Stuffed Collard Leaves

Why not? Why should the Middle Eastern folks have all the fun? I harvested some young collards and put them in the microwave for a few minutes to tenderize them. Then I stuffed them with cooked brown rice and peppers and covered them with marinara sauce. Yum. Who says collards are just to be cooked to death with fatback? I think Marjorie would approve.

Snakebite Sauce and Fried Green Tomatoes

It is tomato freezing cold here at the B&B. I harvested all of the green tomatoes yesterday and made fried green tomatoes for my guests. The Roma tomatoes were cut in 1/4 inch rounds ,dredged in cornmeal and flour, doused with Mrs. Dash's Lemon Pepper and "fried" in butter. The St. Augustine Snakebite sauce was served as an optional side in a crystal dish. The guests from the frozen north seemed to enjoy the sauce engendered warmth.

Florida's Cranberries AKA Rosselle

The flower looked like an okra flower but MKR's description of a rosselle plant was clear enough for me to understand that I did indeed have one courtesy of Lowes. Or at least I HAD one until the freeze. Curses on La Ninya or Ninyo whichever weather system dries us and freezes us. My urban farm is certainly dry and certainly cold.

Anyway I harvested the dead Rosselle calyxs and followed the directions for making jam. Yes, it turned out syrupy and red. It is good on hot biscuits, but then what isn't?

The Vegans Have Landed

Wonder what MKR's take would have been on vegans? No, Dora cream. No butter. No eggs. No meat. I can't imagine Marjorie eschewing animal products. I can't imagine myself doing without them either. Still, reading Dr. Will Tuttle's World Peace Diet has made me think about the effect our diet has on the world at large. The statistics are grim.

Max and Me

I am reading Max and Marjorie, the letters of MKR and Maxwell Perkins, her famous editor. I am amazed by how much her work depended on his suggestions. I knew that The Yearling arose from his initial suggestion that she write a " boys book" and that she was the one who changed it to a book " about a boy." Reading his suggestions for South Moon Under, I am aware of both his talent and his technique. He always began with praise and then inserted suggestions. She took most of them. No wonder she could not compose well after his death.

Last night I received a huge bag of well washed collards. I think I will create my favorite collard soup since I have smoked turkey from Thanksgiving and sweet potatoes from the river yard patch. They are slender but scrumptious. The combo is something MKR would have enjoyed with a pan of hot corn bread.

Golden Acid Apples

Trotted out today to pick the Ambersweet oranges for breakfast. Perhaps it was citrus hubris that got me but the juice made my lips pucker. I wonder if I picked them too early? Sally Morrison says leave them on the trees until the news of an impending hard freeze. Today I have on a sleeveless shirt and shorts, so I guess there is no danger of the hard freeze just yet.

I wonder,have they interbred with the calamondines? Speaking of those lovelies, I have made a wonderful waffle syrup with orange marmalade and a few tablespoons of calamondine juice. It adds MKR's beloved tartness. I am going to make the wild orange pie on page 197 of Morrison's book. The idea of low fat cottage cheese as opposed to the canned condensed milk I usually use, is appealing.

Toasty Pecan Bread

The moment it dips below 90, I'm making pecan bread in the bread machine. Because I live in what was at one time a large pecan grove, I feel like making the bread is somehow connecting with the land's history. I use a simple white bread recipe and add a quarter a cup of pecan meal. It is delicious. The leftovers are wonderful especially layered with honey ham.

Kumquat Butter

The Meyers lemon is taking the year off after its stellar performance last year. The kumquat is stepping into the center ring. Hundreds of kumquats hang from the bush that is nestled under the amber sweet orange. Can't wait to make the kumquat butter from the recipe on page 91 of Cross Creek Kitchens.

Cross Creek Kitchens II

I'm reading Sally Morrison's cookbook the way I have read some of Marjorie's short stories, delightfully. Morrison is a state park ranger and the curator of Marjorie's Cross Creek house. According to the book, she cooks and bakes on the original woodstove and fills the pantry with preserves she makes from the same trees and gardens that Rawlings once tended. This seems to me to be as close as possible to the culinary Marjorie.

Morrison's gingerbread waffles on page 87 have passed muster at the B&B table. Offered with a little orange butter, they are ambrosial.

Cross Creek Kitchens

Walking through Southern Crossings,my favorite consignment store in the cosmos, I found a copy of Cross Creek Kitchens by Sally Morrison. According to the blurb on the back, it has over 150 recipes for fresh-tasting specialties AND tales of life at Cross Creek. Can't wait to make okra pickles. The table garden is going gang busters with baby okra.

