Ina Garten's Halloween Bark: My First Non-Recipe!

When I was younger, Halloween was always my favorite time of year. Other than for the obvious reason (my sweet tooth), Halloween was the entree into the holiday season. The leaves that fell were raked into piles, my sister and I would roll in them as children. We got older, she got a boyfriend, and still I loved Fall. To dress up, to be someone else, a form of drag and an exercise in imagination. 

I wasn't invited to a lot of parties, so I dressed up as a cowboy, a princess, and one year when we were very poor and very lazy, a dining room table. The cheap dollar store masks that stuck against  your face, breathing the stale, moist, reused breath all night. My mother and I would eat candy, watch a movie, go to sleep with a wrapper clutched in my hands. Our town was not set up for trick-or-treating back then, so we'd buy our candy in bulk and snack on it into Christmas. Santa-shaped sugar cookies found themselves next to orange and black wrappers on the buffet.

We don't do this anymore, traditions change and I changed, too. But now we have Lana, my niece, and we think back to all the old things we did as children and how we can improve on those things now. I updated a simple recipe, chocolate bark, to get rid of all of that chocolate sitting around before the holidays roll in. And it just so happens that Rebecca over at Displaced Housewife had a very similar idea too!

Halloween Candy Bark

This is essentially a "non-recipe" due to the fact that it doesn't take any skill, is totally adaptable, and requires no prep of any sort. Further, this is labeled as Ina Garten's because that's who I went as for Halloween this year!! A picture (and video!) follow the recipe below! 

Ingredients:

• 40 oz of chocolate (see note below)
• 1 1/2 cups chopped Halloween candy bars, M&M's, etc
• Pinch of flaked sea salt

Directions:

1. Prepare a half sheet pan with parchment paper
2. In a medium-sized microwave-safe mixing bowl, pour 2/3 of the chocolate you are using into the bowl (split this up if you are using 2 different flavored chocolates or chips!)
3. Microwave at 20 second increments, stirring when timer is done, until chocolate is melted
4. Add remaining chips that were reserved (this is a very easy way to "temper" your chocolate, actually learned by Ina!
5. Using a rubber spatula, pour onto your parchment paper and spread out into a rectangle
6. Repeat if using any other flavors
7. Immediately add your candy, pressing down slightly
8. Sprinkle with sea salt
9. Put in fridge for an hour or two before breaking up and serving

Note:  I had white chocolate chips and peanut butter chips on hand, but really anything will do. I do think that higher quality chocolate, even in part, would have improved this recipe, but not necessary

And here, for documentation purposes, is my Ina Garten Halloween costume!!

A Labor Day Recipe: Dutch Beet Egg Salad Tartines

These don't need an introduction, nor do they need any prelude.  These are the flavors of my childhood, of pickled eggs on a buffet somewhere outside of Appalachia.  Enjoy the eggs and the tang, the picnic fare, the last vestiges of light summer meals when you eat like a bird but perhaps not all that healthy.  Enjoy it.  Relax on your day off.  This pickling method can be done in four hours.  And even faster if you cook the eggs in a pressure cooker, like I did with REDMOND's multicooker.

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Dutch Beet Egg Salad Tartines

Sweet, earthy, and tangy, this recipe makes about two cups egg salad, enough for 4-6 tartines.  Can easily double or triple recipe.

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Ingredients:

• 4 eggs
• 7 ounces canned sliced beets and juice (can use fresh, but I prefer having the beet liquor of canned)
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1/4 cup white vinegar
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 whole shallots
• 2 whole cloves garlic
• 1/4 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar (or regular white)
• 3 tablespoons yellow mustard
• 2 teaspoons dijon (homemade here, if you're adventurous and have the time)
• 2-4 radishes, optional
• 4-6 slices of bread, toasted

Directions:

1. If choosing to make hard-boiled eggs the old-fashioned way, go right ahead and skip to step two.  If you're feeling adventurous and your pressure cooker is collecting dust, add minimal amount of water to cooker.  In the steamer basket placed above the water, place eggs.  Shut and cook on low pressure for six minutes.  Release eggs into cold water and allow to cool to the touch to shell.
2. In a saucepan, combine beets, liquid, white sugar, white vinegar, water and salt.  Turn on medium-high and boil, stirring occasionally, until sugar is dissolved.  Allow to cool.
3. In a jar, place shelled eggs.  Pour contents of saucepan over eggs.  Add shallots, garlic, and peppercorns.  Seal and place in fridge to pickle (minimum 4 hours).
4. When waiting time is expired, drain eggs and slice or mash in a bowl.
5. In a small bowl, whisk white wine vinegar and mustards.  Add a little more vinegar to thin it out if you'd like (to taste)
6. Pour mustard mixture over eggs and gently stir to coat
7. Finally, slice radishes and sprinkle over. This is optional, but I liked the crunch and the pepperiness of the radishes.  
8. Toast bread and top with egg salad.  Serve immediately (see author's note)

Note: For my bread, I cut a french loaf on the diagonal and oiled each side with a little bit of olive oil.  Then, I heated the grill to a sear and toasted the bread on each side for 3 minutes or until slightly burnt on the edges.

