessert” and this was a dessert chock-full of figs, among other things.)

The top-secret big bowl was filled with a mix of dried fruit and nuts, marinated in a mix of molasses, spices, and rum as described in this fabulous recipe (although for a few days longer than that recipe recommends). I also halved the recipe, which made enough batter for a standard 5×9 inch loaf pan, a medium-size loaf (2x3x6 inches maybe?), a little baby loaf (1.5x2x3 inches) and, most awesomely, six muffin-size fruitcakes, perfect for wrapping in cellophane and putting in people’s stockings. Awww, yeah.

Have completed stocking stuffer phase of Super-Secret XMas Baking Project 2009. Totally gleeful, up way past my bedtime. Hee hee!

3:52 AM Dec 25th from web

Anyway. That kept me up until about 4:30 in the AM, which explains the much-neededness of my nap the next afternoon.

Super-Secret XMas Baking Project 2009 = epic win. Now taking well-earned “stayed up stupid late baking” recovery nap. Whee!

2:09 PM Dec 25th from mobile web

3. So! Much! Indian! Food!

So first things first, I got Peter’s dad a copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking because it is fabulous and also because I had brought my copy up the past two times I’d visited and three times in a row would just have been silly, right? (I mean, bear in mind that this is a book on which I racked up many library hold fees before finally getting my own copy.)

Anyway. Yesterday night I broke out that book to make:

  1. Hard-boiled eggs cooked with potatoes
  2. Red split lentils with cabbage
  3. Cauliflower with fennel and mustard seeds
  4. Mushroom pullao

and Michael Natkin’s awesome five-minute Indian-style cabbage, Dad Boothe’s favorite from last December. That last involved another bit of clever misdirection on my part — it was surprisingly easy to sneak a little extra cabbage prep into all the other goings-on in the kitchen, since I was already making the lentil-cabbage-liciousness. Still, between that ruse (I am still surprised it worked) and the mince-pie-covering-for-figgy-pudding trickery, I am basically all out of sneakiness for like a year.

Anyway. All that added up to one more point for Tracy’s Epic Win Count for Xmas 2009, and made it a perfectly good thing that we’d finished the mince pie that morning, because all of us were way too full for dessert. Yay! (I’m thinking of bringing up some hippie-compliant lamb for next time, to prove to Peter’s dad that it can in fact be delicious.)

Now, however, it is fantastic to be home.

  • Ansley

    So jealous of your holiday companions! And looking forward to having you over tomorrow. Re: Indian food, how much of that book is vegetarian? I am tempted…

  • http://www.bestbreadmachines.org/cuisinart-cbk-200-review-read-this-before-buying.html bethbara882

    How I wish I had a nice holiday like yours.