Slowish Food

Tommy's Pumpkin

2011-09-02T03:54:00.000-07:00

Tommy grew a pumpkin this year. It's small, and it was a hard-fought battle to get this little pumpkin for two reasons:

As I've belabored to the point of becoming tiresome, our backyard is not sunny enough to grow anything bearing fruit.
Squash bores got into the squash vine, and this pumpkin was the sole survivor of that attack.

The pumpkin's special because it was grown from a seed I saved from a pumpkin Tom picked during a kindergarten trip to a local pumpkin patch. Around early November last year, when Max and Tommy had friends over, I removed the seeds, saving and drying some and roasting the others. Then I cooked down the pumpkin and froze the pulp, and threw anything left over into the compost heap. It reminded me of fifth-grade social studies class learning how the Indians were respectful of the buffalo they killed, and used every last part.
So Tommy's prize this year, a descendent of his kindergarten trip, will be cooked into the chocolate chip pumpkin muffins he likes, with seeds saved for next year's sunny front-yard mini pumpkin patch.

Hints from Heloise: Gleaming Cutlery

2011-08-13T18:14:00.000-07:00

A dear friend of mine gave us a set of cutlery for our wedding almost 14 years ago: Marquise by 1847 Rogers. It sat in its case for about 12 years while I worried that it was too fancy for the likes of me and Phil. Since I pulled it out and started using it, it's slowly grown a layer of tarnish that I've hardly noticed. Others have. In fact, one neighbor has casually mentioned not once but twice that he thought maybe we shouldn't use my "fine" silverware because of the patina. I'm sure he was thinking more about the stained fork than my baked ziti. One day, I thought, I really need to sit down and spend a few hours cleaning that stuff up like the household help in the 1920s.
Then I stumbled on a recipe the other day for cleaning silverplate. Here's what I did:

Make a single layer of silverware in one of those disposable foil things you use for potluck baked ziti. The silverware needs to touch the foil. You can also line a pan or dish with foil.
Heat some water to boiling, and then pour it into a 4-cup Pyrex container. For 4 cups of water, add 1/4 cup baking soda. It's going to bubble up impressively when you add the soda.
Pour the boiling water and baking soda over the silverware and watch in amazement as the tarnish disappears. Just disappears.
Call your husband in from the porch where he's trying to have a quiet martini and do a little reading, and drag him in to watch the magic. Marvel that this will be your fourth-grader's first science fair project.
Invite your neighbor over for dinner -- something that will require a few pieces of cutlery -- so he can marvel at your sparkling home.

For really stubborn spots, swirl the water around a bit. Then take out that silverware and add more. When the water cools, you can either re-heat it or make some more.

Brilliant!

In other Household Hints news, I finally paid attention to my kale, which I'd sort of OD'd on in the early summer and hadn't really noticed for a bit. I realized something was chewing the heck out of it. When I went to get rid of the tattered leaves, I found small green caterpillars having a party on my kale. A little Facebook research, and my friends informed me these are white cabbage moths, and the eggs are laid by the little white butterflies I always look at sanguinely when they flutter around the lavender. I couldn't find a good solution until I found the following on an Internet garden Q&A: Pay a kid 5 cents a caterpillar. Max made $2.50 today working next to me, and is eager to start his shift again tomorrow.
Sometimes money DOES buy happiness.

Musings on the Tomato, with Lacto-Fermented Salsa

2011-08-11T04:23:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's been a long time since I've posted. I think this is a record. Yeah for me.

Last year my friend Dave pointed out that my anemic tomatoes weren't the result of the universe plotting against me, but simply that I'd not paid attention to their needing more sun than my semi-wooded backyard would afford. Noted. This year I moved the tomatoes to the front yard, and while we've only had six plants, I've been beside myself with how they've thrived. Simply beside myself. If you have any doubt what sun can do for sun-loving plants like tomatoes, here are two heirloom tomatoes, one in the backyard (because I had some extra plants and a little extra room in the raised beds) and one in the front yard. Case closed.

Sylvia explaining last May why we planted tomatoes out front.

It's been a fun gardening year. I tried potatoes for the first time and am giddy that you can put a part of a potato under ground, and a couple months later dig under the resulting foliage and find... Potatoes. As Phil says, "honest potatoes." I planted a 4 X 4 box with Purple Haze potatoes and we've been eating on them for a bit. I can't find a good source for seed potatoes this fall, so I'm sprouting some myself, and sharing them with my dad, who's never grown potatoes but was fascinated when I told him about our experience this year. By the way, if you're thinking of planting potatoes, you might want to check out The Resilient Gardener, which devotes a whole chapter to spuds. One thing I learned from that book was to watch for the foliage to die, wait another week or two, and then dig up the potatoes. Apparently they keep growing and getting nutrients even while their foliage looks dead and as if nothing good is going to come of them.

Backyard on the left; front yard on the right.

So, back to the sun. I took Dave too literally. While I moved the tomatoes to the front yard, I didn't apply his lessons to all summer vegetables needing sunlight. So my first attempt at corn turned out miniature. The raccoons got it, and frankly, they could have it. Ditto the peppers, which were less than impressive other than one hot pepper plant that did me proud. So the plan next year is to expand the little garden plot next to the driveway , and stock it with tomatoes, peppers, corn, rhubarb, and everything else that's been struggling in the backyard. The raised beds in the backyard will be planted solely with the leafy greens and spring/fall vegetables that thrive there: radishes, lettuce, kale, chard, mache.

Meanwhile, the tomatoes.

I will admit that my ultimate strategy is that we'll be able to grow all or most of our vegetables, and even fruit, on our little 1/4 acre suburban lot. But this year the thought of canning tomatoes made me tired. So very tired. So we're eating and enjoying them fresh, and I'm going to rely on the eight packs of Del Monte organic tomatoes at Costco to get through the winter. Sue me.

That said, we've got an abundance of tomatoes, and even tomato-philes like me and Phil are a little overwhelmed. And we've got a raccoon problem that ends in slightly blemished tomatoes that are still mainly good, if a bit scratched or bitten here and there. Bring in lacto-fermenting. I'm a little in love with it. This is a way to get probiatics (you know... Jamie Lee Curtis yelling at you about a yogurt brand that helps keep you "on track") through crazy-quick and easy prep. No canning. Essentially, you're prepping vegetables (pickles, kimchi, sauerkraut) and then letting them sit at room temperature. The result is living food filled with good bacteria; canning, on the opposite spectrum, kills all bacteria -- bad and harmful as well as good.

So I'm loving lacto-fermented salsa, which uses up less-than-perfect tomatoes, takes about five minutes to make, and tastes phenomenal. (Phil, who is more sensitive to salt than me, says it's a bit salty; I haven't noticed.) I'm using a combination of the method from Nourishing Days and a very slight riff on the recipe from Cheeseslave. I'm tickled that the tomato, garlic, and hot peppers all come from my garden. Next year, the onions will, too. Here's what I've been doing.

Lacto-Fermented Salsa

1 small to medium onion
2 cloves garlic

1 to 2 hot peppers, depending on your taste, split and seeded
Juice from 2 lemons
1 Tbsp. salt
4 oz. whey or 1 Tbsp. salt
About 3-4 decent-sized tomatoes
If you like, fresh herbs like cilantro or oregano

In a food processor, process the onion, peppers, and garlic. Now add the tomatoes and whir them a bit. I have a very small food processor, so I have to add the tomatoes, quartered, one at at time. If you're using fresh herbs, put those in and whir them a bit more. Now pour into a bowl, add the lemon juice, salt, and whey (or additional salt). You should have about a quart, so after it's all mixed up, pour it into a quart canning jar, making sure you have about an inch of headspace (space between the top of the salsa and the lid) and let it sit on the counter for a few days. The salsa should be pretty watery, and you'll want to be sure that stray pieces aren't clinging to the lid, as these could develop mold. In two or three days, taste your salsa; it'll be a little tangy and, in my opinion, crazy-delicious. Stick it in the fridge, and it'll keep for a long long time.

Delicious!

If you're really into this, just double the recipe and use a half-gallon canning jar.

For a lot more about lacto-fermenting, which used to scare the bejezus out of me, you might want to check the books Wild Fermentations or Nourishing Traditions.

Taking Stock

2010-09-14T03:50:00.000-07:00

Phil and I recently cleared out and defrosted our deep freezer in anticipation of our annual quarter-cow purchase from a local farmer. In the midst of organizing, using up, or throwing out Parmesan rinds that I saved in 2008 and was sure I would use to flavor soups, five bags of edamame, a large stock of beef from last year's cow, and various other treasures, I made a gruesome discovery. The chicken carcasses I'd been saving for making stock "some day" created a veritable graveyard of Ziploc-enclosed body bags stacked at the back corner of the freezer. This macabre collection needed to be used up or thrown out, and some Depression-era gene couldn't let me just toss what I felt held potential for putting up stock.

Up to this point, I'd made stock once. Using the soup bones that had amassed with our cow delivery, I followed Julia's recipe in The Way to Cook. The recipe took our biggest pot, two years of soup bones, lots of vegetables, and six precious weekend hours. For my effort, I got two quarts of stock. Lovely stock, but the thought of devoting the next eight weekends to chicken stock wore me out.

Then I found the slow cooker recipe on NourishingDays, and I've since become a stock junkie, using up the chicken bones, as well as a turkey carcass from a turkey breast also found in the freezer. The stock is now frozen (in our newly defrosted and recently restocked freezer), lined up in quart canning jars, and waiting for winter soup making. It's crazy-easy, and because it uses kitchen leftovers, virtually free. I'm tickled pink every time I make stock. Tickled. Pink.

I now keep a gallon Ziploc bag in my main freezer in our kitchen, and all the stock-appropriate scraps from vegetables and herbs go in there: onion skins, half a rosemary stalk, carrot peelings, celery that's gone limp.

Here's how to make it:

Easy-Peasy Slow Cooker Stock

Two chicken carcasses, or whatever will fit in your slow cooker
Water
1 to 2 Tbsp. apple cider vinegar
A couple handfuls of frozen vegetable leavin's

Put the chicken carcasses in the slow cooker, and add enough water to cover. Pour in the vinegar, cover, and let it sit, without turning on the slow cooker, for about an hour. This tip from NourishingDays.com lets you extract some of the nutrients from the bones. After an hour, add a couple handfuls of the vegetable droppings you've saved for stock, cover, and turn to low. Leave it alone for 24 hours. After 24 hours, strain through a coffee filter, paper towel, or cheesecloth, and either use the stock in a couple days, or freeze for later.

Used to be I'd buy organic stock at Costco. Six four-cup (e.g.,one quart) boxes are around $10. This recipe in my cooker usually gives me about two quarts. FOR FREE, as I keep reiterating to my long-suffering husband. Just kitchen scraps. And water. I so love this.

The Modified Compact Revisited

2010-08-24T03:11:00.000-07:00

At the start of the summer, with three kids going into camp or daycare (and the resulting costs), an oil spill gushing in the ocean and making it clear our days of relying on petroleum are numbered, and having felt more and more convicted about traveling more gently on the earth, I entered a modified compact.
Max and Tommy are back in school, and my 10-week experiment is over. How did it go? Here's what didn't go strictly according to plan:

Let's get this out of the way immediately. I bought an iPad. Some of the motivation had to do with my job and being conversant in new forms of e-publishing and understanding what some have touted game-changing technology. But it would be disingenuous to say my boss told me she'd fire me if I didn't have an iPad. And, as you can guess, I didn't get this on Craig's List or at a garage sale.
When traveling for work, a publishing partner took us to a strip of new, locally owned shops and I bought this t-shirt because it made me laugh out loud, it was on sale, and I felt okay supporting the shop and the local goods.

I had not one but two benders at Fabric.com, my newest vice. I swore I wouldn't succumb to the $3/yard sales, but when some designer fabrics dropped to $2.50, I succumbed. I'm weak. I'll admit that. I convinced myself I was just buying it to make gifts for others.

What did go well, and was surprisingly easy:

I didn't buy new clothes for myself or the kids.
I didn't buy physical books, although read some good ones on my Kindle.
I didn't buy new, nonconsumable gifts. I bought my dad some asparagus plants for his birthday. I bought Phil consumables for Father's Day and his birthday, and made him a gift. I made gifts for other family members who had summer birthdays, but I've yet to get them in the mail. I promise guys, they're coming!
I didn't even have to buy new canning supplies for the garden -- a loophole I'd left myself. A co-worker with a toddler, who has no time for canning these days, brought me some jars that were collecting dust in her house. (Thanks, Melody!)

Phil and I have a pretty simple budgeting method: We pay our bills and ourselves first, and scrape off any extra money in checking to go into savings, or, if checking's tight, stop spending. So I can't tell you to the penny whether the compact actually saved money. Also, our income this summer was a little atypical, with the iPad purchased from an unsalaried windfall, so I would have to do some heavy number crunching that I don't have the patience or time for to see whether this made a financial impact.

But it's definitely showed me that (iPad notwithstanding), new isn't always necessary.

Book Review: This Organic Life

2010-08-20T03:30:00.000-07:00

Have you ever read a book that changed the way you viewed the world?

For me, this past winter, one of those game-changers was This Organic Life by Joan Dye Gussow. The friend whose slow-food eating inspired me to start this blog had referenced the book a couple times, but I never got around to reading it. It's not new; I'm very much a Johnny Come-Lately to the table of Joan.

In short, the book chronicles Joan's 40-year-old garden, which moved to a new location when she and her husband moved from a large Victorian home to a funky house on the Hudson River in New York. The garden over the years had grown until Joan, a food advocate, was fairly insistent that she grow all the food she needed -- a huge and life-dominating undertaking. Through talking about the garden, sharing recipes, providing tips for better yield, and relating her noble battles with rodents, Joan also documents major life changes and how often the one constant in her life was the work to be done in the garden.

I was transfixed by this book; it should be on the shelf (or in my case, loaded on the Kindle) of anyone looking to learn more about modern food culture, ways we can take back the family farm, and how to cook a delicious potato and kale soup.

I had trouble envisioning the new space Joan and her husband moved to so I (and I'm not proud of this) cyberstalked her. I put her name into whitepages.com, then plugged the address into zillow.com to see an aerial view of the house. It's fascinating. The backyard, a not large suburban backyard, is plot after plot of garden beds that lead directly to the bank of the Hudson.

Since reading the book, I've read some criticism of Joan. Some disagree that she can be such a staunch food advocate and organic gardener and still unabashedly advocate meat eating. I have no skin in this game. At this point in my life I'm not a vegetarian, and to me, her arguments for eating meat made sense, so I had no issue.

Others have criticized her near-obsession with the garden and growing food, going so far as to contemplate integrating the ashes of a loved one into the garden to enhance the soil. Again, I have no criticism here. This is what she does. This is the constant she was able to come back to when everything around her felt like it was crumbling. Do ashes do more good in a vase on the mantle? Probably not.

I did think she might be a bit of a challenging neighbor; she's borderline strident in her beliefs. And I was a bit off-put by her relaying her anger at an obnoxious neighbor who "stole" four carrots and an onion, forcing her to harvest the onions before they were ready in order to save them from further pillage. I personally love the idea of having enough vegetables to get to share; would it be so bad if she ran low on onions and had to buy some from a local source?

That said, she's made me a firm believer in the power of kale, and the ability of regular folks on suburban plots to affect the food machine.

The book contains about 30 recipes for using the bounty; they are generous with the butter and meat -- my kind of dishes.

Now that the major gardening season is winding down, this would be a good read for starting to plot out next year's garden, or the next forty years of gardening.

Two green thumbs up!

You Say Tomato

2010-08-18T03:22:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago I was at the Meredith Corporation office in Des Moines on business, and got to take a tour of the Better Homes & Gardens test garden. It was, as you might expect, jealousy-inducing and so peaceful and colorful, one just wanted to tuck in and take up residence. The garden manager explained that the garden is about 12 years old, "really quite young for a garden," and that they've continued to refine and hone it. As she said, "You're never really DONE with a garden." What a comfort to know that even the BH&G staff, with their Better Garden, sees gardening as iterative.

Which is a long way of saying that my tomato harvest wasn't what I expected. I have about 10 tomato plants in (three are grape and other tiny varieties that volunteered when we moved the old compost location). The tomato plants went insane in early summer, growing taller than me before they toppled over. I had visions of being overrun by tomatoes; handing out heirloom varieties to lucky neighbors and keeping the stovetop canner in constant use. I spent a lot of time researching what to do with my bumper crop once it came; perhaps a bit less (some might say no) research on ensuring the bumper crop.

So we're getting a few tomatoes a day, and we're eating them now. I stand at the mangle of bushes and eat cherry and grape tomatoes off the vine. All in all very pleasant, but it's a good thing our winter eating isn't dependent on our Purple Cherokee harvest.

Fortunately this past weekend an old friend and co-worker dropped by. Dave and I worked together my first job out of college, and have stayed in touch over the years. For the past decade he's been a a volunteer at Gingko Community Garden (that's him on the home page!), an urban garden that supplies fresh, organic produce to those in need. He took a quick look at my toppled tomato plants and had a few tips I'll be integrating next year:

Prune. Getting rid of the nonproducing (but not downward-pointing) stems will mean a fuller stem and a better harvest. Let the plants more plant energy into creating the fruits, not more foliage.
Move the tomatoes to a sunnier spot. My backyard gets ample morning sun to grow lots of things, but tomatoes need lots and lots of afternoon sun. In fact, the huge growth is likely less attributable to my green thumb as to the plants trying to grow and stretch and get themselves to a sunnier spot. Next summer, I'm putting them in the front yard where they'll have constant access to sun. (Dave reminded me, realizing I'm a pretty lazy gardener, that this will mean I'll need to water more often. Noted.)
The sunnier spot goes double for the tomatillo plants. I chalked up the fact that these plants only produced sad little empty husks to their being overwhelmed, nay intimidated, by the monster tomato plants. In fact, they probably needed more consistent sun.
Stake. In years past, I've forgotten tomato cages until the plants were too big for them. So I was patting myself on the back over the fact that all were in cages this year. Dave reminded me that I also needed to stake them. This could save the current embarrassment of having a small step-ladder next to the garden trying to keep the fruit of toppled-over plants from touching the ground.

With the garden doctor on hand, I also complained as a helpless victim about the bores that had eaten my zucchini plants. Rather than the bushels of zucchini these plants should have produced, I got one -- one -- before the vines rotted and had to be pulled up and replaced with kale. Dave explained that I could actually bury the nasty part of the vine and the healthy part likely would take off and continue growing and producing. Nice tip.

He also tasted my basil and disagreed that it tasted "wrong" and "soapy," and I made a delicious pesto that night.

I'm already planning next year's garden, what I'll do better, what I'll research, where I'll get seeds. Mucho thankso, Dave.

In other news, this one headed off to kindergarten last week. He's taking it like a champ, and has been excited about the bus and chill about having his personal style succumb to a uniform. I'm in denial that he's this big a boy.

I'm going to pretend that she's never going to grow up:

So there.

Three Quick Recipes, Weekend Edition

2010-08-17T02:54:00.000-07:00

We had guests this weekend. The kids were over the moon with extra friends on hand to play with, and Phil and I got to visit with two people we adore and who we don't see nearly enough of. When they left, the house was quiet(er), and it was too hot to cook. Sylvie and I tackled our out-of-control basil and made pesto for the first time ever while Phil and the boys were swimming.

When the men got home, the kids had a quick dinner, during which Tommy complained of a sore throat. He went to a MedCheck that confirmed strep. This left me about 15 minutes between getting his prescription filled and the start of Mad Men to make dinner for the local friends who come over for Don Draper and dinner every Sunday night. Fortunately, the pesto made a delicious pasta dish that whipped up quickly and was consumed in about 10 minutes.

Monday, back to work, Tommy home with Grandma, I didn't think of what to make for dinner until I was driving home. The pantry and pressure cooker let me make dinner in about 10 minutes.

One day I'm looking to get back to lingering over cooking. Not now. I've made peace with that.

Pesto
Fill a food processor with four (packed) cups basil leaves, 1/2 cup olive oil, 1/3 cup pine nuts, and two peeled garlic cloves. Whir up until it's a smoothish consistency. Then stir in 1/2 cup grated Parmesan and a couple good-sized pinches of course sea salt. If you're not going to use it immediately, put it in the fridge covered by about 1/2 inch olive oil.

Pasta with Pesto, White Beans, and Sun-Dried Tomatoes
Start boiling about 8 to 10 ounces pasta like rotini. Meanwhile, heat up 2 Tbsp. olive oil and gently cook 1 minced garlic clove for about 2 minutes. Now throw in 1 can drained cannelini beans, about 1/3 cup pesto, about 1/2 cup white wine, and about 1/2 cup drained sliced sun-dried tomatoes in oil (I buy dried and reconstitute in olive oil). Let this simmer/bubble for about five minutes while it cooks down. By this point, the pasta's done, so drain it, add it to the pan with the tomatoes and pesto, stir it around, grab a bowl, and go check on the progress of Stirling Cooper Draper and Price.

Crazy-Quick Rice and Beans
Dump 1 cup jasmine rice, 1 can coconut milk, 1 can drained black beans, and 1 (14.5-oz) can diced tomatoes into a pressure cooker. Cook on high 7 minutes. I didn't add spices, lest the kids turn up their noses (which they did anyway; sigh), but sprinkled some Adobo seasoning and chili powder when it was done. Despite what the kids insist without trying it, I found it delicious.

Lavender Jelly

2010-07-29T17:39:00.000-07:00

Back when we lived in New York, we once spent a weekend in New Jersey at the home of a friend's parents. The friend's mom grew lavender, dried it in little bunches, and used it to make sachets, many of which included a cross-stitched initial for the lucky recipient. I received a gorgeous "C" sachet when I gave my friend's mom a cookbook that we'd recently published. I dreamed of having a garden and the perfectly manicured lavender bushes I saw at their lovely house.

Several years later, I now have unperfectly manicured lavender bushes, and have yet to lovingly dry the lavender into thoughtful sachets for friends and acquaintances. Usually I hack the things down once or twice a summer and throw away what I cut. But this year I decided to try to do something useful with the cuttings. Having really gotten the jam bug this year, I tried my hand at lavender jelly.

