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If you’re looking for ways to make holiday entertaining easier, consider basing an hors d’oeuvre selection around puff pastry.  If you’re feeling sporty, by all means, make your own and freeze it.  But many of the frozen versions are really quite good.  I like Pepperidge Farm and Vie de France (might have trouble finding this one if you don’t have a food wholesaler near you).  Or if you’ve got a bakery near you that makes it own puff pastry, inquire as to if they’ll sell you some.

First,  if you’ve never worked with frozen puff pastry, you should know that it thaws FAST and can dry out quickly.  Ten minutes on the counter with a piece of plastic wrap over it will thaw it enough to work with it.  If you can work quickly, keeping it covered with plastic wrap is enough, but if you’re working slowly or in large quantities, keep a damp towel handy to drape over the pastry sheets.  Dust your work surface lightly with flour.  Once thawed, puff pastry can be rolled, cut, sealed, shaped…the possibilities are endless.

Try cutting the puff pastry into two inch squares and push each square lightly into the greased cups of a mini muffin pan.  Fill each square with a quiche mixture, a daub of cream cheese and a chunk of sundried tomato, an artichoke wedge and some shredded parmesan…you get the picture, you’re only limited by your imagination.  Bake the cups according to package directions for temperature, but keep your eyes on them for timing.  They should take around fifteen minutes in the oven.

Mini turnovers are a breeze with frozen puff pastry.  Make a few fillings like duxelles (reduced mushrooms, shallots, and cream), browned sausage and apples,  or minced prosciutto with some greens like spinach and arugula.  Cut the pastry into three inch squares and place a half tablespoon of filling in the center of each one.  Dip your fingertip in some water or egg wash and trace along the outside edge of each square.  Fold them all up into a triangle and pinch along the seams.  They are more work than the mini cups, but cute as the dickens.  Paint with cream or egg wash and bake.

Even easier, you can wrap a sheet of puff pastry around a wheel of Brie, seal the bottom well, and paint the thing with egg.  For more fun and flavor, tuck some toasted almonds or walnuts inside with the cheese, and maybe some dried apricots or cranberries.  What emerges from the oven will be a gorgeous, golden delight that cost you perhaps fifteen dollars and fifteen minutes to make.  A gourmet grocer or cheese shop would have charged you far more.  Place the “brie en croute” on a platter, garnish with an assortment of crackers and crudites, and your guests will gather around it like moths to a candle.

I’ve got a couple of other tricks up my sleeve for puff pastry, but they’ll have to wait for another time.  There’s something I want to try involving miniature smoked salmon napoleons.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.

It’s no secret that I have trouble seeing leftovers in the fridge, and even more trouble throwing good food away.  Here are a few interesting uses for some things I found hanging around in the kitchen this past month.

We’ve had some apple cider in the fridge for a couple weeks now, a couple of cups in the bottom of a two quart jug.  Neither me nor my husband has been drinking it with the gusto that comes with a first taste in early fall, so there it sat.  I used it as a braising liquid for pork chops.  Yum.

In the cupboard I had a sleeve of Girl Scout tea cookies that while unopened had been there too long.  I pulverized them in the food processor with some dried cranberries and melted butter to make a yummy crumb crust for a pumpkin pie.

That same pie yielded extra filling that I wasn’t counting on.  I really only needed about two-thirds of the filling a standard recipe for a 9-inch pie calls for, due to the thickness of the crumb crust I had made.  I stowed the extra filling in the fridge along with the bottom of the can of evaporated milk I hadn’t finished.  Today, I combined the filling and the milk with two extra tablespoons of sugar and two tablespoons of canola oil.  I mixed it well with a bowl of dry ingredients consisting of one cup all purpose flour, a half teaspoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon of baking powder, a pinch of salt, and a half cup of oatmeal.  Voila!  The result was enough batter for eight fragrant and moist muffins.  I baked them at 375 degrees for about twenty minutes.

“Waste not, want not,” is pleasantly true when really good things come out of disparate bits and pieces.  I’ve got half a roasted chicken sneering at me from the fridge right now, but with a little innovation, it’ll be rockin’ dinner yet again one night this week.  Maybe with my leftover marinara, capers, and wine I can negotiate some cacciatore.

Yesterday, I traveled an hour and a half to spend over three hours in a noble pursuit…I helped my father-in-law make sauerkraut.  We can only hope that when it begins to ferment, all our effort will not be in vain, and a good brew will be happening.  Ideally, the sauerkraut will be ready for consumption by New Year’s Day, with a pork roast or maybe pork meatballs.

Unfortunately, I completely forgot my husband’s advice to document the process photographically.  When I walked into the house, my father-in-law had everything all set up to begin, and I was so excited I never even thought about the camera.

