Happy Fourth, with cherries

Breakfast in bed, with cherries, which seem like patriotic food to me, probably the Washington connection. And a Charles Todd Inspector Rutledge mystery, not Bess Crawford this time.

Note the stainless steel cup, hot tea from the thermos. This is great.

Quiet day, handsome Son working full day as usual in Sunday and most holidays and this is both. But in summer he's off to the shore every chance he gets, so I may see him less anyway.

Yesterday I was so industrious that I made the curry powder and the baharat. Grinding that many spices is in fact quite buzzy. Definite high happens, a happy one, no crash.

So here's what transpired.

Getting the seeds out of cardamom pods, wonderful smell. After a bit I decided just to grind the whole pods anyway.

Here's the mixture ready to grind. Everywhere the recipe says ounce I used two teaspoons, just to keep the proportions right. Half ounce = one teaspoon etc.

Then after grinding, I winnowed a bit, then reground what was left in the sieve, a tip from Bill Veach which I'd never noticed before.

And came out to this beautiful powder.

On to the baharat, much simpler recipe

Very different from the curry powder, warm scent and taste, great for all kinds of food.

And somewhere I found a tip for cleaning the grinder. The top comes off and can be washed, but all you can do with the grinding chamber is wipe it out. Hard to remove traces of previous spices. Anyway the tip was to grind some salt, then empty and wipe.

Which I did, using kosher salt, which is a great scouring material, safe and it works, and that was a good tip. But there's more..

I realized that I now had a supply of ground salt with spice flavoring. I tasted, and the saltiness was amazingly amped up, along with spice flavor. So, frugal me, I bottled and labeled it, and it's joined the salt collection. Tiny pinch is all it takes. Happy discovery.

And, since I didn't waste, I mean spend, all my time in the kitchen, I also discovered a very funny writer, D.G.Strong, humor pieces, right up my street. 

So that's another holiday, my whole life is holiday, chez Boud.