It has seriously been a blur the last few weeks. I've been slipping between extreme bouts of depression and inability to function...I am so close to winning an award for "longest time between showers by a person with full access to a shower and clean, running water"...and cooking. Cooking a lot.
So let's talk about what exactly it is I've been cooking, because today's outing really was hilarious to me, but it made me remember that I've been meaning to blog about all of the yummies I've made over the last few months...for...well...months.
Now I can do it all in one gigantic post. Hooray, efficiency! Depression has its benefits!!
Several months ago, circa the spring, I was foraging every chance I got. I learned so much this year about what's edible in my yard if I just...don't make my daughter mow it. I've got purslane, plantain, clover, yarrow, dandelion, two varieties of nettle, the list goes on and on. We had an abundance of violets this year, so I wanted to do something with them. I took Alex with me to grab about a quarter of our violet population...gotta leave some for the pollinators and other critters!...and I made violet syrup.
Look how pretty!
LOOK HOW PRETTY!!!! That was after steeping overnight. I boiled it down with sugar after that, and it turned a truly ugly shade of grey. So it's been hiding up in my cupboard. Derek also reported that it didn't even taste like violet, it just tasted like syrup. Well. So much for that. I'll double the amount of flowers next year. Or triple them. I picked my flowers late in the spring, so I didn't have as many to grab up, but we really did have a bounty this year. I'll easily be able to triple the flowers without starving my other yard visitors.
I also attempted to forage a fuckton of dandelions so I could make dandelion soda, and dandelion syrup, AND dandelion jelly...at one point early this spring, our entire lawn was blanketed in dandelions. But I also went about dandelion collection too late in the season and I couldn't forage enough to make one thing, let alone three. So no dandelion goodies were made this year. Next year for sure.
My next big make this year came after we got home from Ithaca. In one of my Ithaca recap posts, I wrote about the irresponsible amount of vodka we bought in Ithaca, and I cannot recall, but I feel like I mentioned wanting to make limoncello with them. So.
I spent 100 smackers on sorrento lemons. The real deal. The tasty yummers that are prized in limoncellos across Italy.
In case you can't tell, these are what scientists refer to as, "honkers". Check it:
My brutishly large hands for scale.
I made a LOT with these lemons. First, and most importantly, I made limoncello:
This batch contains vodka made from grapes from Six Mile Vineyard right outside of Ithaca.
This batch is from the Ithaca is Vodka vodka. Made from NY corn! What a treat.
And I made a third batch, but I made that one with Grey Goose, and it did not need to be photographed. The other things I made I did not think to photograph, but I made a gallon of lemon basil switchel with basil from my garden. I made a gallon of standard lemonade. And I made about a pound of lemon curd that Alex and Derek ate on various store bought cookies. I love to bake, but I only have so much energy to expend. And those lemons really took it out of me. It takes HOURS to peel them, for real.
When we went to Six Mile Vineyard, Derek and Caryn (those fucking traitors) both tried the orangecello that was made in house. I couldn't let that stand, so I made my own arancello with three different kinds of oranges, though it's meant to be made with blood oranges. I just couldn't get access...affordable access...to any, having blown my citrus wad on lemons from the Sorrento Peninsula.
I also ALSO made liquore di basilico. I'm not sure why it isn't just called basilcello like the rest of the citrus liqueurs, but whatevs. I did not take a picture of that while it was steeping, because it looked fucking disgusting. Just like....sewer water. I put about a half pound of my sweet basil from my garden in it, and I am adult enough to admit that I added green food coloring when it was done, just because it needed to be green. Not grey. It isn't like, hulk green or anything, it's a very pleasant tint. It has a few more months of aging before it's ready, though it has been strained and emulsified already. All of my cellos from this year have. Now they just need to mellow for two years, and they're ready to go. My last year's batch isn't so bad, Derek and I tried them a couple of months ago when Allen was here. They need more time to deepen into themselves. Anyway, I have made a fuck ton of alcohol in the last year. I made a big ass bottle of gin from shit I foraged last year, and I should have written about that, but whoops! I didn't. I want to do it again in the spring, with different ingredients that I know more about now. so I'll document that next year.