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Mama

I used to chew my mother's hair to fall asleep.   I was in love with it, the texture soft and the smell of her sweat perfumed the pillow.  I used to be obsessed with my mother, and then went three years without talking to her.  She was every metaphor you could think of and so much more.  She was blood over cast iron bones.  She was olive-skinned and tanned with baby oil.  She never wrinkled, she cries at the thought of mousetraps and says life is unfair sometimes.  She takes long pauses and tries to get me off the phone.  She says I love you in her own way, in small ways.  She's bought me a housewarming present for all the apartments I've rented to get away from her.  She forgot my eight birthday once.  She had a migraine.  I called her selfish.  She had tumors removed from her neck that Spring.

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My mother's name is Nancy and she is my soulmate.  I love her more than anything in the world.  I'm obsessed with her, with the idea of her.  I have her broad bones and lack of people skills.  I have her distrust for good ever coming around, surprised that life can be fortunate once in a while.  She has arthritis in her collarbone, she worked as a janitor once.  She finds symbolism in every bird that stops for a rest on the windowsill.  She never took us to church growing up.  She never says her own mother's name, she never talks about her own mother.  It's a small, secret word that's only spoken once a year.  The tetragrammaton by the high priestess Nancy, spoken once when we threw flower petals on her grave.

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My mother is not a good woman; but she's not a bad woman either.  She lives her life in the two-story farm house the best way she knows how.  She's had a tough life, a life with not a lot to offer.  Born in Indiana, a runaway at 15.  She worked odd jobs, was held up at a video store once.  Lit her nails on fire once.  Lit her hair on fire once.  Had three children.  Wore jean shorts to her wedding.  She doesn't like music much, she says it gives her a headache.  She can sing real sweetly under her breath when she's getting ready.  I first heard her say fuck when I was six.  

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My mother is the best woman I know.  My mother still holds my hand when we cross the street.  My mother held me for eight minutes before I moved to California and kept repeating in my chest, "Don't go don't go, don't go.".  When I left for Italy, she said she didn't care if I ever came home.  Her brother died in Afghanistan three weeks after I landed in Europe and I was the first person she called.  I slept on a pew that night, the only quiet room in the convent I was staying at.  I fell asleep with the phone in my hand, my mother didn't hang up.  

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My mother is an orphan now.  My mother has me and eleven cats.  My mother has a permanent tan and laugh lines where you can see life wasn't all that bad for her.  My mother raised me the best way she knew how:  "be honest, don't hurt anyone, and don't fuck it up".  My mother told the truth and lied to us when she had to.  Like how she was married to someone before my father.  Like how she held me back when I could have skipped third grade.  Like how she tells my brother she loves her children equally.  Like how she says she's happy.

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I found my mother crying once out by the grapevines that strangle themselves on our chickenwire fence.  I hated seeing her that weak and I told her it made me sick.  I was nineteen and I don't forgive myself.  I walked inside and drove away.  I left her crying in the backyard.  She had seen a baby bird fall to its death and got upset by it.  My mother, the patron saint of loss.  Her son, too selfish to ever let her be vulnerable, even for two seconds, when she was alone and surrounded by dandelions and skipping stones at the creek bed. 

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I call my mother every day now.  She took some time off from working to enjoy summer and the last surviving dog from my childhood.  She take her coffee with cream and wants to paint the kitchen a soft yellow.  Before we hang up, I ask her if she loves me.  She always answers the same, "You're the only good thing I've done in my life.  Of course I love you."

Avoiding the Red Cliche

Most things come easily to me, things you wouldn't expect from a boy with no discernible talent.  Things like baseball, calculus, forgiveness never came easy to me, but love did.  Love in the carnal sense, love in the fictional sense.  Love in the sense of letting go, love in the sense of finding yourself.  Love in the sense of that ever-present gnaw at the pit of your stomach that registers in the mind as I am responsible for someone else's happiness. Love has come easily to me since birth.  I love my mother in an almost manic sense, an almost Oedipal obsession with my desire to make her smile.  In kindergarten, I kissed a girl named Alex's hand when she reached out to grab a colored pencil, I thought I was gentlemanly and adult of me.  Years of expansive love bloomed in me as I began to daydream of boyfriends and how exotic the word fiancé sounded, with it's accented e and promise of a future with someone else.  With each boyfriend, there was a breakup, and with each breakup, there was some promise of next time, next time, next time.  I found Nolan during one of those next times.  During my return to Italy, when we were both a little bruised, both a little cut up and the vinegar kisses of a stranger felt like when soap gets in a hangnail.  But, underneath all of that, once we stripped down and opened up, there was love.