Here's all you do. First, come about June, hack the heck out of your bushes. Here's half of what I cut. The other half, I'm ashamed to say, went into the compost. Next year I'll consider sachets...

With a little luck, you'll have a lovely and enthusiastic assistant helping:

Now separate the lavender into little bunches. It's a thrill to know that the buds look like bugs; I was desperately brushing buds off myself, thinking we had a kitchen infestation. But the terror is worth the end result:

You need to tie up the little bunches and let them dry, upside down, not touching each other, for about two weeks. They should also be out of direct sunlight. Our house is short on space, so the living room bookshelves were adorned. Here's some of the harvest in progress:

And here's a close-up of my improvisational tying. Thing is, lavender is so beautiful it stands up to knotted kitchen twine, baby hairbands, and old bread ties. Still, I'm not seeing the staff of Martha Stewart Living paying me a visit anytime soon:

The strings of lavender were secured with a collection of books I trash-picked from behind my college library more than 20 years ago. I have yet to crack one of these, so it's good to know they're getting some use:

In about two weeks, you're ready to remove the buds from the stems. I read lots of advice online advocating removing the buds by putting the bunches in a pillowcase, rolling them around, and removing both the stripped stems and the buds. I tried this method and found it cumbersome and messy. After trial and error, I found the best option was to roll the bunches between my fingers and thumb over a clean piece of paper, and then roll the paper and funnel the buds into a jar for storage.

Making the jelly is really very quick -- about an hour start to finish, including steeping the lavender. Outside of the lavender (which was free and organic), the recipe just requires some pectin, sugar, and lemon juice. The recipe I used is here, and it was so simple I didn't make changes. The recipe says you'll get about five half-pint jars; I got almost six.

I was so tickled with this jelly -- the fact that I could do something useful with what had essentially become a weed. I also absolutely love the taste. It's definitely lavender, but not remotely overpowering. Just soft and delicious. The first batch I made I handed out like a meth addict on the beach: Lavender Jelly for All! So I recently made another batch. I have enough dried lavender buds left for at least two more. I'm seeing some unusual teacher gifts for the holidays...

Happy canning!

Random Birthday Thoughts

2010-06-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

Today is my birthday. The day has been low-key. Phil has strep, and went to bed early, which left me alone, quietly, with things I love:

My Kindle, newly loaded with this month's reading group book (The Shadow of the Wind), a stack of favorite print books, my little knitting bag loaded with a knitting project (We Call Them Pirates hat in the new Amy Butler organic yarn), and a martini -- with blue-cheese stuffed olives, no less.

And Pepper:

Pepper is an 11-year-old Dachshund we're test-adopting. My uncle and aunt had to find a good home for Pepper when they moved from their house on 7 acres to a retirement condo. The family voted 4 to 1 (with Phil as the lone dissenter) to try Pepper out. So far, relatively so good. Current voting has 4 of us loving Pepper, and Phil neutral. But we'll win him over.

I worked from home for 2 days to help Pepper transition to our little family. He was a nice colleague:

Max and Pepper are becoming fast buddies:

Downloading the pictures of Pepper, I found a sampling of random happiness from the last couple months. Like dapper Tommy being ring bearer at Phil's cousin's wedding. Here's Tom hanging out with his cousin and giving himself the photo bunny ears. Goofy boy:

Tom took his role very seriously; it's unclear if this is a wedding or funeral:

Aren't the bride and groom adorable?

And here's Sylvia peeling a hard-boiled egg. Shirtless:

And helping me with the lavender harvest. Pantsless:

My new favorite thing in the world: the Pioneer Woman's Potato/Leek/Bacon/Goat Cheese Pizza. Try it if you haven't. You'll thank me. i think I was the only one eating this one:

Twenty-four more minutes of my birthday. The family's asleep. Pepper's in his cage. I might just get a little crazy.

Compact Update: Can You Live Without New?

2010-06-11T11:39:00.001-07:00

I started a modified Compact a couple weeks ago, trying to lessen my environmental impact by limiting my purchase of new products. Overall, not a biggie, although I was sad to get a 15% off birthday coupon (with a wacky birthday candle necklace) from Anthropologie and realized I'd be breaking my Compact to have a girly birthday bender. Oh, how I love Anthropologie.

My hope was that a by-product of the Compact would be saving some money, although it wasn't my primary goal.

Today. Oy, today. I had a 7:15 am flight to get to a lunch meeting in DC. I was getting into the city early enough to meet one of our publishing partners for a casual meeting before the lunch meeting, so had a couple pieces of business during my in-and-out trip. I got to the gate at 6:30 a.m. just in time for the announcement that the flight was delayed two hours due to mechanical issues, so cancelled my first meeting. Four delays later, I was not going to make even my lunch meeting and threw in the towel. I decided to work the remaining day from home.

On the drive home from the airport, I happened upon two yard sales. The first was an annual event some neighbors throw to benefit charity. The second was a family fundraiser to fund an upcoming trip to celebrate the mom being five years cancer free.

Total, I spent $20 at the two sales, and here's what I bought:

Small stoneware brownie pan
Pizza stone (we broke ours two days ago)
Vera Bradley glasses case
2 glass piggy banks -- the kind you have to break to get the money; Sylvie has one, so these were for the boys
Vintage fabric cut into three-inch squares that I'm going to use to make a quilt for Sylvie
Vintage sewing notions, like rickrack with its original 10-cent price sticker
Glow-in-the-dark Perler bead kit for the boys
Leather Coach backpack
A yet-to-be-revealed Father's Day gift
Jeans for Sylvia
Spiderman action car for Tommy's Spiderman action figures
New package of sewing machine needles
Three-piece food mill for making applesauce
2 DVDs for the boys (Mythbusters and Superman Returns)

The biggest-ticket item was the Coach backpack at $5. I'd coveted this backpack at Coach stores in years past. I think it retails for somewhere between $300 and $400. The yard-sale edition had no wear, and cost less than the Venti Skinny Cinnamon Latte I'd bought in the terminal after the second delay was announced.

Not too shabby. And not too much suffering, despite eschewing new products. I might keep up this Compact thing after the summer.

Scenes from the Garden

2010-06-02T18:58:00.000-07:00

Tonight...

Tom watering the plants with the water I'd left in the car from driving back from Michigan this weekend. I figured the plants would be fine with any plastic leeching into the sun-heated liquid. Sylvia accompanies him doing I don't know what.

American Gothic.

The little 8 X 4 raised beds I made this spring. Please don't scrutinize the craptacular workmanship.

Phil and Sylvia working on their circus act.

Beets, carrots, and kale. I love the color of beet greens.

Welcome, little out-of-focus cayenne pepper. Max will be so happy to see you. He's currently obsessed with the idea of feeding hot peppers to unsuspecting folks.

Hey, there, whatcha knowin'? I've come to watch your pea pods growing...

I'm seeing kale chips in my near future...

Wow! This alien carrot is as big as a grill!

...or smaller than a five-year-old's pinky.

Our neighbor took out his circa 1920s cast iron front rails and gave them to us. I think they lend a Grey Gardens vibe to the original, appropriately overgrown, little garden plot.

The end of the rhubarb and the start of the sweet peas. I froze the rhubarb to pull out mid-winter for Angry Chicken's rhubarb hand pies. Man, those things are delicious.

I keep thinking the little lettuce patch, which now has a couple zucchini plants interspersed, is exhausted and ready to be tilled over. And then I cut more greens. Here's tonight's cutting; we're a very healthy family:

Oh, dear. Is that a leftover Cinnamon Poptart in the background?

Pretend you didn't see that.

Consider the Banana

2010-06-02T03:32:00.000-07:00

An old and dear friend and I recently got into a modern-day kerfuffle -- over Facebook -- about the BP oil gusher. He scoffed at my Liking someone else's status update suggesting we boycott BP. His thinking is that if you want to boycott something, boycott oil, which is so entrenched in modern culture as to be an almost impossible boycott. My retort was that, my feelings about BP notwithstanding, oil dependence can't be cut off cold turkey, but there are steps to take that can lessen the current, frightening dependence. I don't agree that because oil is impossible to eliminate for almost every American, we should throw out the baby with the bathwater and just live with the current dependence. Most of us work jobs outside the home where we have to drive to work; that doesn't mean we have to do it in a Hummer.

I was struck when I saw An Inconvenient Truth (oh, Al and Tipper, I'm so heartsick things didn't work out!) that the first tip at the end of the film for making a difference was changing to fluorescent bulbs. Changing a light bulb? That's it? But it's little changes like switching light bulbs can make huge differences. A couple winters ago Phil turned the thermostat down a degree while we were awake and in the house, and turned it down significantly when we were going to bed or heading out. Our monthly bill went down 15% almost instantly.

Likewise, I never accept plastic bags in stores. This has been awkward when a quick dash to the grocery without tote bags in hand has ended in buying more than I expected, and having to precariously balance my haul out of the store. But if everyone in America just started using tote bags, we'd eliminate the annual need for the 12 million gallons of oil needed to make the bags we consume in an average year. (Click here for some other sobering plastic-bag stats.)

In looking at some of the changes Phil and I have made in the past couple years, I think of the banana. I know, I know. Bananas are harvested under often inhumane conditions and shipped halfway around the world to get to my Fresh Market. I know; if I truly was making a difference, I wouldn't eat bananas. But hear me out.

It used to be we'd buy a bunch, and eat them until they got spots. Then Phil and I would wait for the other to eat the spotty ones, which didn't happen. So sometimes I would throw the old bananas wholesale into the freezer with the intention of eventually thawing them out and squooshing out the contents to make banana bread. But I rarely make banana bread, so would generally find an unseemly chocolate-colored lump in the back of the freezer many many months later. Often, we'd just throw out the old bananas.

In the last year, we've started composting, so organic waste always goes into a pile to nourish the garden and our future meals.

So, banana consumption today: We buy a bunch of bananas, and what Sylvia doesn't consume in one sitting (that girl does love her some bananas) sometimes start to get spotty. When the fruit gets too spotty for even Sylvie to eat, I peel the bananas, break them into three pieces, and throw the pieces in a bag in the freezer. The peels go into the compost bin.

The frozen parts could be used for banana bread, which we still don't really eat, but generally go into smoothies. Two of our favorites:

Double-Milk Banana Smoothie: I got this from one of the What to Expect books, but we drink them all the time now. In a blender, whir up a cup of milk, the amount of powdered milk required to make a cup of milk (usually about half a cup), a frozen banana, a bit of vanilla, and a teaspoon or so of cinnamon.
Sylvia and Tommy's Favorite Breakfast Smoothie: A cup of vanilla yogurt (Trader's Point Creamery is their fave), a bit of milk (maybe a quarter cup), a frozen banana, and a handful of frozen berries.

So now, when a banana comes into our house, it doesn't go out in the trash. The flesh eventually gets eaten, and the peel goes into the garden. Our banana routine isn't eliminating the need for oil, but it's a tiny change that, along with the hundreds of other tiny changes we're making, can start to move the needle.

Kale Chips

2010-06-01T03:44:00.000-07:00

The little 8 X 4 garden box I planted in the spring is exploding. Pea pods, beets, onions, and carrots are about ready to be picked. The radishes have been eaten and replaced by tomatoes. And we've got kale. Oh, do we have kale.

My favorite two ways to eat kale are either sliced very thinly and eaten raw on salad, or sauteed with garlic and olive oil. But a friend told me about kale chips, and with the kale regenerating what seems like nightly, I tried them the other day. I like them. Phil wasn't even in the mood to try one. So you'll have to trust me when I say they're good.

Kale Chips

Just pick (or buy), wash, and dry a big bunch of kale. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Fold each leaf in half and cut out the thick vein running up the back. Then rip the leaves into about 1-inch squares. Spray cooking spray on a couple big rimmed cookie sheets. (You can also cover the sheets with parchment paper.) Put the kale pieces on the sheets, drizzle lightly with a little olive oil (and spread it around if it's uneven -- try to get some on each kale piece), sprinkle on some kosher salt, and pop in the oven for about 10 minutes. When they're done, they're crispy and golden on the edges, but not burned.

You won't mistake them for potato chips, but they have that same salty, crunchy thing going. And they have a unique greeny flavor. I loved them. I made my chips a little large, requiring biting into them, which was a mistake. The variety of kale I planted (Red Russian) came out very thin in chips, and biting into them meant a sprinkling of green tiny kale pieces. But Phil's got band practice tonight, the kale exploded again while I was gone for the weekend, and I'm in the middle of a great book (Twelve by Twelve), so I'm seeing some chippy goodness in my near future.

The Modified Compact

2010-05-24T19:18:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot about The Compact. Which sounds like a new John Grisham novel. But it's not.

The Compact began in California as a challenge between ten friends looking to cut down on their material consumption by purchasing nothing new (with a few exceptions) for a year. The goals were to counteract the American consumer culture, to cut down on their own personal waste and clutter, and to live more simply. Thousands of people have since joined the Compact, many extending it long past that first year. Members range from the casual to Freegans, who try to pay for nothing through means like dumpster diving behind restaurants for their food.

Many blogs document various Compact participants and their personal journeys in their Compact lifestyles; my favorite so far is the Nonconsumer Advocate. I can relate to the author's commitment to the Compact, as well as her drawing the line at used undergarments.

In the wake of the ongoing BP underwater oil gush, it's been shocking to read about the amount of oil that is used to create and transport goods. I feel convicted that I need to be more responsible and to go beyond just bringing my own tote bags to the store. I need to be mindful about even going to the store.

Yesterday I was canning jam with my friend Martha. If you're curious, we made strawberry, strawberry-jalapeno, and strawberry chutney -- notice a theme? Anyhoo, we've been friends for 20 years, and we were post-college poor singles at the same time, and share a love of the bargain. I told her I was thinking about doing a modified Compact, and she said, "Um... isn't that kind of what you already do?" I looked down and saw what she meant. My shirt, tank, and earrings were all from garage sales. My shoes were new, but they are Dansko's and built for life. She reminded me that most of Phil and my barware is vintage 60s. We've been eating off vintage Fiesta (and likely now glow from the lead paint) for about 15 years. Sylvia and Tommy were there with me, and both were wearing garage-sale duds.

"Why do you need to do anything formal?" she asked. I took another sip of wine and agreed.

But the more I thought of it, the more I thought that my garage-sale earrings weren't the whole story, and there's a lot I buy new that is unnecessary or completely wasteful. We're entering the most expensive time of year with Max out of school and requiring another $400 a month over the summer for day camp. And yes, for those of you not living in the Midwest, I realize how insanely cheap that is. But still.

So with the motivation of an extra $400 going out the door, and really wanting to be more mindful about what we bring into our house and the virgin materials necessary, I've made my own Compact in force for the next 10 weeks, starting tomorrow. Meaning I have an hour and 17 minutes to go crazy on Anthropologie.com. Here are my guidelines:

This compact is mine. Phil is on his own, and I won't cluck my tongue if he has a bender at Luna Music. That's his business. Maybe he'll even buy me something during his bender. Just saying...
Undergarments can be purchased new. I'm unbending on this point.
E-products can be purchased new. I am in the book business and staunchly support the purchase of information and entertainment. So books that are sent to my Kindle and don't require sacrificing trees or transportation costs are just fine.
Items needed to finish up craft projects are okay. So if I'm about to make a dress for Sylvie out of stash fabric, but need some medium-weight interfacing, I can go to town. $3-a-yard clearances on Amy Butler fabric at Fabric.com don't count as "items needed to finish up craft projects." No matter how hard I'll try to convince myself otherwise.
Likewise, items truly needed for the summer gardening season are at my discretion. I know I'm low on canning jars, so will try to get some through Freecycle.org. If that doesn't work, however, and I'm about to lose a crop of tomatoes that need to be preserved, I'm getting new jars. This doesn't extend to the rose structure I'm coveting.

So really not too bad for 10 weeks. And really not too different from the way we already live. I'm excited and curious to see if putting stricter parameters around what I can and can't purchase will make me realize how much money I've been wasting and how much more ecologically responsible I could be.

One hour and eight minutes and counting....

When the Front Walk Hands You Too Much Lemon Verbena...

2010-05-16T02:52:00.000-07:00

make Lemon Verbena Jelly. Which is what I did this morning.

(Yes, it's been so long since I've posted that I nearly forgot my password.)

This spring I read a thought-provoking book called Radical Homemakers. I'd first seen it referred to in a New York Times article, and since have seen it popping up everywhere. The book, written by radical homemaker Shannon Hayes, looks at the history of homemaking, something shared equally by men and women historically, and how it devolved from making a home to making enough money to buy things we're convinced we need for our home. I have been very taken by the idea of our little household becoming more of a productive than consumptive unit.

Reading this book has dovetailed nicely with my current reading of Gone with the Wind, a mammoth tome my book club inexplicably chose this month. (Thank God for the Kindle, which weighs only 10 ounces, as the print book weighs more than Tommy.) I'm at the point where the South is going down and Scarlet is back at Tara and trying to feed her family. Without what the Yankees left in the garden -- and Scarlet blowing the head off of and robbing a soldier, but we'll forget that part for now -- the family would have starved. It gets a gal thinking.

So, taking baby steps, I've been looking for more ways for us to be self-sustaining and more wisely use what we have.

When I recently read a post from my favorite blogger about making violet jam from the violets peppering her lawn, I started eyeing our little yard. I'd spent a couple weekends earlier pulling up two wheelbarrows full of violet, intent on destroying them, not eating them. Again, gets you thinking.

Several years ago I got a tiny lemon verbena twig. Someone with a house on the way to the CVS we walk to twice a week used to have a perennial exchange; you'd leave little cups of perennials and pick up a couple. Since I picked up the innocent looking styrofoam cup of lemon verbena, it has become a near-nuisance, taking over any time I have my back turned. So last night Sylvie and I went out and picked a bunch, which didn't make a dent in the plants, and this morning I made lemon verbena jam.

I was worried the color might be a little blah, but my disorganized shopping took care of that. I ran out of white sugar and had to include a cup of sucanat sugar, which made the jelly a lovely honey color. Next time, I'll just plan to use a cup of sucanat.

The recipe I used came from Gifts from Your Kitchen. Here's all you do:

Lemon Verbena Jelly

2 packed cups chopped lemon verbena leaves
Large pieces of zest from 1 lemon (I just used a peeler to scrape off big pieces)
2-1/4 cups water
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
4 cups sugar (3 white, 1 sucanat)
3 ounces liquid pectin (Certo)

Combine the lemon verbena, lemon zest and water. Bring to a boil, then cover and lower to a simmer for 15 minutes. Take off the heat and let this sit for several hours; I let it sit overnight because I got sleepy about an hour into it.

Strain the mixture (I did it through a coffee filter) into a big pot. Be sure to squeeze all the liquid from the leaves and zest. Add the sugar and lemon juice, bring to a boil. Add the pectin and bring to another boil; boil for two minutes. Now take off the heat, skim any foam, put in canning jars, and seal. (This link tells how.) If the idea of actually canning makes you woozy, you can just freeze the jars. I don't, since my freezer is full of beef and popsicles, and I love that *THINK* sound the jars make when the lids seal.

This made about five 8-ounce jars.

The taste is really pretty and subtle; I'm thinking scones and chicken glazes.

Lavender bushes that are taking over and I haven't had the heart to cut back, don't think I don't see you...

Rose's Heavenly Cakes Bake-Through: Cheater's Pumpkin Cake

2009-11-02T18:51:00.000-08:00

This week Rose's Heavenly Cakes Bake-Through featured Pumpkin Cake with Burnt Orange Silk Meringue Buttercream. No kidding. That's the name. Quite a handle. The cake itself is stunning -- baked in two round molds that are then forged together to create a pumpkin shape. Frosted in burnt orange silk meringue butter cream. Little marzipan pumpkin leaves and tendrils to complete the pumpkin ensemble. It's really spectacular.

I was debating whether to try it when I skimmed the following description two pages into the four pages of frosting instruction: "It will bubble up furiously." This sentence made me woozy. I am often called away from furiously bubbling pans to find the red Power Ranger or change a nasty diaper or replay Weird Al's "Eat It" on the iPod. I wrote off this recipe and decided I'd catch up with the bake-through next week for Baby Chocolate Oblivions.

But Rose's headnote started with, "Anyone who has tasted this cake has pronounced it the best non-chocolate cake ever." Would you feel you could miss this cake after that description? I know I didn't. Rose went on to state that a tube pan could be substituted for the round molds. So I decided to bake the cake and skip all the trimmings.

The cake itself comes together extremely simply. It's almost like a pumpkin walnut quick bread. The only extra step is toasting the walnuts, and that's so simple and quick and adds such flavor, I don't feel I can quibble. The cake itself is very basic: Dry ingredients mixed together, wet ingredients whirred up in a KitchenAid, dry ingredients added to the wet ingredients.

I frosted the cake with a simple buttercream frosting -- the kind of buttercream my mom would make to spread on graham crackers for a makeshift dessert. A little red and yellow food coloring to make it pretty and orange. Easy peasy.

I had only two challenges with this cake:

It calls for walnut oil. I stood in the oil section of my grocery store Friday night, Sylvia complaining about being contained in the shopping cart, staring and staring at the oils. Then I cursed Indiana for being so backward it didn't stock walnut oil. Then I debated whether to substitute flax seed or safflower oil. Then I noticed that the walnut oil was right in front of my face. Heh heh. My bad. Indiana is a lovely state in which to live.
It's taking every ounce of my depleted willpower to not just take a big wooden spoon to the cake and finish it off tonight. It's delicious. In fact, my now official Tasting Panel (Phil, Noah, and Holly, served during commercial breaks on Mad Men) all pronounced this one utterly delicious. We all had two pieces and thought of going for a third, but that would be excessive, right? This is definitely my favorite cake of the three I've baked so far.

Thinking of the trajectory of cakes, in fact, each has gotten better. The Barcelona Brownies were magnificent. The Apple Upside Down Cake was spectacular. This was even better. I'm fearful for next week's Baby Chocolate Oblivions during the Mad Men season finale. Individual molten chocolate cakes and Don Draper: How much wonderfulness can one person take at a time?

Tune in next week...

A Very Truant Rose's Heavenly Cakes Bake-Through

2009-10-28T18:25:00.000-07:00

I signed up for the Rose's Heavenly Cakes bake-through because I figured, really, how hard can it be to bake a cake every two weeks? And it's not hard at all. Two cakes into it, it's fun. But life has been messing with my ability to blog about the baking. Hence, I'm two days late writing this.

But let's back up three days to last Sunday. Max, Tommy, and I went to the Haunted House at the Children's Museum. Tommy was a little listless. At lunch, I looked over and was alarmed to find his face pale, and his lips as colorless as his face. We headed for home where he watched some Thomas movies quietly and, while Phil occupied the other kids, I baked the Apple Upside Down Cake on this week's schedule.

With the cake safely out of the oven, I took Tom to Immediate Care where they determined he might be in the early stages of H1N1 and prescribed Tamiflu. Back home, undeterred, I whipped up the bourbon whipped cream for the cake, and Noah and Holly came over for our weekly Mad Men date. All four of us agreed the cake was spectacular. The fact that Tommy cried out for me, delusional and extremely sick, midway through my piece and during a climax on the show isn't important. What's important is that this is a really really really good cake.

Being new to the upside down cake world, I thought the process went like this:

Cut up apples and put them in the pan.
Mix up cake batter and pour over.
Bake and enjoy.

This one's slightly more labor-intensive, although well worth the effort. It would have been a bit of a pain if Sylvie had been in the kitchen clinging to my legs, but Phil had her outside playing some form of toddler baseball, so I enjoyed my kitchen time. Here's what I did:

Peel and cut up the apples and let macerate in lemon juice and brown sugar for 30 to 90 minutes.
Melt some butter and pour some into the pan to grease the pan. To the remaining melted butter, add the juice from the macerating apples and more brown sugar, and bring to a boil. Then let this bubble and simmer for a while until it becomes a deep golden brown. Pour this into the pan.
Add the apples to the pan, trying to make a pretty and even pattern.
Mix up cake batter and pour over.
Bake and enjoy.

The final step before eating is to whir up some whipped cream with a tablespoon of bourbon to make a (we found) rather boozy foil for the sweet cake. The whole package really was magnificent.

A couple things to note:

I baked this in a silicone pan that was regifted to me. I'm beside myself in love with silicone now. A co-worker read my Barcelona Brownie entry and brought me some silicone pans she'd received as a gift that she felt were just cluttering her kitchen. If you haven't baked with silicone, run to your nearest Target and get some. Seriously. Nothing sticks to this. In fact, when I unmolded the cake I was slightly off-center on the serving plate and had no second chance to make it right as the cake slide right out immediately.
I eyeballed the bourbon going into the whipped cream, and might have overshot. The cream tasted extremely boozy. Next time I'll be measuring. Although I do have to say bourbony cream seems perfect for enjoying during Mad Men, even if most bourbon on that show is enjoyed liberally during the workday.
I used a cake tester to see if the cake was ready, but didn't stick it in the center of the cake. My bad. The center wasn't cooked through. In fact, after the first night, I scooped out the center so that it wouldn't go rancid and spoil the rest of the cake.
Rose suggests baking this in the pan on a pizza or baking stone to better caramelize the caramel sauce. I didn't, but I'm going to try this next time.
Tommy was very sick and delusional Sunday night, and when he called desperately for me mid-cake, I was a bad enough mom to weigh whether it seemed he needed me immediately, or if I could just finish my cake first. It's that good.

I never got a chance to have a second piece of this masterpiece; Phil ate big hunks of it the next couple nights until it was gone. Which just means I'm going to have to make another. Soon. I'm hoping this next time will be on a night when Tommy doesn't projectile vomit on me, as it delays my getting back to my cake. Just sayin'.

Tell Them That It's Human Nature

2009-10-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

Lately I've noticed that moments of contentment come unexpectedly. With three kids, a sometimes demanding job, a house, a marriage, and other relationships I don't spend nearly enough time tending to, I often spend more time thinking of what didn't get done than what did. What I hadn't gotten to at work and should have. What quality time I'd half-assed with my kids because my mind was in a million places.

Michael Jackson's Thriller came out when I was in tenth grade. It defined my high school experience. My best friend Susan and I shared a locker in our conservative private Christian school, and were reprimanded for decorating the door in a montage of Jackson shots. I put a plastic "Thriller" jacket on layaway at Sears; not being particularly courageous in the fashion department, I ultimately only had the courage to wear it once or twice.

By this time I no longer shared a room with my sister, but the remnants of our time together remained. Years earlier we were allowed to choose how we wanted the room decorated, and at that moment Becky had been feeling purple. The result was purple carpet, purple walls, a purple ceiling, purple crushed velvet bedspreads on our twin beds. The room remained regal into my high school years, although I made throw pillows to tone down some of its royalty. So I spent hours in my purple room, playing Thriller over and over on my Emerson turntable. I loved every song on the album, but "Human Nature" had a special, eerie feel for me. It felt grown-up in the way the other songs didn't, and I heard it and thought of all the possibilities laying out before me. The road was wide open.

A few years later I was in college, and Michael Jackson was a joke. The Thriller jacket was loaned to a friend for a comedy bit in a college show and never returned. The album was long packed away. The ensuing years, with their tabloid drama and true or untrue allegations, were not kind to Michael. I gave Thriller and Off the Wall to Goodwill when Phil and I were downsizing for a move to Brooklyn.

When Michael died, though, I bought a copy of The Essential Michael Jackson, and the kids and I have been listening to it nonstop. Whenever a slow song comes on, the boys yell that they hate love songs, and I have to skip over, say, "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" so that we can get to "Leave Me Alone." They have no tolerance for "Human Nature," which is fine with me. The song has made me feel sad, seeing that the road is no longer wide open, and I prefer to listen to it alone, without their banter and squabbling. I've made life choices that have negated other life choices. My age now was inconceivably old to 16-year-old purpled-roomed Cindy. Had I let my mind wander to this age, I would have won an Oscar for best screenplay in between consulting with patients in my thriving New York psychology practice. I was not picturing the chaos that is my current life. The fact that the physical flaws I saw at 16 didn't disappear but only magnified as I grew older. I wouldn't have pictured myself schlepping to work in jeans and a hail-damaged Subaru.

Tonight Phil took the boys out to get their Halloween costumes, and Sylvia and I had a little girl time. She destroyed the living room while I loaded the iPod with some favorites I'm only able to listen to alone. When "Human Nature" came on, before I could get wistful, she came into the kitchen and started dancing and laughing. She appreciated the song. She didn't ask me to flip past the ballads. She has her whole life ahead of her, with all the promise and possibility that brings, and she was enjoying it.

Sylvia wasn't a planned-for or necessarily wanted baby. I was at the point that I was ready to move on from babies. When I learned I was pregnant, Phil and I spent a good deal of time hand-wringing before we settled into the inevitable. When I lost that baby, we were sad but also had some guilty relief. When I learned I was pregnant again a month after the miscarriage, I knew this baby wanted to be here. Watching her dance to "Human Nature," I listened to the song for the first time feeling the same excitement and potential I'd felt at 16. I hope she felt it, too.

Bake-Through Entry 1: Barcelona Brownies

2009-10-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

Stardate Sunday morning. Sylvia's still asleep. The boys are plugged into Sponge Bob. The kitchen, with its new countertops and lovely new stainless steel sink is begging to be messed with, and I remember that I signed up for the Rose's Heavenly Cakes bake-through. So I roll up my sleeves and flip to the appropriate marked page.

Barcelona Brownies.

Normally, my favorite brownie recipe is the One-Pot Brownies from the out-of-print masterpiece Cook Something. Since I'm usually playing beat-the-clock in the kitchen these days, the idea of one pot and 10 minutes is perfect for me. But I signed up for the bake-through, I'm in the mood for chocolate, and Barcelona Brownies are on the docket.

Check and check.

A couple things to note about these brownies. They are baked, in the book, in a silicone financier mold that make individual brownies. Brilliant. Except that three calls the Friday before brought me to the conclusion Indianapolis is not long on your specialty baking items. I was excited to try the molds, however, so I bought a silicone mold featuring six hearts at Target, and figured I'd make the rest of the brownies in a muffin tin, as I was digging the idea of individual brownies.

Another thing to note is that they include optional ganache plugs of lovely gooey chocolate. I was on the fence about whether to go for the plugs. I ultimately decided against it because 1) I didn't know how much time I had before Sylvie would wake up and cling to my leg as I moved around the kitchen 2) I had forgotten to pick up heavy cream 3) I bought enough dark chocolate to make both the brownies and the plugs, but Tommy and I had snacked on it the day before, and now I only had enough for the brownies. So no plugs. So really 2 and 3 trumped 1, as I didn't have the ingredients to make the plugs. Next time.

The recipe has some great details: toasting the pecans so that they're more flavorful. Combining two kinds of chocolate -- sweetened bar and unsweetened powdered -- to get extra chocolate flavor. The addition of a couple ounces of cream cheese for extra creaminess. And Rose is right: The brownies pop right out the silicone molds. I don't know where these have been all my life.

So after toasting the pecans, melting the chocolate in a make-shift double-boiler (as mine is now part of the kitchen play equipment in the basement playroom), whirring everything in the Kitchenaid, spooning into individual molds, and waiting the allotted time, I was rewarded with some pretty fantastic brownies. I tried one to see how they were, hot hot hot from the silicone mold. Then I tried another just to be sure I could truly report on the taste. (Lovely.) Sylvia meanwhile woke up, had her breakfast, and then spied the brownies. She yelled and pointed until I let her try a piece, and then yelled "more" and pointed and kept getting bites until I distracted her with a walk to the drugstore. Our friend Holly was over Sunday night for our weekly date with she, her husband, and Don and Betty Draper, and tried one. She commented that they were extra chocalatey without being too sweet.

Phil, by the way, was thrown the next day by the muffin shape, thinking I'd made muffins. He ate two, apparently because one wasn't enough to realize they were rich brownies and not breakfast food, and then said he had to go lie down for a while.

Will I make them again? Heck, yeah. I'm even thinking of ordering the financier molds, which I found on Amazon. Next time I will make them at night so that I can make the ganache plugs without worrying that someone will be waking up and harshing my kitchen mellow. And I will go a little lighter on the chocolate; the bar I chose was 86% cocoa, and my powder was dark chocolate. Next time I'll do as Rose suggests and keep the chocolate in the 60s. And, eyeing the pots piled in my new stainless steel sink, I think I'd melt the chocolate and butter (very carefully) in the microwave. I won't skip toasting the pecans, though. They had a much more complex taste after toasting.

If you want to try this recipe, Rose includes the recipe here on her blog. It's delicious.

Next up: Apple Upside Down Cake. I can hardly wait!

Dreaming of Marshmallows

2009-07-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

I love Facebook. Whatever you're into, there you are. A few weeks ago I saw that my neice became a fan of s'mores. I couldn't believe that the s'mores fan base was smaller than the fan base for, say, Barrack Obama, Hugh Jackman, or the Old Facebook. I mean, seriously, how controversial is that? Who doesn't like s'mores?

Which got me thinking we needed to have them this past holiday weekend. With dark chocolate and thick graham crackers from Trader Joe's, and homemade marshmallows. I was feeling that passionate about s'mores.

Max got sick and July 4 was so rainy here that Indianapolis downtown fireworks were postponed until July 5, so no marshmallows were made. But I'm thinking next week will be a do-over, complete with marshmallows.

I've only made them once -- last Christmas. Both Phil's and my families had decided to go easy this Christmas and just be together and not buy gifts. But I love gift-giving, so made each family a bag with hot cocoa mix, homemade marshmallows, and the stuffed bird ornament on the cover of one of my favorite quilting books:

The marshmallows are a little sticky to make and take several hours to set up, but if you're willing to put in the quality Kitchen-Aid time, I think they're worth it.

Bags of sticky goodness.

Max included a few on the assortment of treats he plated up for Santa. He's generally a scoffer, but suddenly got Santa religion on Christmas Eve, hedging his bets so he wouldn't get shafted. He wanted to give Santa something, so I suggested, with as straight a face as I could muster, that maybe Santa would really appreciate a picture of Max. The picture.

We were out of carrots, so told Max reindeer actually like celery better.

The recipe I followed is here; I have seen a million recipes online and in books for homemade marshmallows, but this was the most thorough for explaining in great detail all the steps in a kitchen process I found a little initimidating.

So happy birthday, America. We'll be pulling out the sparklers, Uncle Sam hats, and homemade s'mores on July 11. I can almost taste them now.

My New Favorite Bean Recipe

2009-06-29T18:53:00.001-07:00

Back when Phil and I lived in New York, the New York Times constantly ran a commercial that competed in dorkiness with the Chock-Full-of-Nuts Pinocchio commercial and any number of Mento's ads. Couples were relaxing and yakking about how getting the Times on the weekend has greatly enhanced their lives. A favorite line from a square looking husband went something like, "On Sunday we go for what we really like. I go head to the sports page while she goes straight for the magazine."

Much as I hate being a player in a candidate for worst ad copy ever ("the Sunday New York Times is 40 percent more wonderful than the Sunday Washington Post!"), we do get the Sunday Times and I do head for the magazine first thing. Often the little features -- "The Ethicist," "Consumed" -- are all the paper reading I get. Periodically I'm blessed with an in-depth article by Michael Pollan. And nearly every week there's a recipe or two with an accompanying write-up. While I miss Molly O'Neill from when we were new subscribers years ago, I like that the articles bounce between remembrance, history, technique, and expose. Although I have to admit that I can't stand when "Cooking with Dexter" is up about a persnickety "four-year-old foodie" who I find tedious, but that's another topic. (Boy, that kid works my last nerve.)

Yesterday's article gave a brief history of beans and rice in the five boroughs, followed by a Sunday beans recipe that I tried about 30 seconds after reading it. I was intrigued by stewing the beans in fruit juices as well as the unapologetic use of canned pinto beans, which I have a pantry full of thanks to chili season winding down and a fairly recent trip to Costco.

I didn't have everything on hand that was called for. My beans would be more savory and fatty if I had the chunk bacon called for, for example. But the sweet with beans is brilliant. Phil and I have about killed off the pot I made, with little help from the kids other than Sylvia -- who grabbed a fistful from my bowl while I was eating tonight.

The original recipe is here. And here's my close-enough improvisation.

My New Favorite Bean Recipe

2 Tbsp. or so olive oil
1 yellow onion, small chopped
1 shallot, fine chopped
2 Tbsp. ground cumin
1 Tbsp. ground coriander
1-1/2 cups orange juice
3 cans (15-1/2 oz.) pinto beans, drained with the juice reserved
Salt and pepper to taste

In a medium soup pot, heat up the olive oil. Add the onion and scallion and cook for about 5 minutes -- until they're nice and wilty. Add the cumin and coriander; stir around for a minute or so -- until your kitchen smells lovely. Add in the juice. Raise the heat until the juice starts to simmer, then lower and simmer until it's reduced by half. (The recipe says reduced to 1/4 its original volume, but Sylvie woke from her nap so adjustments had to be made.) Add the beans and enough of the reserved bean liquid to make it a nice sauce consistency. Let it bubble for another 20 or so minutes, adding more bean liquid if it gets at all dry. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Phil and I found it's good hot, cold, and at room temperature. We have yet to try it frozen on Popsicle sticks.

While I was saucing up new bean recipes, Phil was visiting folks back in the Big Apple. He stayed with our friends Amy and Dan, whose basement bar you might remember from this post several years ago. They're renovating their kitchen (and adding a half bath and growing the house), and Amy's getting a six-burner, two-oven stove out of the deal. We might have to stop being their friends.

Beano Tuesday: Saucy Cannellinis over Spinach

2009-06-16T18:40:00.000-07:00

One week into Beano Monday and I miss posting. As Tommy and I often say, silly Mommy!

Anyhoo, tonight was fast food for the boys (Tom's "collecting" all the Night at the Museum 2 toys), so Phil and I were on our own for dinner. He cobbled together a meal from about five little containers of leftovers, while I guiltily made myself a dinner that's one of my favorites. My friend Katie, a favorite cook, made it for me one night and it's maddeningly simple and really delicious -- especially considering how few humble ingredients it contains.

Saucy Cannellinis over Spinach

2 or 3 tsp. nice olive oil
2 or so cloves of garlic, minced
2 or so tsp. anchovy paste (or a couple anchovies, if you like)
a few sprinkles crushed red pepper flakes
1 can (15 oz. or so) cannellini beans, drained but with the juice reserved
A generous handful of fresh baby spinach leaves
A Tbsp. or so grated Parmesan, if you like

Heat up the olive oil over medium heat in a little saucepan. Add the garlic, anchovy paste (or anchovies), and pepper flakes; stir until the garlic is nicely browned but not burned and the paste is mixed in nicely (or the anchovies disappear into the oil). Add the drained beans and then add back a little of the juice. Lower the heat a little and let it simmer, stirring every now and again. If tonight gauges your quiet time, you'll have time to read a few small features and a Fareed Zakaria (love that man!) article in the new Newsweek while the beans gently cook and get a little saucy. Add a bit more of the juice if they seem like they're drying out.

Pour the hot beans over the spinach greens, which will partially wilt. Lovely. Sprinkle with the Parmesan. Apologize to anyone eating scrounged leftovers that, sadly, this recipe really only comfortably serves one. Too bad.

In other food news, my friend Kitty recently introduced me to the idea of homemade Greek yogurt. I'd lost steam making my own yogurt because it always came out a bit runnier than I like. So we'd become big fans of a local dairy that makes the most amazing yogurt, which the kids devour, and Phil's become a fan of Greek yogurt. But with Kitty to encourage me, this weekend I made yogurt. When it was finished, I lined a strainer with a coffee filter (Kitty says you can also use a linen towel) and poured the yogurt in, letting it strain over a bowl overnight in the fridge. In the morning the bowl was full of whey, which looks not unlike what fills Sylvie's diapers several times a day. So although I understand you can bake with whey, in what seems like a sign of wanton consumerism in these tough economic times, I guiltily it threw out.

The resulting firm yogurt did need some whipping up with a whisk to make it creamy, but then it was delicious. And far less expensive than the $4.99 containers someone in our household keeps picking up at the Fresh Market. I smell a new staple in our house...

A Weekly Feature*, Featuring White Bean and Tuna Salad

2009-06-08T18:35:00.000-07:00

* when I remember.

This weekend Sylvie and I made a mad trip to Michigan to hang out with the family. My sweet niece and nephew planned a surprise anniversary party for my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother and I made the trip to see the look on Becky's face. Which, I might add, was priceless.

Having been out of the house all weekend, I woke this morning realizing there weren't leftovers for my lunch. So I threw together one of my favorite pantry-staple, high-protein, South Beach-lovin' salads: White Bean and Tuna. And I realized that early last week I'd also posted a legume recipe, so welcome to

BEANO MONDAYS

I'm a huge lover of beans. Dried. Canned. Whatever. Even if you buy the designer variety, like Rancho Gordo, they're still very cheap next to most meats. And they look lovely in jars in the pantry, so I tend to go overboard at the bulk-foods store. If you have a great bean recipe, e-mail me at cindy_kitchel@yahoo.com, and I'll share it here -- or share it in the comments. I mean, really, who couldn't use another bean recipe in the repertoire?

Even if you aren't a bean lover, I think the Rancho Gordo packaging would win you over.

White Beans and Tuna Salad in a Flash

2 cans cannelini or similar beans, drained and lightly rinsed
2 small cans tuna in water, drained, or tuna in olive oil, undrained
1/2 red onion, sliced very thinly
6 or so Tbsp. red wine or similar vinegar
2 or 3 Tbsp. olive oil, if you used tuna packed in water
1/2 small jar capers, drained
Salt and pepper to taste

Combine the beans, tuna, and onion in a bowl. Add the vinegar and, if your tuna was packed in water, olive oil. Stir it around a bit, and then add the capers and salt and pepper to taste. Done and done.

In other food-related news, my sister-in-law just sent me a pair of onion glasses. You wear them when slicing onions to stay tear-free. I can't wait to try them! I have four cups of onions to slice for a dip I'm making later this week, so I'm going to put the glasses through their paces and will report back.

The Blog Post that Made Me Happiest Today

2009-06-03T18:47:00.000-07:00

Most days I cycle through a blog roll, some for work, some that I just personally like.

One of my favorites is my co-worker Suzy's blog www.four-by-two.blogspot.com, in which she chronicled her pregnancy with quads and now life with quads. Yesterday's post was absolutely delightful. Check it out!

I Stand Corrected

2009-06-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

Teensy issue in the last post. I forgot the number 1 rule of converting traditional recipes to slow-cooker recipes: You don't need so much liquid. In fact, generally speaking, you can cut liquids in half because they don't cook off in a slow cooker.

So use 1 quart of chicken stock, not 2. My bad. The soup was still delicious, but when I came home and realized the error of my ways, I cooked it down a bit to get to the consistency I wanted. I fixed the entry, but wanted to point out my goof.

Incidentally, if you're doing it on the stove, use the two quarts, bring everything to a boil, and then turn down to a gentle simmer for 45 or so minutes -- until the beans are soft.

Late Spring Meal: White Bean Soup and Homemade Croutons

2009-05-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

Julia Child always said you should never apologize. I think she meant for the state of your home or the dinner you're serving, not if, say, you rear-ended another motorist. But I'm guessing it also applies to not updating a blog for, oh, almost three months. So I'll just move on.

Something comes over me when I go to Costco. Suddenly I'm stocking up a fallout shelter and really need two dozen kiwi. Last week I bought two huge loaves of multigrain La Brea Bakery bread. Then we went out of town. Consequently, even with me and Phil doing our best to gnaw our way through the enormous bag, I still found myself staring at one and a half drying loaves last night. Not in the mood for bread pudding, which I always associate with winter, I made croutons.

Homemade Croutons

They're easy. Just preheat the oven to 400 degrees, cut the bread into one-inch or so cubes, lay them on a rimmed cookie sheet, drizzle them lightly with olive oil, and stir around a bit to get them a teensy bit coated. Pop them in the oven for 10 minutes, stir around a bit more, and bake them for another 5 to 15 minutes, checking every 5 minutes. Once they're golden, they're ready. If you have a cheap and temperamental oven like mine, some might end up black while others are barely browned. Just chuck the black ones; no one deserves to eat burned croutons.

White Bean Soup

Staring at the Ziploc bag of croutons this morning, I decided to make a soothing white bean soup to go with. While I love stirring bean soup contemplatively, it's a workday, so I enlisted the help of my slow cooker. The recipe basically comes from The Barefoot Contessa, still one of my all-time favorite cookbooks.

Medium chop 2 or 3 yellow onions -- it's going to make 3 or 4 cups of chopped onion. In a skillet over medium-high heat, heat up a few good glugs of olive oil -- 3 or 4 tablespoons. Dump in the onions and let them cook until they're a little wilty and translucent. Now add in a couple minced cloves of garlic. Let that continue simmering for a few minutes. Pour everything into a slow cooker and add 1 quart of chicken stock, 2 cups of rinsed white beans (I never soak them), a bay leaf, and a nice branch of fresh rosemary. Set it to low and go to work.

When I come home tonight, I'll strip the rosemary leaves from the branch, throw away the branch, and then puree the soup using an immersion blender. You can add some salt and pepper to taste here.

In a shallow bowl topped with a couple drops of olive oil, maybe a little bit of fresh minced rosemary, and a small handful of croutons, this soup's going to make one nice dinner after a crazy-hectic week.

I love this soup. It's so much more than the sum of its parts. I used to make lots of bean soups when I was following that crazy Susan Powter's low-fat plan in the early 90s. The soups were functional and cheap, but not delicious. As with everything, I find that bean soups really need some fat to make them not taste like something out of Oliver Twist.

Meanwhile, if anyone has any ideas for the bowlful of limes I bought last week, I'm all ears.

Whoo-hoo! Guess Who's One Year Old?

2009-03-10T18:32:00.000-07:00

Yeah for me!

It's hard to believe. Monday Sylvie hit her first birthday.

This weekend both sets of grandparents came to celebrate.

I whipped up some applesauce cupcakes that I've made many times from The Buttercup Bake Shop Cookbook. Something went terribly awry (the powdered egg substitute, perhaps?), however, and they collapsed like deflated basketballs. The lemon and strawberry numbers that Phil picked up from The Flying Cupcake were much, much more appropriate for such a momentous occasion.

Sylvie got some presents: Tasha Tudor books from Grandma and Grandpa Morrow, cute little girl clothes including the cutest, flounciest dress I've ever seen from Grandma and Grandpa Kitchel, a talking My Pretty Purse, which Tom and Max kept usurping to "show Sylvia how to use it."

How cool is it that the little girl's name in the story is Sylvie Anne?

Sylvie dove into her first cupcake with the kind of respectful gusto one might expect.

And then it was time for the ritualistic post-cupcake hose-down.

I can't believe you're 1, birthday girl!

Slow Cooking the Crazed Kitchen Way

2009-02-15T06:23:00.000-08:00

My college roommate Julia has a wonderful blog called Hooked On Houses that tracks decorating trends, celebrity houses, Home-a-ramas -- basically anything involved with the housing market. I see the spacious, clutter-free homes on her site, and go away to a world that does not entail a small Cape Cod filled with the toys of three kids and the overwhelming book stacks of two ratpack adults. Some day, I tell myself.

This is a great parallel to our food life. Things have been more hectic than normal lately, with my work travel increasing and Sylvia getting more mobile and feisty, and I find I'm spending my time thumbing through cookbooks that celebrate slow, unfettered kitchen time; long meals stretching long into the night; and an insistence on ingredients of only the best quality. A favorite line I recently read, "If you've ever been to Barcelona, you know some of the best anchovies in the world are found there." I'm dreaming of a time when I can not only travel to Barcelona, but have the clarity of mind to recognize the superiority of its anchovies.

Meanwhile, I'm letting the books take me away, like a Calgon bath. My two favorites for these armchair cooking trips recently have been David Tanis's A Platter of Figs (and Other Recipes) and Paula Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes for the Passionate Cook.

The reality is that these days on those nights when we don't have take-out or "silly supper" (i.e., breakfast for supper, which is usually cereal) or warmed-up frozen corndogs, my best friend has become my slow cooker. I'm always of two minds on the slow cooker because it seems things either come out breathtakingly wonderful, or are a one-color brown mess that I picture being served in a cut-rate nursing home. And cooking in our slow-cooker always means we'll have enough food to feed the block, so it's not a tool I pull out daily.

A recent boon to my slow-cooker repertoire has been the discovery of A Year of CrockPotting, an amazing blog in which writer and slow-cooker addict Stephanie chronicled her successful attempt to cook with her trio of slow cookers every day for a year. I can't even imagine how much food this would produce, but I love the blog nonetheless.

Two recent recipes I've tried and loved are the rib recipe Nikki Royer included in her interview a couple years ago (even my picky boys love ribs) and a slightly modified version of the Taco Soup recipe from A Year of Crockpotting. (Stephanie's original recipe is here.)

Stephanie raved about the recipe, and I have to admit when I initially made it, I was somewhat "meh" on the first night we had it. But it made a ton of soup, so I ate it for lunch for a week, and every day it got better until by Friday I was thinking about it all morning and ripping into my lunch at 11:20. If I were making it for a crowd, like for a Super Bowl party, I'd be inclined to make it a couple days early, refrigerate it to let the flavors all meld together, and reheat it before the guests came. I'd also serve it with sour cream, shredded cheese, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes... you get the idea. I also liked that this helped clear out my pantry; I tend to stock up on canned food like I'm preparing for the apocalypse.

Be sure to have your recycling bin cleared out before you start this. You'll be filling it!

Slightly Modified Taco Soup

1 pound ground meat
1 packet taco seasoning
1 packet ranch dressing mix
2 cans of kidney beans, drained
2 cans of black beans, drained
2 cans of corn, drained
1 large can of diced tomatoes, undrained
1 can mild chopped chiles, undrained
About half a can (use one of the bean cans) of water

Brown and drain the meat. Put the meat in the slow cooker. Sprinkle the seasoning mixes on top. Dump everything else on top of that, and cook on low for about 8 hours. While eating, surrounded by your fighting boys and yelling baby girl, take a moment to dream of the superior anchovies in Barcelona.

New Year's Roast

2009-01-01T16:12:00.000-08:00

I bought some black-eyed peas and cabbage, but somehow couldn't bring myself to make it tonight, knowing the boys won't eat either. So I'll subject them to this traditional holiday meal some time this weekend. Instead, we welcomed in the new year with my new favorite roast.

I think the secret ingredient here (besides, you know, a good cut of beef) is coffee. My friend David, a magnificent cook, once explained to me that he uses coffee in all of his marinades because it opens up the meat cells so it stays tender, or some such thing that is now a blur thanks to his partner's magnificent Cosmopolitans. But my vague remembrance of the conversation is coffee + meat = good.

Unlike other recipes I've tried in the past, this one really does produce a juicy, delicious roast. Tommy, who often subsists on three pretzels and a spoonful of yogurt, asked for seconds before I had finished cutting Sylvia's beets into tiny pieces.

The basic recipe comes from a cookbook I found at my mom's house: Cooking from Quilt Country, which the good people at Amazon tell me is now out of print but available pretty cheaply used. The author, Marcia Adams, notes that the frugal and clever Amish found a good use for leftover morning coffee. I generally find a use for this extra coffee, as well, but it usually involves some half-and-half and a fourth cup. But that's another post.

Tommy's Favorite Roast

A roast (Marcia suggests a 3-pounder, but our local farmer usually puts them in about 1.5 pound lots)
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 cup coffee
2 crumbled bay leaves
A couple garlic cloves, minced
About 1/2 tsp. dried herbs (I used Dean & Deluca's Herbs for Meat)
2 sliced onions

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.

In a Dutch oven, heat the oil over medium heat and brown the meat. (Here's the Dutch oven I've pledged my love to 'til death do us part.) Set the meat on a platter for a second.

Mix up everything else except one of the onions and pour it into the Dutch oven. Set the meat on top. Top with the other sliced onion. Cover and bake for anywhere from 2-1/2 to 4 hours, depending on the size of the roast, marinating every hour or so. My 1.5-pounder took around 2-1/2 hours. The roast should be in quite a bit of liquid, so if it dries out while it's baking, pour in another cup of coffee and a generous splash of soy sauce.

To serve it, I move the roast on a platter, put the onions in a separate bowl (the boys won't eat them and turn into drama queens if any appear on the roast), and pour a spoonful or so of the liquid on the roast.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T18:28:00.000-08:00

It's 9:28 p.m. on December 31. I was supposed to be at a party, with kids, but Tommy turned into such a pistol today that Phil and I changed plans pre-party. He went to the party with Max, and I put Tommy and Sylvia to bed. At some point, Phil will bring Max home, drunk on bubbly apple juice and too many cookies, and Phil might or might not return to the party. On paper, it seems like I'm getting the raw end of the deal, but I don't mind a little time to myself to settle in, maybe read some, maybe have a glass of wine, and reflect quietly.

Today I thought about what a year it's been. Like many people, the precarious economy has had me pessimistic much of this year. When 2008 began, I knew we weren't in a bull market, but I never would have guessed the year would close with Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, IndyMac, and Washington Mutual all effectively dissolved. Or that the Detroit auto makers that comprised my reality growing up -- I was about the only kid I knew who didn't have at least one parent working in the plants -- would be on the edge of collapse. I wouldn't have guessed that unemployment and foreclosures would be at record highs while retail sales would be at record lows. There's much to be pessimistic about.

There's also reason for a lot of hope. I would not want to be in Barrack Obama's shoes right now (although I wouldn't mind wearing some of Michelle's cute numbers), but I feel like more than any other presidential candidate this year, he understands the gravity of the mess he's walking into. We'll all have criticisms of what he's doing and how it's getting done, but I feel that I can trust him to make sound and reasoned decisions. Foremost, I feel he's a strong leader in a country that needs strong leadership. Secondarily, however, it gives me great hope that America elected its first African American president and that we collectively judged the incoming president on the content of his character and not the color of his skin.

Personally, I have so much to be thankful for. While I cringe every time a financial statement comes, and have finally taken Phil's advice to quit opening them for a while, we're doing well. So far Phil and I, and our family and friends, have held onto jobs. We aren't in danger of our home being foreclosed. We don't have to decide whether to feed our children or put gas in the car to get to work. I know that many people in this country are not in that situation, and am humbled by our good fortune.

And I am thankful every day for Max and Tommy and Sylvia. We started the year with two kids and some trepidation about having an unexpected third so late in life. But from the moment I met Sylvie last March, I can't imagine our family without her. Nine months later, she's an expert crawler, a lover of baths, a nonstop chatterer, and a strong-minded female who will work and work for what she wants -- like, say, a handful of the cat's food.

I hope you all have whatever New Year's Eve you're hoping for -- whether that means you'll fall asleep with a book or dance Mambo #9 with a lampshade on your head.

Peace.

Imagine Last Week's Picture...

2008-11-11T11:09:00.001-08:00

With a big black hole in the front of the pained smile.

Max was more than a year before he got any teeth. His 10-month pictures boast a big gummy grin. Then about a week after his first birthday his mouth exploded like a bag of microwave popcorn and he got four teeth in about ten days.

Which appears to be the way he's going to lose them. All of his friends have had Tooth Fairy visits a'plenty, and he's been stuck on the sidelines, fruitlessly wiggling his very solid teeth and praying for a miracle.

But in the last two weeks he's lost both his bottom front teeth and his right top front tooth. It's really something to watch him struggling with an apple.

Meanwhile, the Tooth Fairy is more seriously eyeing those e-mail solicitations to unlock the equity in her home.

By the way, I loved the comments about Max's photo. I'm still giggling over the thought of Photoshopping on a big gold clock, Flavor of Love style. And, offline, my friend Kim said he looked like Napoleon Dynamite's brother Kip after he got all gangsta'd out.

Enjoy Them Today... And for a Lifetime!

2008-10-30T18:40:00.000-07:00

Max had picture day a couple weeks ago. His school does picture day old style: Your parents pick and pay for the package they want, the photographer gives everyone a 10-cent black comb, one picture is snapped, and two weeks later a raft of those pictures are sent home.

And yes, Max, who has the most beautiful smile and infectious laugh in the world, freezes up horribly when he's told to smile for the camera. And yes, he and Tommy have been going through my old jewelry from the 80s and 90s and wearing it around the house. And yes, Max was overdue for a haircut. And yes, he recently got a silver cap as the result of our being negligent in the flossing arena. All of this I knew.

And yet nothing prepared me for the 8 X 10 glossy that greeted me when I opened his homework folder:

"Tell us what you think!" states the envelop containing 25 -- 25! -- of these photos. "We'd love to know what you think of your school portraits."

And I'd love to tell you. Darn tootin'.

Knitter's Weekend 2008

2008-10-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

Good times.

Protecting Our Food Borders

2008-10-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

Through the years I've harbored crushes on men who were never to be mine. Take my fifth-grade love for Andy Gibb (dead). Or my late-high-school affection for George Michael (surprisingly, not playing for my team). These days, my crushes are centered on Don Draper (the character, not Jon Hamm who plays him), Stanley Tucci, and Michael Pollan. So there were schoolgirl screeches this weekend when we got the New York Times and found that the entire Sunday magazine was devoted to food, with a very large article contributed by Mr. Pollan. Be still my heart.

For those who haven't heard my blathering on about Michael Pollan, he's a journalist and food activist who is known for his wit, balance, and ability to boil down complex topics into readable prose. He spoke here in Indy last winter, and I waddled my nine-months'-pregnant self into Butler University to bask in his glory and giddily ask him to sign my copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma. I still get chills thinking of his discussing the difference between Food and "food," how we can turn around the current unhealthy eating situation in America, and sustainable agricultural practices. The stuff of dreams.

The article, which you can read here, is basically an open letter to the future president, explaining his thoughts on how government can help to take oil from food production and give the job of nurturing our food back to the sun, as it was intended.

Mike, as I like to call him, is a huge advocate of eating local where possible, something Phil and I have been trying to do more of in the last couple years. One argument he made, which I'd never thought of, however, is that it would be extremely easy for terrorists to attack through our centralized food supply. If your salad is coming from a mondo-farm in California that produces 20 million servings of salad a week, tainting that supply could quickly hit millions across the country in a way that tainting the supply of a weekend farmer at your local farmer's market couldn't.

Remember the big beef recall last winter? It affected 143 million pounds of beef that was distributed nationwide. Since Phil and I have started buying our antibiotic-free meat locally from a local farming family, our meat for an entire year has come from a single cow, and the packaging is labeled with our name (KITCHEL - BEEF STEW MEAT, it'll read). Should something go wrong, the source of the issue would be easy to trace and would be miles, not states, away.

While I don't see a terrorist around every corner and am as annoyed as the next air traveler about dispensing my toiletries into 3-ounce lots and collecting them in little baggies, it is something to think about. The current uber-farming system is bad for our health, it's bad for the environment, and it does make the possibility of hitting millions of people quickly relatively simple. Certainly, I'm guessing, more simple than building an on-board bomb from my hair conditioner.

Baby 1 / Cindy's Good Intentions Zip

2008-09-22T18:29:00.001-07:00

Sylvia passed the six-month mark a couple weeks ago, and I've just started introducing her to food. It's very exciting. So far we've done rice cereal, which she gobbled up. Bananas, ditto. Pears, couldn't get enough. This weekend it was time to move to carrots. Whoo-hoo.

With each of the kids I've had the best intentions of making their baby food, but twice now I've bowed to the gods of Gerber. Third time's a charm, though, as just the thought of weighing down my Ecobags with dozens of little jars of food and then piling them willy-nilly in the pantry wore me out. So this weekend I made Sylvie some food.

First I toted my Ecobags to the store and bought organic apples and carrots and an ice cube tray. Then I peeled, cored, chopped, and cooked the apples with a couple tablespoons of water. I froze all of this in little applesauce cubes to use later in the week. Next I peeled, chopped, and steamed a few carrots, added some of steam water back in, and used a pureed her up a nice little dinner. The extra I froze in little carrot cubes for later in the week.

Come dinner, she got one taste of the carrots and gave me a betrayed look. She added insult to injury by shaking her head side to side a few times as if to clear her head, then screwing up her face as if she'd smelled something foul. I tried again. Oh, I couldn't, she seemed to say. I'm simply stuffed.

Feeling deflated by her lack of hunger, I picked up a plastic container of Gerber bananas. She kicked her feet vigorously, made the happy squeaky sound, and opened her mouth like a famished baby bird. Then proceeded to eat the whole thing container and part of another.

The next day I tried the carrots again. Same diva routine. More packaged bananas.

Meaning it might be time for a talk. While she was born at a lower birth weight than her brothers, she's heading in a different direction: She gained 20 percentile points on girth between her four-month and six-month checkups. If she's not willing to eat her vegetables, I'm not seeing her lose the one physical trait she clearly inherited from me: The Morrow thighs.

(For what it's worth, I'm consulting a great little book called Top 100 Baby Purees for making her baby food. Although I'm guessing Sylvie will have little interest in any of the recipes until we proceed to the dessert section.)

Antiquarian Cookbooks for Your Viewing Pleasure!

2008-09-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

I discovered the coolest site via the Angry Chicken blog. The Michigan State University Library and MSU Museum has scanned several dozen antiquarian cookbooks from its collection. So you can check out 200-year-old recipes perfect for everything from the chocaholic to the convalescent. I'm loving the 1830 copy of The Frugal Housewife, as well as Fannie Farmer's Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent.

If you have a huge chunk of time on your hands -- cuz trust me, it's a time-suck -- check out Feeding America.

Pre-Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

2008-09-12T12:27:00.000-07:00

Why haven’t I read this book? I don’t know. It’s been on the bestseller lists, both in hard cover and paperback, since it published more than a year ago. And I love reading about food and sustainability and sticking it to the Processed Food Man.

When this book first came out, in Spring 2007, I was intrigued. In it, novelist and essayist Barbara Kingsolver and her family spend a year growing their own food or only eating local. The reviews I’d read were glowing, and the brief essays I’d read by Kingsolver in other publications, including a Mother Jones article about modern organic farming and the politics involved, were stellar. At the time it published, though, I was feeling too cheap to spring for the hardcover edition. So I held out.

And then a department assistant I adored announced she and her fiancé were moving to the West Coast. As a thank-you gift, she gave me this book, even though we’d never talked about it. So I started reading.

Almost immediately I found myself pregnant and sickly, and I truthfully couldn’t care less about eating local. So the book’s been sitting in my living room pile of unread books for a about a year. Recently I'd started eyeing it again.

Yesterday my mother-in-law called and in the conversation asked if I’d read this book. She'd read it and loved it, and thought I’d enjoy it as well. “Funny you should ask,” I said, relaying how I had a copy and had gotten sidelined.

Then last night I checked my high school alumni site and found that the sister of my best-friend- in-high-school had left me a message. Judy, my friend’s sister, was the type to screech like a school girl if she broke a nail. I remember one time when she stepped in dog mess and moaned and complained incessantly; I thought we might have to get her new shoes. So it was a surprise to learn that she’s now living on acreage, raising bees and selling honey at the local farmer’s market, and dreaming of moving her family to a true farm with working animals. After I read her profile and pulled myself off the floor, I sent her an article by my beloved Michael Pollan about what could be causing the decrease in honeybees. Since then, we've written back and forth a little about sustainability and food choices. Last night she sent a message asking if I’d read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and praising the zucchini chocolate chip cookie recipe.

So one random gifting and two unrelated recommendations in the same day lead me to believe that the sustainability gods are telling me I need to read this book. I picked it back up before bed and got through about four marvelous pages before konking out -- a result of Sylvia being up four times the night before, not a boring text. I can’t wait to get back to it tonight.

Has anyone read it? Thoughts? Any other food writing of note?

Random Musings on the Lost Art of the Cocktail Hour

2008-09-02T18:16:00.000-07:00

I just finished re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's Two-Part Invention about her 40-year marriage to Hugh Franklin that ended with his death from cancer. I first discovered the book 15 years ago and consumed volumes of L'Engle after finding it. This copy is extra special to me because I had her sign it at a conference that she headlined. "For Cindy," reads the inscription, "Beautiful Inventions."

I've since learned that much of what was written as fact in the book might have been fairly fictionalized, but it's still a striking book. I've enjoyed re-reading it. Even if I initially picked it up for a rather trite reason: I was trying to find her description of their family's evening ritual. (Turns out, I must have remembered that description from A Circle of Quiet, because it's not in this book.) Every evening when her and Hugh Franklin's three kids were old enough to be civil but young enough to live at home, the family would have quiet hour before dinner. Hugh and Madeleine would each have a martini and talk about the day or world events. If their children wanted to participate in adult conversation, they could join in. If they didn't, they could make themselves scarce.

With our kids being six, three, and zero, I spend most of my time with them being talked at incessantly about Webkinz and Power Rangers and what Santa's on tap to bring in four months. Sylvia is mute, but still manages to stir up a fuss if she's a mite peckish or is tired of the bouncy seat or is stuck in mid-rollover. It will be a long time before Phil and I can incorporate a civil cocktail hour into our day, but I do aspire to it. From my vantage point, a properly executed cocktail hour serves a purpose in shifting focus from work to family.

One of the most beautiful and articulate descriptions of cocktail hour I've found comes from Rachel Fudge in her essay "The Art and Science of Cocktail Hour," which is included in this great book of food writing. Rachel, whose parents enjoy a similar ritual to the Franklin-L'Engles, writes, "The underlying function of the cocktail hour is to create a smooth transition from work to relaxation, from hectic to tranquil." Who wouldn't love that? A quiet drink prepared thoughtfully and sipped meditatively is a far cry from what cocktail hour has evolved into: Happy Hour. That phrase fills me with thoughts of being trapped in the industrial windowless bar of a W Hotel, the beautiful people drinking layered or lime-green drinks, a television blaring sports, electronica playing too loudly to be comfortably talked over. The art of the cocktail has been hijacked in the past generation. Let's bring it back.