Moving on!
Alex had a birthday party in late July, and I made her and her friends cupcakes, but with all of the trans flag colors. I learned how terrible I am at filling cupcake liners to the proper line, and also how terrible I am at putting three different frosting colors into one piping bag.
I wanted them to be all marbled, but instead they were messy.
This isn't baking, but it is worth mentioning: Derek and I took a trip to Keakuk to go geode hunting. Which...if you haven't been, is a wild experience. It's where you go to a creek bed, you pay someone to be there, and then you spend hours and hours doing fucking back breaking physical labor to MAYBE get some geodes. Real white people shit.
Our dig site!
I realize that it is going to look like Derek is the only one doing any hard work...I assure you this is not true. I took photos every time I took a water break, which was every seven seconds, but during those other seconds where I was working, I was working hard, ok? Real hard.
You can't see the left side hole in that photo, but I dug out that ENTIRE thing. I was fucking sore for days.
I hit a REALLY great vein, which is why I excavated so much of this geode cubby. I couldn't stop finding geodes.
My muddy grabbers for scale.
We have since carved through almost all of our geodes, but my photos of those are lost, I guess. They aren't on my phone anymore. Actually, thinking while I type, I think I just moved them to another folder in my phone. But I am too lazy to check. They're all very nice geodes, though!
Here is Derek's haul:
This is Derek's haul before he took over the vein I found. I had been hammering and chiseling and digging away for like, two hours, and my arm was tired, and I needed a break, so I was benevolent and offered him my area. In the picture below, you can see the position that I had been in for literally hours, hammering and chiseling and getting rained on and finding geodes. Derek had been digging around right behind my blue bucket, and having none of the good luck I had had.
I do not have a pitcure of his bucket AFTER he dug through my vein, but he got a lot more geodes. And he's since cut through them and polished them up beautifully. We are aching to go back, but we have so many other places we want to explore for great rocks a lot closer to home. We were going to go up to Haunted Ridge this weekend, but I got a few last minute shoots, so no dice.
About...uh...a month and a half ago, Derek and I went apple picking. I haven't gone in years, and I really wanted to pluck several bushels and immerse myself in the kitchen for several days, making all kinds of delicious apple fuckery.
Isn't there something so wonderful about sun warmed, freshy apples right off the branch?
My forever hot man piece, being an apple connoisseur, roaming from tree to tree looking for the finest Missourian apples.
This was the lane I gathered the most apples from. Jonagolds.
We only ended up picking two bags. Forty dollars worth of fresh apples, minus the ones Derek ate while we were picking. The orchard lanes were littered with fallen apples, and all I could think about was grabbing them up, washing them off, and making cider and butter with them. I hope that's what they do to minimize waste. Either that, or they let the deer and critters come in and eat all of the lovely floor goodies. Though I suspect it's the former, as there was an abundance of apple butter and apple cider in the little market you pay for your apples in.
So Derek and I took our twenty pounds of apples home, and I got to work. First, I made apple butter.
I slathered six pounds of various apple varieties in sugar, cinnamon, and a proprietary blend of spices, mixed them up real rough, just like I like, and then put them in a pressure sauna for three hours.
BEHOLD!
Mushy and spiced and truly a wonderful smell. Next, I blended the ever living fuck out of the mush with an immersion blender.
Ta da!! Apple butter!!! 6 jars, canned and wonderful.
Alex reported it as being scrumptious. Derek reported it as being mmmmmmm. I cannot report any of it, because I cannot eat real sugar. Sad face for me.
Next, I made pickled apples. I fucking LOVE pickled apples. Derek was not a fan, Alex didn't want to try them, and Alex's bestie Kailani did not know how she felt about them, so I'm left with a gorgeous jar of pickled apples that I can only eat one slice every few days, and that is a travesty. They're fucking bursting with flavor, they are complex and sweet and sour and punchy. They should be on everything. Like as I write this, I'm eating some kimchi jjigae and it would be gorgeous with some pickled apples and my chili oil. I just had oral surgery, though, so nothing too spicy for me. And also no sugar for the last four years and until forever, so no pickled apples either way. Booooooooooo.
