How about a recipe?

This is not a photo of a recipe. It's a vintage picture of my husband and son at Niagara Falls. I wanted to put a picture in this post, but the food wasn't particularly photogenic. My kid is. ;-)

Here's a recipe that my kids and I enjoyed last night  (hubby is in southern Florida visiting his dad). It's based on one by smitten kitchen, blanded down a bit for my kids' taste and my cupboard's  lack of ingredients.

I love the smitten kitchen site. (Until just now I've been misreading it as smitten kitten. Huh.) I made one of her salads the other day, with escarole and hazelnuts, and the whole family gobbled it down. The pickled red onion was kind of like eating firecrackers, but we liked it. (In very small quantities.) Escarole is new to me. It's a pain to prepare, and there seems to be an awful lot of waste, but it tasted pretty good. In a rare move, I followed the recipe exactly, which involved finding the escarole and hazelnuts (and the pecorino romano cheese, for that matter) in the local grocery store. Even an employee didn't know if they had hazelnuts, so I had to search for them. (Baking aisle. Not with nuts in the produce section.)

Anyway, I'm not sharing that recipe, because it's hers, she does it better, and it's only a click away. (Mom, see the underlined word "salads" above? Click on it.) What I made was a bastardized version of  her roasted butternut squash and couscous recipe. I trust that it is delicious, but my pantry doesn't have preserved lemons in it, and while I do have some fresh parsley (rare for me in winter, because I hate to pay for what grows plentifully in my garden), "fresh" doesn't quite describe its condition after a week in the fridge. 

Also my kids have what I'll call a midwestern sense of taste. They love bland. They love spicy-hot. But strong flavors are another thing. The Girl dislikes parsley, and the Boy only recently accepted onions into his repertoire. So I was pretty sure the original recipe wouldn't fly at my table. (Too bad. I would have loved to make it as written.) 

1 3/4 cups Israeli couscous (the large kind) 

a butternut squash 

a large sweet onion 

olive oil 

salt and pepper 

grapes 

Set oven to 475 F (246 C). Put racks on upper and lower thirds of oven. 

Peel and cut the squash into 1/4" dice (standard quilt seam allowance). That's the hardest part.

Cut the onion in the shape/size you want the pieces. I cut it in quarters, then thin slices. 

Cover a baking sheet with foil, the nonstick kind if you have it. Lay out another piece of foil. 

Put some olive oil in a big bowl, just a slosh. Add the squash and toss till coated. Spread the squash on the foil-covered baking sheet. Salt and pepper it. 

Put the onion in the greasy bowl, adding more olive oil if necessary. Spread the onion on the foil sheet. Salt and pepper it. Fold up edges to make an envelope.* 

Put squash on top rack, and tuck onion packet wherever it fits. 

At this point, set a big pot of salted water on to boil. While the vegetables cook, boil the couscous until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain. Also while the vegetables are cooking, wash a handful or two of grapes and cut them in half. They've got to be really tasty grapes, not sour. 

Bake vegetables until squash is soft and sweet but not mushy, about 25 minutes. Turn around the baking pan halfway through if you remember. Turn the foil packet upside down while you're at it. Remove from oven. 

Taste the squash. If it's soft enough but hasn't gotten that roasted sweet flavor (it happens), drizzle a tiny bit of honey over it. 

Combine the couscous, squash, onion, and grapes in a bowl. Toss to mix. Add more salt and pepper if necessary. 

This makes a bland, barely sweet, comforting dish. The original is probably a lot more flavorful. Oh. I was going to squeeze some lemon juice over it, but forgot. 

*I suppose you could put the onion on another sheet, but my oven isn't  big enough for two baking sheets.

Stirring the Pot

Isn't there something magic about old, stained recipe cards? The worse the condition, the more they were used, I'd guess. 

When my grandmother moved into a nursing home, my mom went through all her stuff, giving much of it away and keeping only the treasures. Bless her, she deemed the recipe box a treasure. 

