Category Archives: music

Jan13

Ribbing the cook… ;)

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Ribbing the cook… ;)

An homage:
Perched atop a mountain on a cold January day, with our friend Bryan from the Philly area in town on his own and welcoming a home cooked dinner, I decided there was plenty of time for me to make the dish my friend Erin describes thus: “like strong, lasting relationships, this recipe takes time.” What an advertisement, huh?


I won’t paraphrase much more because I’d really prefer that you instead check out her blog, Breathing and Cooking, https://breathingandcooking.com/ and specifically this recipe: Port and Cherry Braised Short Ribs.

If you know me at all, you may have already heard me complain (as many folks do) about recipe/food blogs and the anecdotes that precede the formula. In fact, it is one reason why my own blog is so sparsely populated, because I tire of even my own kitschy chitchat. And yet here I go! So, while I DO wholeheartedly recommend that you read the entire entry on Erin’s blog first, on the actual day you need to make this recipe, I’d hit the “jump to recipe” button (thank God for those!) unless you plan on setting an alarm and getting up extra early that morning. But read it, do. Before it’s time to make the dish. Because in addition to the fact that this was the first meal she ever made for her hubby Eric (and the first dish she made for we Tweardys! She loves us! She really loves us!) There’s plenty of thoughtful and necessary information about how to make this dish a success. I will be honest though, and it will not surprise you to know that I very rarely do that. I’m a “jump”-er. However, I have low-key chops in the kitchen after so many years of having a healthy appetite paired with anxious, neurotic emotional spaces to fill. We have both amateur and professional chefs in our family as well, so I’m intuitive on the full backstory of advice for most recipes. But Erin is a friend, I’ve eaten at her table and breathed in her yoga class and as of today, we even share a hairdresser (shoutout to https://www.todaysheadlinesalon.com/), so I owe her my undivided attention on this one, and I give it wholeheartedly.

Erin and I have much in common: we both like to cook, we are interested in sustainable whole foods for health, we love yoga and in fact, we both teach yoga…we enjoy similar music (we once ran into each other when my number one songstress Lori McKenna came to Cleveland, and that says a lot!) and wine, we cry rather easily, we have achieved grandmother status, and…then there are all the ways we differ. Erin is blonde, and pretty, and lithe, and well-mannered, soft spoken. Erin’s kitchen and tools and methods (“mis en place,” which happens to be tattooed on my Chefew’s arm) are those of a patient and expert preparer of food. Oh, and she bakes. For restaurants, even. I, on the other hand, differ in that I am (ahem) brunette, loudly robust and raunchy, and I am the messiest and laziest ad hoc cook on the planet; impatient and haphazard. Oh, she wears an apron, by the way. I just buy new clothes instead.


Therefore, when I decided to make her elegant but earthy recipe live from Wilkes County, North Carolina, I thought it might be fun to do it her way, but also to share how I do it my way, so that if you too struggle with the details…we can have some fun together.


This dish is already in the oven as I begin typing this – while the process is still fresh in my memory and ongoing (there’s sauce to finish, among other things,) I’m going to pull up Erin’s blog on my phone and comment as I scroll though on the what and how of what I did, vs. the what and how recommended…remember that brief show, “Whatever, Martha!” where Martha Stewart’s daughter and her sidekick watched episodes of her mother’s TV shows and kind of…mocked? Well, I won’t be mocking, exactly. Not much, anyway. Especially if you consider the angle that I’m truly mocking my own self rather than Erin, who is doing things correctly. But she has a sense of humor, and let’s all just acknowledge that hers is the correct way before we begin. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat, in most cases. And no cats will be harmed in either version of this recipe.


*Short Ribs – Erin specifies that there are two types, flanken and English. I can report that at the closest available meat counter to me from my mountain perch, there are not two types at all. Check. Long or short? Mine are long. Check check. Bone in or out? Bone in. Check check check. See how I’m not even digressing into 7th grade humor about the long and the short of the bones?

*Onion, carrots, celery – the classic mirepoix. Your grocery store will probably have them already cut up – feel free to use those, NO shame!! Unless I’m truly strapped for time, I almost always cut up my own as I did today. For one thing, I find the precut to be a little dryer, a little staler, and probably more expensive. And one more plastic container to dispose of. Hippie. While we are on the subject, I prefer to buy loose carrots and celery, organic carrots with the green still on when possible. Yes, I know how precious and privileged that makes me sound, and yet not as elite as Erin’s talk of her favorite dried cherries, which we will get to later, so I’ll allow it.

