Coconut Cake, Top of the List, Almost

 

No, we haven't had snow yet. I made this coconut cake when we had a beautiful snowfall on January 3, 2022 because it just didn't get made before Christmas of 2021.

But I'm thinking back to November of 2020--you remember that year, don't you? The year the world shut down and many of us had Thanksgiving in our house, alone?

That November I started watching every new Hallmark Christmas movie premier. Religiously. It had been that kind of a year.

 

I even kept a pen and notebook nearby and titled a list--"What Hallmark Movies Taught Me About Christmas."

Top of the list was...Baking is good!

Fruitcake is top of my baking list (my White Fruitcake with no citron posted here "Stir Up Sunday") 

Coconut Cake is not far behind. 

 One of my favorite childhood Christmas memories is of Mama making her Coconut Cake with lemon filling on Christmas Eve and it being refrigerated overnight and eaten cold on Christmas Day.

It was a serious project requiring Daddy's help in poking an ice pick into the eyes of the fresh coconut to save the coconut water to pour over the warm cake layers, tediously removing the shell from the meat, and finally grating the coconut meat, sometimes resulting in scraped knuckles. 

 

It was a cake straight from heaven!

Foolishly neglecting to secure Mama's recipe before she left us for her heavenly home, I've tried several recipes. One was very good and also very time consuming:

See my post Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal here!

I finally found a recipe that was very close to Mama's in Eugene Walters, American Cooking: Southern Style, a Time Life book and a fascinating history of Southern cooking.

I have four cookbooks from the Alabama author, who I "met" through Pat Conroy's cookbook. He taught me never to use the black dust that you put in salt and pepper shakers, that the essential oils in peppercorns help with digestion when freshly ground. Although RH still demands his black dust.

I wish I could link to Mr. Walter's recipe for Coconut Cake with Lemon Filling but it's not online. I will link to a recipe I substituted for his frosting recipe that required me to boil to 239 degrees. I found one at addapinch.com. It was delicious even though not like Mama's. Maybe hers was whipped cream based?  But I did make Eugene's recipe for cake instead of the one at add a pinch--those 8 eggs separated won me over--and I am going to put his recipe for lemon filling at the bottom of the post because it's become my foolproof go-to recipe for that. 

 

Full Disclaimer: I did not buy a fresh coconut and poke out his eyes! Despite using Baker's coconut flakes the frosting was excellent. It was one of those times when we didn't see any family to share my baking with so eventually the remains went to the birds. 

 

Take my word for it, RH had hardly turned around and all our resident crows and bluejays were fighting over their dessert of the day. 

Eugene Walters Lemon Filling:

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/4 cup cornstarch

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 eggs, lightly beaten

2 tablespoons butter, cut into 1/4 inch bits

2 tablespoons finely grated fresh lemon peel

2/3 cup strained fresh lemon juice [I did not strain it]

1 cup water

Combine the sugar, cornstarch, salt and 2 beaten eggs in a heavy 2 quart saucepan and mix well with a wire whisk or wooden spoon. Stir in the butter bits, lemon peel, lemon juice, and water. When all ingredients are well blended, set pan over high heat.

Stirring the filling mixture constantly, bring to a boil over high heat. Immediately reduce heat to low and continue to stir until the filling is smooth and thick enough to coat the spoon heavily. Scrape the filling into a bowl with a spatula, and let it cool to room temperature.

What's top of your baking list for Christmas?

 

 

 

 

 

Judith Huxley's Marinated Olives with Alison Roman's Vinegar Chicken

It was a happy merging!

I wanted to try Alison Roman's Vinegar Chicken with Crushed Olive Dressing that was a most requested New York Times recipe after seeing it here on Ted Kennedy Watson's beautiful blog. Every recipe I've tried of Roman's has been delicious and I knew this one would be, too.

But as I read the recipe I thought of the partial jar in my fridge of Judith Huxley's Marinated Olives with Citrus and Fennel, the olives that my daughter-in-law loves and helps make when she visits. 

All of the ingredients in Huxley's recipe from her wonderful cookbook, Table for Eight, could only enhance Roman's recipe so I stirred them into all the good drippings of the chicken dish, the olives and remaining liquid in the jar.

It was amazing! 

I wanted to share this recipe with you so this week I made up another jar of Judith Huxley's marinated olives so I could take a picture of it. We'll snack on the jar of olives until there's about half left and then I'll once again use the remainder for another recipe of Alison Roman's Vinegar Chicken with Crushed Olive Dressing. 

 You'll need:

1 pound jar of olives, drained and rinsed under water.
     (She calls for calamata but I use these pitted Sicilian olives.)

2 garlic cloves, peeled and lightly crushed.

