Monday, January 9, 2012

Today's post must perforce be brief as I have too much to do and too little time to do it. Oh, these distracting eighth-grade meetings, reprint-permissions requests, birthday dinners, basketball practices, and editorial cleanups. When will I ever get the chance to work (i.e., to wander aimlessly around the house drinking tea, staring out the window at crows, inserting one word and then deleting it, reading six lines of the The Prelude and half a page of Walter Scott, inserting five words, staring out the window at woodpeckers, etc., etc., etc.)? Well, it won't be today. The best I can do is to share the menu for Tom's birthday dinner tomorrow:

Cream of tomato and garlic soup
Sourdough baguettes
Carbonnade a la flamande (Belgian beef stew)
Spatzle
Spinach and pear salad
Homemade vanilla ice cream with home-canned purple grapes in syrup (which taste remarkably like canned sweet cherries)

5 comments:

Ruth said...

Happy Birthday to Tom! Sounds like a marvy dinner menu.

Thomas said...

I'm curious about the spatzle as I've always wanted to make them but the tiny size of the true spatzle has been daunting to me. Do you use the colander method or do you own a spatzle maker? I always use the recipe from the old Joy of Cooking but just dump spoonfuls into the boiling water -- they end up large and ill formed but quite delicious. I would like to try them in their original size, though.

Ruth said...

re: Spatzle, I have my grandfather's spatzle board and use a flat straight-bladed knife to scrape them off into the boiling salted water. The size depends on family tradition I've found. Good luck creating.

Dawn Potter said...

I use a hand-crank food mill: the kind you might use to strain applesauce or pumpkin. It has interchangeable strainers, so I use the one with large-ish holes--maybe they're 1/4 inch in diameter?--and just crank the dough directly into the boiling water.

Thomas said...

Another motivator to buy a food mill. Thanks Dawn and Ruth for the tips.