Extreme Cooking Blog

The best tamales are made from fresh masa, but in a pinch this stuff is really good. I whipped it with the lard I had used to make the carnitas the other day. Then filled the tamales with strips of roasted poblano and some pieces of cheese. Steamed for about 2 hours. Let rest for another hour. Gone in about a millisecond.

So I had some ripe San Marzano plum tomatoes from my garden and I also wanted to try the recipe in the latest issue of Cooks Illustrated for Chicken & Dumplings. Lunch today became a fusion of the two – chicken braised in a tomato sauce with dumplings. I made one major departure from the CI recipe which I think worked very well. Instead of melted butter I used the fat that was rendered when I browned the chicken pieces. The combination of all of this was an explosion of hearty flavor and varied textures. Next time, I’m going to try the dumpling recipe on the box of Pioneer Buttermilk Biscuit Mix. There will definitely be a next time.

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Just put a bunch of peaches into the dehydrator. Wet spring and summer has produced a bumper crop.

I love old books, including old cookbooks. This evening I was looking at a very old chocolate cake recipe from a book I’ll talk about in a future post. I can’t but wonder what this cake tasted like when the author prepared it 100 years ago.

• What strain of wheat was used for the flour and how was it milled? Was it anything like the A/P flour I would use?
• Was the sugar as refined and sweet?
• How big were the eggs? They were probably from yard birds that ate a very different diet than the hens that laid the eggs I buy at the market.
• And the butter. Was it freshly churned? Cultured? What was the fat content?
• The milk was likely fresh from the cow –  not homogenized nor pasteurized. How did that effect the taste of the cake?
• Was the chocolate anything like what I have in my kitchen? What was the cacao %?

I have to believe that the cake I bake with contemporary ingredients just isn’t going to be anything like the one from 100 years ago. Furthermore, our palates are likely very different today; I was raised on a much more varied diet including all kinds of processed foods. Did the author care as much as some of us do about the flavor of the food we eat or did the author’s living conditions engender more of an “eat to live” attitude?

Went up into the National forest again looking for Boletes, but instead found a bunch of small chanterelles – about 1.5 pounds. Made chicken with chanterelles and marsala:

I wish I could find more Boletes, but I’m not complaining. These chanterelles are awesome.