Rinds of 1 orange and 1 lemon, peeled with a citrus stripper in long, thin strips. (I just zest the lemon and orange but I'm sure the strips would be even better.)

Juice of the lemon and orange.

2 tablespoons of fennel seed. (And I use a little  oregano from Crete that is wonderfully aromatic.)

Pack the drained olives, crushed garlic cloves, strips (or zest) of citrus, and fennel seeds in a pint jar.

Add citrus juice and then fill to the brim with olive oil. Cover, refrigerate, and shake the jar when you think of it. Wait a day or two to use, bringing to room temperature before serving. 

I used this beautiful vintage pink Italian jar marked Abagal's Useful Jar. Isn't it pretty? I badly need a rubber gasket for it. 

 Again, the recipe for the chicken is here.https://www.tedkennedywatson.com/2020/01/02/vinegar-chicken-with-crushed-olive-dressing/ 

And a little extra cooking note--if you ever see this olive oil for sale, snap it up. I sipped this olive oil by the spoonful as well as making salad vinaigrette with it.

RH bought it at Costco around Christmas for about $14 and it was wonderful! Naturally they were out of it when he went back and I found it on Amazon for $40 a bottle. I just can't justify that but we will be watching for it next Christmas. 

And I hope that someone tries Alison Roman's chicken dish. With beef prices soaring, chicken is a good choice now. And I wish I could suggest Judith's Huxley's olive recipe to Alison Roman as it is a match made in heaven with her chicken dish.

Huxley's one and only cookbook was published posthumously. I read it year round as it is organized by the month. She was food columnist for The Washington Post and was married to Matthew Huxley who was an epidemiologist. And Matthew was the son of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and screenwriter for 1940s Pride and Prejudice. 

All of that has nothing to do with these recipes but I found it interesting. 

You Say Potato, I Say Potato...Salad

There is no such thing as really bad potato salad. So long as the potatoes are not undercooked, it all tastes pretty good to me.

Laurie Colwin in Home Cooking

   
I love good potato salad. Do you?

Everyone has their own favorite recipe for potato salad so the only reason I presume to give a recipe for it here is that my gal Nathalie Dupree's recipe has been our family favorite for two decades, and her technique in making it is different from most. 

 Here's her recipe with a few of my own additions.

Boil new potatoes until tender and drain on tea towel. I agree with Laurie Colwin about undercooked potatoes so I err on the side of overcooked.

While potatoes are cooking chop 6-8 ribs of celery and one large onion. Lots of nice fresh celery leaves chopped is a plus.

[If you love celery leaves as much as I do, this really helps to keep them pretty longer: before putting celery in the fridge after buying it, cut off the tops that have nice leaves and plop them in a bowl of cold water while you're putting other groceries up. Change the water a few times, dry well with a tea towel, wrap in paper towel and put in plastic bag or covered bowl in fridge to use as needed.]

Peel potatoes while still hot and put on top of the chopped onion and celery. I crosswise slice them with a knife while still warm in the bowl and then pour over equal amounts of a good apple cider vinegar and olive oil, about a 1/3 cup of each. 

Season with salt and pepper and chill in fridge overnight or at least 2-4 hours. 
 
Stir in 1 cup of mayonnaise and refrigerate another two hours. [I also then add hard boiled eggs, cubed, and sliced olives, and extra mayonnaise if needed.]

Just before serving stir in a few tablespoons of sour cream. Dust with paprika if you like it as much as I do. Delicious!

And how about some Caesar-crusted Crispy Chicken Strips on lettuce to go with it?

 Combine 1/2 cup of Caesar dressing with 1/4 cup buttermilk, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Add 2 pounds of chicken strips and toss to coat.

Combine 1 cup Japanese panko, 1/2 cup flour, and 2 tablespoons dried parsley. 

Dredge chicken in breadcrumb mixture, pressing crumbs in gently. Place on baking sheet. Chill at least 30 minutes in fridge.

Cook chicken in batches in coconut oil, not crowding, 3-4 minutes on each side till golden brown. Drain on paper towels.

Serve warm with Caesar dressing on Romaine leaves. [My favorite container for mixing a vinaigrette or dressing is a jam jar with handle from a thrift store!]

Comfort food! 

Another really good recipe for chicken strips I tried recently was from Half-Baked Harvest's Spicy Honey Mustard Pretzel Crusted Chicken Fingers. Recipe here. 

How are you doing this week? Anyone else feeling kind of jittery lately? When I realized it had been 39 days since I'd left our property, I asked RH to take me for a drive in the country. 

That helped and I took some pictures of pretty dogwoods in bloom and cows and horses grazing.

A post like this seems trivial, so much of social media does now. Next week some non-essential businesses here in Tennessee are set to reopen in Phase I. How about in your state? 

How are you feeling?

Heavens to Betsy!