(I want to take a moment to talk about the enameled cast iron Dutch oven. I didn’t have one until I was about 40, and I didn’t procure one “because you’re supposed to have a Le Creuset…” that part is up to you. I do own one of those, but the one I used for this recipe is another brand and I can report that they both perform equally well. They’re heavy, they do everything, and they clean up easily. Martha Stewart has one, Bobby Flay, mine is Food Network, Sur La Table…you decide what you need, mmmkay?)

*Garlic – I smashed and minced here, but I often use a garlic press. Erin linked to her favorite, but I have a favorite too and it is the Pampered Chef version – you don’t even need to smash and peel first with that one! I remember a funny meme about garlic being high maintenance, each clove with it’s own little paperwork…


*Port – Tawny or Ruby? My store had both, Erin prefers tawny, so that’s what I purchased. RIP Tawny Kitaen. My wine department had three brand choices…I definitely did not buy the cheapest. But you totally could, yes you could! Since I like wine in general, and I like wine in cooking, I do know that reducing wine makes what you like or dislike about it more prominent. I would say go for the mid-level. (Don’t tell my husband, but I bought the expensive one. It still wasn’t that much.)

*Beef stock – Erin makes her own. I have made my own. But not in a very long time. I buy organic beef broth and if there’s time and inclination, simmer it with some spent beef bones and aromatics. Blah blah blah.
*Bay leaf, parsley, thyme, rosemary. I LOVE fresh herbs, but I often use dried – if you’re not totally prepared for anything and everything, you gotta use whatcha got. At this moment and location, I do happen to have fresh rosemary and thyme in a pot right outside my sliders, and when spring comes – parsley can join that party.

*Butter. Butter. Just use the butter. If you’re going to use a butter substitute, please…don’t use it at all. If you’re fancy…pure Irish butter for me.


*Dried cherries – see Erin’s blog! I did not have time to order her heirloom fancy cherries (link in her recipe), but I will look into it for the future. I see why she buys them in bulk, they’re expensive to ship for just a bag or two! However, her point about them not using seed oils or sugar is important to me. Meanwhile, I hunted for dried cherries in vain at my local store here and didn’t have time to look further. No dice, the only cherries were sweetened, which we do NOT want for this dish anyway…I even checked for frozen, and those were sweet cherries as well (not sweetened, but sweet, and I was craving the tartness and the dried texture and flavor). Egads, what to do? Here’s what I did, and the results remain to be seen. I bought an organic, single ingredient tart cherry juice in a jar. That was almost as expensive as a bottle of wine. And some fresh frozen cranberries. I plan to use a little combo of the two of them to almost imitate what I will be missing with the dried cherries. The cherries are literally in the name of the dish, a major ingredient, but Bryan from Philly won’t know and neither will my husband, so I consider this to actually be a grand time to perform this particular experiment. So, let’s gooooo!


Mis En Place – whatever, Martha.
Preheat the oven – always a must, truly.
Scrap bowl – what lil’ dynamo Rachel Ray used to call the “GB” – garbage bowl! This is a worthy idea for a messy cook, rather than with full and filthy hands trying to use your foot to open your trash bin where your husband has just tossed all the half-opened mail so that when you let go of your scraps, they slide onto the floor anyway and you find yourself stepping on yesterday’s coffee grounds and…
Sear – This step is so important, especially the meat being room temp before the beautiful crusty caramel sear. Here, even impatient MB is patient – you want the meat itself to have that texture, color, and flavor, and you also want your sauce to include flavor from the deglaze. You don’t want steam, therefore, so dry and season the meat and don’t crowd the pan – patience isn’t just for waiting to turn the ribs, but also might be for more ribs to wait their turn, if you need to sear in batches. I’ve crowded the pan in haste before and always regret it.


Add the port – deglaze. This is actually fun but again requires patience for the reduction. Even the spoon-test for thickening is fun!

At this point I had to stop for my new favorite snack – cottage cheese sprinkled with cracked pepper and just a tad of cayenne! Congratulations on a comeback year, cottage cheese! Together with sourdough starter discard, you’ve really lived up to your potential lately, if the internet is to be believed.

