So Far This Thanksgiving Morning

 

We have the culinary bible at hand, and have cut up the chickens that will be roasted.
Updates about our dinner will continue to be posted.

Making stock for later use in gravy.

Onions, celery, and herbs prepped for stuffing.

… what we ate for dinner yesterday

Miriam made meatballs and rice in a coconut milk sauce.

After dinner treats: Zingerman’s chocolate cherry bread and maple-sugar candy.

Photos © 2025 mae sander

At My House

 Cooking 

Dinner for Guests

We hadn’t cooked any recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking lately, so when we started planning a meal for friends, we thought about an old favorite: casserole-roasted chicken with tarragon. If you want to get amazing results you have to do every step the way that Julia Child says to do it. So in addition to the recipe in the old favorite book, we watched the 60-year-old TV episode where Julia Child showed American cooks how to make this dish. Back then, it was revolutionary!

These original episodes of The French Chef are of course in black-and-white.
As you may know, Julia Child’s cooking show pretty much invented Food TV.

Julia Child’s recipe  recommends roasted potatoes and peas with mushrooms as side dishes. OK.

Unbelievably delicious!

Our guests.

Best Breakfast

 Another great bake by Len.

Reading

A bit of reading about Tokyo for a change of scene. Tokyo on Foot is a delightful collection of images.
Thanks to Emma at Words and Peace for recommending these books.

Reading next: classic haiku.

This is not one of the best novels by Patricia Highsmith.
I didn’t like any of the tediously portrayed characters and they weren’t
quirky enough to be interesting. 

Watching Peter Ustinov’s Poirot

We wondered why we hadn’t seen these Agatha Christie films before. Each one has an all-star cast.
They have a delightful light touch. We also watched Kenneth Branagh’s Orient Express: very heavy-handed.

The Weather is Grim

Woody, the Michigan Groundhog saw no shadow and (as superstition has it) said no to more winter.
I agree that winter should end, but unfortunately, Woody is only right 35% of the time. (Photo Credit)
The “weather” in our nation isn’t so great either.

What I was doing two years ago

Whale watching in Baja California, February, 2023.

Photos © 2023, 2025 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz and Eileen’s Critters.

June Food Stories in My Life

Food in Film and Fiction

Pixar’s “Bao”

A fun kitchen movie we watched this month: “Bao,” made by Pixar in 2018.

Bao, of course, are Chinese steamed buns — super delicious!

These bao are from a small lunch place downtown where they also show the movie over and over!
I’ve mentioned this restaurant several times, and it’s quite a favorite. Bao and a coke: perfect!

In the movie one of the bao turns into a living human-like creature.

Sherlock Holmes’s Breakfast

From Neil Gaiman’s Sherlock Holmes monster tale.

From a Murakami Tale

A mysterious business owner’s dinner in “Birthday Girl” one of the Murakami Manga.

Chinese Food from The Murder of Mr. Ma

A recent crime novel by co-authors SJ Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee features several Chinese inhabitants of 1924 London, including a reborn version of the ancient Chinese detective Judge Dee. They eat well, and I wished I could join them; for example:

“Dee and Jimmy Fingers contentedly devoured the spring rolls with copious amounts of hot mustard and, following those, a plate of steamed pork buns. The turnip cake and pan-fried noodles had arrived together … .Dee ordered a dish of clay-pot rice with sausage.”

Sweet treats from Madame Bovary

What were sweets like in France in the 1850s? The Bovary family received the following gift:

“Six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar of racahout, three cakes of marshmallow paste, and six sticks of sugar-candy … .”

Explanation:

• Racahout was a paste made from acorns and sugar, and used to make a hot drink or a porridge. 
• Jujubes are a fruit, also called red dates (not related to normal dates) — a candy made from this fruit had been invented in the 18th century. The modern candy called Jujubes does not contain this fruit.
• Marshmallows back then were made from a gelatinous substance produced by the plant called marsh mallow. The recipe for modern marshmallows made from sugar and artificial (or animal) gelatin is an imitation of this natural plant gelatin.