Just when I'd gotten fairly regular again in posting here at the Window and in being a faithful blog visitor, the flu struck, followed by bronchitis. So far RH hasn't caught it from me but let me tell you that after skipping the flu shot for two years I will be a faithful flu vaccine believer from now on, despite some negative news about it.

I just can't go through this every year, folks. I've been sick since September 25th and am just now crawling out of it. 

I missed celebrating our wedding anniversary and I missed an experience that I look forward to all year round, a trip to the Nashville Farmers Market to stock up on pumpkins and gourds to decorate our house for Autumn.

That was really a bummer but at this late date I'm just going to skip it and start decorating for Christmas in early November, God willing and the creek don't rise--I've learned to add that phrase to every plan because who knows what the next day will bring, right? Just ask anyone who lost everything they had in the monster storm Michael. My heart goes out to all of those without a home to return to or returning to months before things are normal. 

That makes blogging seem a little trivial, comparatively.

But please let me throw up a post here now that should have been written three years ago as a followup to a post on November 19, 2015 when I promised a dessert recipe from the meal I wrote about here in Pine Cones and French China.

In searching back through old Autumn posts this last week when I finally came out of the worst brain fog, I discovered this post that never got written. I would have given the directions back then but now I'll just show pictures and tell you a little background of the woman whose dessert recipe it is.

Michèle Morgan's Pineapple Caramel Ring dessert is from Mildred O. Knoph's Memoirs of A Cook. The cookbook author herself is worth a post someday.

She was married to movie producer Edwin H. Knopf. Even if you're not familiar with him, I bet you recognize his brother's name, Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. 

When Mildred and her husband dined with Michèle Morgan in her Paris apartment on the Île de la Cité overlooking the River Seine, she served them this dessert after an elegant lunch.

Not familiar with Michèle Morgan? We might have known her as well as we do Ingrid Bergman if Warner Brothers had been willing to pay RKO Studio enough to release her to play opposite Humphrey Bogart in a little film called Casablanca.

Morgan was stunning, wasn't she?

  Her dessert was delicious but the instructions are long so I won't type it here. If you really want to make it just email me and I'll scan the page and send it to you.

I hope to follow this post in a few days with a few of the many October posts I had originally planned--the Autumn decorating that never happened won't be there--and in the meantime I'll be visiting my blog friends and admiring your own Autumn decor or various thoughts.

As I look out my windows now I see absolutely no pretty Autumn colors yet. Have the leaves turned yet where you live?

Happy rest of October, dear friends! 

MFK Fisher's Gazpacho Salad

If it's still in the 90s in the daytime and 70s at night, it's still Summer and it's hot, I don't care how many Autumn pictures I see on Pinterest.

It's still aspic weather in the South and will be in my house as long as the hot weather lasts, although I've been known to serve tomato aspic on Christmas Eve.

I did one post on it at my other blog back in June but MFK Fisher helped me take my recipe to a whole new level when I made her Gazpacho Salad this week. 

It turns out that hers was just a fancier name for it and I guess that gazpacho salad does sound more gourmet than tomato aspic.

The recipe for the basic tomato aspic is back on my blog post here but I updated it with Fisher's recipe in Joan Reardon's delightful book on her called M. F. K. Fisher among the Pots and Pans.

I added 1 cup of beef consommé, 1 red sweet bell pepper diced, 1 sweet red onion, chopped, and 1 cucumber peeled and diced. And I added a couple of chopped jalapeños from my garden. All of these chopped vegetables were so good in the salad!

And I added a cup of chili sauce, something I saw somewhere, can't remember where, and thought would be good and was it ever! Extra spiciness!

I didn't make her dressing of 1 clove garlic mashed into 1/2 cup olive oil with salt and pepper because we love my own dressing of mayo with a little olive oil, lemon juice and snipped basil so much.

I know from emails on my other post that very few of you like aspics. But I stand with Julia Reed (I love her column in Garden & Gun) when she wrote in her cookbook Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties that we congeal everything in the South. 

Her mother once "had a four-day house party during which she served an almost exclusively gelatin-based menu...crabmeat mousse, a strawberry mousse, two kinds of tomato aspic, and a charlotte russe."

I would have been a happy member of that house party! 

Now I can just bet that no one is going to try the Gazpacho Salad recipe and I'll put money on not one of you trying the entree of our meal. But you might just like my dessert recipe, so stay with me, please.

Are you asking what in tarnation is that ugly entree? I never said I was a food stylist but believe it or not this was good.

On a slice of pumpernickel for each of us I spread avocado mashed with a little lemon juice, next I put on some good wild caught canned sardines, next went thin slices of cucumber with black pepper and a squirt of lemon juice and then I topped it off with jalapeño slices. 

