Light and Momentary

Speedy speedy brownies

Today I got it into my head that I was going to make a video post. The impetus for this impulse was the Cub Scout cookout last weekend. The parents were supposed to have the boys cook something as a potluck contribution, but there wasn't a lot of actual cooking happening.

I've also been reading food books: Rowan Jacobsen's American Terroir, Michael Pollan's Cooked, and Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal. It's easy to be preachy about food (I have to admit: Funfetti Cake Dip gets me up on my high horse in a hurry), but preachy is not my intent. The thing is, cooking doesn't have to be slow and complicated. It is entirely possible to crank out something significantly better than a mix without causing yourself stress and extra work.

In my video I was going to see if I could get a pan of brownies in the oven within five minutes. It actually took me six minutes and two seconds, but still: six minutes to get from-scratch brownies in the oven. Six minutes, start to finish (including preparing the pan) for a recipe I hadn't made in months. Joe said, "You could have done it four minutes if you hadn't been talking so much."

I still swear by this recipe (it's at the end of the post, after the book review), except that these days I add a bit more chocolate in the form of semisweet chips, and dial back the sugar slightly in consequence. It turns out that making an interesting cooking video is more complicated than making brownies from scratch, so I will spare you all the shots of the back of my head. But spread the word: there is no reason for brownie mix to exist. You can make them yourself, a million times better and every bit as fast.

Seven Quick Takes: You're A Mean One, Mrs. Grinch Edition

1. Harrumph.

2. I am grumpy. I have not yet been to the PO, which means that I can offend my frugal self by paying extra postage to get the niece/nephew/godchild gifts to their destinations on time, or I can offend my avuncular (what is the feminine form of avuncular? amital?) self by sending them cheaply. I had Amazon send the actual gift-gifts, but every year I send an ornament with the idea that they'll have 20 or so to take along when they leave home and set up their own Christmas trees. I bought the ornaments on time and then let them languish in the basement. (While shopping I stumbled on this ornament. Is is not a riot? Even in my current harrumphing state it makes me chuckle.) A Christmas ornament that arrives after Christmas is not a particularly useful Christmas ornament.

3. ALAS, ALAS, the PO on 12/21 is a dismal place.

4. I think that's what we call a first-world problem.

5. Somewhere in the Catholic blogosphere earlier this month, someone wrote, "What's the big deal about Advent? It's just four candles." To which I say: harrumph. I had been feeling lucky (my friends certainly think I'm lucky) because Elwood buys (!) and wraps (!!) the kids' gifts. I am in charge of gifts for everybody outside the family. And Christmas cards are my job too. Elwood is happy to cook part or even all of Christmas dinner, but cleaning is pretty much my job. For the past day or two I have been feeling more overwhelmed than lucky.

6. I have been nibbling away at the long list of things to do, but I would rather take a great savage bite out of it. The paper stack is much smaller, but I want it G-O-N-E. I have 13 emails in my inbox instead of 90, but I would like to have zero. I am about halfway there on Christmas cards (that might be optimistic, actually), but I would have much preferred to send them out two weeks ago.

Strangely, none of these tasks are getting any smaller while I sit at the computer and lament their incompleteness.

7. I will leave you with something to nibble on, or to take great savage bites of if you are so inclined -- something much more pleasant than a to-do list. I began by printing out a copy of this recipe, but I wound up with something pretty different. After I had begun making the crust, with a limited time in which to get the finished product out of the oven, I discovered that my 9x13 pan was full of lasagna and that the recipe didn't actually call for fresh cranberries. Oops! Luckily, I was able to wing it with pleasing results. (ETA: Miriel says they should be called Gladly Harrumphing Bars, since they are so different from the source. I hope they boost your gladly and decrease your harrumphing.)

Cream 2 sticks of butter with 1 c. brown sugar. Blend in 2 c. rolled oats and 1.5 c. flour along with a pinch of salt. Reserve 1 c. of this mixture. Pat the rest into an 11x15 pan and bake at 350 for 8 minutes. In a food processor, combine 2 c. dried cherries, 1 c. fresh cranberries, 1.5 c. sour cream, 1 scant cup sugar, 1 t. vanilla, 1/2 t. almond extract, 1 egg, and another pinch of salt. (Taste for sweetness, because I like things more tart than most people.) Let it rip until the cherries and cranberries are chopped to your liking. Pour over the crust. On top scatter walnuts, chocolate chips, and blobs of the remaining crust mixture. Bake until the middle is set, which will probably be about 40-45 minutes. It will be easier to slice if you let it cool for a bit first. Serves many, unless one of the people in your house is having a harrumphing kind of day and keeps cutting herself consoling slices.

More quick takes at Jen's.

Obituary cheesecake, for real

One day in 1996 I was surprised to see a recipe in the middle of a New York Times obituary. Harry Rosen, founder of Junior's Restaurant, had died. The Times included his famous cheesecake recipe in the obit. Totally delicious and couldn't be easier. I must have dozens of cheesecake recipes but obituary cheesecake is the one I always make.

Preheat your oven to 350 and butter an 8-inch springform pan generously. (I only have a 9-inch springform pan, so I just adjust the cooking time downward slightly.) Scatter 1/4 c. graham cracker crumbs over the butter. Stir together 3/4 c. + 2 T. sugar with 3 T. sifted cornstarch. Beat in 30 oz. softened cream cheese (3.75 of the half-pound packages), 1 egg, 1/2 c. heavy cream. and 3/4 t. vanilla. Bake 40-45 minutes, until the top is golden brown. Cool in the pan on a rack for 3 hours.

