An Appeal to the Ones Who Brung Me

I have to stop the show. I think it needs said that no one has ever mentioned, let alone surrendered the recipe for, The Filling. I know I've lost many of you already, but sit tight, I am coming back for you.

The Filling: This esteemed and shadowy culinary creation comes to us via my Godmother's family hailing from Hazelton, Pennsylvania. It is, all at once, a stuffing, a Frank Stitt style savory bread pudding, and a rich bread casserole. It is airy with custard and deeply eggy with undoubtedly specially considered bread: Saved and frozen from the blessed Easter loaves, maybe. Or gently mixed with challah. It is very hard to say whether the bread is toasted before incorporation or not .or whether there is a ratio of bread to custard or the ladies of Margaret's family make the Filling by feel and with a cadence developed as children.

I should say first, I have not seen The Filling in recent years and there is some good information afoot that I just might see the pillowy eathenware bowl of golden crusty magic this year. This potential event is very much on my mind you see because this is no Stove Top-y looking mongrel. This is the Queen of Holiday Accompaniments. The Holy Grail of Turkey Side Dishes. The Mother of all Good Bread Dishes. And hard as Food Network may try, nothing they have told you about what goes with the turkey is true: They don't know from side dishes. They don't Thing 1 about perfect stuffing. Here is who does: The Sharkeys of Hazelton, Pennsylvania. Write it down. Call your Mom tell her that her hoax is done, she can quit the stuffing masquerade and lay down her slotted spoon. Give her that name and tell her if she can find these ladies, get them to reveal the details of the revered Filling, and return home to recreate it, she will be the envy of all.

Sadly, the Hostess is unable to help you in your Stuffing Grail quest because the Hostess is as in the dark as you. And the Hostess would be questing right along side you through the mysterious peaks and valleys of Pennsylvania heritage cuisine: Through the pickled egg forest, tasty sausage hollows, and remarkable homemade bread hills, but the Hostess is very much at Hostess High Alert. Known in the Hostess' world as Warning Level Red, I am tied to the oven with the baking involved with a holiday cocktail party for 50 which seems to now be precariously hovering around 80. And that's almost as serious as this stuffing enigma, People.

Because I am prevented by other festive obligations from assisting you in this quest, I encourage you to begin a letter writing campaign to the Sharkey's who read here often, issue public appeals in newspaper ads, letters to editors, and cable commercials. Why stop there? A billboard conspicuously located near their routes of travel! Another on your front lawn! A sit in! Do what you have to do, but for the sake of all of us forced to endure seemingly endless Food Network segments on pretenders to the Filling Throne, prevail upon this family to give up the secret!

Happy Thanksgiving and Heritage Recipe Cooking to you all!

A rather grand fire and all that followed after

Today at Blushing Hostess Entertains I advised on menus for party planning. Confident and sure footed when it comes to entertaining, not much throws me except the occasional agony resulting from my creative and admittedly questionable genius. It is at these times the Hostess feels very glad she did not give in to the current housing floor plan vogue of an an open kitchen and the Blushing Hostess becomes The Cussing Hostess.

No, indeed! The Hostess believes in the swinging kitchen door and the privacy of a room where cooking trial failures and related events do not become conversational fodder for the guests nor a source of their terror. Not that I would advise you to try anything new in the wee hours before the guests arrive, but it is my role in this funny blog world to do such a thing and report with accurate abandon the results in order to prevent your event from meeting the same fate. Further and to be crystal clear as I relate these foolhardy and uproarious happenings to you: I began the study of the hors d'ourvre in question a full three days before the Sunday supper where they were to have been served. So I was not at all tardy, hasty, or without adequate time to complete the steps involved to complete my hare brained finger food scheme. Let's understand: There was plenty of time to create several fires if need be, not just the one that toppled this porky house of hope.

Disclosures: I did not have a recipe. I was loosely, licentiously, and recklessly following Alinea's concept as recounted by Carol over at Alinea at Home. I looked up several recipes for old fashioned butterscotch, checked the Hostess witch-watch, noted all the other steps I would need to complete, and decided I would indeed have to find a substitute for the butterscotch component.