A couple visits ago, I had a good long sit at the scanner and made copies of some of the recipes. Grandma was a good, utilitarian cook, content to work from printed recipes, mostly from women's magazines and the sides of processed food boxes. I don't know how many copies she had of the same bran muffin recipe, but there were a lot. It probably made finding it in the thick box of recipes an easier task if there were ten or fifteen copies of it seeded around.

I most associate Grandma with two recipes: a fussy and time-consuming but delicious nut torte, and peanut butter cookies. The nut torte is (I assume) a family heirloom and was made only on special occasions. I think I tasted it only once, but I'll never forget the rich, dense cake and buttery frosting. Mmmm, nut torte. The peanut butter cookies were, as most peanut butter cookies are, delicious. What made them special was the addition of orange juice to the recipe. I baked them many times as a kid and grew up assuming that all peanut butter cookies had orange juice in them. Since then, however, I've never come across another. (I should probably write to Cook's Illustrated and ask if they found this odd ingredient in their research on peanut butter cookies.) 

When I discovered the recipe card for the cookies, I was thrilled -- and disconcerted. I'd come to the conclusion, over the years, that the orange juice must have been Grandma's secret addition. But the recipe card was not written in her hand; it was clipped from a magazine. If you'd like to try them, have a go:

Grandpa was a Renaissance man of sorts, interested in every possible subject and probably (he was a man, after all) an authority on them all. (I say that with great fondness, just so you know.) He must have driven Grandma nuts. In Grandma's collection of recipes, I found many that he typed out. (Grandma had a beautiful flowing longhand.) I wonder if he cooked these recipes, too, or gave them to Grandma to make. 

I don't remember much about Grandpa, but I'm willing to bet he cooked Fidel Castro's Black Beans. As a Socialist, how could he not? I can imagine him stirring the pot and discoursing on leftist politics with his dinner guests. Stirring the pot in different ways, now that I think about it.

I did a quick internet search for the origin of this recipe, but I haven't found it yet. Until I do, I'm going to picture Mr. Castro shaking my Grandpa's hand at a political rally and laughing at his jokes. They stand a bit apart from the crowd, smoking cigars, and Fidel gets a secretive look in his eyes. He motions Grandpa closer, then surreptitiously whispers his favorite recipe, handed down through generations of Cuban laborers.

So make some Fidel Castro Black Beans for your next supper, and talk politics (any sort you like) with your dinner guests. And Fidel, if you're reading this, thank you for the marvelous recipe. I hope you don't mind that I'm passing it on.

Talk About a Carbon-Based Life Form

This is what happens when you burn a cow.
Fortunately, I wasn't the culprit. Also fortunately, it was cooked outside on the grill, rather than in the house -- that would have smelled awful. Although that's also why it burned -- it's easy to forget there's a pan of hamburger cooking when it's outside on the grill.

Popovers

Popovers have always been a bit of a tricky wicket for me. Sometimes they pop; sometimes they don't. Sometimes they stick to the pan so tenaciously that I'm tempted to take an axe to them. Occasionally, when I'm counting on them most, they're hard little rocks.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, they rise gloriously, and when they do, popovers are sublime.

How to achieve the perfect popover? I'm convinced it has more to do with gremlins than science. Although the concept is simple -- flour, eggs, milk, butter, and salt -- the execution has a lot of variables. Must the ingredients be at room temperature? Do you mix the batter vigorously, or treat it tenderly as if it were muffins or biscuits? Do you let the batter rest? Do you pre-heat the pan? Change the temperature mid-bake? And what sort of pan do you use: a deep popover pan, a regular muffin tin, or (as I used above) a tin sized for jumbo muffins?

Recently and with great reluctance I further increased the variables by revising the popover to conform to a low-cholesterol and low-saturated fat diet (the reasons for which are tragic but boring). So, no egg yolks and no butter. I feared total, dismal failure.

Check it out. They popped! And the taste and texture were great. Sure, they're a little less eggy, and someone with taste buds more perceptive than mine would call out the missing butter. But for me, they're divine.