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I'm glad you guys enjoyed my whiskey-fueled post from last night. :-) I re-published a really old post from my first blog that tells more of the story. We didn't start dating right after Casablanca. We did a lot of fun stuff together that first fall, almost always in groups. Elwood loves to get people together to do interesting things and I was a frequent tagger-along, but I assumed I wasn't smart enough or cool enough for him to be romantically interested in me. I dated someone else for a couple of months; Elwood and I started dating very shortly after Steve and I broke up.

Tonight, quickly, I am posting about greens. And radishes. I love the idea of our CSA -- eating seasonally, eating locally grown organic vegetables, supporting a small business here in my own area code. It all sounds good. But the reality of using a CSA share with picky children in the picture has not been so rosy. We've eaten almost of all of the food we've received. It hasn't been easy. Especially here in the fall, when the drought has eased and the shares are bigger, we are drowning in greens and radishes and turnips.

I have some good tricks for using up greens. If I steam-saute a batch of them one night, the big people will eat some while they're fresh and everyone will eat them the next night in quiche. If I get the greens/potato balance right, everyone will eat greens pureed into potato soup -- especially if I make rolls for dipping. Gumbo is another option, although it's really labor-intensive.

It's certainly easier to steam a head of broccoli.

A disadvantage to a CSA is that the stuff that's in season for the farmers in your area is also the stuff that's likely to be thriving in a home vegetable garden. My greens problem has been amplified by the fact that I have chard and collards growing well in my own little garden in addition to the funky greens coming my way in abundance every Tuesday.

Oh my GOODNESS, talk about your first-world problems. Oh, dear, I have too many beautiful organic vegetables to feed my family. Help me, I have a surfeit of arugula.

Still, I think we'll all be a little relieved when the CSA deliveries are over. I am sure the boys would vote unanimously not to do it again next year -- they'd say that grocery story veggies win hands down. And I'm not sure how much energy I want to expend trying to encourage my little mainstreamivores to be locavores.

PS Do you have any radish recipes? Lay them on me.

Play-Doh Socket Wrench Ice Cream

Southerners use buttermilk more than people in other parts of the world. A long time ago I posted about making buttermilk pie, and people said, "What? Buttermilk? In a pie?" It's like custard pie, only with more zip.

Buttermilk ice cream is the same idea: it gives a little twist to a summertime standard. I was thinking about fun summer things we could do today and homemade ice cream seemed like an obvious choice.

The recipe is easy: 2 cups buttermilk, 2 cups whipping cream, 2 cups sugar (I like dark brown sugar better than white sugar, but white sugar is more traditional), 2 T. vanilla. Stir it until the sugar is dissolved. Pour into your ice cream maker and let 'er rip.

When I got to the let 'er rip stage, however, I was chagrined to discover ice water leaking from the bottom of my ice cream maker. A dim memory from late last summer resurfaced, a piece that rusted out. Since I bought the ice cream maker at the thrift store 7 years ago, I didn't shed bitter tears. I said, "All right, boys, we're cranking this batch ourselves."

The boys have been watching Mythbusters lately, courtesy of Amazon Prime, and they had a bunch of ideas about how we could get it going. ("It's too bad we don't have any servos," my 12-year-old mused.) We plugged the hole at the bottom with Play-Doh and added the water and salt. We tried a couple of options for connecting a lever to the dasher, including superglue and a plastic fork (FAIL), until we settled on a wrench and packing tape.

It was kind of a slog, but the result was really good ice cream.

I had it stashed in the freezer in a plastic container. Marty came in while I was doctoring a different plastic container, filled with the vichyssoise I planned to take on our dinner picnic tonight. It hadn't turned out very well initially, but I thought I'd improved it. He tasted it and said sadly, "It's so...potato-ey." I thought, "Yeah, well, it's POTATO SOUP, kid," but I said, "What do you think it needs?" He knew right away: "It needs to be sweeter." I said, "Sweeter?"

He thought I had been doctoring the ice cream, and had turned it into vichyssoise. He was relieved to be wrong. :-)

6(+)6(=)12

So I am sitting in my living room floor, and I am tempted to feel a little gloomy. There is a pile of paper in the floor that I was going to sort through tonight, but I might rather clean the oven instead. (I don't clean ovens, even when it would be a really good idea to clean an oven. I just figure the ook will burn off, and I channel Dionne Warwick to sing "That's What Flames Are For.") It's going to take some time to get things back in order after working so much between early March and late May, and that's just the way it is. On the plus side, grades are submitted and the house is clean and my veggie garden is planted. One thing at a time, right?

Laura Vanderkam wrote a post that I kept unread in my Google Reader for, like, weeks, waiting until I had time to think about it. I've made myself a list of things I want to do this summer -- some relatively quick and easy ("make profiteroles" is one that I can do in stages in an afternoon) and some more involved ("take family to West Virginia" will require planning). We'll see how many of the items make it off my list and into reality, but she also recommends keeping a record of what's going well. Instead of sifting helplessly through the heap of colored pencils that the boys brought home at the end of the school year, I am going to write quickly about some fun things from the past two days.

Yesterday was exhausting in a good way: I was up until 1 because I was determined to finish grading, and then awake at the usual time with the kids. Even though it was a short night, we worked well together to get the house cleaned and then we went out to lunch. We made a slightly chaotic but mostly fun stop at a consignment store to pick up some summer clothes, and a flying trip to the pool, and then we flung together a picnic and walked to campus to see the transit of Venus. I might see Halley's comet a second time, but I will be dead and buried the next time anyone sees the transit of Venus. I thought about Joseph Banks and his arduous trip to Tahiti, and I was grateful that the most difficult part of getting to our viewing site was figuring out where Elwood had stashed the pastrami.

I finished up the last of the CSA veggies from last week about 15 minutes before I went to pick up the next installment -- success for week 1! The kids love the playground at the pickup site, and I was pleasantly surprised to run into a friend who, it turns out, has been part of the CSA for years. This week we have more food than we did last week, but I'm off to a good start: I knocked together a speedy lambs quarters soup for lunch (3/5 kids requested seconds) and a cilantro pesto at dinner that is probably the tastiest thing I've made this year. I'm reading Lord of the Rings to Joe and Pete, and we finished chapter 2 today, and Wolf Hall is getting better and better, and I was able to get to yoga for the first time since spring break.

Recipes if you are interested: Saute some onion and garlic in butter, and add a bunch of lambs quarters, or spinach if you have no lambs quarters. Peel and slice three potatoes, and toss them into the pot. Add about a quart of water or stock, and simmer until the potatoes are tender. Salt emphatically. Add pepper and ground celery seed and a generous pour of cream. Hit it with an immersion blender until it is smooth. Serve with minced green onions and garlic scapes, and a spoonful of sour cream. My kids were happier to taste it when I said they could dip their buttered bread into it, and then they figured out that it was good on its own.

Cilantro pesto, from the CSA cookbook: take a clove of garlic, a hot pepper, a bunch of cilantro (stems and all), 1/4 c. oil (I used a mix of plain vegetable and toasted sesame), 2 T. lemon or lime juice, 1/4 c. nuts or seeds (I used pumpkin seeds), and 1/2 t. salt. Toss them in the food processor and let it rip. Eat with a SPOON. (I served it with the fish we had for dinner, but it is SO good that it really is spoon-worthy.)

Seven Quick Takes: Nom Nom Nom Edition

1. I am typing this post with a cup of coffee at my elbow. Not just any cup of coffee, though -- a madeleinian cup of coffee. We're out of milk and cream, so I popped open a can of evaporated milk. The taste and the mouthfeel take me right back to my grandmother's kitchen. I can hear her saying, "Would you like a little Pet milk for your coffee?" to my mother and my aunts in the tone of someone proffering a special treat. I am remembering the coziness of her kitchen and a feeling of satisfaction at being big enough to sit with the grownups.

Maybe by the bottom of the cup I will remember what color the curtains were.

2. It's Thursday as I'm typing this, and dinner is almost ready. In the oven there's a beet-green quiche, made with not quite enough eggs and a blend of sour cream and evaporated milk. I do not expect it to be a hit. It's time to go to the grocery store.

3. On the stove I have a pot of delicious soup which I will never make again. Once for Christmas my MIL gave me a book called Master Chefs and Their Crazypants Recipes, or something like that. Each recipe had at least 20 ingredients, to be combined in a dizzying sequence of steps. Any cookbook that has me making praline powder in step one and moving on to the complicated stuff from there is above my pay grade. But do you know, if I were to write up the recipe for this soup it might almost fit in. A slacker's crazypants recipe, or something.

4. The soup is only accidentally complicated, made of beets and carrots that I roasted on Christmas Eve and gussied up on Christmas Day. It wasn't hard to chop an onion coarsely and fry it up with some garlic and ginger. After that I just had to tip in the leftover veggies, add a splash of apple juice and enough stock to make it look like soup, and hit it with a plop of sour cream and an immersion blender. If I wrote it all down -- "first, prepare the Roasted Beets With Saffron Cream, followed by the Blanched Tamari-Roasted Carrots Accented With Butter and Orange" --  it would sound fancypants rather than seat-of-the-pants, which it actually was. It makes me wonder how many of those crazypants recipes came from people scavenging in the back of the fridge, thinking, "Better use this up before it goes bad." I bet it's easier to recreate an accidental success if you have a sous-chef to do the heavy lifting.

Maybe I need a sous-chef.

5. It's Friday now, feast of the Holy Family and my firstborn's 15th birthday. I've been waiting for this day, when my children would be 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15. Doesn't that sound orderly? He told me he'd be happy with any kind of cake I wanted to make, and so I am going to try my hand at a Swiss roll: devil's food cake, whipped cream filling. If the rolling is a disaster, I'll turn it into a trifle and pretend that was my plan all along.

6. The reason I had that pretentious-sounding Saffron Cream for my beets was actually a children's book -- Tomie de Paola's Jingle the Christmas Clown. Years ago the kids and I made the delicious cookies it describes, covered with sunny saffron icing. On Christmas Day the kids were happily rolling out cookies. (Does that sound very domestic of us? It was not. I had made the cookie dough on the 22nd or 23rd, but I just couldn't get it together to bake them until Christmas.) I let them eat the whole first tray, thinking they'd make a second batch that we could ice for the grandparents to enjoy after Christmas dinner. I let a pinch of saffron steep in a little dish of milk until they announced that they didn't want to make more cookies. I'm too cheap to throw out saffron, so into the beets it went. I think we might try iced cookies again this afternoon.