It was raw and passionate, it left me heady in the perfumed 10x8 dorm room where the heat was on and a blizzard blew through Pittsburgh one night in January.

It was lazy, falling asleep with a bucket of chicken during XLV.

It was chaotic in the sense of never having an ending, never knowing the dates of anything important, throwing shoes and his grandmother's dishes when I got too angry and forgot to say, "I'm sorry."

But I was never sorry, never sorry for loving someone so ferociously and tender.  I'd lick the wounds I had created and then blame the rust-taste in my wolf mouth on his laziness, his determination to let our love fade away.  It was raw and passionate, it was lazy and chaotic.  And somehow love became this little succulent, never needing watered, collecting dust on the windowsill, timid in its approach to life.  Our love had a geophyte approach to sustainability, fatty and tuberous, holding onto any love that existed when life got barren and dry. When it got hard to come by, when it couldn't be found in the moonlight nor with a dowsing rod, broken off from a backyard apple tree when the Santa Anas made us unbearable to one another.

Since I left for Texas, we fell in love again--hard and fast, when the bones were most brittle.  An apologetic love where conversations often ended in "How did it get like this?"  We are finding our way back to the frenzied love of when I was 19, and slowly those sour wounds heal when they're exposed to air.  I wanted to celebrate this love for Valentine's Day and forget all the other four years and the bullshit we put one another through. I wanted to celebrate this love in boxes, small tins of love that overpowered Nolan for Valentine's Day.  I wanted to remind him what home could feel like.  I wanted to remind him what love could feel like, because our house in San Diego was big by San Diego standards, and it could creak too loud when you're lonely.  I made him dinner, cakes and bread, and shipped it to him to have for Valentine's Day with a movie, so it felt like a date tonight.

I love you.

“He shall never know I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same.”

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Roasted Beet Pasta

Ingredients:

• 2 large-sized beets
• 3 whole eggs + 1 egg yolk
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 teaspoon lemon zest (optional)
• 6+ cups flour

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 450
2. While oven is preheating, peel beets and wrap in foil, place on baking tray.  When oven is ready, roast for 40 minutes.
3. Remove from oven and allow to cool for a few minutes, unwrapping so steam can release
4. Cut into large chunks.
5. In a large food processor (6 cups or more), throw in beets, eggs and yolk, olive oil, and salt (and optional zest).  Puree until smooth
6. In a stand mixer, combine puree and three cups of flour using the paddle attachment.  When dough begins to form, switch to dough hook and continue to mix, adding in last three cups of flour, one at a time, until a proper dough forms
7. Remove from bowl onto a floured work surface (i prefer marble for pasta-making) and knead for 7 minutes or until is elastic
8. Keeping dough floured, cut into eighths and lay plastic wrap on sections you are not going to use.
9. Use your pasta machine's directions for thick noodles, and dry.
10. Enjoy with a vinaigrette and parmesan!

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Bacon Salt

Ingredients:

• 5-6 strips of bacon
• 1/2 cup sea salt (preferably a larger crystal)
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Directions:

1. Fry bacon on a skillet until extra-crispy
2. Put on a plate lined with paper towels and allow to cool, blotting excess grease
3. In a food processor, combine all ingredients and pulse until combined.  Do not over-pulse, as it can result in fats in bacon to liquify.
4. Enjoy over popcorn, with potatoes, or be creative!

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Handcrafted Candy Bars

There is no real recipe for a basic candy bar.  I used some of my mother's recipes, which use more specialized chocolate and techniques, but the instructions I have below can be practiced even with chocolate chips. From here, you can personalize them and make them your own, even including honeys, spices, herbs, salts, and even homemade nut butters!  But, I would start here for an intro into confectionery.

Before you begin, use a ratio of 3 oz per candy bar, so you have some room for leeway with sticking to the bowl, the mold, and your spatula.  From here, you can cut and halve, mix chocolates together and multiply easily.  I particularly like mixing white chocolate and a milkier, lighter chocolate.  When you have decided how you would like to flavor your chocolate, measure out how much you will need.  Then, take away about 30% of that amount and set aside (this will be your "seed chocolate", a step for this pseudo-tempering.  It is necessary so your chocolate doesn't turn grey when cooled).

