My holidays involve a lot of spice.

 

I really love the colors of the holiday season. Not the gaudy red and green decorations that pop up everywhere, or the desperate blue and white, rather nonsensical Chanukah stars that try to participate in the holiday frenzy. And I'm not talking about the bleak white, grey, and blacks of the winter world as everything outside gets pounded by wind, rain, snow, and that cold winter sunlight. What I really love are the warm browns and tans, the nutty, spicy, crinkled colors of holiday cookies. 

And I love baking them in my parents' kitchen, with the cranky oven that you light with a match and the standing mixer inherited from relatives and the dysfunctional organization system that changes just enough each time I visit so that I have to call my mother to find the powdered sugar and the plastic bowl that survived my childhood baking projects.

Being a family that's rather a-religious, a bit Jewish, and even less Protestant-ish, the holidays are rather half-assed around here. But even heathens like cookies, and I especially like cookies, so I've taken over the cookie baking duties over the past few years. 

This year I made lemon-tangerine sables, which had zest from our lemons from the backyard, meyer lemons, and a tangerine.

And snickerdoodles, the recipe by way of my dear friend Sarah, who (I think) got it from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. It's super easy and super delicious.

And pfeffernüsse, a peppery German spice cookie (we use the Joy of Cooking recipe) that's a family-favorite in this household. Or my favorite. Hard to tell the difference.

 Happy holidays!

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.

Let me update you on what I haven't found the time to write about:

Not having much experience with it before, I tried to get in every moment of autumn this year. And found that the most delicious, most productive, and most enjoyable way to experiencing the colors, tastes, and essence of the season is to eat as many apples as possible.

So when I took a mini-road trip up to Ithaca for the apple festival, and volunteered to make birthday cake for our beautiful hostesses, I found this apple cake recipe from Smitten Kitchen.

 Not really a birthday cake, but it was pretty good.

But I wasn't happy with it. It was more a breakfast-y coffee cake than the wet, apple-y, spice laden cake I'd been hoping for. So I tried again, this time with David Lebovitz's apple spice cake recipe.

Right off the bat it calls for apples and butter, so you know it's a winner. 

 It was a hit when I brought it to class - both the dreadlocked, Jamaican, high school history teacher and the middle-aged family woman studying women's history were very complimentary. It's one of those nice, simple recipes I'll be happy to make over and over again.

 I don't have a bundt pan, so it's not quite as pretty as it ought to be, but it did taste exactly right. Possibly because I doubled all the spices?

For Thanksgiving, though, I went the more traditional route, with this apple-cranberry pie from Cook's Illustrated. Cook's requires a subscription to view their recipes (hence the link elsewhere for the pie recipe), but they are always marvelous. This is the pie recipe that they used to feature their now-notorious vodka pie crust - apparently using vodka instead of water makes the crust easier to handle but doesn't affect the structure. I'm pretty happy with my crumbly, hard-to-handle, ugly pie crusts and I never have a lot of vodka on hand, so I still haven't made it, but this pie is amazing. 

 And patriotic.

But sometimes even simple baking is too much. Finals, holidays, and the end of the apple season coincided in a big way this year, so I decided to repeat my cheap, easy, homemade gift of last year and make everyone apple sauce.

Most apple sauce recipes are pretty simple. Mine cuts the ingredients in half. Apples, cinnamon. That's it. No added sugar, no other spices. Just a variety of apples cooked together with cinnamon.

And then you can them and get on an airplane with a really heavy suitcase.

 To recap:

Apples are delicious.

Epic Pig Roast: We Don't Know How to Do This. (Aftermath)

To recap: We bought this whole, uncooked pig and roasted it. Which was lovely and difficult and I'm so glad we did it and I'll never do it again, and everyone had a good time and ate lots of pork. And then, and you probably saw this coming, we had all this pig left over.

Or, to be more precise, we had whole pig carcass with all the pork eaten off it.  The bones, the ribs, the head, the liver, the feet...those things we had. 

Well, and I guess there was some actual pork left too.

 

So, after weeks of planning a pig roast, we suddenly found ourselves with about twenty pounds (give or take ten pounds) of pig bits that needed to be dealt with.

First we cut up the pig carcass. After the roast, we'd just put the whole thing in a garbage bag and left it in the fridge, so there was quite a lot of cutting and sorting to do. I don't have any photos of that (lucky you), but it was a huge pain and took the two of us about two hours. As is true of this whole project, had we known what we were doing, it would have been a simple process and taken about twenty minutes.

After our carving ordeal we got hungry and ate liver, onions, and pig cheek for our afternoon tea. And, well, about the liver. It tasted wonderful on the day of the roast, covered in the citrus-y marinade, but most of the delicious seemed to have dissipated in the meantime. Liver is sort of gross, even when you're a grown-up.

With that, we'd gotten rid of the liver and the cheeks, which wasn't really making much of a dent in the huge pile of pig pieces. So we filled up a stock pot with meaty bones and feet, threw in some onions and bay leaves, and boiled the hell out of it.

The resulting stock was so thick (and the refrigerator so cold) that it congealed overnight. Which made bagging it for the freezer extra easy!














The thing about pork stock is that it really isn't a good soup stock. It's thick, it's overwhelmingly flavorful, and it's sort of... intensely porky. Extremely good for cooking beans. Not so good for a nice noodle soup. Luckily one of my favorite, freezable, hearty foodstuffs involves lots of pork and beans.


Feijoada is a Brazilian staple. Like all regional specialties, there's only one way to make it, and everyone in Brazil has their very own, totally authentic way of doing so. Luckily they do usually agree on two things: black beans and pork.

And onions, because everyone loves onions. We kept it real simple: Cook two pounds of black beans with some pork stock. Sauté all the onions left over from the pig roast, add a couple of pounds of chorizo that you picked up at the corner store and about an equivalent pile of pork that you just spend hours chopping off a pig carcass. Everything should be bite-sized pieces. Add it to the beans with some bay leaves. Cook for awhile.

After eating it in your Pre-Modern Europe class, decide it needs a salty/smoky flavor. Buy a package of bacon. Add it to the pot. Cook for awhile.

Now put it in your fridge, next the pot of pork stock, the tupperware of pork fat, and the bowl of pork pieces.

Come back next week for my exciting foray into a rigid kosher diet! This new religious adherence will be a desperate and terribly transparent ploy to avoid all the pork that's invaded my life.