7. New Year's resolution? At the top of the list: more veggies, less sugar.

More quick takes at Conversion Diary.

Notes to myself for next year about things that were a good idea

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, roast a chicken for dinner. Put in a whole tray of sweet potatoes -- some for dinner, the rest for Thursday. If you start the chicken at 400, you can also bake up your skillet of cornbread for stuffing at the same time.

When you clean up the kitchen after dinner, throw the chicken carcass straight into the crockpot. Add a halved onion, a stick of celery, a carrot, a parsnip, and a bay leaf. Cook overnight on low. Cool and strain in the morning, and you'll have delicious stock for stuffing and gravy.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, make Pasta of Awesomeness for dinner. Save some of the squash cubes for this salad, and some of the browned sage leaves for the stuffing. (I had no idea sage was frost-hardy, but I am still using leaves from the sage plant in my garden. I feel very domestic even though it is dumb luck rather than good planning.)

Pasta of Awesomeness: peel and seed a butternut squash. Preheat your oven to 450. Cut the squash in smallish cubes and in a large mixing bowl toss them with olive oil and 1-2 T. brown sugar. (I know, I know: I hate putting sugar on vegetables too. Totally worth doing here, though.) You want them to be coated with the mixture so that when you roast them (about 25 minutes, and be sure there's a lip on your baking tray) you get a delicious brown carapace. Except it's a vegetarian carapace.

While the squash is roasting, melt a stick of butter. Over gentle heat, brown a cup (or more! these are so yummy you might want more!) of sage leaves in the butter. Boil a pound of your favorite pasta. Save a mugful of cooking water before you drain it. Toss the pasta with a cup of Parmesan cheese and a dab of cooking water. Tip out the squash and the sage leaves on top. Resist the temptation to toss them all together, because the squash cubes will sink to the bottom if you do. (From The Quarter-Acre Farm.)

Oh, browned sage leaves! I've never been a huge fan of straight-up sage out of the garden, but I could snack on a whole plant's worth of leaves browned in butter. In fact, do you hear that? It's the leftovers, telling me they are very lonely. And I, chivalrous soul that I am, will not leave them in their despair.

Sick and Wrong Pie

About ten years ago I was swapping meatless recipes with some email pals, and I shared a Nigella Lawson recipe that she calls supper onion pie. One of my friends made it for her children, assuring them that the Gladly children snarfed it down. Her daughter, resolutely appalled by the offering, said, "That is sick and wrong."

My friend shared this story with me and then had immediate second thoughts about sending the email. Would I be offended? I would not. I cracked up on the spot, and ever since I've thought of this as Sick and Wrong Pie. It makes an easy, cheap, and cozy meatless main dish for a chilly evening.

Preheat your oven to 400. Peel and quarter four onions, and in an ovenproof 9-ish-inch skillet fry them in a blend of melted butter and olive oil until they are tender and lightly browned. This will take some time -- maybe 25-30 minutes? -- but it's mostly hands-off time. Stir regularly so they don't scorch, but no need to hover over the skillet. At the end add salt and pepper and a sprinkle of thyme, along with a handful of grated cheese sprinkled on top.

Make a speedy biscuit dough (here my recipe diverges slightly from Nigella Lawson's, because I am as bossy about biscuits as I am about cornbread): 2 c. flour (whole grain works fine) stirred together with 1/2 t. salt and 1/2 t. baking soda, about 5 T. cold butter, cut in small cubes and rubbed briskly into the flour, and enough buttermilk or thinned-out yogurt to bind it into a cohesive dough without making it soggy. Add a sprinkle of thyme and grated cheese to the biscuit dough too, if you like. Pat or roll your dough into a skillet-sized circle and flop it on top of your browned onions, tucking in the edges all around. Bake for 15 minutes at 400; turn the heat down to 350 and give it 10 more. Flip it upside down onto a plate for serving, so it's like a savory tarte tatin.

This doesn't serve my whole crew these days, so I also made a tomato pie (same idea, with biscuit crust above and below and thinned-out mayo poured over the tomatoes, which sounds disgusting but is not). Typing this post is making me think I should go and investigate the leftovers. Wouldn't want them to go to waste, you know.

The food of my childhood, only not really

I don't know exactly when I crossed the line, the point at which I'd spent more of my life in the Midwest than in the South, but I do know that some things run deeper than geography. Cornbread, for one.

I haven't lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line since 1989, when I spent the summer at my parents' house before my junior year of college, but I have strong opinions about the One True Cornbread. It has to be all cornmeal. (Yellow, of course, because what happened to white cornmeal? A mutation? A corn vampire? I am suspicious of any cornmeal that's not yellow like God intended.) It has to be made with buttermilk, in a cast iron skillet. You get your oven nice and hot and melt the butter in the skillet before you pour the batter in. And if there is any sugar in it, even a speck, it no longer qualifies as cornbread. It has become Heathen Yankee Food, fit only to be sneered at.

I suppose if a person has been reared on pseudo-cornbread, fluffy with white flour and adulterated with a scoop of Heathen-Yankee-ness, the One True Cornbread might seem a little austere. I say piffle. Some people find, say, Gregorian chant austere. Does that mean that chant needs an electric violin or perhaps a didgeridoo on the side to make it less austere? Obviously not. In just the same way, the pure simplicity of the One True Cornbread should be embraced and not gussied up with frivolities like white flour and [shudder] sugar.