What’s up with the cork? I hadn’t heard this before, but Erin claims to have read that adding a cork to a braise would add tenderness. Like her, I claim no shortage of corks but here in NC, my corks go into a lovely custom glass-fronted box which was a gift from our kids with a small hole on top to send the corks in…but no way to get them out. Different story if we were in Cleveland. Alas, no cork for my braise.

You’ll see other recipes for short ribs (and other meaty good things) calling for a 350 degree oven but believe Erin when she suggests 250 and “trust the process and walk away.” It works. After 2.5 hours, I went ahead and checked my ribs and decided to add another 30 minutes for good measure.


Once I let the ribs, removed from their silky pool, cool enough to handle, the removal of the bone was beyond easy. I used a sharp knife to separate a bit of the tougher fat and connective membrane near the bone and had really nice tender ribs left. I didn’t remove any liquid fat from the sauce because, well, #lazy. But if I had done the make-ahead directions, that would’ve been a no-brainer. And it would have helped the final product to be more cohesive.

At this point in the original recipe, the cherries are added to the sauce. So, this is where I added just a handful of cranberries. NOT Craisins, but fresh or frozen crans. I neglected to mention that I substituted about half a cup of the pure tart cherry juice (unsweetened) for that amount of the beef stock. I finished the sauce as the recipe specified and slipped the ribs back into their delicious bath.


What to serve with short ribs: I did old fashioned regular mashed potatoes, because I had russets on hand to peel. Typically, I would’ve enjoyed a smashed redskin (by the way, have you ever tossed a couple of handfuls of fresh baby spinach leaves into creamy smashed potatoes? Even with a glug of buttermilk? A trick I believe I learned from my sister Judy – it adds nutrition and color and is delish!) or polenta, but who doesn’t love mashed potatoes? Something green is good too – a warm kale Caesar?



Because men are messy and my table is sporting new cream-colored placemats, I plated these in the kitchen instead of lugging everything to the table. Looking at Erin’s original post, this is actually part of her advice! I did hit each plate with a sprinkling of chopped fresh parsley, but also with one of my favorite touches for hearty winter dishes – flash fried sage leaves! Speaking of messy – and blaming the men – the first time we were invited to gather around Erin’s dining table for this meal…guess who spilled the red wine? Yep, I’m the problem…it’s me. Thank goodness for Ruggable. Stemware is tricky.

My super rando iPhone photos will not make you want to prepare this dish, but Erin’s pictures will! I made the guys’ plates look better than my own but forgot to snap a pic until my own. You’ll notice her sauce is thicker – I think that’s the assistance of those blended cherries! Excuses, excuses!

Whose is whose?

Wanh Wanh Wanh…


Not everyone loves to cook slowly and patiently all day, but every now and then a day offers itself with the time and space to do that, and this is just the recipe for that day. With a mountain view and Lori McKenna’s music conspiring, I had my best day in weeks (don’t get me started on seasonal affective disorder) and this long-form cooking was just what I needed! Oh, and then you get to EAT it! Yum!
Wait, how did the substitutions go? I think it probably held up about as similarly to the original as it could be. I am such a lover of cherries, though, that I plan to invest in those bougie cherries for next time!

Sep18

A melting ice cube…

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I remain in love with a road trip. Not just the destination, no, the road trip. Yesterday was a rare opportunity for me to have a solo one; Jeff and I had been in North Carolina for two weeks, and he flew from there to Philly on business while I had the luggage and the Fruck (the Fake-Truck, as we call the white Honda Ridgeline we recently leased) to bring home to Ohio. I had visions of loud music and an open sunroof, but alas, Mother Nature had other plans. I had cool temps, dense fog, and full-on rain through much of North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. For once, it was Ohio weather boasting the sun and warmth, so my last two hours were the breezy and loud ones. The front end of the trip, though, was spent catching up on podcasts.

First, I listened to an episode of The Modern Yoga Podcast, of which I am a co-star (you’re laughing, right?) or more accurately, regular co-host…this was the episode I missed because I had four inches of water in my old basement on the morning of the recording. Next in line was Jesus Calling, an episode in which Dr. Esau McCaulley passionately reminded that every single life, the life of every criminal and addict and idiot, as long as it’s still going on, has the chance to be something beautiful AND more importantly, that’s how we need to look at each other. To not see someone as a lost cause, ever. And to know that our own successes are not simply the result of our own talents and work, but of Providence. My favorite quote was “we owe each other ATTENTION.” Before you can help someone, you have to SEE them. Not the thousand mile stare we give the homeless (all paraphrased). Every single human life matters, but we only listen to the stories that end with our definition of success. Those are all his words, not mine, and they’re simple ones. Platitudes we all know by heart, but for me, that’s what’s good about a road trip. Listening. A lone drive, the solitude of experiencing the weather, knowing what the fog is shrouding on the winding West Virginia turnpike, but having no agenda besides listening. Fertile soil for the seeds to grow.

