If Rufus agrees to abandon his fleecy fortress of solitude this morning, we’ll head to the Fall Picnic/Greyhound Planet Day Celebration at Duke Island Park in Bridgewater.

Rufus is always excited to meet more greys, but you really have to keep an eye on these bad boys — don’t want him getting liquored up and coming home with even more tattoos:

Update: Gil wrote all about our experience at the picnic, so I don’t have to! The post contains neat observations and links to lots of doggie pictures, so check it out!

If Sarah Palin were your mom, what would your name be?

via The Agitator

I was craving buttermilk biscuits this morning, but went down the rabbit hole of recipes and ended up worshiping before the blueberry streusel scone. Despite the sugary topping, it wasn’t overly sweet, so I didn’t feel too guilty about having it for breakfast.

Despite the previous sentence, it’ll be great for dessert later in the day.

It was my first experience making scones (though very untraditional and American they were), so I was concerned it would be a complete disaster like so many of my other baking projects are. But they aren’t pastry, so I needn’t have worried. The most difficult thing in the whole process is making sure you don’t overwork the dough so the scones stay tender.

After kneading the dough 4 or 5 times on a lightly floured board, shape it into a disk about seven inches in diameter and and inch-and-a-half thick.

Cut it into eight wedges.

My dough was a little wet, I thought, but the finished product was just fine, so what do I know?

Arrange the wedges on a baking sheet lined with parchment and top with streusel.

Oh, streusel, how could I ever stay mad at you?

Bake, then set the scones on a wire rack to cool just enough so you don’t burn your fingers as you tear into them like a wild animal. Were you raised in a barn? Sheesh.

Fancy backlighting

And take just one more photo, if you can stand it.

Sconehenge!

It’s strictly coincidence that I made gnudi on the NFL’s opening weekend. (A quick note to the league: Many thanks for kicking off the season with The Hochuli last Thursday night! Your female fan base was pleased, I assure you.) You see, I had planned to revisit the egg yolk ravioli I made a few months ago, only with sheep’s milk ricotta per cook eat FRET’s suggestion, but with all of the excess moisture in the air I decided not to test my pasta-making skills in such a hostile environment. So gnudi it was! And what a happy turn of events, really.

Cuz, wow. Good stuff.

All of the recipes I found online were variations on the same basic theme — ricotta, parmiggiano-reggiano, an egg, and some flour. I figured I could work on proportions to taste, so I just winged it from there. How can you go wrong with a bowl of sheep’s milk ricotta?

Turns out, you really can’t.

I tasted as I mixed the ingredients together, adding a little more grated cheese here, some salt and pepper there to offset the addition of flour, then rolled a tablespoon of the mixture at a time into little footballish-shaped dumplings before rolling them lightly in flour. They cooked in almost no time — about 5 minutes or so in a pot of simmering, salted water. I took them out shortly after they rose to the surface and let them drain on a paper towel-lined plate while I was getting the sauce and garnishes together.

To start, I browned walnut pieces in a small pan with about 1/2 tablespoon of butter, then put the walnuts aside on a cutting board to cool. They seemed a little bland at this point, so I sprinkled them liberally with salt & black pepper and um … ate about half of them before the rest of the dish was even finished. Highly recommended.

After washing the pan (and my delicious buttery, salty fingers), I added about two tablespoons of butter and fried the sage leaves just as soon as the butter had melted and started to sizzle. By the time they were done the butter had started to brown, so I added the gnudi to the pan and cooked them for a minute or two on each side, until they’d developed a thin crust and smelled heavenly. A quick spritz of lemon juice brightened the flavors just enough so the dish didn’t feel as heavy or rich as it really was.

I only cooked six of the 30 or so gnudi I made, so I froze the uncooked ones on a baking sheet before transferring them to a plastic storage bag. Now we’ll have plenty for leftovers when we want them again, which should be in about 24 hours or so.

Of course, what I really need to do is get to The Spotted Pig to try the real deal even though mine will inevitably suffer in comparison. Hey, I’m willing to take my lumps; it’s the only way to learn.

Last week, I paid another early-morning visit to Buon Italia for the express purpose of buying my weight in cheese. Naturally, pork products leaped into my basket as well (insistent little buggers, they are), but the primary purpose of this trip was loading up on cheese, glorious cheese, because one of the recipes at the top of my weekend to-do list was marinated feta, inspired by this David Lebovitz post.

It seems to be a pretty simple recipe, open to any number of variations. French feta was available at Buon Italia, so that’s what I used here, but once Corrado’s Family Affair opens its Wayne branch, you can bet I’ll be up to my ears in Bulgarian feta, my favorite. I kept the flavorings to a minimum for this first batch, though you can really let your creativitity shine. My thyme plant is one of the few herbs that produced for me this summer, so I gathered about 10-15 sprigs and layered them in a large glass jar with the cubed feta (about 1 1/2-inch pieces), a couple of sage leaves from a less prolific herb plant, a few thin strips of lemon zest, dried oregano, lots of red pepper flakes, black pepper, and a couple of small bay leaves. (Because it’s a simple thing to grow your very own jar of botulism when storing garlic in olive oil, I avoided adding it to the blend.)

Oh, did I forget to mention the olive oil?

Yeah, this recipe uses a lot of it, so I went with my basic everyday stuff — Colavita extra virgin — instead of a good finishing oil. It’s exceptionally fruity, very affordable, available at my local grocery, and comes with Lidia’s stamp of approval — what more could I want?

This marinated feta holds the promise of getting better with age, but will I be able to resist its siren song long enough to find out?

You see, I have plans for this stuff. While tomatoes are still in season, they’re demanding a date with the feta. Then there’s grilled pizza, perhaps a nice spinach pie with roasted garlic, and of course, sampling it straight from the jar.

But for now, the feta marinates…

My parents are going to try to head home today! St. Charles Parish residents got very lucky this time around: The storm surge wasn’t as bad as expected, so there was no flooding. It sounds like the damage to the area was comparable to the damage done by Katrina (and exactly what you’d expect from a hurricane) — quite a few downed power lines (some live), trees, and limbs, and a roof gone missing here and there. They won’t have power for a while and no stores or gas stations will be open, but people are heading back to hook up their generators and rough it, relatively speaking.