The One True Cornbread is the one I grew up eating, the cornbread my mother and my grandmother made. What they never made, something I love although I've rarely eaten it, was spoonbread. I made a batch for dinner tonight.

To make spoonbread, you first make cornmeal mush. Bring 4 cups of milk to a boil, and add 1 1/3 cups of cornmeal (yellow, unless you want the corn vampires to come after you and suck your blood). Whisk it in briskly, because lumpy spoonbread is a sad sad thing. Cook it for about ten minutes, stirring often and with vigor, until it is thick. Toward the end, stir in 1 1/2 t. salt and about 3 T. butter. Set it aside and let it cool for a bit.

Preheat your oven to 375 and grease a 2-quart baking dish. Separate four eggs. When the mush has cooled enough that you won't scramble them, stir in the yolks. Beat the whites until they are stiff, and add a healthy dollop to the yolky mush to lighten it. Then stir in the remaining whites, mixing gently but combining thoroughly. Bake for about 40 minutes, until it's set but still a little bit moist.

Serve it with a spoon, and explain that the utensil might be the reason it's called spoonbread. If you have an etymologically inclined audience, you can tell them that it might also be called spoonbread because there's a Native American word for porridge that sounds a lot like spoon. Nobody knows about that.

I do, however, know about this: if you put sugar in your spoonbread, you'd better not tell me. Some things are better kept hidden.

Like a cabbage crunching

My husband and I were talking about the weekend, because our weekends require more planning than they used to. The two oldest boys are going camping and I mentioned that I needed to pick up a snack for the Friday night cracker barrel, when everyone brings something to share. He rolled his eyes. "There'll be plenty of junk," he predicted. "Get a bag of apples. Or clementines." Apples, I expect, would come back home uneaten, or perhaps be used as projectiles. But the exchange sparked a memory.

My pal Anneleisa told me years ago about a granola preschool she had attended in California, where they served wedges of red cabbage to the kids for snack. At the time we had no children and I had just been waxing rhapsodic about red cabbage. ("It's such a fantastic color!" I had probably been saying. "It's so lacy when you slice it thinly!" I used to wax rhapsodic about vegetables at regular intervals. I even did it in a blog post once. Wonder when I stopped?) Anyway, in that context it struck me as a nifty idea. Why wouldn't you serve red cabbage to preschoolers for snack?

Five children later the answer to that question is obvious: because most of the preschoolers I have known wouldn't touch the stuff. Because they would hold out for the goldfish or the graham crackers and grow crabby from low blood sugar. That's why. Don't you think? How long would you have to serve wedges of red cabbage before the kids stopped hunger-striking?

It makes me feel a little wistful, remembering my youthful optimism. (I first typed "useful optimism." There's a lot to like about optimism but usefulness is probably not its strong suit.)

Say It With Suet

I steamed our Christmas pudding on Tuesday, which meant that all afternoon I was listening to the happy hissing of my biggest pot. I tweeted about it: "Nothing says 'Welcome, Jesus!' like suet."

Christmas pudding is a little weird. The grocery store checkout girl asked me about the suet and I tried to explain: dried fruit! more dried fruit! suet! hours of steaming! stash it in a closet and feed it with brandy! then set it on fire!

I don't think she's going to race home and make one herself. We're not so keen on the dried fruit desserts here in the US of A, where fruitcake is more of a joke than a treat. Still, ever since we moved back from the UK I make some sort of dessert based on dried fruit for our Christmas table. Sometimes it's little mince tartlets; sometimes it's a British Christmas cake. This year it's Christmas pudding.

In Britain you just couldn't have a Christmas dinner without one of those things. It'd be like inviting people over for Thanksgiving and serving them raw okra with canned water chestnuts. My great-great-greats mostly came from the British Isles, and that's part of what caught my fancy about these desserts: the near certainty that my way-back g'g'g'g'g'great-grandmothers stirred up something very similar in their own kitchens, all those generations ago.

Michael Pollan writes in The Botany of Desire about how the availability of white sugar has changed our perception of sweetness. Imagine a world in which the only concentrated sweetener was one you had to negotiate with hacked-off bees to obtain. Imagine, too, a world in which Chilean raspberries stayed in Chile and there were no aisles full of frozen food: if you wanted a December dessert, you had to plan ahead. It's a luxury for us to be able to say, "Oh, I hate raisins." (I used to complain vociferously about raisins.) Christmas pudding reminds me to appreciate sweetness wherever I find it.

It is not by any means a penitential dessert, though. I soaked dried fruit and candied peel overnight in brandy, to plump them up and enhance their flavor. I mixed up just enough of a batter to hold the drained fruit together, and stirred in grated apple and grated suet. (More about suet here, and a little more here. I might be the Midwest's leading suet blogger, you think? Everybody needs a niche.)

I asked my 11yo which kind of dessert I should make this year and he said, "Pudding. Definitely pudding. Isn't that the one we set on fire?" (That's one of my favorite memories of Christmas 2002, his puzzled little 3yo voice saying, "Why we are setting the dessert on fire?") I'm not much for kitchen theatrics but it's awfully fun to bring a flaming pudding to the table in a dark room. I think, too, of all those generations before electricity, when Christmas dinners must have been dimly lit affairs -- punctuated by those flames.

At Christmas we celebrate the Light of the world bursting forth; we honor the Word who is sweeter than honey to our lips. We've learned how to make both artificial light and artificial sweetness. Christmas pudding is a reminder for me -- a delicious reminder! -- of how long people have been hungry for the real thing.