And there was our dinner. I know that Poppy loves sardines, although hers are fresh caught ones from Crete. Anyone else out there like these protein packed little fish that have the same omega 3 that salmon does?

Enough of that, let's have dessert! What about pecan pie? 

That purple is just a sprig of Joe Pye Weed hanging over the pie from a vase on the table. 

Have you ever tried an Authentic Pecan Pie? One without nasty corn syrup in it? 

I've had this recipe for years and the clipping said it was by a Carolina cook. "And don't ever use corn syrup! That ruins the consistency. Authentic pecan pie is jelly-like, translucent with sparkle. Just start with a pound of brown sugar, then add three eggs, about two eggshells of milk, a big splash of vanilla, some salt, and a lot of pecans."

I baked it at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes.

Easiest pecan pie ever and you wouldn't believe the good flavor. I have several recipes for pecan pie but RH says this is his favorite. I only had a small piece of the pie and left the rest for RH, and he took a slice to Zack.

Besides, my favorite dessert is another serving of aspic. And I'll take fish and seafood any day for my protein rather than poultry or beef or pork. 

Maybe, just maybe, I've been influenced by MFK Fisher's thoughts in Serve It Forth.

For many old people, eating is the only pleasure left...And between gobbling down an indistinguishable mess of heavy meat and bread, or savouring a delicate broiled trout or an aspic full of subtle vegetable flavours, how few of us would choose the distressful insomnia that follows the first for the light easy rest of the second?

Okay, I really don't think of myself as old yet but I'm already finding that I sleep better after a supper of vegetable stuffed aspic and fish or seafood than red meat. Wild caught Alaskan salmon is usually my choice but I think that Rainbow or brook trout is my very favorite fish and I have an excellent recipe from Judith Jones for that. 

I wonder if RH would agree to trout and pecan pie for Thanksgiving Dinner? 

Oh, and thank you so much for ideas for using the copper gutter in the garden! I think that RH is now thinking about making it into a water fountain if he can find a pretty basin for the water to fall into.

Happy Birthday, M. F. K. Fisher and review of The Gastronomical Me

Remember when you have discovered a new to you author and her writing takes your breath away and you cannot stop until you devour every book she's written? 

I felt that way about M. F. K. Fisher decades ago when I discovered her. Last year I ordered her The Gastronomical Me published in 1943, feeling fortunate to find a wartime copy instead of a reprint. 

Since today is her birthday, I though I would share this book with you in case it is new to you. With this autobiographical book you get travel, food and love.

As an armchair traveler I love books that let me see a country not as a tourist, and through Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher's pen you do, whether it is Switzerland, France, Mexico or California that she writes of.

"I heard Juanito singing almost as soon as I came to earth in Mexico.

I did not know it at first. I was like a sea-plant, with a thousand ears out on little stalks, but only to hear what I was listening for."

Food, naturally, is all through the book, and Fisher continues to be frustrated with America's meat and potatoes mentality at that time, and with the many heavy course meals of affluent America. Instead, she always chose a simple meal of something like salad, a casserole of cauliflower, bread, fruit, and wine.

"I was beginning to believe, timidly I admit, that no matter how much I respected my friends' gastronomic prejudices, I had at least

an equal right to indulge my own in my own kitchen.

My meals shake them from their routines,

not only of meat-potatoes-gravy, but of thought, of behavior...

perhaps next time they come I will blast their safe tidy

little lives with a big tureen of hot borscht and some garlic toast and salad,

instead of the 'fruit cocktail,' fish, meat, vegetable,

salad, dessert and coffee they tuck daintily away

seven times a week and expect me to provide for them."

America had vast areas of the country with mediocre taste when Fisher was writing. But how many of us today dare invite company to dinner and serve them borscht, toast and salad?

And where does love come into The Gastronomical Me? To borrow today's catchphrase: It's complicated. Fisher writes about her marriages but the following sums up her philosophy:

"It seems to me that our three basic needs,

for food and security and love,

are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot 

straightly think of one without the others.

So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing 

about love and the hunger for it,

and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...

and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...

and it is all one."

Those needs sometimes haunt all of us, don't they? 

I remember another thing that Fisher wrote in another book, something to the effect of her encouraging her reader to study their own hungers. Good advice, don't you think?

What are my hungers? Beyond fried potatoes and onions, that Is?

That's an ongoing thought process for me, but it is beginning to become clear to me that the answer lies somewhere in the realm of simplicity.

When Mary Frances moved into her Last House, she purposely chose simple food and a simpler life. In later years travel became rare. Instead of going abroad to see the world, the world came to her.

Where she usually had a bowl of soup for them, hot crusty bread, and a glass of wine, with a fruit dessert.

That sounds about right to me, how about you? Especially if the cook was...

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher