Happy (Constant) Holidays!

Here's a late Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Yule and Festivus greeting to all Constant Holiday readers! Thank you so much for keeping up with me this year.

The week between Christmas and New Years has been designated "catch up with all that stuff you've been meaning to do and I mean NOW, cuss", so the regularly scheduled post (like anything around here is "regularly scheduled") will be reduced to the Photo of the Week while I run around like a dog chasing it's tail.

Photo: view up into the glass atrium of the Galleriew Lafayette, a very fancy department store in Paris where I can't afford to do much but ogle and be spritzed by perfume ladies. Or mademoiselles de perfume, depending on how you look at it. It's beautiful nonetheless.

(This photo is from last Christmas (2008) and I sort of remember hearing that the Galleries may close. Or maybe that the Samaritain? Either way it means I am far to involved in French Department stores.)

Happy New Year to all! Be safe, and many blessings.

-trace

Stir Crazy

Ever feel like you are climbing the walls? I sure do this week. And not as attractively as the flowers in this photo.

Bougainvilla, Portosissi, Crete 2009

Big News, though - I recently had some calendars designed by the fine folks at Snapfish, and they came out GREAT! I am thinking of offering them for sale on the site. Email me or leave a note in the comments - I have one for Greece and one for Spain, and I will post the photos for each to Flickr if anyone is interested.

And up we go....

It's Monday! time to start climbing the ladder again. But remember, take time to smell the flowers on the way.

(Even if that's a cheesy expression)

Stairway, Portosisi, Crete, 2009

The Great Egg Taste-Off Challenge!

First of all, I'd like to apologize for the disturbing resemblance of the eggs in the photo above to the owl in the Hooter's logo. It weirds me out too, I promise.

Second, I suppose this is the moment to out myself (Just like Meredith Baxter-Birney! Only without the cruise ship full of women) as a closet chicken-keeper, since I haven't mentioned them before on this blog (I think). I do talk about them all the time on Facebook, to the dismay of my FB friends, many of whom have helpfully suggested that the way to deal with chickens is to go down to Publix and buy them off the rottisimat. The mojo flavor is particularly good.

At any rate, we (I) bought two chickens in July, and for the last several months they have been running amok in my yard, because when I got them home and put them in the lovely chicken coop I had made for them, they escaped in, oh, aproximately 15 seconds. We never could catch them either. Wily things they are.

But over a few months we ( I like to pretend my boyfriend is anything but appalled by all this) got them accustomed to us, and eventually one of them would even eat out of my hand. They got so used to me feeding them that they will now follow me around the yard like a pair of oddly feathered, diminutive puppies. But they got a little too exploratory (I came home from Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago and found them halfway down the block, cheerily eating someone's begonias) so we persuaded them to take up residence in a NEW, improved, larger pen (a huge 6X8 dog kennel with a hutch inside). This had the additional benefit that we can finally get eggs - we suspected they'd been laying but could never find any, and now they have a special nest box for the purpose.

Amelia, the shyer of our two (Greta is big on personality, if you can consider a chicken to have a personality) promptly showed her approval of the new digs by laying an egg. My God, I was so excited I nearly laid one myself. She has since laid about a half a dozen (Greta's energy apparently goes into making lots of noise and strewing feathers everywhere) and with that first, precious egg (raised at a cost of approximately $135.74, if you include the shower curtain I bought for $1.99 at Publix and am using to keep the rain off them) we did a taste test. My Boyfriend was willing to help with that bit.

As you can see, there is no mistaking the different eggs in their raw state. The egg on the left is an organic egg from the grocery store, and the right hand egg is ours. The home-grown egg is visibly yellower, the yolk stands up sharply from the white, and the white is much tighter and rounder.

We (I) carefully cooked the two eggs separately, using the same method (scrambling), in the same pan (carefully washed between), gently decanted them in bowls, and then I closed my eyes (no peeking!) and Alex patiently gave me a sample of each to taste, and asked me a careful series of questions, including:

- does one egg taste markedly different from the other?

- does one have a different mouthfeel or aroma?

- if you had to be stuck on a desert island with only one egg, would it be sample A or B?

- can we have breakfast now?

And the results are in, and they are......

I can't tell you.

Not because I am sworn to secrecy, but because the two eggs TASTED EXACTLY THE SAME. I almost just wrote that "eggsactly", btw.

No kidding. My carefully raised, organic, no pesticide, specially fed chicken, whom I adore, gives me eggs that taste no different than what comes of the shelf at the market. Oh, the horror. To be so ordinary! Which is not to say it wasn't delicious, and we didn't enjoy it for breakfast. But I was stunned. They were literally interchangable. No difference at all.

This is quite a blow to "my home-made is better" philosophy. I'll have to turn in my foodie membership. And what happens if Michael Pollan finds out? He may berate me for being a bad egg-taster. And he might bite me. We'd better not tell anyone, ok?

Photo of the day...err, Week

This has been a busy busy week (when are they not, I'd like to know) so the Photo of the Week may be all you are getting. But it's a nice one - the cupola of a beautiful church on Paros Island in Greece, from my trip there a few weeks ago. The building is actually still under construction - the exterior is still pure white, rather than blue and white, and the interior frescos are unfinished. So eventually the white areas you see around the painting now will all be decorated. I kind of like it as is, though - floating peacefully in it's white frame.

Have a good weekend!

Cookbook Review - Halloween Special Edition

So this it's time for this week's Cookbook Review. Where are all the OTHER week's reviews, I hear you asking. Listen, I am a busy person and not every week gets it's own review. Some weeks are not that special and some weeks I just wind up being a heavy Chick-Fil-A consumer. BUT! This week IS special because it's halloween, and so we are cooking from the book "Bones" by Jennifer McLagan, to fit in with the whole scary skeleton theme. Whooooo!

"Bones" is delicious - strictly for carnivores only, though. The vegetarians among us may take umbrage at the description of how gelatin is made (don't read before eating jell-o), how cooking with bone-in meat keeps a dish moist and flavorful, and most importantly, what a marrow spoon is for. Mmmmm. Your shins will feel weird for about an hour after you read that bit.

The recipes are great - I've eaten most of the lamb chapter, even though eating lamb makes me feel slightly guilty - and they are mostly my favorite kind of food, which is to say things you stick in a roasting pan with a half a bottle of wine and some veggies and let them cook for hours, until the house smells so good you are ready eat the furniture. Don't do that though. The book is divided up into chapters by the actual critter it came from, and in the beginning of the chapter there is an illustration that show said creature as a transparent butcher's diagram, so you can see where, say, that beef shank you plan to rub with olive oil, braise, and serve with citrus gremolata, was originally attached to the owner's body. Did you know the "picnic shoulder" on a pig is not actually the shoulder at all, but the lower end of the front leg? I had no idea. The artist who did the drawings left the head on, so to speak - it is rendered normally instead of the skeleton effect, and so as you study the diagram of the cow it seems to be looking at you out of the corner of it's eye. Maybe it wonders why you are drooling. The lamb chapter features a drawing of a full grown sheep, ostensibly because there is a mutton recipe in there but really to save the sensibilities of weenies like me.

"Bones" (whoooo!) also has a series of vingettes about uses for bones, bones in art, and the way bones and words for bones have become part of language - did you know fibula is latin for pin, becuase Romans used that bone to make clothing pins - and a great collection of expressions that mention bones - I feel it in my bones. I am worn to the bone. Rolling the bones. Hard work breaks no bones. And so on. They show how integral bone was at an earlier time in history, when there were no plastics and the flexibility of bone gave it a thousand practical uses, from buttons to tools, to pins to jewelry, yet retained its mystical significance and was used in magic, superstition, and medicine. There is an expression "bone useful", i.e. good for all manner of things, and yes, it was.

Photo of the day

Seville, Spain, Spring 2007. May be my favorite photo from that trip, and it's literally like the third picture I took after arriving.

What doorway will you walk through today?