They're heeeeere!

Another Delicious Sign of the Season .... the Holidays are coming. Let's be happy!

Happy Blogiversary!!

Road Raging Foodie is 1 years old!!!
Actually it's now 1 year and 2 days old ( but who really is counting?)
Incredibly a year has passed already and another one is likely to just zip on by. Amazing.
I have lots of pumpkiny treats to update on, but not tonight. I also will have some photos of the Halloween porch decorations and beautiful cleaned cabinets! I spent probably 4-5 hours in the kitchen today cleaning out all the drawers and shelves, most of which have been sitting empty and dirty since we moved in. Now all of them are lined with contact paper and everything is nice and clean. Finally we can put some dishes and food away!

Maybe soon I will have pictures of a new car. I'm on the hunt for a nice Jeep Wrangler :) The office might actually move soon so I won't have such a long morning commute ( though I must say I've been enjoying taking the train).

Halloween and Bloggery

The weather has finally decided that it's ok for it to be fall! Hooray! As I said, I'm super excited about this. I've been eating orange oreos and even drinking tea!

Unfortunately I also seem to have gotten some sort of sickness for the fall season. Oh yay. The sore throat is the real reason for drinking the tea. Still, nothing is going to get me down with the arrival of cool weather.

I started the preparations for our awesome H house. Pictures will be coming shortly, but I will say that I've started creating some tombstones, and I took a trip to Target to pick up a few odds and ends, including the always essential spider webs. I'm pretty excited.

There's candy everywhere, not that I've bought any.... yet.

Also, I recently discovered a new blog while looking for some baked tofu ideas. It's such a cool name that I have to mention it because I'm insanely jealous that I didn't think of it first. It's called Foodusaurus Rex. She has some cool recipes so pass on the love.

It's almost Fall....

Despite the fact that it seems to suddenly be 80 degrees again this week, it is actually about to be fall... I think.

With the Autumn season comes so many amazing flavors, not to mention cool crisp air, sweaters, boots, pumpkin picking, apple picking Halloween and general leaves falling from the trees merriment. (Oh man, now I really wish I had a backpack and was heading off to school).

At any rate, I've started the season by buying the first pack of orange colored Oreos! Honestly, I think things just taste better when they are orange. I also discovered that oreos have taken on another interesting twist by making football shaped oreos. I'm not really into sports, but it's still kind of a cool idea.



I can't wait for the weather actually gets cooler. Besides all of the funtastic things that come with fall, it will also be my blogiversary in a month! Crazy! It's almost been a year since I embarked on my food documentation adventures. I'll try and keep more up to date. More food adventures to come!

Turkey Day...

So I've fallen a week behind with my turkey updates. I started writing but never got to posting. Food hasn't really been a top priority lately. Anyway, here we go with the Thanksgiving story:

What's better than a holiday devoted entirely to food?? Thinking.... thinking......... nope, nothing I can think of right now. Ok, maybe Christmas. But Thanksgiving is a truly American holiday. What is Canadian Thanksgiving anyway? (Sorry Canadians but can anyone actually tell me what Canadian Thanksgiving is? I think we had it first).

Thanksgiving was spent with the parents and grandparents down in PA and dad and I volunteered to do the cooking. My dad watches a cooking show called Cook's Country and they had a very interesting turkey and mashed potatoes recipe. The turkey is cooked with salt pork on top of it and then the salt pork is taken off halfway through cooking to let it brown. As I've mentioned, I'm not a big fan of pork products, but this recipe is meant to moisten the turkey. It came out delicious! Everyone agreed that the turkey was incredibly juicy and tender,and my mom even consented to eating some of the white meat instead of the usually more tender dark. I'd highly recommend this method, even though cutting through the salt pork was very difficult. Of course the pork is really disgusting after you cook it. I can't understand why anyone would voluntarily eat that; basically its just fat. Shudder.

The mashed potato recipe is actually quite brilliant and makes so much more sense than the normal way of making mashed potatoes. This method is actually supposed to be used for garlic mashed potatoes but I vetoed the garlic because it didn't seem Thanksgiving appropriate. The big secret is that instead of boiling the potatoes in water, you actually boil them in the cream and then mash them. It worked out really nicely and they got a big thumbs up.

The only other really time consuming cooking activity was making the gravy, for which we used all those nasty inside turkey bits that make gravy so tasty. You cook those up with stock and drippings from the turkey and some flour and voila! Gravy! And good gravy at that!

We made the stuffing the night ahead and gave it the final cook up on the day of. I don't love stuffing, but this one was really tasty and had everything imaginable in it from apples to cranberries to nuts to wild rice. I think in the end the rice was unnecessary, but I hardly ever find rice necessary so I might not be a good judge.