Cross Your Fingers and Squint Popovers (to make them pop)

3 egg whites

1 1/4 cups half-percent milk

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour (I have not yet tried whole-wheat, but I will.)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon zero-trans-fat butter substitute, melted (I used Smart Balance)

Whisk together the egg whites and milk. Stir in the flour and salt, then the melted non-butter. Let the bowl sit on top the stove while the oven pre-heats to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. (If your stove is like mine, it has a warm spot, good for bread dough and popover batter.) Pour batter into a greased 6-hole jumbo muffin tin and put in oven. Immediately reduce heat to 400 degrees. Bake 25 minutes or until they're browning and smell good. Remove from pan and eat immediately with maple syrup or jam, burning your fingers and mouth but enjoying every single bite.

Mmm Mmm Good. Sort of.

photo by Northern Miniatures by Amanda on flickr,

under a Creative Commons license

After reading selections from Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma, a new fervor for mostly-vegetarian cooking has assailed me. Helped along by the surprise gift of How To Cook Everything Vegetarian from my mom (thanks, Mom!!) I've had lots of fun planning out menus and serving simple, fresh, and delicious meals.

Well, not always simple. Yesterday I made homemade tomato soup. It sounds easy, but let me tell you, any soup recipe that involves roasting and straining and food processing in addition to stove-top cooking is not a simple recipe to me. And the clean-up was daunting for a simple bowl of soup. (Note: I probably used more pans than called for because I'm a lousy cook.) 

The result? It was . . . okay. Kinda like straight tomato sauce.  (Additional note: I should probably not expect gourmet taste from store-brand ingredients.)

It was perfectly good soup. It tasted like tomatoes. And I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I prefer the taste of Campbell's. To be perfectly fair, I should make the recipe again, using high-quality ingredients. But I'm not going to, at least not right now. One can, one pot, and one bowl. That's awfully hard to argue with.

counting beans, or playing with my food

I'm knitting mittens, and it's driving me nuts.

The first pair of mittens went well enough. I found a pattern I loved and fumbled my way through, producing a perfectly serviceable pair that I adore, errors and all, and wear every day.

I got more adventurous on the second pair, changing yarns (and therefore gauge) and size, as I was knitting these for my daughter. I chose a different pattern and, true to my nature, instantly made changes. (Can't do anything simple around here, nosiree bob.) This mitten, like the first, has an opening for fingers. It also had a new thumb gusset -- knitterly excitement!

The first mitten went pretty well. I only had to rip it back, oh, six or seven times, and that was for size issues. What really tripped me up was that thumb gusset: specifically, how to make it for the left hand. The pattern states,

Knit second mitten, being sure to reverse instructions to place flap on palm side of mitten.

(I didn't make the flap. I was following the pattern for the rest of the mitten. Well, actually, I changed the top, too, but that doesn't matter here.)

I just couldn't get that thumb gusset to end up on the left side of the mitten. What does it mean to reverse instructions? I counted stitches backwards and forwards, knit and ripped and knit and ripped.

What I needed was a visual aid. Legos? Playmobil flowers? I couldn't find enough similar pieces. No, I wanted something else:



Lima beans. Each line of beans represents stitches on a circular needle. (I'm using two circular needles instead of double-points.) They're joined into a circle, although I left the beans in straight lines. The arrows in the picture above point to stitch markers surrounding one knit stitch: the beginning of the (hopefully left-handed) gusset.



Now I've increased by making one stitch on the inside of each stitch marker.


Here is the final gusset round, having increased four times to make nine gusset stitches.


Now I've put the gusset stitches on a holder. I cast on three stitches to cover the gap, marked by arrows in the picture above.


Take the stitch markers off and hey presto, a side-seam thumb! It can be left- or right-handed!

Looking back at the original pattern, I see that the designer already knew that:

Knit second mitten, being sure to reverse instructions to place flap on palm side of mitten.

One reverses the instructions for the flap, not the thumb. D'oh.

I had tried the first mitten on so many times that it naturally formed around my right thumb. Because the first pair I knit had left- and right-oriented thumbs, I figured these did, too.

