Happy Mardi Gras

Tomorrow (or today, depending on when you're reading this) is Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday. As you may know, I make king cakes every year for the kids to bring into their classrooms. Often I'll go too, bringing beads, masks, and music, and sharing some of the history and tradition of Mardi Gras. I find the holiday to be such a fine way to keep my kids aware of and tethered to their Louisiana roots, for Mardi Gras isn't religious (although it has some religious roots) and it epitomizes joie de vivre and celebration, two characteristics of Louisianians that I have always adored.

As the kids have grown, a single king cake has ceased being enough to feed their classmates. This year I doubled the recipes and made two much larger cakes and then a third one to split between us, Jack's math teacher (a Louisiana native), and a few other special teachers and friends. Doing so added a great deal to the cook time, but I'm pretty confident no one will go hungry tomorrow. That said, I expect not a crumb to return home. And that is how it should be.

For the first time, I've added a plastic baby to each cake, comfortable that all the kids are old enough now not to freak out if they cut or bite into a naked infant. Louisiana folks take such knowledge for granted, but I have long wondered if a child who's unfamiliar with the king cake tradition might be traumatized with such a surprise in his or her cake. 

As I usually do, this year I used Southern Living's classic, unfilled king cake recipe. I also made their glaze but omitted the lemon juice as I find it terribly distracting and unwelcome on a cinnamon sugar treat. 

So here you have it, six hours later, much in the way of celebratory cake. Laissez les bons temps rouler!!

after the very successful rising (see top pics), I rolled out subdivided balls of dough, slathered with butter, and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.

king cakes that have risen and are ready for the oven

Post-Valentine's rose petal jam

Each year, my sweet T brings me red roses for Valentine's Day. As our years together have grown in number, so too has the size of the bouquet; somewhere around a decade, it went from 12 to 24 stems. 

I always feel a bit sad when the heads start to droop and the petals begin to brown and wither. Part of me wants to toss them at the first sign of decline, while at other times I'm prone toward resuscitative efforts or preservation. 

Five years ago, unwilling to part with my roses but unable to store more dried petals without starting to feel like Miss Havisham, I wondered what it would be like to make jelly with them. What resulted, after not a short and sweet process, was lovely. A transparent, cardinal red jewel with a distinctly herbal tang and elements of sweet and tart, thanks to the addition of sugar, apple, Meyer lemon, and red currants.

I'm a good jam maker, but jelly is tough. I don't like the taste of synthetic pectins but you need to add some in this case. I try to take a light hand with liquid pectin which has less of an aftertaste but often results in a jelly with inconsistent wobble. It's weird, but I'd rather my jelly be too loose than too stiff. I'd rather spoon than grate, you know?

It's been a long while since I've made rose petal jelly, but this year's bouquet was so beautiful, and our first V-day of ordering take-out and watching a movie in pjs so just-what-we-needed, that I decided to make some Love Letter Jelly (that sounds awfully X-rated in some respects; sorry, but jelly is more accurate than jam).

I doubled the recipe since I received 24 stems this year but came to find that I only had one envelope of liquid pectin. Alas, I now have loose jelly. But it still sings with the unique taste of rose, a taste that becomes really magical atop lemon curd and warm bread; that is my favorite way to eat this jelly. 

The process is a long, involved one, but I can manage that once every five years or so. 

rose petal trimmings; you want just the velvety red parts!

the red leaches from the petals into the water...

fading further

ethereal petals in rose red water

rose syrup

A Sunday roundup: 14-cup commercial food processor, a foster cat, friend visit, misc

Y'all will be as thrilled to hear, as I was to experience it, that I have had the dreaded relapse that so many people have succumbed to following round 1 of this horrid virus going around. Not even kidding I have gone through FOUR boxes of Kleenex since Thursday. Don't even talk to me about phlegm and nosebleeds and that disgraceful chap pattern I now have under my nose. 

That said, my dear friend, Anne, came to visit Thursday - Saturday, and as it always is when you spend time with someone who makes you pee in your pants laughing and also shares their deepest secrets and you yours and doesn't mind watching you go through two of those four boxes of Kleenex or eating leftover pizza from the double-slumber party you host one night during her visit for dinner, it was marvelous.

As evidenced by that picture.

Also last week I received a new kitchen toy, Hamilton Beach's 14-cup dicing food processor. My friend, Christine (I call her Burratine because we first truly bonded over a plate of burrata and have been fast friends since; was that two years ago, C? three?), writes the snappy food blog, Chew Nibble Nosh, and recently had a giveaway sponsored by Hamilton Beach. Out of 175 entrants, my name popped out of the Promo Simple winner generator. Y'all, I was thrilled. I don't think I've EVER won anything. And then, faster than I can type Hamilton Beach, this puppy was waiting by my front door. 

Thank you, HB; photos below courtesy of Hamilton Beach

I used it yesterday to mandoline three Meyer lemons in the blink of an eye for a Shaker lemon pie and again today to DICE many pounds of green peppers and onions for the chili verde I make most every year for the Superbowl. 

Because I was BESIDE MYSELF thrilled by the speed and mostly-accurate dicing and mandolining of all these things, which otherwise takes not an insignificant amount of time, I neglected to take any action shots. You should click here as Christine photo-documented her entire maiden voyage with her dice-chop magic appliance. It dices tomatoes without crushing them. WTF?! #winning

I cannot wait to use this bad boy to deal with potatoes in a million different ways. Latkes, hash browns, you get my drift! Thank you to Christine and Hamilton Beach!

In feline news, a beautiful little cat has been wandering our neighborhood for weeks, collarless and thin. It has emeralds for eyes and is the sweetest, calmest ball of silky fur and purr ever. Many of us have come to believe it's homeless, and so today we took him in. 

I promised T it was just a foster cat (he does NOT want another cat), and I have put signs up all over the neighborhood and also reached out to a friend who recently lost her beloved cat of 17 years to see if she might want to adopt this honey. But y'all know the truth: the boys and I want to keep this cat. Big time. Right now he's sound asleep, still purring, in bed with Jack. 

As I scooped this sweetie up today, and felt unabashed love literally course through my body, it all felt so simple. Such a perfect counterpoint to all the ugliness and complete lack of love and respect and care being spewed from the White House. It's so much easier to be kind and put a little goodness out there. #resist