Prepare any mold you may be using.  I always use a light olive oil cooking spray and then wipe off the excess with a paper towel.

In a microwave-safe bowl, combine your remaining chocolates and microwave on HIGH for 20 seconds.  Take out and stir.  Put back in for another 20 seconds and repeat this process until all chocolate is silky smooth and easy to stir.

Add remaining chocolate and continue to stir.  The heat from the melted chocolate should melt remaining chocolate.

Add any add-ins and pour into mold and smooth out with a rubber spatula.  Allow to cool for at least half an hour in the fridge before unmolding.  Package however you want (I went a little far with homemade packaging I designed and printed on special paper, but basic foil will do). Store in a cool place, or the fridge.

Other recipes used: For the cake (marzipan inspiration here)/  For the hot chocolate mix /  For the marshmallows / For the bread.

Giving Thanks.

The theme this year was burlap and wheat.  Tactile, scratchy.  It irritated the skin, the colors were mute.  The vase full of weeds and blooms were foraged on the morning walk.  There were sprigs of rosemary in jars, next to the salt.  For garnish and for earthiness.  For authenticity, for aromatics.  Rosemary steeped in hot water can speed recovery.  I think we can all use a little of that.  The table was beautiful, simple and connected.  It was crowded.  The windless day would sigh a breeze, and the grapevine would rustle slightly.  It was alive.  Every moment was electric in that brick and mortar kitchen.  We ate outside. It's hard to reflect, I get lost in my thoughts.  i'm like Narcissus, lost in that reflection.  Thanksgiving is hard for me, it seems silly sometimes.  I never appreciated my parents; I still don't, fully.  When I was young, my mother would stay in her bathrobe until three, when the turkey was done, and she'd change into jeans and a black sweater.  Every year.  Every year, it was her formalware.  She cooked for seven hours, we'd be done in twenty minutes.  Never appreciated.  No one ever thanked her for her meal.  No one ever told her she was beautiful.  She told me she wore her pearls this Thanksgiving, the ones I got her last year.  The ones I bought in June, waiting, anticipating, happy to make her feel special.  And she did.  I am thankful she wore them, thankful she smiled as she clasp them around her neck, feeling beautiful and not having to cook for three ungrateful children.

I am thankful for my father, who tells me every day he loves me.  I reflect on the Thanksgiving I called him from Italy and told him he needed to send me more money.  He said the banks were closed and I hung up.  I ignored his emailing until I saw my bank account.  I'm thankful he was patient, patient in a way I know I couldn't be.  He loves me more than I realize.  It's jarring when you realize how one-sided that love is.  I'm thankful he's waiting for me to catch up, to appreciate him.  Appreciate the times he took me to school.  Every morning he'd buy me coffee and ask me about my day.  Most mornings, I was too asleep and too annoyed to answer back much.  Now, I want to go to the Legion and drink a beer with him.  Ask him how his life is.  Tell him I'm growing up and I love him, too.

I'm thankful.  I'm reflecting on this.  I was called ungrateful more than once in my youth, and I don't want to be that same asshole anymore.  I try to say thank you for everything.  It's difficult sometimes.  When you feel so deserving of love, and you still have to stop and realize that someone is willingly letting you have it.  Nothing is for free.  I've given it my all this year.

There were five of us for Thanksgiving, and I cooked for everyone.  I did it out of love, as a challenge to see if I could.  I wrote it all down on paper and used our neighbor's oven as a back-up.  I roasted vegetables and thought about terms like umami and emulsify.  I've grown a lot as a cook, and today I wrote down all the things I could do with pasta.  I've seen a change in me, and I like it.  I'm thankful for that.

And I'm thankful for friends.  I grew up lonely, and it's a human condition I can't shake.  I laughed with friends and called more that evening, we made dinner and I wrote little Thank-You cards, totems of gratitude for sticking around.  Sometimes I can be desperate, I'm always playing aloof and then begging for love.  But we ate around candlelight, drank the red when we ran out of white, and created a small family that night, and I'm thankful for that trust.

Thanksgiving is not the hand-traced turkey holiday of my childhood, it's not that line drawn in the proverbial sand between autumn and "The Holiday Season" where it's more appropriate to have a Christmas tree up.  It's is living, breathing, steeping yourself in that gratitude and calling your parents, saying you love them.  Saying you'll change every year a little bit and love them forever.  Loving everything a little harder next year.  Nothing is for free.  I've given it my all this year.

Here are some pictures of the table and our guests...