Candied Sweet Potatoes

MKR's recipe on page 68 of Cross Creek Cookery makes me skip down memory lane. Candied sweet taters were always on the menu in my home place whether it was Jonesboro or Miami. By the Miami era, we simply opened a can and out oozed the sugar sodden potatoes. Then we ADDED more sugar and stuffed them in half an orange with a marshmallow sitting perkily on top of the tater. I think there may have been some orange juice added. The dish was good even if it was not good for you.

Sweat and Sweet Potatoes

Dug them this morning by accident. One half dozen perfect sweet potatoes. I thought their vines were weeds. When I started to pull them the potatoes began to pop out of the soil like rubies. I will makde the sweet potato souffle on page 68 of CCC. MKR calls it luscious and utterly deadly. What more could one ask?

Seven City Citrus, my answer to Cross Creek

Black Bottom Pie NOT

Used MKR's crust ( 14 crisp ginger cookies 5 TBLS. melted butter) to form the base for my latest calamondine pie. Yum. The ginger sets off the citrus in a wonderful manner. I love the fact that Marjorie loved the original Blackbottom Pie recipe so much that she wanted to be " propped up on my dying bed and fed a generous portion."

Chili for the Chilly

Now that it is less than 100 degrees daily, I am looking through the cookbook for some cool weather food items. MKR's Chili Con Carne ( page 117) looks excellent and I think I will make it if and when the thermometer signals fall. I made it last year. Actually, I think I commingled her recipe with one of Bill Bellville's because it had habenero peppers in it.

I grow lots of habeneros without trying. They are beautiful to look at, resembling ruby red Christmas ornaments when they are ripe. Unfortunately, they are the atomic bomb of the pepper family and must be handled with care. MKR did not mention them in the cookbook. Her range of peppers is short...bell to datil.

Apologies to Miss Marjorie

I made homemade ice cream tonight. It was vaguely related to MKR's Fresh Peach Ice Cream on page 202 of Cross Creek Cookery. The weasel word here is vaguely. I threw a large container of French Vanilla yogurt in the wonderful ice cream maker then added two serious Georgia peaches which I had chopped in small pieces and left to sit in their own juice fortified with just a tiny bit of brown sugar and a little lemon juice. Finally, I pressed the start button and went back to reading the NY Times book review. In six minutes I had Fresh Peach Ice Cream. Not bad for someone without her own Dora.

Calamondines Keep Fallin' On My Head

Opening Marjorie's memory meals for the eighth season. So far we've celebrated with citrus, a calamondine tart for breakfast. The tiny tart citrus is making tree branches bend out by the river. I remember MKR's story about searching for the Seville orange tree on her Cross Creek property. Martha thought Marjorie wouldn't like the oranges because they were bitter sweet. I wonder if she knew about calamondines? My Cuban friends marinate pork loins in them. I make lemonade , cupcakes and cake out of them. They grow like weeds.

Made the first waffles, too. I love MKR's description of the correct waffle iron temperature, " smoking hot." Mine was. Yum.

A Calendar's Days are Numbered

Although I'm not in session until 1 October, I'm still eating quasi- Marjorie. Last week I tried an aspic. Yes, I know Julia C. scraped beef bones to make it jell, not moi. I open a tiny brown envelope of Knox. Not having any beef in the house for a decade makes a beef bone hard to come by.

Anyway, the aspic was cool and quivery. It was a gazpacho recipe that I have always loved. One that features summer time tomatoes , honey , whole lemons and a glug of red wine.With a slice of roast chicken and a two bite brownie, life was good.

I am reading Marjorie's letters again; the ones Gordon Biglow edited.I am struck by her " human habitation keeps a house standing." In an age of foreclosure, so many houses have been left with the doors swinging open.They don't seem alive anymore in the same way a loved one seems a stranger when the last breath goes.

Summer Time and the Living is....

The B&B has closed for the season. No more big breakfasts. Now I will just read her correspondence with Maxwell Perkins, her editor. What an incredible relationship they had.He knew how to honor her gift by asking just the right questions.

In her Nov. 4, 1931 letter she tells him about her fine stand of broccoli. I agree. Fla broccoli, even urban grown, is fine indeed. Last year I grew Goliath and fed the entire neighborhood. This year I am roasting the broccoli, carrots,and tiny potatoes in an olive oil rosemary mixture. 400 at 20 minutes. Yum.