On our Modern Yoga Podcast, Joyce Fijalkovich Atherton and I often remark how a teacher’s cue in a yoga class can be repeated dozens of times in a hundred ways, in different classes by varied instructors. But then suddenly, something lands differently and the experience, the pose, the breath, becomes a puzzle piece that fits for the first time. A light bulb moment, an epiphany, an A-Ha…we call it many things. That’s how I felt about the next podcast in my traveling lineup. Looking at the episode list for the Mel Robbins Podcast, my eye was caught by “If You Only Listen to One Podcast Today…” — okay, sold! Here was the golden nugget (referring to how we–certainly I!–often move the same goal to the NEXT year’s resolution list over and over again): “your life is a melting ice cube.” Yeah, we know all of those platitudes too, but this time? To visualize a melting ice cube, and there ain’t no ice cube tray or ice dispenser…just the melting ice cube, ’til its a puddle of water. Quotes like “No one gives a shit about what you do” and “you’re the one in your way” supported the visual.

It’s really not my intention here to advertise podcasts. But yesterday’s lessons were this morning’s breakfast, so yes I will spend a very few minutes (which is all it takes to turn the figurative steering wheel) writing.

And also, the actual physical exercising/muscle building that appears on each year’s resolution list. Because, despite never having achieved my best body, it’s now melting literally and figuratively and this old lady’s concern has shifted to health and mobility.

Looks like maybe the drive brought the drive. For this one day, anyway.

See ya!

Mar21

Love Lifted Me

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The weeks leading up to my parents’ 35th wedding anniversary in 1994 were tense.

After so many years of bowing to the desires and demands of his wife and three daughters…my dad had ceased shaving.

My tan, athletic little fireball dad who had gone salt & pepper before my birth in 1969, who by this anniversary was definitely heavy on the salt, had decided for the first time in his life he would let his facial hair grow.

To be fair, this was the closest thing to a mid-life crisis Hap ever had.  This and a very inexpensive, very yellow old Porsche convertible which would come a few years later. 

But Dolores, our mother, was NOT having it.

Why?

“Because you look like Kenny Rogers!” she’d say, with a grimace.

And while Kenny was a very nice looking man, that was not the look she wanted to see on the face of her husband. And she was not playin’…she was not pleased, she was not kind about it. She was punishing him in ways small and large, I’m sure. We were scared–if Hap didn’t shave, if the cold war continued, what would happen when they showed up to the fake event that would actually be their surprise anniversary party and were barely speaking?

Luckily, through whatever marital manipulations will remain unknown to we three sisters, as the date neared Boots somehow prevailed and Hap shaved. They showed up to the party and were greeted by the two grandchildren they had by that time, along with the best friends, coworkers, and extended family they had cultivated during that long marriage. They cried tears of joy, and as the saying goes, a great time was had by all.

They were treated to a slide show of memories, and part of the soundtrack to that slide show was “Through the Years” by Kenny Rogers. It was their song, their family song–not their song as a young dating couple, but their adult, grown-up life song:

“Through the years, through all the good and bad…I know how much we’ve had, I’ve always been so glad to be with you…through the years, I’ve never been afraid, I’ve loved the life we’ve made, and I”m so glad I stayed right here with you…through the years.”

It was just a song, but an emotional one. My dad was a huge fan of country music, the country music before it would have a surge in popularity with younger people after that time. Before artists from Kenny forward would sway it towards pop. His country music was Ronnie Milsap and Lynne Anderson. I remember watching the Barbara Mandrell show with him as a kid and arguing that I preferred her sister, Louise Mandrell. He shook his head, “no way.” He liked Barbara. He liked that she could play so many instruments, a petite scrappy blonde who took on that steel guitar like other women took on baking. As her own song says, Hap was “country when country wasn’t cool.” Oh, sorry, he listened to country when it wasn’t cool. He may have owned a plaid shirt and a straw cowboy hat to wear to a convention of other financial planners and insurance salesmen, but he was not “country” the way Mandrell meant it. Not in the real ways, but I’m fairly certain he lived vicariously through Little Joe Cartwright and the Big Valley Barkleys.