I used the honey from the apiary in Ithaca for these pickled apples, too. Hooray!!
What did I make next? I made hand pies. A fucking metric fuckton of hand pies.
Now.
I have been keto since November of 2018. I was SUPER STRICT for the first three years, I counted every fucking macro with precision. I wing it now, and I stay between 20 and 40 carbs per day. I am a vegetarian, but I eat vegan more often than not.
I miss baked goods. Like, there are keto dupes for various baked goods, sure. Some of them are even good. But when it comes to fruit pies, I hadn't yet found a keto dupe that was easily made vegan friendly. When Derek and I were still on island, I saw a video about a keto apple pie using chayote, and an almond flour crust, so I splurged on chayote (they were like, 5 bucks a pop on island, and I needed three. That's a LOT of money to gamble. AND we should talk about the criminally high rate of groceries in places like Hawai'i and indigenous lands...), came home, and made my pie. It was...alright? I wasn't wowed, and for the money I spent making that pie and the time it took, I just wasn't impressed enough to try it again, or even tweak the recipe, to make it worth the cost. So I ate the pie over the course of a week and a half and felt not terribly great about the experience, and I tucked apple pie away as something I just couldn't eat anymore.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when we picked all of these gorgeous apples and I knew I wanted to make hand pies for Derek and Alex. I took to the internet and started digging for keto apple pie dupes. I didn't have to dig very far, I found one for zucchini. I had read about zucchini being a dupe for cooked apples, but after my chayote experience, I hadn't been enthused to experiment again. Time makes fools of us all, I guess, so I was like, fuck yeah, let's give these green monsters a try.
You. Mother. FUCKERS.
Zucchini hand pies fucking slap. They slap HARD. I could not tell for one fucking second that I was eating zucchini. It looked like apples, it smelled like apples, it tasted like apples. Derek and Alex were both completely fooled. We have a fucking WINNER!!!!! Oh I was so excited!!! But I needed a crust.
So I really scoured the internet for a crust that sounded like it would be sturdy. It took me awhile to find, but on this weird little corner of the internet...the christian keto corner...I found a crust that is just god damn life altering. It's firm. It's not mealy. It tastes and bakes just like a laminated crust would. And I was gagged over it.
That doesn't look like zucchini. It looks like chopped up apples.
Look at my little hand pies!!!!!
Derek is folding his arms because he's so mad that it's zucchini that tastes like apples.
These were seriously fucking amazing. I've made three batches of them since, and another batch of the crust was used for keto pumpkin pie that I spent two glorious weeks eating for breakfast every morning. Adulthood RULES. Did I take any pictures of those? I think I did, I need to check my phone. Oh delightful! I did!
Look at these little ANGELS! Except angels aren't real, and these keto pumpkin pies are. Eeeeeee!
They even have that good sink in that I look for in an excellently made pumpkin pie. Don't give me some aesthetically smooth pumpkin pie...looking at you, Costco...give me the sink in that tells me it was made with love.
Eat your heart out. That perfectly crisp, firm bottom is everything I want in a pie. I really cannot overstate how fucking impressed I am with this keto pie crust recipe. It is fucking amazing.
Look at that. Perfect texture. Perfect size. Perfect breakfast. I love pumpkin pie.
Back to the apples. Obviously I made Alex and Derek hand pies, too, though Alex and her friends ate almost all of them. I made them two versions. One was apple chai, and the other was caramel apple. I was told that both were delightful. What they weren't was aesthetically pleasing.
I didn't use an egg wash to close the pies, and I also overstuffed them. I was experimenting with different ways to seal the crust, going for ease and efficacy over looks, and succeeding at neither thing. They look like pale biscuits that someone kicked into the dirt and then spit on. Yikes. Not my finest showing, but again, they are said to have tasted lovely, and that's what counts.