If I can continue my rant, when it comes to cocktails, size does matter. A "drink" is measured as 1-1/2 ounces. That's it. Like everything, however, cocktails have been supersized to the point of insult. I used to own a vintage set of cocktail glasses that held maybe 4 ounces; I got rid of them in the purge that preceded our move to Brooklyn. Ten years later, I still mourn those glasses at least once a month. Phil and I went on a quest to find remotely normal sized martini glasses several years ago, and the smallest we could find was 7 ounces. Or, for my poor math, the equivalent of four and a half drinks. It's obscene. A cocktail -- especially one that consists solely of alcohol -- should be like a perfect, cold little jewel, not a Big Gulp that has to be sloshed through and leaves its drinker feeling tipsy and bloated.

My cocktail of choice for a decade and a half has been the basic gin martini, not a drink to be taken lightly. I was first introduced to this classic by my friend Martha in a small Indiana bar called Syd's. Martha has always been mature for her age, and she ordered her drink, and then sat with her cardigan draped over her shoulders, chasing the air conditioner chill, and relaying the intricacies of a sketch she'd recently heard on A Prairie Home Companion. I figured what the hey and ordered a martini, too. It was a fun night, and we followed our martinis with Syd's famous burgers and fried pickles. I've never looked back.

For my money, I'm a purist when it comes to the martini. I agree with the sentiment that you can make a lovely drink with vodka and vermouth, but it's no martini. For me, it needs to consist of ice-cold gin, a smidgen of vermouth, perhaps a bit of olive juice, and a big olive skewered on one of various cocktail picks that seem to reproduce nightly in our dining room. Shaken, not stirred, and poured into the glass quickly before any of the ice in the shaker can melt.

While I love stories of extra-dry martini rituals, like FDR making his martinis by filling the shaker with gin and then glancing at the vermouth bottle across the room, I am not militant about the exact amount of vermouth to go in the glass. (I used to have a Smith and Hawken plant mister I used for misting the glass with vermouth, but I realized how effected it was. And the vermouth rusted out the workings, anyway, so it became unworkable.) I periodically like to skip the olive juice and trade in the olive for a lemon twist, but I think it's more because I like to show off now that I've learned to make the twist.

These days it's hard to believe that I'll ever be able to go to the bathroom alone, read an entire article in the Sunday morning paper without fielding half a dozen requests, or get a straight seven hours of sleep. And it's nearly inconceivable that Phil and I some day will be able to implement a quiet time before dinner when we can ease from hectic to tranquil. But I'm holding onto the dream.

Bottoms up.

I'm Ba-a-a-a-ack

2008-09-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

I put this blog on hold about nine months ago due to you-know-who:

I'm finally well past both the pregnant sleepies and the new baby fog and starting to think about cooking again.

So let's get this party started.

Facing Reality, with Recipes

2007-10-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

I've finally come to the conclusion that pending parenthood this third and unexpected time around is taking more out of me than I was admitting to, and some things are going to have to go. So SlowishFood is going on a sabbatical of indeterminate length. I'm hoping to get back to all things food, as my concerns about our food choices remain as passionate as when I began this blog, but I find right now I'm cooking and experimenting less, and just have a lot less to say -- even if I had the energy to sit down and write, which I'm finding I don't.

So I leave you with two recipes, one a new one and one that's been my favorite for years.

First, the new one. And pardon my being apparently the only person on the planet who didn't know this party trick. We recently went to our friends Bill and Toni's house for the weekend. They live in a small town outside Indianapolis. Their house is huge -- originally a very generous house on two lots that had been generously added to over the years. They have two kids, one slightly older and another slightly younger than M, and their home is a kid paradise: Goldfish pond out back, motorized cars, Thomas table with full setup, room for little boys to strip off their shoes and shirts and run around like English schoolboys in Lord of the Flies.

Toni made some wonderful meatballs when we were there, and I asked if she would have a chance to give me the recipe. She looked at me like I was making fun of her, which I wasn't. I was being sincere. They were delicious. Here's the recipe, which apparently everyone in the Western world but me knew:

Mix 1 large jar grape jelly and 1 equal-sized jar salsa in a slow cooker. Add however many frozen meatballs, bought in bulk, that you want. Cook on low for several hours until the meatballs are hot and ooey. These would be great on egg noodles, although we ate them just as they were.

And the second recipe, requiring slightly more effort and resources, comes from Zelda Fitzgerald from Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings, and is for "Breakfast":

See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy.

Peace.

DKW 2007

2007-10-14T12:09:00.000-07:00

The group at high tea. Pardon my blink.

This past weekend was our annual Damned Knitters Weekend, or DKW. (You might remember last year's weekend.) It was at my house, a locale I'd volunteered a week or so before the rabbit died. My plan initially was to get the place finally together. Paint the rooms that needed painting. Finally get a new dining room table that didn't teeter if someone cut meat too vigorously. Fix the leaky sink. I didn't realize at the time that the next few months I'd be lucky to muster the energy to get showered for work. So the house wasn't out of Martha Stewart Living, but with this group of laid-back women, it didn't matter. We could have been camped out in a cabin without running water and still had a great time, provided there was lots of food and a bit of beer.

This has been an interesting year of transition for nearly everyone in the group. On top of my surprise pregnancy, there have been relationship shake-ups, a pending divorce, a pending move across the country, and international adoption. It was so good to get together, compare notes, encourage each other, and of course, eat lots of cheese.

And I mean LOTS of cheese.

Friday everyone came, weighted down with supplies for the weekend. Katie brought growlers -- jugs of beer brewed at the local brewery Broad Ripple Brewpub. Kitty brought a few bathrooms' worth of fun and indulgent bath supplies. Kim brought specialty food, including ten (yes, ten) kinds of cheese recommended from Frasier's Gourmet Foods. Kate and Betsy were both feeling environmental this year and brought everyone the absolute coolest gifts: From Kate, stationery made from recycled Monopoly cards and earrings made from recycled electrical insulators; from Betsy, beautiful magnets or pins (we chose our objects and what we wanted them to be) that she made by painting and sealing with resin recycled beer bottle caps.

Katie and Kitty get down to business.

We spent the next three days eating great cheese, interspersed with meals, knitting, and talking talking talking. The only excursions out of the house in the 90+ degree weather were to go for a short walk Friday (I bowed out and fell asleep on the couch) and to go for high tea on Saturday.

Betsy, somehow looking both funky and Victorian, at high tea.

What did we eat? Other than the prolific cheese -- which included a four-year-old cheddar so silky and tart we were encouraged to eat it sans crackers -- Kate made her famous stuffed mushroom caps, which we used as a pre-cursor to Kim's vegetable-pasta soup for lunch. For dinner Friday night we had cornbread-topped chili. The next morning, we had scones and fruit. Saturday afternoon was high tea, where we stuffed ourselves with more scones, cucumber sandwiches, chicken finger sandwiches, little tartlets, fruit salad in lovely little parfait glasses, and gallons of tea. That night we went the comfort route with ginger chicken, risotto, and roasted carrots. The next morning we made a baked fritatta with leftovers: the filling from Kate's mushrooms, some ricotta and cottage cheese, tomatoes. For lunch, we had the uber-easy crab cakes.

As she did last year, Kim volunteered to be the Ken Burns of the weekend, documenting our every move. She's been publishing a series of digital photography books, and is getting very advanced in her technique. Like this altered focus of Katie and flowers:

Or this knitting action shot of Kitty and a yarn swift:

We realized that next year will mark the tenth year we've gotten together for this weekend. We started thinking of things we wish we would have recorded, and someone mentioned that it would be cool to remember what we'd been working on each year. So, for the record, here's what we were doing this, the ninth year. The eight previous years might be lost to history:

Betsy: A baby blanket for Iraqi orphans that she began years ago, at the start of the Iraq War, at he behest of a politically active friend. After Betsy completed a few inches, she lost steam and put away the blanket. She made quite a bit of progress over the weekend, however, so unlike the actual war, the end is in sight for the blanket.
Cindy: My third Hourglass Sweater from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts. This is my all-time favorite sweater pattern. I realize that it's ludicrous to make any garment with a fitted waist, as I'll have no prayer of wearing it for another year, but the Hourglass is a completely mindless pattern, so I didn't have to worry about finding my place after taking numerous breaks for more cheese.
Kate: Kate is the only non-knitter in the group, but is crazy-crafty. She stitched instead of knit. She embellished some China flat shoes, made a friend an adorable "Dictator" onesie from her book Not Your Mama's Stitching, and spent the rest of the weekend on a cute, multi-colored cross-stitch.
Katie: A beautiful red in-the-round sweater made from yarn she purchased during a rare yarn run Kim, Katie, and I took a few weeks ago. Katie's been knitting for years, and only in the last year actually completed a sweater that looks great on her (she completed one years ago that she hated and shoved in the bottom of a bag upon completion, and then never tackled a sweater again), so this is a second version of that successful sweater.
Kim: Kim worked on a beautiful charcoal wrap/poncho (Phil calls them "raponchos") with an allover cable stitch from Weekend Knitting. The yarn also came from our recent yarn run. She's thinking of giving the raponcho to her sister, but I spent the weekend trying to convince her she should keep it. We'll see if her altruism or my selfishness win out.
Kitty: Kitty is the most prolific knitter in the group. She completed half a pair (i.e., one sock) of pink lace knee-highs that looked stunning with her new loden Danskos. *And* she made a friend a My So-Called Scarf from grape-hued, rich Malabrigo yarn. (Even if you're not a knitter, sometime take the opportunity to fondle this yarn.) As I did with Kim, I tried to convince Kitty that she should keep the scarf for herself.

Kim just accepted a job that will have her moving to Seattle at the end of the year. (I'm weepy just typing this.) So we've already planned that our 10th DKW will be in Seattle. I'm already scheming about what to knit and what we'll be eating.

Wag of the Finger: Ms. Manners' Guide to Blogging

2007-10-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

I’m interrupting food writing yet again for a minor blogging rant. Pardon me while I perch myself atop a soapbox, but I have to get this off my chest.

Blogs are so predominant these days. Yesterday during a presentation here at work, a co-worker who has a blog I love said the estimate is at something like 8 million blogs and counting. Professionally, we use them for book publicity, to keep up with competitors, and to see instantly what our customers are into. Personally, they’re where I get much of my information, including recipes, political updates, knitting patterns, and parenting thoughts.

They’re so prevalent and simple to use and free, it’s easy to forget that they’re public. So I’ll state the obvious: A blog is a public journal that anyone with an internet connection can easily find through a quick Google search. As cathartic as writing might be, this isn’t a leather-bound journal kept by your bed that only you, and maybe a peeping spouse, can access. It’s out there for everyone. That means that prospective employers, divorce lawyers, family members, and future clients can all take a stroll through your life. I know people who have told me they felt violated when someone was reading their blog and didn’t make their presence known. Get over it. You’re posting in a public setting. You can’t run through Central Park naked and not expect people to whip out their cell phones and snap some pictures.

One of the most notable blogging-gone-bad stories happened to Heather Armstrong of Dooce who was famously fired for the venom she blogged about her boss. In fact, getting fired for what is written in a blog is now called getting “Dooced.” In Heather’s case, all turned out well; she now supports herself, her husband, and her daughter through blog earnings. But she’s rare. She’s an exceptional and innately funny writer. Most bloggers, even if they can turn a decent phrase, are only adequate writers and don’t have the magnetism to pull in a substantial fan base. This is why I invite you into my kitchen, but keep the other rooms in my home and office private. I’m okay if my current employer or any future employers know I like to cook; other details that might sway their opinion one way or another aren’t for sharing.

Which leads me to my other point... even if you’re comfortable baring your soul online, don’t bare the souls of others. If your best friend wants to let everyone with a good search engine know about her affair, it’s hers to tell, not yours. Don’t break the circle of trust. Some blogs I’ve stumbled upon remind me of Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers. If you don’t know the story, this was to be his opus; his Remembrance of Things Past. What it ended up being was three chapters of thinly veiled secrets that his society friends had shared with him over the years. They confided, he took notes and spilled to all of America. Amazingly, he died somewhat friendless. Go figure. Friendships have been destroyed and families strained based on what someone thoughtlessly spewed in a blog. So remember to be thoughtful.

If you’re thinking of starting a blog, or if you’re currently writing one, imagine that your employer, mother, and estranged husband are all reading it. Because even if they don’t tell you, they will be reading it. And don’t feel that you can journal about others online the way you can when tucked into bed holding a fountain pen. You can’t.

I’m stepping down from my soapbox now. On a less finger-wagging note, this past weekend was my annual knitter’s retreat, or DKW. When I can get my arms around all the goodness those three days gave me, I’ll write about it. As always, it was a magical time, even if I was drinking Fre wine and avoiding unpasteurized cheese.

The Taste of Crow

2007-10-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

About four minutes after T was born, people started asking us if we were going to "try again" for a girl. "Heavens, no," we'd reply. "We are finished." Even at that point, with hospital staff on hand to help ease some of the burden of a newborn, I was already overwhelmed with two kids. And, not for nothing, I have a cousin with six boys, and I'm sure every one from the third on seemed destined to be a girl. Neither Phil nor I had any intentions of being outnumbered.

To drive the point home, I unloaded all of my maternity clothes, gave away T's clothes and toys up to his current age, and started listening to Justin Timberlake. My maternal years were behind me as I was watching my thirties whipping by.

Other than M's fashion sense, the perfect family. Two kids. Just as we'd always planned.

A week or so after my Milestone Birthday, a co-worker confided that she was pregnant. And the wheels started turning. Maybe my dizziness and vertigo wasn't a sign that I'd be dying any moment of high blood pressure. Maybe my crankiness with Phil wasn't because he had suddenly become impossible to be around. Maybe falling asleep every night as I was putting M to bed wasn't just an inevitable curse of aging and oncoming uncontrollable narcolepsy.

Maybe not. In fact, Heavens-No-We-Are-Finished Kitchel will be making an appearance around mid-March.

So if the entries in the last several months have been a bit sparse and the writing has been a bit light on food content -- one might say intentionally avoiding writing much about food -- forgive me. Know that I was either konked out or sparing you any rhapsodizing about the foods I was enjoying, namely boxed mashed potatoes and Co-Co Wheats.

Bear with me. The food will be coming back. With a vengeance.

The Goddess of the Green Market

2007-09-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

I have the first of our free-range, local, humanely treated chickens in the oven right now, 20 minutes from a delicious, homey meal of roast chicken, baked potatoes, and Brussels sprouts. The chicken was a minimalist affair, as I realized that with a recent lack of cooking, we had no viable garlic in the house. Or lemons. So I washed and dried the chicken; put it in a Dutch oven; sprinkled the insides with salt, pepper, and Herbs for Poultry (a nice Dean & Deluca blend); poured on a little melted butter; tied the legs together; sprinkled salt, pepper, and paprika on the outside; and sprinkled some Vidalia onions around the outside. I'm hoping that the less-processed bird will carry lots of flavor on its own. When it's all finished (about 90 minutes later), I'll add some broth to the drippings and make a nice little gravy. Not bad for a lazy Sunday.

Anyhoo, while I'm being tortured by the smell of roasted chicken, I took a gander around the web. It's been a bit since I've done a lot of food-writing perusing, and I had some catching up to do. I found a great New York Times video of Alice Waters at the Union Square Green Market in lower Manhattan, a place I would often frequent during lunch hours. Alice Waters is, I believe, directly responsible for so much of the local/sustainable food movement in America, and it's such a treat seeing how she approaches food at the market -- not with a list, but with the willingness to let inspiration strike. I wish I'd been at the table for the final product.

A Golden Decade

2007-09-21T10:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Phil and my tenth wedding anniversary. We didn't get a chance to celebrate, although we're planning to this weekend. But it's so hard for me to get my hands around ten (actually thirteen) years with the same person -- and wanting to be with that person even more.

Between endless meetings and emergencies yesterday, I thought a little bit about what we've experienced together in the last ten years, both big and tiny. They're not remarkable; they're similar to what any couple might experience. But I'm proud that we've done them all together:

Moving to New York (celebrity sightings the entire time we were in the city, maybe a dozen, and they included some duds)
Experiencing close-up Septemer 11 and its aftermath
Watching all three epic Ken Burns and one epic Ric Burns documentaries
Choosing and buying a house together
Raising two boys we love desperately
Experiencing a friend dying of a terminal illness
Phil purchasing his first grill and realizing he's got a knack with fire

Happy tenth anniversary, Phil! Here's to the next fifty!

Sonata for a Good Man

2007-09-11T18:17:00.000-07:00

Scott O'Brien was our landlord in New York. The term "New York landlord" brings to mind either an absentee slumlord ignoring the multiplying cockroach population, or Fred Mertz. Scott was neither of these. He and his wife Kelly owned the four-story brownstone we lived in. Scott, Kelly, their two kids, and their dog Dazey (naming by the kids, spelling by Scott) lived in the first two floors of the building. We rented the third floor, and another couple rented the fourth. Scott was funny, vibrant, an engaged father, a devoted husband, a fencer, a lover of great wine, and a Grateful Dead devotee who was also responsible enough to have stock accounts set up for his young children.

When Phil and I learned I was pregnant with M, we decided to move back to the Midwest. We spent Labor Day weekend looking at houses, and settled on the one we live in now. The Sunday after our offer was accepted, Phil told Kelly we'd be moving out in a month. She lamented that "our little honeymoon home was breaking up." We hadn't realized it, but the couple upstairs had separated. That day we'd gone out to breakfast and seen Scott taking his young son for a bike ride. It was the last time I'd see him.

Although Scott largely worked from home, two days later, on September 11, 2001, his company attended a trade show at the World Trade Center. A dozen representatives from the company were there. Most decided to get breakfast down the road. Scott and a co-worker instead went to Windows on the World. After the first plane hit, Scott left a message for Kelly, saying "There's been an accident. We're waiting for help. I love you, and I'll see you soon." Just over an hour later, as we now all know, the building had collapsed. DNA tests on found remains have since confirmed Scott's death.

September 11 continues to be haunted with memories every year. I was in my office when a friend from Indiana called and exclaimed, "You're okay!" and started crying. Later, a friend from work and I walked home together and were shocked at how far uptown the smoke and debris clung to the air. Our brownstone became a macabre party scene as Scott and Kelly's dozens and dozens of friends descended to keep Kelly from being alone, often through forced merriment. Once I remember walking in the door and someone heading out of Kelly's apartment saying to me, "I forgot the salt for the margaritas! Twenty lashes with a wet noodle!" while I heard crying from inside the apartment. I think of all of these things, but mostly I think of Scott.

Scott's memorial service was attended by hundreds. It included poetry, dance, remembrances, and original songs written for the service, and it concluded with everyone in attendance singing The Grateful Dead's "Uncle John's Band." It was unique and reverent and thought-provoking and cathartic all at the same time. Just as Scott would have wanted.

Back in the Saddle: Hot Pepper Jelly

2007-09-09T03:59:00.000-07:00

Someone commented to me that apparently I was no longer writing a blog, and it struck me that it has been a bit since I've written. My bad. I'm back.

Phil took M camping on Memorial Day weekend, which left me and T home to entertain ourselves. After a five-hour marathon at the Indianapolis Children's Museum, where he played with all three of the Thomas the Tank Engine railroad setups, followed the next day by a visit to a toy store so he could play with yet another Thomas the Tank Engine railroad, I was itching for a little non-Useful Engine time. So while he watched a Thomas video, I made some hot pepper jelly using hot peppers and bell peppers I'd bought at the farmer's market on Saturday.

This is one of my favorites. The red and green color of the peppers actually makes it a great holiday gift, if you're so inclined. I tend to horde it all, myself. This is great on cornbread with chili, as well as a nice glaze for chicken or fish. Also, if guests come over unexpectedly and start acting peckish, you can whip up a super-quick appetizer: Spread cream cheese on a plate, top with the hot pepper jelly, and serve with crackers. This, like the Rhubarb Marmalade recipe I posted in the spring, is a perfect first canning project.

Hot Pepper Jelly

1/2 cup finely diced hot peppers
1/2 cup finely diced bell peppers
6-1/2 cups sugar
1-1/2 cups apple cider vinegar
1 3-oz. package liquid pectin (Cert-o or Ball brand are the ones I know)

Sterilize 7 or 8 half-pint canning jars and their lids. They will also have rings that go hold the lids in place, but these just need to be clean, not sterilized. To sterilize, stick them in boiling water for several minutes. Meanwhile...

Mix the peppers, sugar, and apple cider in a good-sized non-reactive pan. Over high heat, bring to a boil. Lower the heat and boil gently for about 7 minutes, give or take a minute, stirring frequently. The little peppers will get limp and the sugar will be dissolved. Pour in the liquid pectin and and boil for another 60 seconds, stirring constantly; the pectin helps firm up ("set") the jelly.

Spoon the hot jelly into the sterilized canning jars, leaving about 1/2 inch of space at the top of the jar; you don't want to fill it all the way to the top of the jar, or the jar won't be able to seal. Also, if any jelly gets around the rim of the jar, wipe it clean or the jar won't seal. Put the dome lids on the canning jars and screw on the lid bands. To seal the jars, either flip them upside down for about ten minutes, and then flip them back, or process them in a water-bath canner (a big pot that is made for canning and has a unit that lifts the jars out easily).

Because I wanted to be sure these would seal, I processed them in a water-bath canner, but the flip-over method would have been fine.

Total, this took me about 30 minutes, and made just about seven half-pint jars of jam. We've already opened the first of them; the jelly is sweet but a little tangy -- a really nice combination.

One aesthetic note: Try for a nice mix of color. If you're using only jalapenos for the hot peppers, then use red bell peppers. If you're using red hot peppers, using green bell peppers. The mix of colors is pretty.

It's early morning and T just started squawking. So I need to go, get him out from under his Thomas quilt, smooth his Thomas jammies, and no doubt find the Thomas engine that he likes to grip while falling asleep, which always falls under his bed during the night. We'll see you on the Island of Sodor.