Rhymes with orange. Really!

Dear Jamie, I urgently need a quick and easy dinner recipe. The kids are gnawing at each other's ankles and CCD starts in 25 minutes! Whatever shall I do?? --Priscilla Procrastinator

Dear Priscilla, fret not! Spornge is your friend when a dinner deadline looms. You may be thinking, Spornge? spornge?? Is that a typo, Jamie Gladly? Has NaBloPoMo left your usually assiduous inner copy editor hogtied under her desk, squirming and grunting and trying to free herself?

Spornge is a recipe from the breakfast chapter of Whole Foods for the Whole Family. Both of the women who submitted it came from Wisconsin, so maybe it's a Wisconsin thing. The note in WFWF says it's pronounced "spornj," which totally rhymes with orange in my dialect. (How about yours? Do you say orange with one syllable or two?) You can't beat that, huh? Ultra-speedy and reasonably nutritious dinner and a solution to the age-old question of how to finish that love poem: "Your eyes so green / your hair so orange / you're never mean / you make great ____ ."

Spornge is perfect for those bare pantry days when you don't have enough eggs to scramble and you don't have enough bread for French toast. It's sort of a hybrid, with its own charms. Here's the basic recipe: Melt a generous knob of butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. When it sizzles, add about three pieces of whole-grain bread, torn into pieces. Let the bread brown in the butter, and pour six beaten eggs on top. Turn the heat down to medium-low and scramble the eggs gently. Serve hot, with crumbled bacon on top if you like.

To adapt for dinner, whip out your grater while the bread is browning in the butter. Grate a pile of zucchini and summer squash first, and toss it in the pan when the bread is almost ready. Stir briefly before you add the eggs. While the eggs are doing their thing, grate a little pile of Parmesan cheese. Sprinkle it on top before serving and pass more at the table. It makes a grandma-approved dinner (vegetables, starch, and protein too) in one pan at the speed of lickety-split. And it's tasty, too, with those crispy buttery bits of bread and soft-set egg around their edges. I served this to the four youngest kids and myself for dinner and it worked out about right, so scale up if you're feeding a hungry horde.

Now close up that laptop, Priscilla P., and get whisking. CCD waits for no mom.

Bar cookies, not bar plots

I have been short on post ideas even though we're only a third of the way through NaBloPoMo. (Questions? ideas? inspirations? It could be a long November.) Today I was going to post about some tricks I just learned for making nice-looking graphics in my stats program. (I know! You can hardly contain your disappointment!) But yesterday I conscripted all the boys to work outside in the yard, and I promised cookies as a thank-you.

I was mulling over my cookie options this evening. As I mentioned, I'm giving up sugar again in hopes of improving my emotional equilibrium here at the onset of gloomy season. (My new tagline will be "Light and Momentary: now with 30% less crazy!") If I have cookies that I like in the house, I will eat them. I cannot quite bring myself to make cookies I dislike. I was wondering if I could make healthy-but-not-disdain-provoking cookies with the leftover roasted squash (I know! Squash cookies! You guys all want to come live at my house, don't you?) and googling pumpkin cookie recipes when suddenly a memory came bursting back.

When my friend Anneleisa and I had our first babies, we dipped cautious toes into the La Leche League waters. We each had a copy of Whole Foods for the Whole Family, which we viewed with a measure of suspicion. Wheat germ! Nutritional yeast! Grow-your-own lentil sprouts! But one day we made WFWF pumpkin bars together, and they were surprisingly...good. Who knew?

These are slightly modified from the WFWF recipe. They were a hit at my house.

Mash a cup of roasted winter squash, or use canned pumpkin. Beat in two eggs, a stick of melted butter, a third-cup of honey or maple syrup, and a teaspoon of vanilla. Add a cup plus 2T. whole-grain flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, a scant half-teaspoon each of salt and baking soda, and 3/4 t. cinnamon. Combine and spread in a greased 9x13 pan. Sprinkle with flaked almonds or pumpkin seeds or chocolate chips if you're not worried about Edwina Froehlich rolling in her grave, pressing them lightly into the batter. Bake for 25-30 minutes in a preheated 350° oven.

Approximately Seven Quick Takes: Fretful Toddler Edition

1. The toddler is sleeping like a baby these days, which is to say: badly. Trouble going down for the night, trouble staying settled. I am the Putter-to-Bedder-in-Chief in my house, the Grand Poobah-rina of Wakeful Children, which means less leisure time in the evenings. This too shall pass, I know, but here's hoping it passes quickly. I am sprinting through this post so I can just call it a night if she wakes up unhappy.


2. I served the craziest dinner tonight but it worked out pretty well. Bearing-Erin linked to this recipe recently, and when we got kale and chard both in our veggie delivery today, I decided to give it a try. I thought, "What if I used it as a crepe filling, and put some leftover pumpkin in the crepes? That way if the kids hate the filling they can still have reasonably nutritious pancakes for dinner." I've been on a pumpkin tear lately, strewing muffins in my wake.