On Day 1, I dehydrated the pepper bacon. It took hours in a low slow oven.

On Day 2, I made the apple strapping: Baked the apples until soft, cored and peeled them, spread the apple gunk on parchment, dehydrated for hours until it became something similar to an apple roll up.

Then fateful dinner party Day 3 arrived. I cut the apple strapping in long strips to match the bacon size and placed three little butterscotch chips on each bacon length then put them in the oven to melt the butterscotch intending to roll them end to end and pin them with a toothpick creating a dreamy combination of porky, tarty, and sweet -y deliciousness.

Or. A bacon, granny smith, candy chip inferno under the broiler accompanied by many words which do not appear in Amy Vanderbilt's glossary, followed by a hasty scramble to the pantry to snatch up the iodized salt, and a heroic leap back to the oven to douse the flames out. You see, putting out kitchen fires was a routine part of my childhood cooking lessons with Mother (did not care for oven cleaning) and Grandmother (did not always keep track of grease temperatures owing to her assumption that most things had to do with providence and those that did not were watched over fastidiously by the ever-vigilant "Virgin Mother"). Consequently, kitchen fires have always been routine and fire department chiefs always on a Christmas card association level with our family (Hi. Dave! How's the family?).

I am here to tell you that if you are going to light any portion of your house ablaze regularly just before company comes it is a good idea to have sets of double French doors and top of the line fans and vents. One might also consider installing sprinklers. Also. get a Plan B for the food. The latter is not my strong suit. In fact, I am the sort of person so committed to a path that I should introduce myself as follows: I'm Catherine and you should be aware there is no Plan B, period. However, fire after fire has taught me a fall back plan is not always the result of a lack of determination and confidence. Sometimes, it is the necessary result of the inferno behind the swinging door.

When I have ignited or incinerated the finger foods and duly extinguished the remains of the pig, Julia and Dorie are always there with their reassuring directions for puffy gourgeres which I must tell you are a world better than Jacques Pepin's. I can count on them even with only minutes to spare after the fire extinguisher falls to the ground next to my Tod's and I make a mental note that it needs refilled again.

Since I am a Dorie Greenspan devotee I have not adapted the recipe here and encourage you to get a copy of Baking with Julia in order that you may also be saved and keep the food on Dorie's table so I can keep reading...

The Hostess has landed

What a slog. I mean, what a seething vicious mess. Animals, children, pregnancy and I took it all and dragged it up the East coast. That is not to say that I am roughing it: No, no, my idea of camping is the Holiday Inn. Certainly not, it is a big enough truck that everyone has a seat when I deem them worthy, otherwise they are threatened with having to ride on the luggage rack again. And we stopped plenty. It is just the strain of transporting many who are unable to care for themselves nor have any interest in sleeping at night, while I continue to mutter, "I just want to go home." And wonder if GPS identifies the closest sanatorium at any given moment. I mean, can I call onStar and say simply, "I just cannot go any further. Can you help?"

Three sleepless days later, here I am to tell you we all survived, but I tell you, where that darling infernal corgi of mine is concerned, it was not a foregone conclusion. She is a lovely, beautiful, little dense barrel of diabolical genius and we are her patsy's. I mean, victims. No, I mean, companions. Yes, that's it indeed. Never before have I said the work Pumpkin as though it was a heretic curse, but long trips with animals, I have learned over the years, can really change ones perspective on cute things with gentle eyes.

I am not complaining, I passed a million horse rigs headed south for the season and thought, things could indeed be more nerve wracking and exhausting. And have been. Lord, have they ever.

Anyhow, what of the trip? We stopped to look at houses along the way, not to be too scrambled about the subject matter at Entertains but I will show you these pictures only because my adorable alter ego, The Hostess, was so taken with one of them but I need to be finishing the Cocktail Party Diaries first....