Summer Blockbusters

2007-08-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

The weather’s been so crazy hot here (our yards look like hayfields) that I haven’t been doing much cooking. In fact, I’m freezing rather than canning our surplus tomatoes because I can’t stomach the idea of boiling anything in the kitchen. So I’ve lounged around in the air conditioning watching movies. Indulge me. They’re slightly food related: The first includes an enormous amount of pies, and the second paints a scenario that if left unchecked will leave folks with little money for luxuries like groceries.

Waitress

I was traveling last week – and my flight home was only delayed by 20 minutes! One night I was meetingless and commitmentless, so picked up some Thai takeout and headed back to my hotel to tuck into a good movie. I’d heard a lot about Waitress, and was in the mood for something fun and funny, so it won out over, say, The Reaping. This is the story of a small-town waitress in a bad marriage who loves creating and making pies at the small diner where she works. She names the pies after whatever is happening in her life. I Hate My Husband Pie. Falling In Love Pie. When she finds herself very unexpectedly and unhappily pregnant (and creates the resulting Bad Baby Pie), she ultimately needs to figure out what is important to her. When I started watching, it was initially hard to separate the movie story from the back story of Adrienne Shelly, the film’s writer/director/co-star, who was brutally murdered not long after shooting wrapped up. But the characters (including Ms. Shelly’s shrinking violet, wacky co-waitress) are so much fun that I eventually just enjoyed the movie. While everyone in it was great, a big tip of the hat goes to Andy Griffith, who played Joe, the relentless and crusty diner owner.

Maxed Out

A horror film without gratuitous gore, Maxed Out is a documentary about the credit card lifestyle and industry. It’s not a secret that Americans are farther in debt than we’ve ever been historically, with savings rates in the negatives. And yes, much of that can be attributed to personal responsibility. Yet, there’s a dark underbelly in the credit card industry that this film uncovers: the predatory, bottom-feeding natures of the companies issuing credit, and what they’re allowed to get away with. For example, MBNA, not any of our representatives in government, wrote the bill that President Bush pushed through and signed that eliminates credit card forgiveness when someone claims personal bankruptcy. MBNA also–what a coincidence!–was Bush’s biggest corporate contributor in the last presidential election. I also learned that credit card companies actually target those who recently claimed bankruptcy because they won’t be able to default a second time, and they have “a taste for credit.” In fact, the companies refuse to screen those with bad credit and refuse them cards because this demographic is where the companies make all their money in late fees and interest payments. This was an incredibly scary film that indicted both individuals who jump on the easy credit wagon and buy things they don’t have money for, as well as a bottom-feeding industry that is unregulated and unrepentant in building a house of cards that can’t be sustained. On a side note, the night after I saw the film -- a night that was not atypical -- Phil and I received seven pieces of mail, and four of them were credit card offers. It's scary.

Have you seen anything good lately?

Very Exciting or Too Horrid for Words?

2007-08-05T12:59:00.000-07:00

On an impulse, I picked up this DVD set when we were at the library checking out every Thomas the Train book they had in the district.

It's been interesting: I've learned to make croissants, a Buche de Noel, green beans the french way, stuffed mushrooms, and goose. And I've only watched about 1/3 of the episodes.

But today, I learned how to make a suckling pig. While I've heard of suckling pig, it never struck me that it's a pig who's been suckling. In more straightforward terms, a 5- to 6-week-old pig that has only feasted on his mother's milk. That alone seemed inhumane enough, but the way Julia was manhandling the pig as only she can do made me want to become a vegetarian.

Or throw a 60s party and have a suckling pig, with an apple in its mouth, flowers it its eyes, and a wreath around its tender young pig neck. (To get the apple in before serving, I learned, you need to stuff its mouth with a ball of foil during roasting.)

So a poll: Is it unthinkable? Is this something that's fallen out of favor but still would be magnificent? Or is it like some of the 50s appetizers -- like, say, the cabbage head holding a lit Sterno can and skewers of raw meat, in which tipsy guests are expected to cook their own chicken past toxidity -- that is best forgotten?

Where Has the Time Gone?

2007-08-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

Believe you me, I had no idea I'd take the month of July off from blog-land.

The weather has just been gorgeous and we've done a bit of traveling, and the idea of sitting in our basement, where the computer is housed, seemed less and less appealing.

Not that it hasn't been an eventful break. During this time...

I celebrated a milestone birthday, the number of which I'd like to forget. But the day was great. My best girlfriends brought over a bowl of amazing foodstuffs from a local gourmet shop and two bottles of wine I can't wait to consume. Then we went to a local restaurant we love. After that, Phil said he was taking me to a jazz club, but actually had gotten us a hotel room and had somehow bribed his parents to take the boys all night, so I slept in until 10 the next day. Unheard of.
My brother and sister-in-law had a little baby girl, who joins her two big brothers. This is the first girl grandbaby my parents have seen in 17 years! We're a very testosterone-charged group, normally. She's just beautiful.
M registered for kindergarten. I get weepy writing that. Where did the last five years go?
We went to Michigan for a big family gathering on my mom's side. This is an annual event I'd never been able to make it to, but it was such fun (and the food so fantastic) that I'll be a regular. M and T slept like logs that night after running around with the other kids. M wasn't so into the water-balloon fight, but T got right in the center of the action.

So I'm back. And I'm hungry. So there'll be food writing coming up...

The Antidote to Flying the Friendly Skies

2007-06-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

Over the past six weeks I've traveled three times for work. Here's how it went:

Early May, Sales Conference in Florida:

Flight out fine. Sales conference went well. Flight home delayed, then cancelled. Arrival time of 1:00 p.m. turns into 8:00 p.m., including a flight past city of destination, and then a separate flight to double back to city of destination.

Mid-June, One Day Trip on Friday for Half-Day Meeting in Hoboken:

Flight out fine. Meeting went well; we all felt great about the outcome. Flight home delayed significantly, meaning that I would miss my connecting flight. No means for getting home that evening. I stayed in a Newark Airport Marriott, fell asleep watching a series of City in Terror documentaries of killers like Andrew Cunanan and BTK. Saturday morning put on same clothes from Friday, took 1:00 flight home to get home at 3:00 p.m. Entire Saturday morning's worth of plans with the boys shot to Blazes.

This week, One Day Trip on Wednesday for Some Meetings in Hoboken:

Flight out fine. Meetings went well. At airport, learn that flight back, along with almost all flights that night, cancelled. Stood in line for an hour and a half to get the quickest flight home, which was the next day at 3:00. Booked a hotel in Manhattan. Went to Macy's on 34th, which was feeling less than miraculous, to get clean clothes and pajamas. Also bought basic toiletries. Flight back delayed about an hour (on the tarmac), but I was grateful for this efficiency, as colleagues flying from a different NY-based airport sat on the tarmac that same night for three and a half hours.

On flight out, purse was searched, as the thermometer I'd bought a couple days ago appeared to be a cigarette lighter on the x-ray screen. The security advisor searched my purse, pulling from it the offending thermometer, a Luna bar, a stack of Lego's, a half-knit sock, and a crochet hook we used in a photo shoot a few weeks ago. Note to self to edit purse contents before flying again.

As a balm to my battered, travel-weary soul, I took M and T to our ritualistic Saturday stomping grounds, the local farmer's market. It was time to stock up for the week on greens and meat and whatever else was in season. Today the market and its local vendors, still-alive produce, and happy smiling Labradors seemed more magical and comforting than normal, having just suffered through a three-for-three bad airline experience.

In all, we:

* Got some fair-trade, shade-grown coffee from local vendor Hubbard & Cravens. T was ogling the ice, so the woman at the stand gave him a cup of ice in a coffee cup that he carried around the market, Yankees cap pulled down, looking like he was getting his first jolt of caffeine to meet the morning.

* Picked up some radishes from a local organic family farm. The radishes were tiny enough that I was advised to slice them thinly and put them on a salad; at that size they don't require cooking. Who knew? Lunch eagerly awaits...

* Checked off Phil's list of meat requirements -- New York Strip (I got crazy and bought tri-tip roast instead) and pork chops -- at the Royer Farm booth.

* Selected a tote bag's worth of salad fixings from Field's Farm.

* Got M a chocolate croissant from local vendor Scholar's Inn Bakehouse. He ate about half and decided he'd had plenty. Resisted the urge to rip said croissant from his hands, eat it whole, and lick any errant chocolate from his fingers. How I do love a good chocolate croissant.

* Said Hi to my friend Carla, who was buying what appeared to be a garbage-bag full of mixed greens for the week. Tried some of the mustard greens in her bag. The spicy bite is pretty interesting.

While I haven't been cooking much lately, my friend Katie just discovered the farmer's market last weekend and sent along the improvised recipe for a stew she made from local meats and vegetables. The weekend was rainy and drab, and the comforting stew would have hit the spot. Because today is sunny and gorgeous, I'm tucking away the recipe for the next overcast, grey day that requires comfort eating. Or the next time I have to fly.

Katie's Farmer's Market Stew

About a pound of sausage: lamb, pork, whatever you like
Three big tomatoes, cut into wedges
A few handfuls of green beans
A small bunch of chopped fresh oregano
A couple pinches of red pepper flakes
Boiled potatoes

To make the stew, Katie browned the sausage, and then added in the tomatoes. She cooked this down until it was "good and saucy." Then she threw in a the green beans, oregano, and red pepper flakes. When the beans turned bright green, she served it over boiled potatoes.

Next time I get home from another trip-gone-wrong, I'm whipping up a batch of this stew, plugging in The Thin Man, and detoxing.

Rhubarb Redux!

2007-06-24T14:01:00.000-07:00

First, if you were waiting with baited breath to find out which book Teresa chose, it was Two Fat Ladies Ride Again, full of all the deep fried, cream-topped, butter-melting Two Fat Ladies goodness. God rest Jennifer Patterson's soul; she's still missed.

Matt's comment about how much he didn't appreciate the rhubarb he had when he had it, and how it's now precious because he doesn't have access to this lowly fruit made me think differently about this lowly fruit. I decided to get and eat every stalk possible--raising a fork toward Matt's international direction while doing it.

With my parents in town to drop off a tired but exuberant M, and Phil's parents coming over for dinner, I made a quick rhubarb sauce to go with the chicken thighs Phil grilled. Like the rhubarb jam, this is delicious but incredibly easy and perfect for the very lazy in the kitchen. I threw in a few apples we had that on hand that were close to turning, and the whole thing made a nice foil for the spicy chicken. Here's how.

Rhubarb Sauce for the Very Lazy

1/2 cup plus 2 Tbsp. sugar
1/2 cup water
About 4 cups one-inch segments of rhubarb
3 apples, peeled, cored, and cut into chunks

Bring the sugar and water to a boil. Add the rhubarb and apples, lower the heat, and simmer, covered, for about 10 minutes. Take the lid off and let it bubble a bit more until it's slightly less thick than you want. (It'll thicken as it cools.) Eat it warm, cold, or at room temperature.

The Incredible Edible Local Egg

2007-06-22T09:34:00.001-07:00

This is very exciting. Tonight I pick up my first dozen eggs in a local egg co-op from the Brown Family Farm. Here's how it works: I determine how many dozen eggs I want every two weeks. For us, for now, that's a dozen. Then every other week I go pick up my eggs after work. They're grown from chickens who roam freely, squawk at each other, and lay eggs at their leisure. If you haven't eaten fresh farm eggs, the yolks are such a bright sunny yellow they can seem alarming, and the taste is lovely and fresh.

This is my third attempt at making a pick-up, which was exacerbated by late work nights and a friend and fellow co-opper who was picking up for me not being able to make it. But third time's a charm, and tonight the connection will be made.

This now means that, come the late summer/early fall pick-up of bulk meat and chicken from Royer Farm, our chicken, beef, and eggs will all be farmed locally and come from animals who were treated humanely. Slowly, we're making food choices that leave less of a carbon footprint, enable us to have a connection to the food source, and don't involve inhumane living conditions for the animals.

If you haven't seen the July 2007 issue of Gourmet, check it out. This month's theme is sustainability and conscious eating. In Ruth Reichl's letter from the editor, she writes, "At this moment, ethical eating may be a mere whisper in our national conversation, but it is getting louder by the day." It's exciting to see that eating locally, seasonally, and ethically isn't a kooky trend from the unshaven guy in ragg socks and Birkenstocks who harangues you in the supermarket line; it's becoming mainstream and is attainable for all of us. One dozen eggs at a time.

Tomorrow I go to our local farmer's market for the first time in four weeks. I've nearly had the shakes from this long absence, which was due to a visit to Michigan, a book convention in NY, and getting stuck overnight unexpectedly at Newark Airport, which I swear I will never fly into again because I always get stuck at Newark. I have a list of about 20 things I "need" from the market. Report tomorrow. Over and out.

Little Victories

2007-06-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

The other day M was watching The Iron Giant. If you're unfamiliar with this cartoon, it's a lovely story of a boy in the 1950s who makes friends with a huge, misunderstood robot. Really, it's better than I just described. The film is based on a short story by the late Ted Hughes, former Poet Laureate of England and the estranged ex-husband of Sylvia Plath whose dalliances purportedly drove her to her untimely death.

So in the film there's a part where Hogarth, the main character, is squooshing spray whipped cream into a Twinkie. And M said, "What's he doing?" And I replied, "Adding even more whipped cream to a Twinkie." And M said, "What's a Twinkie?"

Score.

In other little victories, Teresa was the first to respond with the name of the sportcaster who would yell "Rhubarb!" (Red Barber, if you didn't know.) She's currently thinking through her cookbook options. Will it be Two Fat Ladies Ride Again? Welcome to Junior's? Stay tuned!

Rhubarb!

2007-06-08T19:06:00.000-07:00

Choice of free cookbook (I'll send you a list to choose from, and even ship it) to the first person who e-mails me (cindy_kitchel AT yahoo.com) with the name of the sportscaster who used this phrase when excited by a play.

Last summer my parents brought us about 12 rhubarb plants. A few didn't make it, but several did, and this year I got my first harvest. A small one, but enough to make some marmalade and a pending crisp.

My mom, however, has been overtaken by their plants. I'm packing up the boys this weekend to head to Michigan where they'll have a lovefest with my brother's two boys. If you've ever been around four boys, ages 10 to 2, running, sweating, laughing, and getting grubby, you know that it's a nice little break. My mom and I have plans to set them all loose, putting out sandwiches and juice every now and again, and otherwise get to work on that rhubarb.

Which means I'm pulling out my 1962 Home and Garden, lazy recipe for making rhubarb marmalade. My guess is that this was whipped up in between shaking martinis, gabbing with the neighbors, and checking out Jackie O's latest pillbox hat. The steps are super simple, and there's hours between them, so it's very low pressure. The finished marmalade is unbelievably good melting on a hot English muffin or some good hearty bread. Even if you've never "put up," as they say, jams, you can do this. It's a great way to learn how to can without dealing with all the mucky-muck of a complex recipe.

Rhubarb Marmalade for the Very Lazy

2 pounds, chopped into 1-inch pieces (this equals about six cups)
Grated rind of 2 lemons
4 cups of sugar
Juice of 2 lemons

Put on your frilly apron and take a sip of your martini. Now, in a non-reactive bowl, mix the rhubarb, lemon rind, and sugar. Stir it around really good. Go back to your martini. Have a pitcher. You're done with the marmalade for the evening.

In the morning, sterilize about six 8-ounce canning jars, lids, and rings. You'll probably only need five, but it's better to have more than you need than less. If you've never done this before, see the notes below.

Now, as you're finishing your third cup of coffee, pour the marmalade, which will now be pretty wet and oozy, into a pot. Over medium-high heat, bring the marmalade to a low boil and cook it until it thickens up a bit. This will take maybe 10 minutes. As it's cooking, you need to stir it constantly (I use a wooden spoon so it doesn't get hot), but you can easily do this absent-mindedly with one hand while using the other to hold a novel.

When the marmalade seems to have thickened up, carefully spoon it into prepared jars, leaving about 1/2 inch headspace (in other words, fill it to about 1/2 inch from the top of the jar). Put a lid on the jar, screw on the band, and flip the jar over. Because the marmalade was boiling hot when you added it to the jar, you don't need to worry with water baths and canners and such. Just flip the jar over. Do this with all the jars until the marmalade is gone.

In about 10 minutes, flip the jars back upright. Over the next 30 or so minutes you'll hear little *ping!* sounds as the dome lids pop down and the jars seal themselves. If any lids don't pop down and seal, just refrigerate the offending jars and use those first. The rest can go in the pantry and won't need to be refrigerated until you open them.

A couple notes:

My friend Kitty and I, many years ago, made a killer Rhubarb-Lime-Ginger Marmalade. Did we write down the recipe? No, we did not (she says, shaking her fist at the heavens). But you could add some fresh grated ginger and use limes instead of lemons and taste periodically during the cooking to see if you like the taste. The three tastes together were something else: comforting and fresh and tart.
To sterilize the jars, wash them thoroughly and them boil them in water for about five minutes or, alternatively, run them through the dishwasher. I know people who have not sterilized jars and lived to tell the tale, but I'm quite a freak about the idea of any kind of food poisoning, so I always sterilize the jars -- especially if I'm using the flip-over method for sealing the jars.
To sterilize the lids, either boil them in a little pan of water for a few minutes. As an alternative, microwave some water in a glass container until the water starts to boil, and then take the glass container out anddrop the lids into the water for a few minutes.
If you're just not that into the idea of canning, just make a half batch and put it into the fridge immediately.
If you'd like to learn more about canning, check out this site: http://www.homecanning.com/usa/ALBasics.asp. I learned to can maybe ten years ago (I was making some pumpkin butter when I heard about Princess Diana's death, if that dates it). The first time was intimidating, and after that, I was hooked.

Some Recipes for Local Meat, and M Gets a Chance to Interview

2007-05-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

Nikki Royer of Royer Farm Fresh was kind enough to take time from their busy spring farming schedule to answer some questions I had about local, sustainable farming and meat supplies. Today, she answers a question from M, age 5, whose been known to eat half a pound of Royer bacon in one sitting. And she shares some of her favorite recipes.

Asks M, age 5, with a mouthful of bacon and some greasy fingers he's wiping on his pants, “Why is your bacon so good?”
Taste and quality are a bigger focus than speed and cost. The bacon is cured with a sugar-based cure and smoked with hickory flavor. Plus the pigs get fresh air, sunshine, and exercise while eating a simple, balanced diet.

And believe you me, it's some good bacon. The one thing Nikki warned me about when I first bought it was that less-processed bacon cooks much more quickly than shrink-wrapped bacon from the grocery store because it contains less "stuff." She's right. I've got a good bacon-cooking rhythm down now, but it took a little bit to get used to how quickly fresher bacon cooks than the Eckrich we were used to.

But enough of my yakking. Let's get onto some of Nikki's favorite recipes.

Wild Mushroom Beef Roast

A great mix of flavor and texture, easy to make and special enough for company!

2.5 lb roast (chuck, arm, tip, or rump)
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
1/2 tsp. thyme leaves, crushed
3/4 cup ready-to-serve beef broth
1/4 cup tomato paste
1/4 cup dry red wine
2 bulbs garlic, minced
8 ounces assorted mushrooms, such as shitake, cremini, oyster, and button, cut into quarters Fresh parsley (optional)

Combine flour, salt, pepper and thyme in small bowl. Place beef in a 4-1/2 to 5-1/2 quart slow cooker. Sprinkle with flour mixture; toss to coat.
Combine broth, tomato paste, wine and garlic in small bowl; mix well. Add to beef. Add mushrooms; mix well.
Cover and cook on HIGH 6 to 7 hours or on LOW 8 to 10 hours, or until beef is tender. Do not lift the lid. (No stirring is necessary during cooking.) Stir well before serving. Garnish with parsley, if desired.

Mexi-Lamb Tortilla Lasagna
This recipe, from the American Lamb Board is a fast way to get multiple food groups in one dish. If your family doesn’t like sour cream, just eliminate it and double the amount of salsa. So that we can have leftovers, I usually double the recipe and bake it in a 13 X 9 pan.

1 pound ground lamb
1 cup salsa
1 can (15 ounces) red kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup (8 ounces) light or regular sour cream
1/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
3 10-inch flour tortillas
1 cup shredded lettuce
1 medium tomato, chopped
Toppings: shredded cheddar cheese and salsa

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a skillet, cook and crumble the ground lamb until it's no longer pink. Drain well. Stir in the salsa and beans, and set aside.
In a bowl, mix the sour cream, cheese, and flour.
Spray a 10-inch pie plate with nonstick cooking spray. Place one tortilla in the bottom of the dish. Top with 1/3 of the meat mixture and 1/2 of the sour cream mixture. Top with a second tortilla and repeat with 1/3 meat and remaining sour cream. Top with a third tortilla and remaining meat.
Bake for 25 minutes or until heated through. Let stand for 5 minutes before cutting into wedges. Top each serving with shredded lettuce and chopped tomato. If you like, garnish with the additional cheese and salsa.

Fall-off-the-Bone BBQ Pork Ribs

Another slow-cooker family favorite that came from the October 2006 issue of Good Housekeeping.

1 medium onion chopped
1/2 cup ketchup
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 tomato paste
2 Tbsp. paprika
2 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp. yellow mustard
1tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
4 pounds pork spare ribs or country style ribs

Coat a 4 -1/2 to 6 quart slow cooker with nonstick cooking spray, and then add in and stir together the onion, ketchup, vinegar, sugar, tomato paste, paprika, Worcestershire, mustard, salt, and pepper until mixed.
Layer spare ribs or country style ribs over sauce and cook for 8 hours on low. Do not lift lid while cooking.

Many thanks to Nikki for shedding a little light on sustainable farming. If you’re in the Indianapolis area, stop by one of the farmers markets that features Royer Farm Fresh meats. If you're not, check out www.localharvest.org to see what local and sustainable options are available in your area.

By the choices we all make regarding what we're willing to put on our table, we can change the cruel and sometimes toxic meat industry. If you can, do try to buy local, where you can know how the animals were treated and how the meat was processed. I can attest that it makes a huge difference in taste, and it will support a meat industry that is humane, safe, and carries a much smaller carbon footprint.