The pattern's author recommends Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, so I surfed on over to Amazon and checked it out. I love that "search inside the book!" feature. Side-seam thumbs explained, just like in the pattern. I am such an idiot. And I'm buying that book.

It takes beans labeled with Sharpie pens to make me understand simple instructions. Please, when you meet me, speak very slowly and use short words. Visual aids will help. You'd better bring some beans.

Going All Medieval

At middle school, my sixth-grade daughter took an exploratory class in medieval history. This fit in nicely with the book they're reading in language arts, Crispin: The Cross of Leadby Avi, which is set in the Middle Ages. (I used to live in Avi's attic. How weird is that?)

In class, the students worked in small groups to research different aspects of medieval life. Madaleine's group studied food. They made a nice poster detailing typical meals for nobles and peasants and set up a table with food models -- a plastic loaf of bread, crumpled purple paper grapes, a rubber chicken. All very well and good. But Madaleine decided, on her own, to find a recipe for and make a read medieval dish. What she chose was candied horseradish from a fourteenth century treatise on candymaking, Libre de Totes Maneres de Confits, translated from the Catalan by Vincent Cuenca and available on the Medieval Cookery website.

What a taste sensation! Candied horseradish is to modern candy what lapsang souchong is to tea: smoky. It doesn't have the sinus-clearing bite of fresh horseradish, but the heat remains in a taste reminiscent of campfires. (I can just imagine the castle cook looking at yet another knobby horseradish root and thinking, "What the hell am I going to make with it this time?" and then yelling at the scullery maid who knocked it into the vat of honey. "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" "No, you got peanut butter in my chocolate!" Wait, wrong century.)

Tonight my daughter finished an extra credit project, making a board game out of Crispin. It was so much fun to watch her work. And here it is. Wanna play?

Unfortunate Cookies

I have heard of people making fortune cookies. I even seem to recall recipes for them, ones that never got off the ground in my kitchen because they called for "orange water." Eh?

But yesterday I found a simple recipe for fortune cookies in an old (May 2006) copy of Cooking Light magazine. I like fortune cookies. And these have no fat! No cholesterol! Only four ingredients! And no orange water! So I whipped up the batter and overlooked my misgivings.

First off, the batter tasted bad. With only bread flour (bread flour? tiny alarm bells in my brain began ringing.), sugar, egg whites, and vanilla, there's not much there to taste. It reminded me of the cardboard boxes that sweetened kids' cereal comes in. (Not that I've ever eaten the box, but I can imagine.)

While the batter rested in the fridge (and the brand new Pyrex measuring cup it was in exploded, necessitating a complete fridge clean-up and a quick check of the Pyrex website, which is neither here nor there), I had lots of fun looking up fortunes and fortune cookies on the web. Wikipedia, as usual, had the best information, which you can read here if you're interested. (Yes, I did make a second batch of batter.)

Making the cookies was a nightmare. (The Pyrex explosion should have been a warning to me.) Here's how:

Draw 3-inch circles on baking parchment (and can anybody find a protractor in this house? Seems like I buy one every year from the kids' list of required school supplies, but they never use them and the sneaky devices scuttle away on their pointy little legs to hide with all my good pens and scissors.)

Measure all your cups and glasses to find one with a 3-inch rim. Draw the circles. Then tape the parchment to the baking sheets.

What? Tape? In the oven? Are they nuts? No way am I cleaning baked-on glue from my cookware. Let the darned paper curl whatever way it wants. (And it does.)

Now measure a teaspoon of batter (that's a tiny little dab) and spread to cover the now alarmingly large 3-inch circles. It doesn't work. It won't spread that far. Try to hold the parchment steady while you do this. The parchment is now alive, and wiggles and crunches in its efforts to wave free.

Add more batter. Have a clue in your little head that the recipe author knows what she's talking about when she tells you to only bake three cookies at a time, and only cover three of the circles.

Figure out that adding more batter was the wrong thing to do when the cookies take 9 minutes to bake instead of 5.