Alex's friend was spending the night one night and saw me cooking, and asked if she could help me. So Kailani and I made apple jelly together!
Another few pounds of apples, cooking down into juice.
Et Voila! Apple jelly! Kailani got to take home the little jar on top, not because I'm too stingy to give her a big jar, but because I couldn't taste it and I was worried it would be bad and I didn't want to send her home with gross apple jelly and then have so much of it go to waste. Thankfully, everyone said it was truly tasty. Hooray! I'm the best.
My next big cooking project was keto cinnamon rolls made with ChocZero "honey", and this was an absolute fucking undertaking. I believe I called it a saga when I told Amber about it. I took about fifteen minutes worth of video while I was making the cinnamon rolls and I can't lie about this: I was positive they were going to be an absolute fucking disaster, because I fucked up the recipe. I put the fake honey in where it didn't belong.
But they were a smashing success, and I ate them for breakfast every day for a week. It was meant to be twelve servings, but again, I am an adult, and I get to define what that means. SEVEN FUCKING SERVINGS IT IS. Well, eight, because I ate one the night I baked them. I want to make them again, but I am still on the mend from oral surgery. The tail end of the mend, but the mend just the same. I don't quite have the energy. I worked out today and it was a chore. I'm amazed how like, connected my face is to the rest of what my body goes through. I felt the same way after I broke my arm. The things I couldn't do after that were astounding. The things I STILL can't do, all these years later. Thanks, I hate it.
I have also been tinkering with tiktok copycat recipes made keto and having a great deal of fun. Mostly with macaroni and cheese. I was obsessed for a bit with jalapeno popper mac and cheese, though I kind of accidentally stumbled on that recipe myself more than I copied it. When Derek and I go and have a day in STL, we try and center it around a meat cheat day for me so we can it up Salt and Smoke. I want to like Pappy's so bad, but the brisket at Salt and Smoke is superior. I am so sorry, Pappy's. Anyway, I order two pounds of brisket, take it home, then make make and cheese with it. I add jalapenos to it, and the keto mac and cheese bechamel uses cream cheese, anyway, so bam! I'm ahead of the curve, tiktok! But I just saw french onion soup mac and cheese and immediately had to try it. And I did that Saturday, and holy fucking holy. It is absolute divinity. I don't even want to imagine my life before french onion soup mac and cheese.
I tried to explain it to my dad and he was very confused, but he also wouldn't stop talking over me long enough to hear my explanation of it, so h e can remain in the dark. I'll make it for him in a few months.
Cooking is a thousand percent my love language. Cooking for people and creating for people. I painted this on Rhyann's wall in their room:
It isn't perfect, or finished the way I personally wanted it, but Rhyann said they liked the blue band without anything in it, so I left it the way they preferred it. After all, it isn't ME sleeping in there. The door is still in need of finishing, and now I've only got about four weeks to finish it. Yikes! That's pressure.
This, and school, is everything I've been up to lately. I suppose I should do an update on what's been going on with school, but I'll save that for another blog. This has taken me literally days. Maybe weeks. Time to publish this and be on my way. I can't fucking believe it's almost time for a photo rundown of the year's sessions. Where the fuck has the time gone.
Speaking of, I think I've had this blog for ten years now. I put a lot of them into drafts, mostly because they were silly, and others because they were about Dan and how much I was pining over Dan, and I feel a deep sense of shame about those particular blogs. I am thinking about resurrecting them, just because like...I shouldn't be ashamed of how I felt, or how I needed to write about it, or how I expressed myself in my mid to late twenties. I've grown a lot, and I hiding the things I've grown from doesn't make them any less real, it just like...perpetuates the idea that we should hide the things we consider bad, even though it can definitely be a tool in showing others that growth happens and we're all human, nobody gets it right all the time.
But uh. I will be re-reading all of those blogs to double check. I think a lot of them also have just like...startlingly bad photography in them. From a time when I thought I was so good and I was just...really not. I wonder what I'll think of my photography in another ten years.
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