3. Pumpkin muffins: universal thumbs-up, especially with a sprinkle of chocolate chips. I use an adaptation of the muffin formula Amy Dacyczyn lays out in the Tightwad Gazette. Highly recommend getting it down pat so you never need another muffin recipe: beat two eggs and about 3/4 cup of buttermilk or clabbered milk or thinned-out yogurt. Add 2-4 tablespoons of oil or melted butter and a bit of vanilla, along with about 2/3 c. pumpkin puree. Mix well. In my version you don't need to mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl. On top of the wet ingredients dump 2 c. flour (go right ahead and sub in some flax meal, wheat germ, almond meal, etc., or use all whole grain flour -- whatever suits). On top of the flour sprinkle 1/2 t. salt and 1/2 t. lump-free baking soda (because lumps of baking soda in the finished product are so disgusting, like the anti-chocolate chip) along with spices to suit: ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, pinch of cloves, cardamom if you're feeling wild and crazy. [EDITED! Oops! This is a hazard of sprinting through recipe-writing! Also add a quarter-cup of Sucanat or the sweetener of your choice. Hope nobody tried to make these for Saturday breakfast.] Mix swiftly, emphasizing speed over lumplessness to avoid tough muffins. A handful of chocolate chips may make your crowds of muffin-eaters ooh and aah, like fireworks if fireworks were brown and melty. And edible. Not so much with the fireworks analogy, I guess. Anyway: bake in a preheated oven for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. Use this approach to make any muffin under the sun, adding moist things like banana to the wet ingredients, and dry ingredients like nuts on top of the flour.


4. Part of the reason I have been especially flexible about the flour component of that muffin recipe is that we've been having trouble with Indian meal moths. They are very sneaky little suckers. I am double-wrapping and freezing and wielding my mighty mighty fly swatter with vigor and determination, and they keep surprising me. I hadn't seen any adults in a few days, after killing one every other day for a while, but tonight I found that they'd moved in on the sesame seeds. How do they get into glass jars, I wonder? I imagine them with teeny-tiny lepidopterous tunnel-boring machines.


5. So dinner worked out better than you might expect a dinner of pumpkin crepes with coconut kale filling to work out. Everybody whose age is measured in double digits ate it contentedly, and Stella nibbled happily from her bowl. The younger boys, though, weren't convinced about the kale and Pete hated the crepes too. He clung to my knees after dinner. "Please, Mama," he pleaded, "don't make me new things for dinner. Just make me old things. Like quesadillas."


6. What do you do when your kids hate what's for dinner? Our policy used to be that a boy could go quietly and get himself a slice of whole wheat bread with peanut butter. I'll tell you more about that another time -- wakeful toddler.


7. The end. More here.

October yumminess

I just republished an old post with two of my favorite fall recipes. We're having that salad tonight!

Stealth Pumpkin

If ever I write a book on how to feed vegetables to young children, it will not include any strategies like "Pureed chard is really awesome in brownies! No one will ever know it is there!" It will include only boring strategies, to wit:

1. Cut veggies in small pieces, because it's easier for a kid to try a bite of something that he suspects to be a hunk of demonic gum scraped from Satan's own shoe (in reality: maple-glazed roasted butternut squash) if it is only a little bite.
2. Don't forget to add a little fat and a little salt. This is supposed to taste like food to be enjoyed-- not like penance, not like wallboard.
3. Serve veggies regularly, eat them with unfeigned gusto (and if you can't, then work on your own issues first), and never get into power struggles with kids about what they're eating. Make it appealing, and then detach after you serve it up. If they hate it, that means more for you to enjoy tomorrow at lunch.
4. Repeat for 8 to 10 years. Patience, grasshopper.

So a post on super-secret vegetables is kind of a weird post for me to write, but I am writing it anyway. If you happen to make that pumpkin-tomato soup I posted about last week, and then a few days later you decide to make that macaroni and cheese from the Like Mother, Like Daughter blog, then you might like to know that you can add a cup of pumpkin-tomato soup to the macaroni and the kids will not have the faintest idea. I bumped up the cheese a bit, because I thought they might complain about the weirdness of pumpkin soup in the mac and cheese if they suspected it was there. Kids mostly expect mac and cheese to be the color of a nuclear fireball, so pumpkin fits right in. It was an easy way to slide some veggies into our dinner on a soccer practice night.

Also, if you happen to make a batch of pumpkin-tomato soup in the same week that you make a batch of sunshine soup, you can mix them together after you get tired of eating them individually and wind up with something new and delicious. I served it tonight with grilled cheese sandwiches and my standard carrot-heavy cole slaw. It made for a very orange dinner but it's the right season for serving very orange dinners, wouldn't you say?

The only bummer is that now I'm all out of leftover soup for lunches.

 

In which I prepare to feed my family a spotted dog

On this day in 1571, the outmanned Holy League won the Battle of Lepanto, protecting Rome and halting the Ottoman Empire's advance across Europe. They attributed their victory to the intercession of Our Lady, and it is commemorated today in the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

On this day in 2010, my thoughts turn inexorably to eating spotted dog. And sunshine soup.

Spotted dog is a steamed suet pudding popular in the Royal Navy during the age of sail. (That linked post contains the pun that cemented my online-pal-ship with Lauren.) I will not, of course, do the whole storing-and-feeding-with-brandy rigmarole I described in that earlier post since I have misplaced my time machine AGAIN, but I will soak raisins in apple cider all morning and steam my pudding for a good couple of hours this afternoon. This morning I drove way way out to the boonies in search of a place that would allegedly sell me suet, but no dice. I am going to grate a frozen stick of butter and hope it works. If it doesn't, I'll tell the kids to pour more custard atop and be glad they don't have to row to soccer practice in a sixteenth-century galley.