Scrape the cookies off the parchment, which has developed a powerful attraction to them, lay a fortune on each one, fold in half without breaking, then fold again over the edge of a bowl. The author mentions that you might have to hold the cookies in shape for a few moments while they set. Now these cookies, which were set enough to crack upon leaving the oven, now do not want to hold a crease. Hold the cookies for about half a minute before giving up.

(Spread, bake, scrape, fold) endlessly in this ridiculous baking project that you intended to do with your daughter, but you spared her the agony and let her play computer games instead.

Go down to the basement for a Chinese rice-grain plate and discover one dead mouse and one live one. Scream. When the family does not notice, scream repeatedly until they thunder down the stairs (it takes quite a few screams).

Place the few cookies that managed to fold more-or-less properly on said rice plate and take a picture for the blog.

Present cookies to family. Have them peer suspiciously at the pale blobs, take one nibble, and declare the cookies inedible.

Write family out of will.

I will not surrender to cookie misfortune. Obviously the planets were not aligned or something. Although I may wait some time before making another attempt. I don't want my house to explode.

Cooking the Books

I want to be Julie Powell, who cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, blogged about it, and then wrote a book about her transformative experience. Unfortunately, my cholesterol levels are too high to attempt anything like traditional French cooking. And my admittedly conservative tastes (in food only, mind you) would rule out whole chapters on sweetbreads, shellfish, and anything with really icky ingredients.

Perhaps The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook? A behemoth captured in a 3-ring binder, this tome is clearly intended to supplant the old standard Betty Crocker in the kitchen (although I've always been a Joy of Cooking follower myself). I love this book. Christopher Kimball and his minions are the ultimate food geeks, and their fanatic recipe testing practically guarantees wonderful results. Of course, with more than 1,200 recipes, it would take me at least four years of dedicated cooking to make my way through the whole book. And the cholesterol? These people focus on taste, not butter limits. There would probably be a whole lot of nights where my family would enjoy all their tasty recipes while I broke out a can of beans to go with my plate of brown rice.

Diana Shaw's Almost Vegetarian might be a good bet. It has some chicken and fish and, while nowhere near vegan, utilizes fresh vegetables and other plant foods while stressing health and good taste. It has about 150 recipes. Doable. Very doable. But this isn't a tome, a classic, a milestone of cookbooks the way the others are. As good as it probably is (and Diana Shaw is a well-known and respected cook and writer), Almost Vegetarian doesn't have the oomph of the others.

Then again, I don't have the oomph of Julie Powell. What a woman. She managed to track down odd and sometimes out-of-date ingredients (bought a marrow bone recently, anyone?), follow lengthy and difficult instructions (boning a duck), and eat stuff I wouldn't even be able to contemplate (brains, lobster). Every day. For a year.

She cooked through a terrible job, September 11th, and the massive East Coast power outage (she lives in New York City). Not only did she eat this stuff every night, but she served it to friends and intimidating people.

In the end, what she did wasn't really about cooking a whole book, but more about transforming her life, finding meaning and joy in a time of personal and national torment. This is what awes me about Julie Powell. I wonder if the irritation Julia Child apparently showed over Julie's efforts was simply a misunderstanding of what she was really doing, or if Julia unconsciously recognized a force perhaps greater than her own in this somewhat bad-tempered New York secretary.

I'm probably not going to find Julie's courage or focus in the kitchen. A little bit of joy, though, would be good.

Trashy Traditions

It's my husband's birthday today -- he's one of those unfortunate souls who shares his day with a national tragedy. It does tend to drive home how lucky we are to be alive.

We celebrate in the traditional way, with cake and candles. Sort of. Not being organized folk, we never have matches when we need them. What we do have is a blowtorch. It has become our custom to light birthday cake candles with the blowtorch, in a sort of Red Green nod to home handiness.

And our lack of orderliness means that we're unexpectedly out of candles. Lucky I've been cleaning the basement, so I know where the Halloween candles are. Birthday tradition saved, and enhanced.

The cake upholds another trashy tradition, that of the store-bought box mix served straight out of the baking pan. I draw the line at canned frosting, however. It's gotta be homemade.