Fairy wine from Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries

“Like the food, the wine smelled lovely, of sugared apples and cloves, but it slid eerily within the ice, more like oil than wine.”

From Our Own Kitchen this Month

Len did most of the cooking this month. This swordfish was a really delicious dish!

A Julia Child recipe: Gratin Savoyard, or potatoes cooked in stock and topped with cheese.

We worked together on this recipe, which was tasty. We chose it because we had the ingredients on hand:
pork, green lentils, onions, carrots, and tomatoes with some interesting spices.

Of the dishes depicted here, this is the only one that I cooked.

Food Elsewhere

At Sweetwaters’ Cafe. An espresso with a classic donut.

Ice cream at the Dexter Creamery.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sherry’s In My Kitchen and  Elizabeth’s Tea Party.

In My Kitchen, January 2024

We started the year in Costa Rica, as I’ve said, at the birding lodge called Rancho Naturalista. I'm starting my January kitchen wrap-up with photos of the kitchen there. 

On the table beside the stove in the first photo are two trays of stuffed baked potatoes, one of the dishes we enjoyed at a couple of dinners. The main Costa Rican dish served from this kitchen was Gallo Pinto, which was offered each day at breakfast: black beans, rice, onion, and spices. Several bottles of salsa were always available to flavor the rice and the various sorts of eggs and other breakfast dishes or whatever was served at other meals. The food at lunch and dinner was good, but more North American in style, like the roast turkey dinner for New Year's Eve, or a simple grilled steak or breaded fish filet, almost always with salads and vegetable dishes. (For more about the cuisine, see "What is Costa Rican Food?" in Eater.)

Before breakfast was served, coffee and small snacks were available on the balcony 
where guests gathered to watch the early-morning bird life.

Back in Ann Arbor

Since we returned home, we’ve been trapped indoors by some of the worst weather we have ever lived through. January has been sunless, freezing cold and icy or just chilly and damp, and very depressing. We haven’t seen a ray of sunshine since our return to Michigan. So we have cooked a lot. Here are some photos from our own kitchen and dining room.

A New Sauce from Costa Rica

We bought some of the special Lizano brand sauce that we had in Costa Rica.
Also a new chili sauce from Trader Joe’s.

Soup for Cold Nights

A Costa Rican specialty is Aztec Soup — a tomato and tortilla soup. (link)
This is the only Costa Rican dish we have tried at home.

I tried this dish in Costa Rica-- it's also popular elsewhere in Central America.

Also at home: this corn chowder mainly made from leftover vegetables and a can of cream-style corn.

Weather like ours demands lots of flavors of soup! Mostly, I make soups without a recipe.

Winter Salads

Preparing broccoli salad with the new sauce. No recipe!

Champignons à la grecque: a French classic dish of mushrooms with cilantro and lemon.
We had this as a side dish with chicken legs and vegetables. 
Julia Child's recipe, which I wrote about in the past, is more complicated. (link)

Main courses with or without meat

From Fuchsia Dunlop's book Every Grain of Rice.

Crispy potatoes: we ate them as a main course with a salad. Another New York Times recipe.
I haven't given links to NYT recipes because they are behind a paywall.

Sweet Pastry

A “Pompe” — that is, a large apple turnover in flaky pastry.
Details of the two apple pastries that Len made were in yesterday’s post (link).

These cardamom buns were a nice treat on a snowy afternoon.

Tuna and Salmon for Salads

I make tuna or salmon salad often. No recipe.
Mayo and pickle relish are essential!

New Refrigerator Magnets

From our trip to Costa Rica: magnets of sloths, birds, a bat, and a folkloric painted farm cart.

That’s my kitchen for January — not much new "stuff." I’m sharing my kitchen post with Sherry’s once-a-month blog party “In My Kitchen.” All photos © 2024 mae e. sander.