So this is a note to say: Not to worry, I made it back alive, my Precious ones, and I shall be updating you further regards The Hostess' antics straight away. In the meantime, as soon as we arrived home I hopped off to Trader Joe's to get the (Organic, D Fortified) milk for Twinkle Toes and the Wild Coho Salmon as a quick dinner because it is remarkably delicious and perfectly buttery. I made a huge meal for five in fifteen minutes flat with the salmon in that super tasty and incredibly easy recipe of mine for Honey Thyme Salmon and served it my Mom's help in making jasmine rice and bread. Lovely thing to come home to, I say.

See you back here in no time after I take several more naps and rustle around for my heavy coat.

Stealing home

Afternoon, Friends.

I might have mentioned that we have been on a journey to the house in North Florida which has reached the end and we are now stealing home to New York for the holidays and all the glorious food that comes with wonderful ethnic texture that is that great city and its environs; not to mention the holidays themselves.

I will ask your patience for a few days as we trek northward swelling with anticipation at a great Northern holiday season: Visions of homemade marshmallows on Mexican hot chocolate swirling in our imaginations as we bid Ponte Vendra and Jacksonville farewell, all the while making nuisances of ourselves at Waffle Houses from here to Fredricksburg, and cursing the traffic from DC on home.

I ask you for your wishes that our tiny family arrives there safely and that the remainder of this pregnancy is without issue so that Baby Face and I can be back here in time to see Josh's ship return from its seven month deployment after the holidays. It is a lot to ask from a couple of months of life: Relative ease. I am hoping for the same for all of you and will see you right back here before you even miss me... Be well.

A Utensil Void: Individual Cake Chisel Knives

Photo: The offending cake bricks only hours before being used to shore up the foundation of the house in Florida.

Southern Cakes. A book by Nancie McDermott. A highly questionable and occasionally indefensible supposed reference text on many cakes one will recognize and several I have never heard of (but, I have never had dessert in the Ozarks). Also, a moderately effective source of kindling material. And, a means of stumping the Hostess with regard to acquiring a utensil with which one can consume the Mississippi Mud Cake small enough to be placed by each plate and where said mini-chisel or hand saw is properly located around the plate.

This past Sunday night, an evening which saw a lovely dinner for four, began with gorgeres, moved on to Barefoot Contessa's brisket (absurdly delicious), potato souffle, braised cabbage, and ended, confusingly, with this Mississippi Mud Pie. We tried this dessert about one hour out of the oven when I sliced it and it was a fine layered chocolate, marshmallow, and fudgy bar cake : I wouldn't get rich if I slapped a pretentious label on it and hocked it at Neiman's at Christmas, but it wouldn't bankrupt the bake sale that is my life either. Fast forward a few hours while it awaited its fate on the tiered dessert tray and find it hardened into a brick with chocolate marshmallow topping.

Of course, I did not know this change occurred until I put the tines of the Grand Baroque into the corner and had to restrain myself from kicking off my kitten heels, climbing up into my chair with the carving knife and fork, and hacking away at my little square with all the force and intent of Vlad the Impaler. Lordy! I exclaimed to myself. I should get the guests another utensil. But, what? WHAT? This criminal of a dessert laughed in the face of steak knives (as if I could hear myself liltingly explaining the presence of the second knife at the setting, "That's the dessert carving knife! Fun, don't you think?!")! After dinner, I scurried off to the computer to access my bookmarked Grand Baroque tab at Replacements.com and answer the question regards what happens when dessert needs to be carved by each guest.

Huh.

Nothing. Nothing to assist me with this crazy cake. You are on your own with this one, Pals. You could get a carving set for each place setting which can alternately be used for the dessert moose carving on other evenings. Or, get small handsaws and saw horses for each guest, make a festive table of unfinished cedar planks, and have large buckets of nails as centerpieces. Conversely, pitch the book into the fire because the recipe for Huguenot Torte is also an insult to all we came to know of the dessert by the same name in Charleston, the city of its birth, and instead serve Chocolate Mousse with a spoon.