Almost a Souffle

I cleaned out the weeds for the spring garden. Turning over the wonderful black dirt I discovered eight sweet potatoes. These were the remnants of an earlier harvest, bumpy little things with strange holes.

Took them inside, peeled them and drizzled them with olive oil. They roasted into golden coins of goodness. Lagniappe, yes !

Dash of Datil

The collard greens are a lush emerald carpet in the square foot beds. I harvested a double grocery bag of them and brought them in to cook for a departing artist, a Northerner who has spent enough time in the South to develop a taste for good greens. I don't boil them for the hour MKR mandates in CCC pg. 57. Rather, I chop them finely and saute with olive oil , bacon and pressed garlic. After They are limp for some time, I put in a cup of chicken broth and them cook the mixture down. Before I serve, I stir in a big spoonful of datil pepper jelly. YUM!

Pot of Tea and the Devil

" I liked to sit by the open hearth fire on a winter's day, about four in the afternoon, and eat a quarter of a devil's food cake,with a pot of tea or coffee." pg 149 CCC.

This is another quote that makes me feel one with MKR. I, too, love tea time cake rather than stuffing down dessert after a full meal. ( Although I can stuff if required.)

My favorite morsel is choco-banana bread which is simply any banana bread liberally embellished with chocolate chips. Somehow that bread seems less evil in the mid-afternoon that a pure slab of MKR's beloved devil's food. Just a bit anyway.

Peanut fed ham

According to MKR, peanut fed ham is the best possible ham because it is a juicy ham. This morning I tried a Black Forest ham to accompany the Cross Creek eggs. The Black Forest ham comes from a pure piglet, one who has had no antibiotics and no feedlot experience.

I love her CCC story of the party guest who hacked huge wedges of Kentucky country ham off and devoured them unaware of the fact that one is expected to nibble daintily on wafer thin pieces. Evidently he was removed from future guest lists.

New Grandchild

My son and my daughter-in-law just produced a bouncing baby boy. It took awhile( 36 hours) but they had a home birth just as they had planned.This morning I will whip up a stack of pecan waffles to celebrate the new arrival. I will follow MKR's guidelines " Pour the batter from a pitcher into a smoking hot waffle iron. Waffles are best when made at the table and eaten at once." That is so true. The best waffles I have ever eaten were made on smoking hot center table grills at a national park restaurant outside Deland. I don't remember the name but it featured a water wheel outside. Of course the waffles were eaten on day four of the ECG trip. That means we had already cycled over 100+ miles. Grilled shoe tongues might have tasted good by then.

Is the cookbook in Italian?

The three Italian guests were very interested in Cross Creek Cookery. Since we were speaking through an interpreter, I xeroxed off a copy of the cover so they could have it for their search on Amazon. My breakfast was fairly mundane....Italian bread, dried cherry granola, collard quiche and just-off-the-tree Amber sweet oranges. juice, coffee, tea. yogurt, coconut milk by request,and eggs. We talked for a long time. It was a goodf moning.

Dealing with Death

What does one cook when the phone rings in the predawn hours and a voice from the rehab says, “ No pulse, we tried ? We called rescue. No pulse.” And you say the D. word because the voice will not say it. And the voice says, “Yes, but we tried.” And you wait an hour to tell your beloved husband who is the next of kin who until this one night has been at the bedside of his father. What does one cook? Does one cook? Or does one leave a scribbled note beside the guests’ empty plate, “ I’ve gone to do last rites for my father-in-law.

But last rites are brief and hospitality is long and guests don’t come down before nine. So one stands by the beautiful priest and mumbles the ancient words then one runs home and cooks out of MKR's cookbook. The hands shake but the eggs scramble. And with the biscuits one serves sour orange marmalade which is sharp and sweet like the recently deceased.

Ice balls and train whistles

I went out to pick the collards for the quiche and found ice everywhere. The buckets I had leaned up against the citrus grafts froze solid. Poor little Key Lime, a casualty of my belief in zone creep.

Baked Sherried Grapefruit Fiasco

Followed MKR's recipe page 195 CCC. Using my new g-fruit knife, an instrument that is so lethal it could split the atom, I sectioned the grapefruit. Turned it over and drained it as Marjorie cautioned. Sprinkled the edges with brown sugar, powdered clove and dots of butter. Filled the center with sherry. Broiled it. Served it with a smile and NO ONE ATE IT. Everyone was on cholesterol medication and grapefruit is contraindicated. Sadness. Were folks just heartier ( pun intended) during Marjorie's time?