Back at the anniversary party in 1994, Kenny Rogers’ voice took us all on an emotional photographic journey of our longtime neighbors and friends “through the years,” which included a third generation of children playing in the same two backyards. And while no more Kenny Rogers songs were included in that day, as I awakened this day in 2020 to the news of Kenny’s death, my mind’s eye shows me quite a few other snapshots that Kenny Rogers’ songs frame:

A cassette tape of his greatest hits played over and over…and over…on a driving trip to Nashville, when my parents allowed me to bring my best friend and next-door neighbor Kristine. It is only as an adult that I realize they wanted me to bring her to keep me occupied so that I didn’t annoy all the joy out of the vacation for my older sisters. There were several of those trips, so I cannot recall if that was the same one that also included the family/neighbors on the other side, which would have included Sandy and Karen, my elders as well.

My days in Tennessee were eclipsed by thoughts of a boy named Mike who worked at the stables of Loretta Lynn’s Dude Ranch, who gave me a peacock feather. It was obvious he was in love with me. I was a pre-teen. I assume he was old enough to have a work permit.

I wrote a few postcards on that trip, one to yet another neighbor and friend, Lisa, to whom I had written something like “the trip is fun, MOST of the time,” which was a dig at Kristine getting on my nerves, and me on hers, and a lesson learned when my mother (who was about to mail said postcard) handed it back to me with a “shame on you, that’s unnecessary.”

I wasn’t yet at the age where I bought much music for myself. I had listened to (and ruined) many 45’s and albums of my sisters in the early 70’s, fought through a few of Hap’s 8-tracks, and then when cassettes came out, I just listened to whatever was in my parents car. So, some Kenny Rogers. I loved the song Ruben James, “you still walk the fertile fields of my mind…faded shirt, withered brow, calloused hands upon the plow…loved ya then, and I love you now, Ruben James.”

Over the years Kristine and I shared many choruses of “Coward of the County” and “The Gambler,” and I privately swooned over “She Believes in Me.”  “Lucille” took on a new shine when in my adulthood, my coworker/friend Maureen told me a story about an automotive breakdown using the lyrics, “ya picked a fine time to leave me, loose wheel…”

But after childhood, I didn’t really follow Kenny Rogers, and his signature low growl in songs like “Lady” annoyed me. Years later I joined in the mocking when he had plastic surgery and those eyes were wound up a little too tightly. I never really sought his music again. I felt like he was making an aging attempt at being a sex-symbol.

But his song, my parents’ song, “Through the Years,” was the closest thing to an anthem our family had, and it was revisited on many anniversaries after that. My parents would go on to celebrate their 50th anniversary. By their 52nd, my dad was in a nursing home. By their 54th, he was gone. Sirius satellite radio continues to bring songs like that into my car, and when that happens I laugh, or cry, take a snap with my cell phone and text it to my sisters and my mom. Same thing happens with John Denver’s “Sunshine on my shoulders,” Sunshine being the name of our childhood dog. Thank God for music.

Now, it’s March 21, 2020. One of my sisters texted me this morning about Kenny Rogers’ death and how it made her cry, for all the reasons illustrated above. Kenny’s death might be getting more airplay today if we were not in the midst of a global pandemic of Covid-19, Corona virus. My husband keeps telling me to write about the worldwide crisis, to document the days we are all quarantined so we can read it and remember the details years from now. I haven’t done that yet, because what can I have to say about it–what we ate that day? What time we Face-timed the grandkids? Who of us still have jobs?

Instead, here’s my offering today. Kenny Rogers has died, and his music is part of the soundtrack of our lives. Hearing the clips of his songs again makes me smile. Nostalgia is strong, and I still know every word to those songs. Thank God for music, have I said that already? During this terrible health crisis when countless will be sick, many will be lost, and more will be devastated financially, I will go online and hopefully find one of those Kenny songs I sang after playing it over (and over, and over) on that trip to Tennessee, and I hope the sentiment rings true to us all:

“Love lifted me, love lifted me. When nothing else would do, you know love lifted me.”

Love Lifted Me