In which I discuss food at length, again

I took a few days off, both from work and from blogging, and mostly vegged out over this food-tastic holiday. A bit of that time was spent cooking, although we ended up at my mother's for Thanksgiving, because a) I am physically unable to show up at anyone's house empty-handed and b) my mother asked me to make appetizers for the 15 or so people who were attending. This has long been my role in family gatherings. For many years, I made complicated hors d'ouevres that required deep-frying right before serving, or esoteric ingredients best culled from the local Asian grocery, or both. I learned the hard way that Martha Stewart has crappy recipes (although I am intrigued by her Everyday Food magazine - I hold out hope that she was imprisoned for much of its inception and early-to-mid existence). And didn't she steal a lot of her recipes, anyway? I dislike her, and yet I find her fascinating. Ugh. But I digress. In the end, I found that the best way to make people happy was to keep things simple, so now I make pigs in a blanket, and then something else simple and easily popped into an open maw. Sweet 'n' sour meatballs, say. This year I did Mexican pizzas. They were good, but I must remember that the oven is full of turkey on these occasions, and there is really no other way of cooking anything in my mother's house, save for a 15 year old microwave with an inner capacity of about .2 cubic feet.

I also made squash & granny smith apple soup, using Mark Bittman's recipe, although I tweaked it, as I often do with most any recipe (I used acorn squash instead of butternut, sue me). It was nice, although Booby proclaimed it merely "OK." Everyone else raved, and, most importantly, I liked it, so it's been added to my mental "easy recipes that turn out well" file.

Booby has been obsessed lately with ginkgo trees, which are all over the place here. The story goes that the Philadelphia and surrounding city planners got a good deal on a big order of trees, and planted them without doing their research first. For anyone not in the know, these trees let down berries that stink to high heaven, and a little interwebbing reveals that they contain butyric acid, which is also a component of vomit. Once the berries are crushed, the wonderful vomit smell rises to the fore (and often lingers on your soles after you've unwittingly trodden through a sidewalkful of berries). In any case, twice this weekend I have seen a little person (gender indeterminate, but I'd guess female) out on the median strip, collecting the berries into a basket. It would seem that they are edible! Well, not the disgusting smelling fruit (thank god), but the inside seed, which, when toasted, is evidently quite tasty. Raw, they are poisonous, though, so beware.

In researching the edibility of ginkgo berries, I came across Wildman's Foraging site, and it makes me want to take one of his tours. This has only been reinforced by reading of SJ's adventures picking wild chanterelles. I am not a mushroom person, but the thrill of discovering my own "organic" wild food has made me push that minor detail out of my mind. Ths whole thing also dovetails nicely with the idea of using my neighbor's sour green apples to make my own jelly - an idea that's been banging around in my brain since my sister kindly gave me a tutorial on home canning (she even bought me the basic supplies for my birthday!). More details as they develop ... but I am thinking this plan will have to keep until spring.

* Image courtesy of the New York Botanical Gardens site.