The rest of the menu was pretty simple: Roasted Brussels Sprouts ( not high on my list), steamed green beans, artichokes (cooked by my grandma), baked canned yams ( also courtesy of grandma, rolls and two kinds of cranberry sauce. All in all it was very successful and yielded leftovers of course.

On a related topic, my world has just been rocked because apparently the correct term in "Brussels Sprouts", with an 'S' not Brussel Sprouts. I had no idea.

Here's what the cooking prep and final products looked like.

Some of the ingredients...The turkey is all wrapped up in cheese cloth

Getting a bath
Knife sharpening

Yams!


Various prep and snacks


Festive table decorations





artichoke remains

Table is all ready!

Turkey on the table
Some snacks from earlier
Even though Tom doesn't look golden, he's still delicious!

Pumpkin Carving

Well today was the day of epic pumpkin carving. Man, carving a pumpkin is a lot harder than I remembered. I bought a giant one too so it was kind of a wrestling match between me and the pumpkin. I did win though. Haha! I was going to go for the traditional scary face but we have this giant spider web decoration out front of the house and no spider for it so I decided to try out carving a spider. I found this one for inspiration and I started on the ambitious task of fighting the giant pumpkin.

This has to have been the stringiest pumpkin ever. There wasn't much goop or too many seeds but the whole body of the pumpkin was just a stringy mess which caused lots of problems. This is it cleaned out.


I was tempted not to even cut the legs out cause I wasn't sure I could do it with a giant knife but with a few tiny ones and some very strong persuasion I managed to cut out the legs too. It only took ohhhh, a few hours to do the whole thing. But it was fun!



And for good measure I roasted the seeds, the few that there were and they were delicious! Oil and salt in a 325 oven for 15 minutes. Yum!

Apple muffins

So recently I found a use for all the remaining apples. They've already been eaten plain and with cheese, and baked with nuts and sugar but now they have become muffins. I chose two recipes because neither one needed very many apples and I wanted to try them both. One was apple cranberry muffins and the other was apple yogurt muffins. Here's a little visual tour of the process.

First the cranberry apple muffins get mixed up and then off to the oven. Sadly I only seem to have one little muffin tray to work with so its a long process. And the kitchen gets messy.




And apples get naked.
Finished! They came out a bit more crispy on the outside than I wanted and a bit more flat and smooshed but they were ok.

The consistency of the next batter was much lighter and more springy so I had a better feeling about them and sure enough they came out very moist and light. They also got a nice cinnamon sugar topping. Anyone want some? I still have a bunch.

APPLES!!!!!

Despite the very confusing East Coast weather these days, it is supposedly Autumn which means it is apple season. I've recently just had two very apple filled experiences which I'd like to share as both resulted in the consumption of a massive quantity of apple products and apples.

The first apple adventure was last weekend in Ithaca, NY at the Downtown Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival, now in it's 28th year. I had the opportunity to visit some friends and attend the festival with them, which was lovely but also challenging during the peak of the festival on Saturday. The entire commons area of the quaint little hippie town was so jammed with people that it was difficult to even walk. The food however, was delicious! I only managed to pick up one bag of apples for myself which included some hybrid apple that crossed a red delicious ( not usually my favorite) with another type of apple. I did snag some very delicious and filling Indian food and some cold cider.

We purchased a sizable few bags of apples to cook which through some team work and recipe alteration we turned into an absolutely mouth-watering apple crumb pie. Think apples, brown sugar, white sugar, butter, oatmeal and cinnamon in a pie crust. Yum!

When I came home from my Ithaca adventures my family was a little disappointed by the small bag of apples I returned with, however I got the opportunity to make it up to them this Friday with a trip up to Warwick NY to pick my own apples at Masker Orchards. Check them out.
I have to say, every apple we tasted was delicious. Since they literally came right off the tree and into our hands they were as fresh as physically possible. We got a whole variety including Cortlands, Jonagolds, Macintosh, Empire and some we weren't even sure what they were.

The Red Delicious also had the chance to redeem itself from the mealy, soft, boring quality that I normally experience in this apple. The ones that came off the tree didn't even resemble the typical "teacher apple" you normally see. The color was much more vibrant and the shape was much rounder, and the taste and texture far superior to any red delicious I've ever had the misfortune to eat. All in all the experience was a really nice one- walking through the orchards and choosing our own fruit. Now I need to find something else to cook involving a massive quantity of apples, although it seems almost a pity to cook these crisp apples into a mush. I'm extremely picky when it comes to apples, and if they aren't break your teeth crunchy, as my mom likes to say, then I don't want to eat them.

Here's the bag I brought home:

Apples actually are really fascinating, as I learned watching The Botany of Desire, based on Michael Pollan's book. Apparently if you plant an apple seed you don't get the same type of apple as the apple the seed came from. What?? There's a whole grafting process of putting the seed with an already growing branch in order to get back the same type of apple. Pretty crazy and awesome, but I find botany pretty cool in general.