Ambrosia

In ancient mythology, Ambrosia (Greek αμβροσία) is sometimes the food, sometimes the drink, of the gods. The word has generally been derived from Greek a- ("not") and mbrotos ("mortal"); hence the food or drink of the immortals . . . . The classical scholar Arthur Woollgar Verrall, however, denied that there is any clear example in which the word ambrosios necessarily means immortal, and preferred to explain it as "fragrant," a sense which is always suitable. If so, the word may be derived from the Semitic MBR ("amber", which when burned is resinously fragrant; compare "ambergris") to which Eastern nations attribute miraculous properties. In Europe, honey-colored amber, sometimes far from its natural source, was already a grave gift in Neolithic times and was still worn in the 7th century CE as a talisman by druidic Frisians, though St. Eligius warned "No woman should presume to hang amber from her neck." [I think I'm going to make a practice of wearing amber from now on -- Anne.] W. H. Roscher thinks that both nectar and ambrosia were kinds of honey, in which case their power of conferring immortality would be due to the supposed healing and cleansing power of honey, which is in fact aseptic, and because fermented honey (mead) preceded wine as an entheogen in the Aegean world: the Great Goddess of Crete on some Minoan seals had a bee face: compare Merope and Melissa. See also Ichor. . . .

Derivatively, the word Ambrosia (neuter plural) was given to certain festivals in honour of Dionysus, probably because of the predominance of feasting in connection with them.

from wikipedia

In summer, we feast on pesto. Basil is our fragrant food, so potent that I suppose it must have aseptic properties (and the garlic certainly does). Although we don't yet have a vegetable plot in our yard, we planted lots and lots of basil in pots on the deck. There is more than enough to make pesto on Saturdays and Sundays simply by pruning the plants. Pesto has the taste of summer to me. What could be more summery than masses of green leaves? And what better binder than Greek olive oil? Food of the gods, I dub thee pesto.

What puts me in mind of things Greek is the most marvelous book, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. This is his first book for young adults. Part American Gods and part Harry Potter, The Lightning Thief follows the uneasy growth of a teen troubled with ADHD, dyslexia, and social problems, which stem from his mixed parentage: part human, part god. My 10-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son both devoured it as voraciously as I did, and it is somewhat rare for our tastes to agree to such an extent. This book is (groan with me here) pure ambrosia.

Fake Flans

Since tasting and loving the flan at Cancun, the local Mexican restaurant, my kids and I have been making it at home.

At bat was a boxed mix from Mexico, about a dollar at the local supermarket:

It was very stiff and yet somehow slimy, and the caramel sauce tasted burnt. We gave it three thumbs down.

On deck was Royal's take on the same thing:

It was smooth and slippery, rather like a pared-down custard. The caramel was dark but sweet, toasty but not burnt. Two thumbs up (my daughter was put off by the texture). I didn't think it was quite rich enough to qualify as flan.

In the hole was a recipe based on eggs and sweetened condensed milk. It was easy to prepare and used ingredients I already had at home (which is why I didn't try the more authentic cream-based recipes -- no cream). I found the recipe at allrecipes.com, where it was submitted by Jessica Dezendorf. She says it's a Mexican recipe from the late Iris Perez, and suggests substituting 8 ounces of cream cheese for two of the original 8 eggs, which I did, like this:

Put 6 eggs, 8 ounces cream cheese, 1 can sweetened condensed milk, and 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract in a blender. Blend until smooth.


Melt 1 1/2 cups of sugar in a saucepan. I'd never done this before, and my kids and I were amazed by the transformation. It went from this

to this


Pour the melted sugar in a 9-inch round pan, then pour the egg mixture over it.


Bake in a water bath at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for 70 minutes. How do you know when it's done? My most trusted source is the folks at Cook's Illustrated. In The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, they state that "if a paring knife halfway between the center and edge . . . comes out clean," the flan is done.
We loved it. It was dense and creamy, nearly like cheesecake. In fact, it was so close to cheesecake that my daughter said, "It's really good. But it's not flan." Out of the mouths of babes, eh?

Next we'll try a cream-based recipe, if I can still get into my jeans.