Talking Sustainable Farming with the Royers

2007-05-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

Nikki and Scott Royer with the next generation of farmers-in-training, Knic and Cale.

Yesterday was the opening of our local farmer’s market, and the boys and I met our friend Carla and her daughter for some foraging, tasting, stocking up, and reconnecting with the farmers we hadn’t seen for nine months. One of my favorite vendors, Royer Farm Fresh, was there with locally and humanely produced beef, pork, lamb, and eggs.

Recently, Nikki Royer, who with her husband Scott runs Royer Farm Fresh, took the time to answer a few questions about local meat: the economics, environmental impact, and advantages. (She also provided some candid shots from the farm.) We’ve been a Royer customer for a year or so now, and it was great to learn a little more about what goes on behind the scenes to make a fantastic and sustainable leg of lamb…

The farm has been in your family for several generations. Did you always know you’d be involved in farming?

Raising livestock was and is something Scott and I really enjoy. We wanted farming to be part of our lives but 19 years ago when we started dating we did not have a specific plan laid out. We both grew up showing animals in 4-H and farming providing my family’s livelihood. While attending Purdue University, Scott and I bought our first sheep together. After getting married in 1994, Scott worked with my Dad for about a year on the farm while I started a job in pharmaceutical sales. Scott eventually took a research scientist position, where he stayed until my Dad’s unexpected death in 2000. Scott then reduced his off-farm job to half-time while taking over the major farm production and management responsibilities. In 2001 Scott returned to the farm full-time and we entered into a long-term farm lease with my Mom.

After about a year we begin analyzing how we could make the farm a success for future generations just like my family had done for us. With our knowledge of beef and lamb production, taking into account our moderate farm size—300 acres—and our willingness to move beyond basic commodity agriculture production, we decided to sell beef and lamb direct to the consumer. Ten years ago I did not know this is what Scott and I would be doing, but we both feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to carve this path for ourselves and would not want to be doing anything else. We are very committed to raising natural, wholesome beef, lamb, and pork and look forward to continuing to serve even more customers.

What distinguishes the meat from your farm from the meat someone might buy from a large chain grocery store?

First, the direct one-on-one contact we have with our customers helps ensure people can know exactly how their meat was raised: what the animals ate, where they lived and if we gave the animals any hormones or antibiotics, which we don’t. In fact, people are welcome to visit the farm and check things out for themselves.

Second, the lamb is dry-aged a minimum of one week and the beef a minimum of two weeks. Most grocery store meat is not dry-aged. Dry-aging helps to create a better eating experience because the meat becomes tenderer over time and with some water evaporative loss the flavor is better. Also the butcher shop we use is a small, family-owned facility. The animals are treated humanely and all the meat is cut and wrapped by hand.

Finally, our meat just simply tastes better. The dry-aging plays a part in the improved quality but that is just part of the package. Our breeding stock is not just any type cow or sheep; we have selected animals over the past seven years with a goal of producing healthy, meaty beef and lamb. We feed the animals simple, balanced, high-quality feeds. Our cattle and sheep are raised on pasture and the pigs are raised outdoors. All three species have access to shelter, plenty of room to roam and clean, fresh water to drink.

Who is your typical customer?

We probably do not have just one typical customer, but our meat mainly is purchased by consumers needing a variety of qualities in their meat.

The meat connoisseurs love the taste, tenderness, flavor, and variety.
Families on a budget appreciate the discount volume packages of beef, lamb, and pork.
People whose cooking experience is limited to making something from a box or take-out bag value the good, easy recipes that we share and our assistance as they transition to a healthy, simpler, balanced diet.

We also supply a few restaurants with beef, lamb, and pork.

What was behind your decision to offer 100% grass-fed beef?
We have two main reasons for the addition of 100% grass-fed beef. When we first started selling at farmer’s markets in 2003, we had maybe a dozen inquiries about grass-fed beef the entire year. Last year (2006) multiple customers were asking weekly. So we have seen a definite increase in interest. Also, a grass-fed program is more sustainable for our farm in the long-term. We will buy less inputs and the animals and pastures will have a more symbiotic relationship: The pastures feed the cattle and sheep and the animals fertilize the grasses.

All of our beef and lamb is grass-fed—the sheep and cattle are out on pasture all year long. They are never confined to just dirt lots. By using a variety of grasses and other plants (like turnips, rye, and sorghum-sudan grass) the animals are grazing green plants March through December. In January, February, and early March, the animals have access to hay bales along with stockpiled pastures consisting of non-growing plants. Depending on their age, these cattle and sheep also can eat grain (primarily corn) out of self-serve feeders. To add the 100% grass-fed beef, we have kept on doing what we had always done, but just eliminated the grain.

How does the future of small family-owned farms look from your vantage point?

About like any small business in America—challenging, yet with unlimited opportunities. Some of the main difficulties facing farms of all sizes across the country are land costs, taxes, and the lack of a new approach to farming on a professional level. It is rare to find land that is priced based on its agricultural production value as opposed to the worth for some other activity.

However, there are still opportunities, if you are a good steward of the land, absentee owners are more likely to work with you on leases and rental agreements. Second, taxes are ever increasing and are based more on the value of land for uses other than agricultural. Finally, there are plenty of professional farmers who are responsible land owners, but many of them are large-scale commodity producers who make their living producing large volumes of one or two undifferentiated products. There are a few people farming like us (taking food from pasture to plate), but not very many. We approach raising beef, lamb, and pork not as a hobby, but as a business where people are depending on us to raise their food right.

Are there any good resources for people who want to buy local meat?

If you are in the Indianapolis area, visit us at one of the farmers markets we attend. You are also welcome to visit the farm and pick up your meat when you come.

If these options are not right for you, try your local farmers’ market, visit www.localharvest.org, or call a local meat packing plant to find about farmers that are butchering meat.

I really appreciate Nikki taking the time from what is for her an incredibly busy season to shed a little light on local, sustainable farming. In the next post, she'll share a couple favorite recipes and answer a burning question from M, age 5, who is one of the farm's biggest fans.

If you're in the Indianapolis area, you can stock up on Royer Farm Fresh meat at these locations throughout the summer and fall:

Broad Ripple Farmers Market: Broad Ripple High School; Saturdays, May 26 through October 27; 8 a.m. to noon.
Zionsville Farmers Market: Corner of Main and Hawthorne; Saturdays, June 2 through September 29; 8 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Fishers Farmers Market: The Municipal Complex off 116 Street; Saturdays, June 2 through October 6; 8 a.m. to noon.
Terre Haute Farmers Market: 9th and Cherry Streets; Saturdays, June 2 through October; 8 a.m. to noon.
White Violet Center for Eco-Justice: Saint Mary-of-the-Woods; Wednesdays, May 30 through October; 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Royer Farm Fresh: Tuesdays, starting June 12; 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

The Party House and Party Nuts

2007-05-15T18:33:00.000-07:00

I first encountered the Party House about 10 years ago while driving with my friend Kim. "We're going to go by the most tacky house you've ever seen," she said. For three miles I would question every ranch sporting too many potted plants on the porch and some gargoyles, asking, "Is that the one?"

"No," she'd say. "You'll know it when you see it."

"Is that it?" I'd ask as we drove by a two-story with a phalanx of those bent-over-lady stand-ups in the garden.

"Trust me," she reiterated. "You'll know it."

And then we came upon an indescribable sight. A huge windowed mansion with Gothic light posts, a circular driveway winding around a nautical-themed iron fountain, Christmas decorations displayed in the upper left picture window, even though it was September, and porches that made elaborate waves from the second floor. "Holy Pete, what is that?" I screamed.

"That" was the Party House.

For years the house held a strange fascination for me. It and the two other houses on the "compound" were owned by an (it's fair to say) eccentric dealer in concrete who had bought a small ranch house several decades prior, gussied it up with Italian mafioso decor, and proceeded to buy the surrounding properties, building two other houses (his main residence and the Party House). The complex was constantly being updated, added to: a gargoyle here, multi-colored glass block there.

Last summer Phil and I drove by the house, and noticed the weeds were getting out of control and there was an IndyRepo.com sign in the front. The house had been foreclosed. I immediately decided we needed to buy the Party House. Phil was a little more reluctant, thinking perhaps the price was a bit out of our range and, well, the house was horrific. But I loved the idea of never having to give directions to our home. "We live in that abomination on Kessler," I would tell new friends, adding, "when you get there, just park anywhere near the life-size dolphin fountain."

I got our realtor to book me a showing, and was blown away by the sheer workmanship and vision coming together in such a tacky interior. Rooms flowed by half-staircases into other rooms. The place was huge but had only had three bathrooms, one that was in process and for which you needed to turn sideways to walk between the toilet and bathtub. The first-floor bathroom was a half-bath with a glass door directly facing the toilet. All of the floors were Italian tile -- not a bit of hardwood or carpet to be found. Walls were lined top to bottom in native quartz. The home didn't have an official bedroom or closet, just room after room of flat surface. The "kitchen" was actually a little island with small appliances that would only work for heating up appetizers or giving the caterers somewhere to set their things. None of the house was up to code. It was a wreck. "I don't know," said my realtor as we walked in, "it makes me think of hookers."

And yet, I thought about the house constantly, checked the listings to see the price drop, drove by anytime I could.

The place eventually sold for half its listed price -- not much more than our little Cape Cod. This weekend the boys and I drove by and saw that the weeds were under control, palettes of wood were outside awaiting new projects, and the house no longer felt abandoned. The original owner, who died last fall several months after being foreclosed, would be pleased that his vision didn't go to ruin.

In honor of the Party House's new lease on life, I'm sharing a Curried Pecan recipe that's been a party go-to for me for a few years. These are so incredibly good, with the sweet curry balancing the rich pecans; I think I first found the recipe in Real Simple magazine, but I'm no longer sure. These lovely orangish-brownish nuts would be perfect in bowls perched around atop Gothic Italian-tiled tables, while the booze flows too heavily and party-goers attempt to keep from falling down open staircases with no railing. And the nuts can be made in a tiny kitchen that's only good for heating appetizers and giving the caterer a place to set things.

Curried Pecans

1 pound (about 5 cups) pecans
1 egg white at room temperature
1 tsp. water
3/4 cup sugar
2 Tbsp. curry powder (I use 1 Tbsp. hot and 1 Tbsp. mild)
1 Tbsp. sea salt

Heat an oven to 250 degrees. Pour the pecans on a cookie sheet in a single layer and toast in the oven, stirring once or twice, for about 10 minutes -- until the room starts smelling like wonderful warm nuts. In a big bowl, beat the egg white and water until it's frothy and thick. Stir in the toasted nuts, and then the sugar, curry powder, and sea salt. Mix around well, and then pour back onto the cookie sheet in a single layer. Bake for about an hour, stirring every 20 minutes or so.

Cinnamon Nuts: For a variation, substitute 4 cups almonds, walnuts, or a combination for the pecans. Substitute 1 Tbsp. cinnamon for the curry. Lower the salt to 1 tsp. Lower the sugar to 1/2 cup.

Happy Mother's Day!

2007-05-13T11:09:00.000-07:00

I'm still trying to get caught up after five days traveling for work. I often will come home Thursday night from these sales conferences, even though Friday is dubbed a "travel day," but that always means getting home around midnight and then going into work the next day. So this year I took advantage of the "travel day" and scheduled an 11:00 direct flight from Tampa to Indianapolis that would have me home in time to run a few errands, throw in the laundry, and still have time to pick up the boys early. In fact, our flight was cancelled for mechanical issues and we had to fly right past Indy from Tampa to La Guardia, change airlines, and go from NYC to Indy. I got home around 8:00 Friday night. And I was at La Guardia only long enough to down an $8.99 egg salad sandwich. On white bread.

So, getting back up to speed on the blog has been slow. This week I'll be back in the swing.

Fortunately, today's been the sort of lazy day we moms deserve once a year. Phil got up with the boys, who usually start rising about 5:30, but stayed in bed until 7:00 today. I made some rhubarb jam from the rhubarb overtaking our garden. I took the boys out on an errand. T just went down for a nap and I went to do more work, but found the server is down. This might be my cosmic sign to let the work go for the weekend.

The best thing today, though, was Phil's Mother's Day present to me: Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. I didn't even realize this book was out; Phil didn't know that I worship Alice Waters, who back in the 1970s brought the idea of fresh, seasonal, local products to a new restaurant she was opening in Berkeley, Chez Panisse, that is now considered the best restaurant in the country. She's also started other programs like the Edible Garden program in California in which kids in the public school system -- many who live in low-income families -- grow their own food for school lunches. She's just amazing. I had no idea this book existed, but I've been sneaking reads every time the boys have had a few quiet minutes.

For all of you moms, grandmas, godmothers, wanna-be moms, or best aunts ever, Happy Mother's Day!

Rubbing Shoulders with the Stars

2007-05-08T04:08:00.000-07:00

I'm traveling for work this week, so the kitchen-recountings are going to be pretty spare. It'll be a week of lots of hotel buffets and stolen jaunts to the Whole Foods a couple blocks down the road.

This past weekend I tried to impress M with my limited celebrity access. It's never worked in the past. As we were watching Monsters, Inc., for example, M was confused and then just plain bored when I tried to explain that Mommy and Daddy used to live just a couple blocks from the man who does the voice of Randall.

But he's getting older, so when M was playing with some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I tried again to impress him. I said, "This will be hard to explain, but movies have people who write them, and one of Mommies friends from college was a writer on the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie."

His eyes got very wide and awed. He thinks I'm cool, I thought. And he replied, "There's. A. New. Teenage. Mutant. Ninja. Turtles. Movie??!!"

Two Insanely Easy Desserts

2007-05-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

Last night I was worn out but in the mood to cook, or at least produce. So I made two desserts that took about five minutes each of hands-on time.

The first were Acai pops for M & T. I'm trying to wean them from the nutritionless supersweet popsicles that they love, and this recipe from Super Natural Cooking seemed perfect: Just vanilla yogurt, some acai smoothie blend, and maybe a teensy bit of simple syrup to make it a bit sweeter.

Acai berries are a fruit that grows in South America on acai palms. The fruit is said to be a SUPERFOOD, rich in dietary fiber, fatty acids, potassium, pixie dust, and I forget what-all. It's becoming available at natural food stores in frozen, pureed "smoothie packs" that are about three ounces each. I'd picked up a package of smoothie packs the last time I was at Wild Oats.

To make the pops, you just let the smoothie pack sit for five minutes, then crumble it into a blender with 1/2 cup vanilla-flavored yogurt. (The author suggests full-fat yogurt, but I couldn't do it and went fat free.) Mix this in the blender and taste the mixture; it it doesn't taste sweet enough, sweeten it with some simple syrup. Now use some more vanilla yogurt to fill popsicle molds about 1/2 to 2/3 full. Then fill the rest of the way with the acai/yogurt mixture. Use the end of a spoon to swirl around each pop so you get a lovely gradation when the pop is unmolded: cream-colored on the top, swirled purple and cream in the middle, and rich purple on the bottom.

I unmolded them tonight after dinner, and M was wary, but T, who could eat gallons of yogurt on his own, loved them.

I also made what I thought was a brilliant new dessert: rice pudding with risotto. Turns out I'm not the first person to think of making sweet risotto, I later dishearteningly found some recipes from other cooks. But it still was pretty fabulous. Here is the superquick version I made, and a little more dawdly traditional method.

Risotto Pudding Two Ways

2 Tbsp. butter
1 cup Arborio rice
3 cups milk
1 tsp. cinnamon
2/3 cup sugar
1 or 2 tsp. vanilla
Raisins if you like (me, I don't)

SuperQuick Version: Melt the butter in a pressure cooker turned to the Browning setting. Add the rice and stir around to coat in the butter. Add the milk and cinnamon, give it a stir or two. Secure the lid and process on high pressure for 11 minutes. Let the pressure come down naturally; don't release it quickly. Now stir in the sugar and vanilla, and if you like, raisins.

Dawdly Version: In a saucepan, heat the milk to just warmed -- it shouldn't be boiling. In another, medium-sized saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the rice and stir around to coat in the butter. Now lower the heat and add a ladle of the warmed milk and, using a wooden spoon, meditatively stir it around until much of the milk has evaporated, but some still remains; the rice shouldn't be dry. Add another ladle and keep doing this for 20 minutes or so until the milk has turned all creamy and the risotto is al dente. Stir in the sugar and vanilla, and if you like, raisins.

The Day the Music Died

2007-05-03T18:58:00.000-07:00

When Phil and I bought this little house back in 2001, it came with a "newly remodeled kitchen." This included the standard appliance package that comes with every new slapped-up house in our area: the side-by-side fridge with ice-in-door, the smooth-top electric range, the dishwasher that you need to pre-wash and post-wash dishes in order to use. Although we've moaned about the appliances for five years, with the exception of the dishwasher they've done their job, so we haven't replaced them. But I've eyed lovely gas ranges and freezer-below fridges, waiting for the day something would break down.

This weekend a blighted star hung over our house. First, our lawn mower took a nosedive, and Phil had to take it to the repair shop and then go to our neighbor, hat somewhat in hand, asking to use her mower so that we wouldn't look the folks on the street with the car engine hanging from a tree and peat moss for sale in the driveway. Then we had Phil's sister over and the la Croix didn't feel as cold as it should; the next day we paid a premium for a Sunday repairman to pronounce the refrigerator's imminent demise-by-compressor. Later that day we realized our 12-year-old cat hadn't been seen for hours, and I was fairly certain, based on our weekend track record, she'd dragged herself into the crawlspace to expire. You'll be relieved to know Billie's alive and well and not waiting for me to find her rotting corpse.

With the fridge barely keeping things cold enough to avoid e Coli, and having only a couple days left of even that limited performance, we packed up the boys and went to the appliance megastore. I wasn't in the mood to lay down serious cash, but this was the opportunity to get the amazing, Barefoot Contessa-worthy fridge I'd dreamed of, so tried to ignore the checkbook balance and just enjoy the moment. I wasn't expecting a Subzero or Viking, mind you. That would be greedy. But I did immediately gravitate to a KitchenAid with huge doors, a massive freezer on the bottom, and a slick stainless steel interior. I have, after all, really enjoyed cooking food lately. And I've always enjoyed eating food. So it really was essential.

What we found, however, is that we don't live in a spacious house in the Hamptons. We live in a 1950s Cape Cod with small rooms and tight spaces. And no fridge on my first-tier list could remotely fit the space without knocking out some of already spare cabinets. In fact, no fridge on my second tier fit the space either. I refused to buy the brand that had konked out on us, which the repairman said was notorious for compressor failure (clue: the brand rhymes with "Meneral Nelectric"). So what we ended up with was a very modest, side-by-side fridge with ice-in-door that almost exactly resembles the much maligned fridge we were replacing, save for one major detail: It's got much less space. Which makes the half a grass-fed cow I just reserved with my friend Carla seem very, very large.

To cheer myself, I'm dreaming of the day the smooth-top electric stove will finally bite the dust and we can get an enormous eight-burner, dual-oven Viking to put in its place.

The Problem as I See It...

2007-04-30T17:18:00.000-07:00

Secret, undoctored footage of the hypocrisy lurking in my pantry.

I went to the pantry for something the other day. I forget what, whether a can of organic garbanzos or some Lucky Charms. And I looked up and saw this: clearance-sale Peeps (purple no less) sharing a shelf with organic wheatberries and millet. I keep writing in here about all we're doing to better our food life -- "We don't buy store-bought bread." "I'm cooking with quinoa." "I'm only buying local or organic meat." But there remains a dark underbelly that stays shadowed from the online world.

When the cashier at Kroger, where I swear I just ducked in to get some cat litter, said, "Would you like to add some Peeps? They're only 12 cents," I had a choice to make. I could have thought, "Ewww. Peeps. Sugar, gelatin, and more sugar. In lots of packaging. That will do nothing to help the environment, my health, or local producers." Or I could have thought, "Peeps! At 12 cents! Why, that's a bargain at twice the price. And I *do* love Peeps." I think it's clear that I took the road most traveled.

And the epic battle rages on.

A Big Midwestern Breakfast

2007-04-29T07:08:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning I got up, relieved to have made it through a treacherous workweek, and decided to skip the raisin bran and putter around making the kind of breakfast that would have made our hearty, farming Indiana forebears proud.

First came the bacon, purchased from local Royer Farm. I'd been warned when I first bought four pounds of this thick-cut bacon that it cooks much quicker than the store-bought, shrink-wrapped variety. Which it does. Apparently the added preservatives, fillers, and unmentionables in pork from major chains slows down the cooking. This was on the table in time for M to eat his usual five pieces.

Next I tried a pecan coffee cake recipe from a great out-of-print book called Sourdough Baking. Because I couldn't see us eating a whole coffee cake before the it all went green, I baked these in three mini-loaf pans so that I could freeze one or two. I also played around with the recipe a bit, adding whole grains and using a natural sweetener. The recipe made a nutty, sweet, dense (but not overbearing) loaf that was incredibly moist. (Could the moistness be due to the stick and a half of butter? You be the judge...)

I made a mistake in reading the recipe and put allof the sweet pecan mixture inside the loafs, and it was pretty good that way. If you want, though, you can layer batter-pecans-batter-pecans.
Note to self: When using mini-loaf pans, the tiny pans have a tendency to tip over and spill batter and pecans all over the bottom of the oven. Check.

Pecan Sourdough Mini Loaves

2/3 cup sucanat (or brown sugar)
1 tsp. cinnamon
3/4 to 1 cup chopped pecans
3/4 cup butter
1 cup sucanat (or brown sugar, white sugar, or a mixture)
2 eggs
1 cup sourdough starter
1/4 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup white flour
1 cup whole-wheat flour

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

Mix together the 2/3 cup sucanat, pecans, and cinnamon. Set aside.

Cream together the butter and remaining cup sucanat. Add the eggs, then the sourdough starter, then the milk, and then the vanilla. Now add the baking soda, then the baking powder, then the salt, and finally the flour. (This step mixes everything up well without requiring you to dirty a third bowl to mix together the dry ingredients.) Mix this for about three minutes until

In three greased or nonstick mini-loaf pans, use about half the batter and distribute it between the three pans, spreading it out evenly. Now sprinkle the sucanat/pecan/cinnamon mixture over the batter in all three pans. Then top with the rest of the batter.