So armed with forty pounds of fall cabbage (which had to be cleaned, quartered, and cored), two antique sauerkraut shredders, kosher salt, a ten gallon crock (also antique), and a recipe book from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (published 1944), we set to work.  And what work it was.  Despite our best efforts and all the clean sheets on the floor, we still managed to spread cabbage bits all around the kitchen.  It was on our shoes, up to our elbows, and the salt made me itch.  It was great!

My father-in-law and I talked, too,  about everything from gas prices to Rush Limbaugh.  Come to think of it, what a remarkable confluence of hot-air producing things…kraut, methane, and more methane.  We bonded (my father-in-law and me, not me and Rush).

Making sauerkraut is not difficult, but it takes time and patience.  Physically laborious, the process involves mixing five pounds of shredded cabbage with three and half tablespoons of salt, and packing and tamping each batch on top of each other in the crock.  When you’re through with that, you must cover the cabbage with a big plate, a wet cloth, and a heavy weight.  And everything must be scrupulously clean so as to insure a good fermentation. 

My part was over at the end of the day, but my father-in-law will be checking the crock a couple of times a week to de-scum it and wash the cloth on top.  I’ll resume my duties at some point in the New Year, armed with a knife and fork. 

Well, the scientific world is finally coming online to the fact that we humans have the capacity to taste something beyond the four “majors,” sweet, salty, sour, and bitter.  And that taste has been christened umami.  The Japanese (and other Asian cultures) have referred regularly to this fifth taste, which we refer to as glutamate.  In 1907, a Japanese professor, Kikunae Ikeda chemically isolated glutamate, in the process proving that it has none of the properties of the four majors tastes, yet we can still taste it.  Most of the world just ordered in Chinese food for the next hundred years, and wondered why it didn’t taste as good when they asked for it without MSG. 

Long before Ikeda, the first French master chef, Auguste Escoffier claimed the knowledge of glutamate, but as he lived in and for the kitchen, was never able to scientifically prove its existence, or even name it.  Scientists the world over, ever since the days of the classical Greek philosophers, insisted there were only four tastes humans could comprehend, end of story.  Escoffier would cite the miraculous transformation that occurs in a long-cooked stock compared to a short-cooked one, but nobody really listened.  Those fortunate enough to taste his cooking just knew it was the most amazing food they ever tasted, but didn’t care much as to why. 

Want to know more about umami/glutamate?  Visit www.glutamate.org.  This site will explain it far better than I ever could.  The short explanation about umami is that it occurs naturally in some foods, and in other cases is the result of cooking or fermentation. 

Revel in the knowledge that your tongue can taste five glorious flavors, not just four.    P.S… Sensitivity to MSG is extraordinarily rare.  Check out Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay, Why Doesn’t China Have A Headache?

I am not a fussy eater.  I truly enjoy almost any food if it’s well-prepared.  The astute Jeffrey Steingarten has written hilariously and well on the topic of food aversions, coming to the conclusion that anyone can eat anything and like it if they just give it enough chances. 

I have to admit I have a certain impatience and disdain for fussy eaters, being that there are so few foods I don’t like myself.  I honestly can’t wrap my mind around not liking beets or brussel sprouts.  Up until two short months ago, the foods I didn’t care for were lamb, cantaloupe, and tarragon.  Weird, huh? 

This past summer, for some unknown reason, I began to crave lamb, seared or grilled to a medium rare.  Gone are the  days when my husband and I would sit pondering a restaurant menu, and I would suggest he order “the lamb, since I never make it at home.”  Steingarten’s theory of overcoming food aversions hangs on the premise that at some point we either accidentally or intentionally consume a food we don’t like a certain number of times.  In other words, we cross a threshold from dislike to like simply from a certain amount of exposure.  I think he must be right, because while I’ve never hated lamb, I had never, ever sought it out.  I would try bites of it here and there, just to see how I felt about it. 

My friends with children tell me that when introducing flavors to infants, it’s essential to try feeding them new foods on several occasions.  More often than not, the babies will end up liking the flavors and stop refusing them.  Also key is making the flavor introduction a positive experience, with no forcing or acrimony.  My mother never forced me to eat anything, but then again, she never had to.  I’m a big eater from way back.

So I’m figuring that at some point in the future, I’ll start to like tarragon and cantaloupe.  Maybe there is some deep-seated trauma I subconsciously associate with these flavors.  It’s true that tarragon tastes like a cobwebby dried bouquet that’s been sitting in someone’s closet, but every so often I’ll accidentally ingest some in a sauce or soup.  And as far as I’m currently aware, cantaloupe still tastes faintly rotten and slippery, as if it’s just been rescued from a garbage pail in July.  So perhaps I first tasted these things while hidden in a closet or too close to the trash, respectively. 

What foods don’t you like?  Think you could try the exposure experiment to see if it works?  Get back to me.  I’ll keep working on the tarragon and cantaloupe.