14 posts tagged “cats”
A girl kitty, that is. About a week and a half ago I responded to the pleas of the cat lovers at the office and trapped a little stray that had been living under a porch at the lab that is next-door to us. She'd been dumped there, and the lab staff and our staff had been feeding her. She was easy to catch, and as soon as I got her home, my resolve to take her straight to the Humane Society melted away.
She's a real sweetheart... a brown-and-gold tabby with white paws/chin/belly and golden eyes. She's back from her spaying and tested negative for loathsome infectious Kitty Diseases, so she'll be here to stay. Not sure of her age, but less than a year.
Everyone, please welcome Megan!!
Everyone has their own interests. When the weather gets nice, my husband spends more time out on his recumbent trike. Me, I spend more time in the garden, trying to get things shipshape before the grass pollen hits and I am trapped inside.
Today was the first large organized group cycling event of the season, the Monster Cookie Metric Century. So Michael, Katr, and a couple other friends went out and rode their tails off. I got up to fix them all breakfast: slow-cooked oat porridge with all the trimmings, bacon, toasted English muffins, and such. It's always a good day when I get to cook for my friends and/or family.
After they rode off (and Michael will have pics and footage up eventually on his various sites), I took pics of the cats out on the porch in the spring sunlight.
There are many recipes out there. Authentic recipes from Scotland call for a sheep's "pluck and paunch". The pluck includes various innards (heart, liver, lungs) and the paunch is the stomach. One cooks the innards, grinds them, adds onion, oatmeal, suet and seasonings, stuffs the whole mess into the paunch, and steams it for three hours. Several of the recipes I read called for hanging the sheep's windpipe over the side of the kettle during the cooking process.
I decided that less authenticity was called for here.
For one thing, you can't buy lungs here, whether from sheep, lambs, or cows, presumably because of lingering fears of TB. Not for consumption, anyway... honest, that was NOT an intentional pun. Also, I had no stomach for stuffing the mixture into a "paunch", even if I could find one. I just didn't have the heart to serve that to my guests; I knew I couldn't liver with myself if no one ate the results of my effort.
I promise, enough with the puns.
I did find a modern and tolerable recipe from an old Frugal Gourmet cookbook that involved nothing quite so medieval. I adapted it as needed to suit what I had, but used his general method. First, I opened the soggy thawed-out packages of lamb heart and liver... only to find that the liver is MUCH bigger than the heart. I don't know why this surprised me, but it did. I had more liver than I needed, so Lucy (always hanging around the kitchen, hoping for a handout) benefited.
Next, I diced up the hearts (trying NOT to identify parts that I recognized, but mostly failing), and put them in a small saucepan to simmer for about an hour.
They made the house smell lovely, like warm granola. Later on in the cooking process, when the house smelled of warm liver instead, I thought longingly of the oats.
The sliced lamb's livers waited in a larger saucepan, along with about a pound of diced beef stew meat. The beef would help add some body and balance out the liver. I was beginning to feel like Hannibal Lector.
After the heart had simmered for an hour, I added it and its cooking liquid to the liver and beef, then added more water to cover. I brought the whole thing to a boil and then simmered it for about 20 minutes. Now, the house was starting to smell very odd.
The cooled oatmeal went into my biggest mixing bowl, along with a finely chopped onion (I used the food processor, as for this I wanted onion mush), salt, pepper, rosemary, and two ounces of Scotch.
I had half-intended to buy really good, expensive Scotch, but panicked at the liquor store when the salesman told me that the premium brands were behind the counter (and Katr wasn't with me to egg me on). I settled for a blended variety that was called Robert Burns Scotch. It seemed to be fate.
The meat mixture, once it had the chance to cool a little (not much; I was starting to watch the clock by now) was chopped/ground/mashed up in the food processor, in batches. This was, quite frankly, revolting. It was a lot like having the stomach flu: messy, undignified, and best forgotten as soon as possible. So, no pictures of that part. My recipes all said "grind coarsely", but it was hard to get the heart and stew beef chopped up without pureeing the liver. Ewwww....
Eventually, everything was in the giant mixing bowl, and I mixed it thoroughly with my hands (therefore guaranteeing the undying love of my cats, who still think I smell like liver), and packed it into an Appropriate Vessel for steaming. You see, while haggis is ideally stuffed into a sheep's stomach, regular sausage casings are also used, and several recipes told me that in the absence of a stomach, the mixture could be steamed in a bowl or mold just like a sweet pudding. I decided to use my Bundt cake pan for this. I wonder if it will ever forgive me.
I used a portable roaster oven, with steamer rack, for the cooking itself. I like to set the roaster up in the laundry room in the basement, thereby freeing up kitchen space. And it always seems somewhat Dickensian to have a pudding steaming in the laundry room. So, a double layer of foil on top, then into the roaster, which was already full of simmering water. Then I could quit worrying about the haggis (mostly) and make the other dishes.
Katr showed up about 6:00, and we mixed drinks and finished getting the oatcakes ready. The party itself and other details to follow...
The Robert Burns party was a hoot. Summary and photos to follow. Meanwhile, here's some fine kitties.
Need to get the fruitcake pics up, but in the meantime, here's some views of a Fine Feline. This is Max, my friend Fara's dad's cat. He's a good fellow. I think he is the archetypal Kliban cat, if you remember those drawings.
If I were writing the Vox "Question of The Day" bits, I'd have to include one along the lines of, "What's the oldest (or strangest) thing in your deep freeze?" Those who know me well know that I have had some pretty odd things in there in the past, including a series of deceased kitties awaiting burials. (yes, I know, disgusting, but is that really any worse than an entire dead animal that you intend to eat?)
But let's limit the discussion to Items Intended for Human (or Pet) Consumption. Today, I went down to the freezer and pulled out some farm-raised ground lamb from about April of this year, some pork ribs from about a year ago, and (gulp!) a small slab of venison that has been there about four years. Well wrapped, but... The lamb went into a Pastitsio, sort a Greek lasagna, which is sitting in the fridge waiting to be baked. The ribs are thawing and we'll plan on probably oven-braising them on Tuesday, with a side of mashed taters. And the venison? When it thaws, I'm going to cut it into smallish pieces and marinate it in red wine, herbs, and garlic until NEXT weekend, when it might possibly be worth eating as a sort of Venison Bourgignon, with bacon and mushrooms and such. I'll let you know how that one turns out.
That's not all of it. There are some other odd animal bits down there, mostly a legacy of buying whole- or half-carcasses from friends who raise lambies or piggies for food. I've got two lamb hearts and livers that have been in there almost as long as the venison. Maybe I should make haggis! Anyone out there want to give me a makeshift recipe that doesn't require buying any more innards than I already have?
We lost the oldest, tiniest and fiercest of the Cat Colony at Chez Cerise, back on August 8th. Nellie, as you may know if you read the story about her and the mouse, was 13 years old and suffering from some chronic problems. I boarded her at the vet's office while we went on our Alaska cruise, since she needed fairly close attention (and would generally try to rip the face off anyone but me who tried to give her pills or tend to her). Her kidneys decided to give out on her, and they couldn't really do much.
Currently I can't find a picture of her to post, but we'll dig around and see if we can come up with one to add later. Horatio misses her greatly and appears to be still looking for her. The other two, sadly, seem to be oblivious to her absence. Her death was something of a relief, as she was getting more and more difficult to medicate (and better and better at escaping from the back office and from the house in general, the little minx), but we'll miss the little demon.
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