Patrick was the pastry chef in the family. He was a little dyslexic and so he loved the precision of pastry recipes — if you follow the recipe exactly, pastry usually works. A few years ago, he made a Paris Brest for our Christmas dinner. The first few years we lived together, we had these great, impromptu Christmas dinners — one year, Patrick called me from the fancy butcher shop at the Stanford Mall and said “What do you think about Guinea Hens for dinner?” So Guinea Hens it was … The year of the Paris Brest, I was off doing last minute gift buying when Patrick, consulting his beloved Jacques Pepin, decided the Paris Brest looked good.

The first batch of pate choux, when he piped it into an oval on the cookie sheet, looked very unpromising. “This can’t possibly work,” he told me he thought and so he threw it out without even cooking it. When the second batch looked just like the first, he figured that must be what it’s supposed to look like, and so he put it in the oven. It puffed! Just like it was supposed to! Joy and celebration were ours that Christmas Eve as we ate the yummy pastry stuffed with pastry cream and frosted with a chocolate ganache.

Maryanne is doing Chrismas eve this year, and she asked me to bring something for dessert. At first, I thought I’d do a trifle — because it’s pretty, and I have a nice trifle bowl (hmm … Christmas Day?) and then I remembered Patrick doing pastry on Christmas eve. Maryanne is having an open house, and there will be too many people for a Paris Brest, so I thought I’d try a croquembouche. It’s festive. There’s a lot of it in little pieces, so it should work for a bunch of people. And because it’s pate choux, it’s sort of Patrick-like.

So, today I made the cream puffs. The first batch was sort of a problem — I forgot about the altitude. There are a few flat-ish puffs, but I figure they’ll be good for the base of the croquembouche. The second batch of pate choux I used a little more flour, and one fewer egg, and I put the dough in a baggie and cut the corner to use it as a pastry bag. They’re rounder, the second batch, and poofier. Clearly these are the star puffs that are going up on the top of the croquembouche where everyone can admire their fabulousness.

Tomorrow — the pastry cream, the filling of cream puffs, and the exciting new world of caramel! Think good thoughts for me that I don’t burn myself … I’ll try to take a picture of the finished croquembouche!

Well, this isn’t really a recipe, since I don’t have any measurements, but sometimes a girl looks in the freezer, and feels a tiny flame of inspiration. So, here’s the deal — I had some ground lamb and ground antelope left over from last year. I took a pound of ground lamb, two packages of antelope (they didn’t have weights on them, I think they were about a half pound each) and two mild Italian sausages, and decided to make a meatloaf. I started by sauteeing two ribs of celery, a couple of carrots and a medium yellow onion with a little salt and a big sprinkle of red pepper flakes. In a big bowl, I crumbled up two slices of stale whole wheat bread, and added enough milk to moisten them. Then I smashed four or five cloves of garlic and threw them in the minichop with a bunch of fresh rosemary, lots of thyme and parsley, the zest from half a lemon, and a big pinch of coarse sea salt. I whizzed it all up with some olive oil to emulsify. I added the herb mixture to the wet bread, and, when they were soft, I mixed in the sauteed vegetables and one package of thawed chard I had in the fridge (chopped up fine). Like I said, it was one of those what’s-in-the-fridge kind of recipes. Then I added the meats, and two eggs, lightly beaten and a hefty sprinkling of oregano. I smushed the whole mess around until it was all mixed up, and packed the mixture into a greased loaf pan. There was about a third of the mixture left over, which I think I’ll use for meatballs or ravioli — it went back into the freezer. I cooked it at 375 for two hours — it was a big meatloaf so it took a long time.

It was great — it didn’t have that heavy meatloaf-y taste — all those vegetables I think. And it had a nice Greek-ish kind of taste from the lemon zest, oregano, and herbs. Antelope is a really lovely meat — it gets a bad reputation because the season is early, and too often people aren’t careful to get their game packed out in hot weather. But the antelope that Parks brought me last year was delightful — from a young animal, and while lean, and a dark red meat, has a nice clean light taste. I think a comparable mixture might be veal, lamb and a little ground pork.

Anyhow, now I have a whole meatloaf to cut into portions and freeze, a winter’s worth of easy re-heatable meals for those crummy evenings when a girl doesn’t feel like cooking. Yum.

I caught an old episode of Martha Stewart Living this afternoon. She was making a cranberry gelatin mold, and after taking it out of the fridge, she said “You can immerse it in warm water to loosen, or you can use this.” At which point she picked up an ENORMOUS propane blowtorch! And used it on her lovely copper jelly mold to loosen the dessert. I laughed for five minutes. Out loud. Oh we miss her, our domestic goddess with her two foot tall blowtorch. For a jelly mold. I’m still gasping for breath.

I grew three brussels sprouts plants this year — they take a lot of room in the garden, and they’re really slow, and frankly, I wasn’t sure they were worth the time or the space. It’s been cold — small freezes on and off for six weeks or so, but last weekend when the weather said a real cold spell was coming in, I went out in the near darkness to pick my brussels sprouts.

I grew them in part because when I lived in New York City in my 20s, I loved watching the little boys carry their spikes of brussels sprouts home from the Union Square Greenmarket — they always turned them into swords, and it seemed like that was a cool way to get your kids to eat their greens.

But they’re kind of a pain. And picking them is sort of a pain — the little sprouts hide under the big cabbage-y leaves. Tonight though, I was making a quicky dinner — a little salmon, some rice, and I wanted something green. Since I was doing the salmon in my cast iron skillet in a hot oven, I thought I’d just roast the sprouts first. So I cut a handfull of them in half, tossed them in olive oil, and threw them in the hot skillet, cut side down, for about ten minutes. Then I flipped them over, put the hunk of salmon in the same skillet, skin side down, and kept roasting it all.

Yummy! The sprouts got all carmelized on the outside, and were creamy and delicious inside. Salty, slightly burned in a good way, and out of my garden.