According to Patrick O'Brian, the men of the Royal Navy ate dried peas three days a week. They were called "banyan days" after the vegetarian Banyans of western India. I am declaring it a banyan day and cooking up a batch of sunshine soup for dinner.

To make some sunshine soup of your own, saute 2 chopped onions, 2 chopped carrots, and a small rutabaga*, peeled and diced. Add 1/2 t. each cumin seeds and marjoram leaves. Pick over a pound of yellow split peas and pour them in with 7 cups of stock. After you've brought it to a boil, turn the heat way down and simmer until the peas lose their shape. This will take 2 hours or even more -- keep an eye out toward the end of cooking so it doesn't scorch as it gets thicker.  Add 3 T. cider vinegar and a bunch of salt (like at least half a tablespoon and maybe more) and pepper to taste.

We'll have cole slaw on the side, with a healthy squeeze of lime so nobody gets scurvy.

*If you have never eaten rutabaga, fear not! It is mild and sweet. Substitute another carrot or two if you must.

The nicest day, with recipes

Oh, you guys, it was the nicest day. My friend Carla, my first internet-pal-turned-real-life-pal, came for a visit with her two youngest -- such a treat to see her. (We met on an email list in early 2000 and then in person that fall. I was so nervous about meeting someone from the internet.) It's the feast of St. Francis, one of my very most favorite saints (there's a connection there with the virtual-friend-turned-real-true-friend idea but I am typing in too much of a hurry to nail it down -- know what I mean, though, about saints whose lives become something more than a story you read in a book?). I have been cooking a bunch today, and I present you with 3.5 recipes.

Easy Pumpkin-Tomato Bisque, from Crescent Dragonwagon

Saute a chopped onion in some butter or olive oil. When it browns lightly, add 3 cups of stock along with a 28 oz. can of tomatoes and a big can of pumpkin puree (is that 28 oz. also? pumpkin cans in my grocery store come in two sizes and I get the big one for this recipe). Add a tablespoon of maple syrup or honey and a fair amount of salt. Bring to a boil, and then simmer until you have walked around the block with three toddlers to pet the neighbor's cat and admired the pile of rubble from the other neighbors' driveway project. Or until the onion is tender; your call. Just before serving add a splash of cream and whizz with an immersion blender until smooth.

I've posted before about the dilemma with celebrating the feast of St. Francis at the table. You don't really want to get too fancy with dinner when you're celebrating the man who embraced Lady Poverty. Tonight I served cabbage soup with bread and butter and the boys ate it right up, enjoying the fact that they were eating something simple in memory of St. Francis. In fact, they thought we should take the difference between the cost of the cabbage soup and a more typical dinner and donate it to an organization that feeds the poor. We finished dinner with a rousing chorus of All Creatures of Our God and King. It sounds kind of implausible to me as I'm typing it up but that's exactly how it went down.

Caldo Verde, modified from Twelve Months of Monastery Soups

Saute 2 chopped onions in olive oil. Add a quart of stock, a cup of wine, three potatoes (peeled and cubed), and half of a head of cabbage (chopped). Salt to taste. Don't skimp. Simmer until about 15 minutes before you have to race out the door for soccer practice. (The monks recommend an hour, perhaps because they are free of the whole cleats/shin guards/minivan ball and chain.)

I read a long time ago, in a book by...um...that famous hagiographer Tomie de Paola, that St. Francis had a noblewoman friend named Jacoba who fed him almond cakes as a special treat. I made macaroons for dessert, suggesting to the boys that it was a good day to think about enjoying the pleasures of the world with temperance. Four out of five kids thought they were scrumptious.

Almond Macaroons, from Monster Cookies

Combine a cup of ground almonds with a half-cup of sugar and a generous pinch of salt. Add 3/4 t. almond extract and the finely grated zest of a lemon. Stir in a lightly beaten egg white until you have a mixture that looks like cookie dough. (You might not need all the egg white.) Line a cookie sheet with a Silpat or parchment paper or foil. Form dough into heaping-teaspoon-sized balls and flatten them slightly. You can put half of a maraschino cherry on top if that floats your boat or tickles your stigmata. (Is that horrible and blasphemous?) Bake for 15 minutes at 325. Let cool briefly before easing off the foil.

And the half-recipe: to your favorite banana bread recipe, add drained pineapple tidbits, dark chocolate chips, and halved maraschino cherries. Bake in muffin tins and serve up as Banana Split Muffins. So yummy!

Super-good

Last night my husband put beets and potatoes into the oven to roast, right before the woman hosting a birthday party for her 5yo said, "Oh! I forgot to tell you! Everyone's invited to have pizza and birthday cake later." So we ate pizza and birthday cake and put the roasted veggies in the fridge when they were cool.

Tonight Elwood peeled them and I cubed them: four medium beets and approximately the same volume of potatoes -- oh, and a tiny little minced roasted onion too, but you wouldn't notice its absence. I made a speedy pesto out of basil, Parmesan, flaked almonds, and olive oil. I added two heaping spoonfuls of pesto to the veggies along with mayo to coat and the juice of a quarter of a lemon.

Elwood said, "??????" He said, "That is going to be very weird." I just planned to eat the leftovers myself with a big spoon, because it looked delicious to me. But then he tasted it, and suddenly there weren't as many leftovers. I gave some to all the boys. The big ones liked it and the little ones thought it looked radioactive.

"Why don't you want to eat your potato?" Elwood asked the 5yo. "It's super-good." And it was.