If you don’t read Two Lumps, and you’re into cats and food, you should.

This comic appeared last week, and it is grand. I think it’s going to be my new ‘foodie themed’ desktop.

I have recently started reading and participating the forums on a new webzine site, Suburban Conspiracy. It’s an interesting site, and if I’ve introduced you to Look Around You in the past two weeks, it’s because of Rourkie’s column on it. If I haven’t introduced you, it’s very, very funny.

One thing that really interested me when I first hit the site, though, was that in addition to all the standard geekly essays and columns was a cooking column, called The Geek Kitchen, by Rifka. Those of you who are here and reading this know that I believe geekery and cookery are pretty closely linked, so it interests me to see that a site that declares itself ‘the casual side of geek’ would include our particular geekery. The most packed panel I did at Arisia this year was on Food Geekery, and I hope that this trend continues.

Suburban Conspiracy is new, with two issues up, and a third due tonight after midnight, if I recall my timing correctly.

While visiting my family this week, I was delighted by my mother’s new culinary invention. She calls it simply chicken stew; I call it Manhattan Clam Chowder, except with chicken, without the pork, and well, not made in Manhattan. It is absolutely amazing, and shows that one’s parents can provide comfort food even with a brand-new dish.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 lb chicken breast, cut in bite-sized pieces
• chopped onion, including green onions, to taste
• 2 inner celery stalks, chopped
• 3 grated whole carrots
• 1/2 red pepper, chopped
• 1 cup crushed tomatoes
• 1 14 oz can cream-style corn (optional in my opinion as tonight’s soup didn’t have it, but Mom prefers it)
• 1 10 oz can chicken broth
• 4 large red potatoes, cubed in medium pieces
• dried basil
• Pasta Sprinkle
• Montreal Chicken Seasoning

Toss the cut chicken with a little bit of salt and pepper. Saute with the onion, celery, carrots, and red pepper until the chicken is white throughout (a few minutes) with no pink in the middle.

Stir in the remaining ingredients and simmer covered for one hour.

I’d post a picture, especially since Dad served in in his mother’s china, but I ate it too fast to photograph it.

So a few weeks ago, I put together my points from Shaw’s (a local grocery store for those not in the northeast), and realized I had almost enough to get a free turkey from them. So I did what any good little cheapskate would do, and sent out the request for my friends’ points. People responded in spades (I wound up freecycling 5 back out). Now, Shaw’s was pushing this as ‘free Easter Turkey or Ham’, but since I don’t celebrate Easter, it turned out to just be a good excuse to cook piles of food for my friends.

It is golden brown and delicious.

This was my first attempt at cooking a turkey, and I’m afraid…I can’t be modest. People, this was one fine turkey. While the house certainly isn’t a Rockwell dwelling, this turkey looks every bit the Rockwellian turkey. I can’t take credit for this; it was almost totally Alton Brown’s recipe. The only difference was that I threw in some grains of paradise into the brine, because I had them.

I was really, really impressed by what the brining did to it. I’ve had a brined turkey or two in the past, and they’ve been decent, but this little bird was born to soak up brine. The result was a really tasty bird, flavourful throughout, perfectly browned, and, IMHO, better looking than the one on the Food Network’s site (which looks awfully pimply to me). Everyone who was there who ate meat agreed it was a delight to eat, and I was really glad that my first turkey turned out to be such a success.

The Tart, on the other hand, was entirely my doing. At Arisia this year, I hit Auntie Arwen’s Spices on dealer’s row. She does some excellent spice blends, that I enjoy trying, and also caters to the SCA crowd with spice mixes based on cookbooks from the middle ages. One of these, which does not appear to be on her site, is Pouldre Fine, a sweet/hot blend with ginger, raw sugar, cinnamon, grains of paradise and cloves, from Le Menagier de Paris, a cookbook from 1393. I bought it on a complete whim, and then tried to figure out what I might make with it. After about ten minutes of tasting and sniffing, it occurred to me it would be really glorious on broiled pears.

The Pear Tart, before cutting. If you click, there's really great close up.

Thus, we come to the Pear Tart. I wish I had a recipe for this, but I didn’t keep close tabs on it’ it was a pretty freeform tart, prepared the night before the dinner. The crust was simply phyllo dough, from the grocer’s freezer, thawed and prepared according to instructions (phyllo sheet, butter, phyllo sheet, butter, etc.). Because one guest is diabetic, and another is has issues with her glycemic load, I chose to experiment with agave syrup, which turned out to be a wonderful choice; it’s very light and was perfect for this dish. I melted 4tbsps of butter in 1 cup of agave syrup, and then I added the Pouldre Fine to the syrup, a tablespoon at a time until I felt it was hot enough; I wanted something with a little bite to offset the pears and agave. I eventually wound up at 3tbsps, and I think if I had been cooking for myself, or for a Hot Foods party, I might have gone to 4 or 5. I peeled and cored the pears, and sliced them about 1/4″ thick. I did one layer, poured a third of the butter/syrup over them, then did another level of pears, and poured the rest of the syrup over that, and sprinkle the top with a dusting of the Pouldre.

It baked for 30m in a 350 degree oven, and then for a few minutes longer, as it was just setting then; this is one of those stages where you just need to test it a little and see if it’s looking right, a little at a time.

I whipped mascarpone with a little agave syrup and some vanilla extract (made it myself! ) and left it overnight in the fridge to set. I’m definitely going to make it again later in the season when the pears are ripe.

I get sent a lot of free samples of foods, and about 2-3 weeks ago, a package arrived from Kraft containing this and one of those little packet tubes of water flavouring for bottled water. Let me tell you, if THIS is what South Beach Living is like, I never want to go anywhere near the place. It tastes like really cheap bubblegum, from one of those Topps baseball/Star Wars/Wacky Packages packs in the ’70s. And it’s rock hard; like it’s been sitting around somewhere since then, to boot.

Granola clusters should be made of individually crunch bits, but the clusters themselves should crunch but then readily fall apart, not make you wonder if that was a cluster or a tooth. It might be worth getting over if the flavour was outstanding, but my response to the first bite was, ‘Dear God, no,’ and it didn’t get better on the second. I rarely throw out the things I’m sent for free, even if I’ll never buy ‘em again, but this went right into the trash.