Bake for about 35 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean.

Best Banana Bread Ever, Naturally

2007-04-26T19:05:00.000-07:00

This weekend I gave Phil 36 hours alone in the house and took the boys to Columbus, Ohio, to rough it up with my brother's two boys. With a suburban house hosting a 10-, 6-, 5-, and 2-year-old male, there was a lot of pee-wee testosterone this weekend, believe you me.

My parents were also there for the weekend, having driven in from Michigan to grandkid-sit while my my brother and his wife escaped to a bed and breakfast to celebrate their 15th anniversary. With a baby on the way in about three months, this is likely their last weekend away until August of 2023.

The kids pretty much entertained themselves, so at some point my mom and I took a jaunt to a natural foods store (called the Raisin Rack, isn't that cute?) to stock up on bulk millet and fair-trade tea. When we got home, I set to work on a pile of browning bananas with plans to save them from the compost heap. Not having expected to make banana bread over the weekend, and not having my favorite banana bread recipe (from the out-of-print Cook Something) with me, I headed online. At AllRecipes.com I found a recipe I liked and then doctored it up a bit. It was delicious, if I do say so myself, and is now going to be my go-to recipe for banana bread. The natural cane sugar, which isn't stripped of molasses like white sugar is, added a little complexity, and the whole-wheat flour added some heft and a little nuttiness. If you don't have a line on sucanat, just use regular brown sugar.

Raisin Rack Banana Bread

1 cup white flour
1 cup whole-wheat flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1-1/4 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1 cup sucanat (non-refined cane sugar)
1 egg
5 tablespoons milk
1-1/2 cups mashed banana (about 3-1/2 to 4 or so)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a medium-sized bowl, mix together the two flours, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. In another bowl (like, say, the bowl of a stand mixer), cream the butter and sugar. Add the egg and milk and mix together. Mix the dry ingredients into the butter/sugar concoction just until mixed; don't overdo it. Now throw in the bananas and mix until they're incorporated, but don't stir so hard and so long that you totally anihilate them; some big chunks remaining is nice.

Pour into a lightly greased 9 X 5-inch loaf pan. Bake for about an hour -- until a knife or skewer inserted into it comes out clean. Smile demurely when your nephews ask for a second piece.

The Government-Subsidized Pop-Tart

2007-04-24T18:15:00.000-07:00

When I was pregnant with M and starting to get the queasies, my doctor told me to just eat. The important thing, he said, was to get in calories to feed the growing baby; we could work on nutritional needs after I was feeling less green. My ob/gyn was, in essence, doing for me what the farm bill does for all Americans -- finds a way to pack in the most calories, regardless of nutritional value or the dangerously expanding waistlines of many U.S. citizens.

Michael Pollan, one of my favorite food journalists, wrote a fabulous piece in last Sunday's New York Times, which you can find here, that breaks down the farm bill into language laypeople like me can understand. I'll give you the highlights as I understand them.

The farm bill, which is about to come back around as it does every five years or so, subsidizes farmers by paying them for the number of bushels of five main crops they produce; those crops are corn, soy, wheat, cotton, and rice.

The inevitable result is that farmers overproduce the fab five crops, and this subsidized product is then sold to consumers not only as the actual crops and recognizable derivatives. The surplus is also creatively processed into products like high-fructose corn syrup, McNugget breading, and added fats.

In its most basic terms, the bill encourages the processing and ultimate overprocessing of these key crops into "foods" (Twinkies, Pepsi, Pop-Tarts) that pack the most caloric punch per farm acre, making cheap, calorie- and fat-ridden product accessible even to those with limited incomes. This method was possibly admirable when the poor couldn't afford to purchase enough calories to sustain themselves; today, this method isn't so admirable. Carrots and lettuce, as you might expect, remain unsubsidized for farmers and for many consumers with very limited means, out of reach.

An interesting fact Pollan cited in his article is that between 1985 and 2000, the price of produce increased nearly 40 percent, but soda (made mostly from high-fructose corn syrup) decreased 23 percent. I know from Pollan's painstakingly well-researched book The Omnivore's Dilemma that there are about 45,000 products in the average supermarket, and more than 25% contain some form of corn. Corn is also the number-one ingredient at McDonald's, although you'd be hard-pressed to find an actual recognizable kernel save for a sprinkling on one or two of the company's premium salads.

The sad thing is that this bill isn't just making Americans pudgy. The cheap product is being sold to other countries, undermining local farmers' ability to earn a living wage. Mexican farmers, for example, are finding themselves hard-pressed to compete with the government-subsidized price of cheap corn from the U.S.

Phil and I have been making an effort to be conscientious of what products contain high-fructose corn syrup because it's so unhealthy physically. But it's unhealthy in a million other ways, including environmentally, ethically, and socially. And the system is now wired to produce oceans of high-fructose corn syrup as well as a plethora of unrecognizable key-crop derivatives.

All this talk is depressing me, so in my next post I'll include the accidental best banana bread recipe I sort of made up this weekend. Added bonus: it's corn-free!

With God, and Anyone Reading This, as My Witness...

2007-04-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about Earth Day coming up this weekend. It's such a good focal time to reflect on what we all can do to live more sustainable, lighter-impact lives. And I realized it's time. I've been toying with the idea for a while, but couldn't quite bring myself to fully commit. But now I am. I gave up Fat-Free Pringles by posting my desire to do so, the thought of public humiliation outweighing my need to crunch.

So from here on out, I'm no longer buying coffee or chocolate that isn't fair trade. Period. If I'm at a restaurant with you, I promise not to embarrass you by harassing the waitstaff about the origins of the coffee. But as far as products I bring into my home -- or mindlessly purchase from the vending machine at work when I'm restless around 3:00 -- I'm no longer buying products that were produced by hurting the land or the producers. Even if Costco-brand coffee tastes pretty good and is only $3.50 a pound.

Wish me luck.

I'm fortunate in that Indianapolis is the home of Endangered Species chocolate, which not only provides fair wages and conditions for its producers, but donates a portion of its profits to protecting endangered species. My sister-in-law told me about the company, and I've consumed numerous chocolate bars in the name of research. In fact, over the course of the last couple months I was forced to consume about six espresso bean bars just to be *sure* I could taste the fair-trade goodness. Which I could. So at least I can get the good stuff close to home.

Please Don't Let This be a New Trend

2007-04-20T03:00:00.001-07:00

The other day Phil, the boys, and I walked to a local sandwich place for dinner. The restaurant is a lot like the chain Panera Bread, only locally owned and just a few blocks from our house.

So we'll forget that it was inappropriately costly to feed the four of us. or that we sat on the couches and waited and waited and waited for our food and were later told later by the woman who took our order that the kitchen had "just lost" our ticket, and she needed us to tell her what we'd ordered so that she could go put in a new ticket. Those didn't add to a mellow vibe, but we could deal.

The real issue was when my sandwich came. I got this great chicken/brie/spinach/vinaigrette concoction on a crusty baguette. The issue was that the crusty baguette was loaded with everything, and then the vinaigrette was artfully drizzled over the whole sandwich, sort of like dessert is finished with a chocolate sauce drizzle. It would have looked lovely photographed, but what it meant to actually chomp off a chunk of chewy, crusty baguette sandwich that's covered in brown sauce means you go through about 10 napkins trying to eat an otherwise delicious sandwich that you've already waited 30 minutes for. I was just thanking my lucky stars I hadn't ordered it on a first date.

Is this some kind of trend I'm unaware of -- slathering condiments on the outside of a sandwich? Doesn't that go against the whole idea of a sandwich? And when will restaurateurs learn that experimentation is great, but form always has to follow function?

And Now for a Break from Our Regularly Scheduled Programming...

2007-04-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

Generally I don’t talk about my work in this blog, but I’m so excited about a book that is releasing this week, publishing out of my group, that I had to share.

This book was a lot of fun to put together. We were fortunate to have a great author, some top-notch and industry-recognized contributing knitting designers, cover and interior designers who really got the whole Harry Potter mystique, and editors who went the extra 10 miles to make a book that evokes the Hogwarts vibe.

To celebrate the book’s release, we worked with the author on a charity knit-along, which you can find here. All of the Potter hats created for the knit-along will be donated to Warm Woolies, a great organization that provides cozy outerwear for underprivileged kids who otherwise would suffer through very cold winters.

Because this book was such a huge deal for us, we spared no expense in securing modeling talent. While it wouldn’t be prudent or ethical to reveal the months of negotiation and legal back-and-forth behind the scenes, it was quite a coup for us to secure the following supermodel, who took some time from the catwalk to squeeze in a couple minutes in front of the camera for us. As you can see, he’s too sexy for his wand cozy... too sexy for his wand cozy...

Faster than a Speeding Delivery Man

2007-04-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

Tonight while the boys were winding down for bed, I took a few minutes and prepped what has become for us an at-home fast food option: pre-baked sourdough pizza shells. This isn't anything new; these are basically homemade Boboli crusts sans the preservatives, packaging, and price. When I get home from work, I grab one or two from the freezer, top them with pizza sauce and grated cheese for the boys and anything Phil and I are in the mood for -- goat cheese, spinach, prosciutto, whatever -- and pop them in the oven for about 15 minutes.

One of my friends freezes unbaked pizza dough that she just rolls out when she's ready to use it, but I love that these are pre-baked. The pre-baking eliminates both rolling out the dough and a bit of baking time. For those of you without kids underfoot, this relatively little timesaving might seem insignificant, but it's not. When making dinner with two hungry boys just in from daycare, every extra kitchen task is an opportunity for distraction when kissing boo-boos, righting sibling wrongs, or explaining why you can't go find the red Power Ranger right now. These pizzas are in the oven, literally, in about 90 seconds, and unless a head is split open or an arm broken in four places, a kid can wait 90 seconds for my attention.

Here's how to do it.

Sourdough Pizza Shells

2 tsp. yeast
1 tsp. sugar
1/4 cup warm water -- 110 degrees, or just slightly warmer than a warm bath
3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 cup sourdough starter
1 tsp. sea salt -- or regular salt
1 cup whole-wheat flour
2 cups, plus maybe a little more, white flour

Stir together the yeast, sugar, and water, and then let this sit for 10 minutes to get the yeast proofed and bubbly. Add in the olive oil, sourdough starter, sea salt, whole-wheat flour, and 1/2 cup white flour. Combine this well; now add the other cup of white flour, 1/2 cup at a time. If the dough is still sticky, add a bit more flour until it feels elastic and like Play-Doh.

Put a tiny bit of olive oil in a clean bowl, rub it around the bowl, and plop the wad of dough in. Flip the dough over so that it's covered on both sides with the oil. Cover the bowl with a damp towel and set in a warm place for about an hour, until the dough has doubled.

Punch down the dough, and then cut it into four basically equal pieces. Roll each piece into a circle. Don't worry whether you're making perfect circles; lopsided pizzas look rustic and pretty.

Bake these pizza shells for about 10 minutes at 400 degrees. They should be solid but not browned. Cool the shells and wrap in plastic wrap; if you won't be using them in the next day or two, store them in the freezer.

When you're ready to use them, pull what you need directly from the freezer, top as you'd like, and back at 425 degrees for about 15 to 17 minutes, or until the cheese is nicely browned.

If you're not into whole-wheat flour, just substitute in all white flour for the mixture of whole-wheat and white. Once the pizzas are in the oven, be horrified to hear your mom's voice from 35 years ago coming from your mouth, stating, "I don't know where the red Power Ranger is; it's wherever you left it." Then go comb the house for the red Power Ranger.

This morning before work I finished Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires, which is about her adventures as the restaurant critic for the New York Times -- including the costumes and personas she would assume to experience restaurants as they truly are, not as they are when the NY Times food critic is in attendence. All three of her memoirs (the other two being Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples) are so delightful. Despite poisoning T with one of the recipes in the book, I absolutely loved this book. Few people can write about food like Ruth Reichl. The second I finished it, I subscribed online to Gourmet, the magazine she edits -- a magazine I later wondered if perhaps it might be a bit beyond my abilities. Stay tuned...

"Key Who?" or Cooking with Grains You Can't Pronounce

2007-04-14T14:10:00.001-07:00

I've been seeing "quinoa" popping up a lot lately -- apparently this is some SUPERGRAIN that makes a perfect protein all by itself (no pesky pairing of grain + legume), is easy to prepare, and can take on the character and taste of whatever it's paired with. I've seen recipes for very savory, very sweet, and very neutral quinoa dishes. So a few days ago I dragged T to Wild Oats with the promise of a Sunrise smoothie to pick up some bulk quinoa.

As it turns out, this isn't pronounced "Kwi-NO-ah" as I had been referring to it, but "KEEN-wah." Go figure. Not unlike when I first asked for a book by "a-NAY" Nin and was condescendingly told (by the woman working the mall bookstore), "you mean 'anna-EES?'" But I digress.

What I know about quinoa could fill a thimble, but my reading on this grain told me that it has a bitter outer layer, which apparently is a naturally occurring pesticide. Consequently, you need to rinse quinoa well before using it, or the resulting dish will retain some of that bitter flavor. To rinse mine, I just put it in a fine seive and ran water over it for a minute or so.

I started with a basic recipe for Quinoa Pilaf from How to Cook Everything, and then gussied it up a little, adding the garbonzo beans I'd been craving, sprinkling in some spices, and finishing it with the Nigella seeds I'd picked up at Dean and Deluca last fall and never quite known how to use.

The result was amazing. I'd like to think I'll be taking it in my lunch next week, but I'm not positive it'll make it through the night. Phil's off at an Eisenhower Field Day gig, I rented Borat for the evening, and I can completely see that the evening could end up with me bloated and moaning on the TV room couch, the deep skillet that held enough quinoa for four lying abandoned and empty next to me. It's that good.

If you haven't tried quinoa and want to give it a whirl, why not try this easy recipe? I used this as a main dish, but it would be great without the garbonzo beans (or with, if you're on a protein bender), eaten as a side dish with meat.

Quinoa with Garbonzo Beans and Nigella

2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 small onion, chopped small
1 cup quinoa, rinsed thoroughly
1 3/4 to 2 cups broth (I used chicken)
1/2 tsp. or so sea salt
a few grinds of pepper
1/4 tsp. or so ancho powder, garam marsala, or any other spice you like
1 15-oz. can garbonzo beans, drained and rinsed
a few sprinklings Nigella

Heat the oil in a deep skillet over medium heat. When it's hot, add the onion and stir around for about 5 minutes, until the onion softens. Add the rinsed quinoa and stir around for another 5 minutes. Add 1 3/4 cups broth, as well as the sea salt, pepper, and ancho powder; stir; and cover. Let this cook for about 15 minutes -- until the liquid is absorbed and the quinoa is no longer crunchy. If the quinoa isn't yet soft but the liquid is gone, add another 1/4 cup broth and give it another couple minutes to cook, covered. Once the quinoa is soft, if there's still liquid left, uncover it and stir until the liquid is largely absorbed.

Stir in the garbonzo beans. Sprinkle with the nigella seeds. Devour.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

2007-04-12T18:48:00.000-07:00

Last night I took M to the library, and was thrilled to pick up a brochure about a free lecture being given by Kurt Vonnegut at the end of the month. In fact, the city had just announced Tuesday that the One City, One Book read is Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse Five, and that this is being proclaimed The Year of Vonnegut for the Circle City.

I heard this morning on the radio that the 84-year-old author had died last night.

I haven't read any Vonnegut in several years, and was looking forward to re-exploring Slaughterhouse Five with my fellow Hoosiers. Vonnegut's absurd, irreverent style isn't the type book I normally gravitate toward, but I adore his brilliance and economy with language and his sometimes startling revelations on humanity in the middle of writing that is comedic and can fool you into feeling it's trite.

This passage about trains carrying POWs across Europe has stuck with me, almost verbatim, since I read it in Slaughterhouse Five more than 15 years ago:

During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle at one another, and then to move. The locomotive and the last car of each train were marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for airplanes -- that it was carrying prisoners of war.

I still remember how jolted I was when I read this brief history lesson in the ridiculousness of war games and the rules of engagement. That's what Vonnegut did -- made us look at humanity in the context of his imagined worlds, giving us glimpses of the real world that were no less absurd, no less fantastical, and no less horrifying. He did it like no one else.

May he rest in peace.

The Thrill of Victory...

2007-04-10T18:23:00.000-07:00

After the crushing blow of Maya's Day of the Dead Cookies, I feared I'd lost all my kitchen confidence and mojo. Sunday was Easter, and I contemplated a quick family trip to Papa Murphy's for a take-and-bake pizza, but with a leg of lamb in the freezer calling our name, I rolled up my sleeves and tried to forget the humiliation I'd suffered less than 24 hours previously.

The lamb was super easy. I just stuck it in an oven-proof Dutch oven and lasciviously rubbed lamb spices, salt, pepper, and a separated and peeled head of garlic all over the meat. Then I poured on some olive oil, gave the lamb another rubbing for good measure, and stuck the pot in a 425 degree oven for about an hour -- until a meat thermometer read 140 degrees.

The real conifidence builder was a Pommes Anna, which is just a potato cake that is baked in a round pan and inverted to unmold it, much like a pineapple upside-down cake. My first introduction to Pommes Anna was on an old Martha Stewart Entertaining video. The video showed shots of her husband, who she's been divorced from for a decade or so -- it was that old. The menu on this classic had nothing to do with ease on the hostess. It included spinning sugar to make a nest for the dessert ("be sure your cats aren't in the kitchen when you do this as the hot liquid sugar can burn their paws," Martha warned), individual spinach timbales, and Pommes Anna. In fact, every time I've read about Pommes Anna, it's in the context of how it will be the centerpiece of your table, causing your guests to gasp in delight. Here's what I've learned about Pommes Anna: It is quite beautiful when it's unmolded, with a pattern of golden-brown potatoes on top and softer potatoes inside, all coated in lovely butter and salt. But it's also incredibly easy to make. And our cat was able to walk freely in the kitchen while I was making it without fear of burned paws.

When the Pommes Anna unmolded correctly before dinner, I wanted to do the Touchdown dance. When M said, "boy, this is just delicious!," I wanted to cry. If you're needing to build back your kitchen confidence, here's an easy recipe to try that will cause your guests -- or at least your five-year-old -- to gasp in delight. I think it actually looks more peasant-like than champagne dinner, so I might make it sometime for brunch, as it's a pretty close but dolled-up relative of the hash brown.

Pommes Anna

1-1/2 to 2 pounds baking potatoes (depending on the size of your pan)
4 Tbsp. (maybe a bit more) butter
Sea salt
Freshly ground pepper

Peel the potatoes and cut them into 1/16-inch slices. Immediately immerse the slices in a bowl of cool water. After you're finished slicing, remove the slices and dry them slightly.

Generously brush melted butter on the bottom and sides of a heavy, ovenproof, nonstick, round pan with sloped sides, about 10 inches in diameter -- a high-quality omelet pan would work well. (I used a smaller, 8.5-inch all-purpose round pan.) Arrange a layer of potato slices on the bottom of the pan. If you want, you can put a slice in the middle of the pan and fan out overlapping layers from there to make the unmolding extra-pretty. Now generously brush butter over this layer of potatoes, salt and pepper the potatoes, and then add another layer. Keep layering the potatoes, buttering between each layer and salting and peppering every other layer or so. When you get to the top of the pan or run out of potatoes, generously butter a piece of foil that is the size of the pan, place this butter-side down over the potatoes, and press down fairly hard to compact the potatoes.

Bake the Pommes Anna, covered in the foil, about 25 minutes. Now remove the foil and bake another 25 to 30 minutes, until the potatoes are starting to turn a golden brown. Remove from the oven and invert onto a serving plate. Cut into slices like a pie.

One more observation about the Pommes Anna: I've never actually eaten it before this weekend; I'd only read intimidating descriptions of it. Consequently, I don't know what it's supposed to taste like. While I thought that what we had was delightful, I didn't find it remarkably different from the weeknight fried potatoes my mom often made while we were growing up. I never realized what fancy, centerpiece-worthy food we were eating on a Tuesday night!

The Agony of Defeat

2007-04-07T17:34:00.000-07:00

Today the whole family was supposed to go to an Easter egg hunt in Wabash, Indiana, at the home of some of our friends. It's a big deal, with three age groups of hunters and prizes for gold and silver eggs and about 30 kids tromping around our friends' property.

Sadly, T -- who is starting to read in this blog like Tiny Tim with all his documented health woes -- was sent home from daycare yesterday with a high fever. He had a rough, Victorian-era night, with lots of crying out in his sleep and tossing and turning as the demons visited his fever-plagued toddler dreams. So we decided Phil would take M on the egg hunt and I would take T to the doctor.

During his 45-minute nap when I had some rare alone time, I decided to tackle a recipe that has intrigued but somewhat intimidated me: Maya's Day of the Dead Cookies. To appreciate them, you need to see the photo I saw on 101 Cookbooks: funky, eerie skulls perfectly formed in two flavors of cookie dough. This is the picture; makes you want to make these cookies, doesn't it?

The reality is -- and I know this -- I have the patience of a gnat when it comes to fiddly kitchen work. If you want radish roses adorning the veggie tray, you'll want to talk with someone else. But I thought maybe I could get over my annoyance at futzing if the result was this cool. So I rolled out the two kinds of dough, plunged a wooden spoon, bamboo skewer, and skinny kitchen knife all the way through the white dough roll to get the skull detail, and put the chocolate and white rolls of dough in the fridge to chill.

When Phil and T got home, I sliced the dough rolls, not quite sure how thick 1/8 inch is, but taking a game guess. I could already tell that something had gone horribly wrong and my skulls looked like maimed aliens. But I carried on.

After baking, here's the best of what I got; the *best*:

Here's most of what I got:

I have a laundry list of things I did wrong: Not making the skull shapes tall and skinny enough, not keeping the skewer or wooden spoon steady as I shoved it into the dough, not making the eyes big enough, cutting the white dough too thin. The cookies actually are delicious, so maybe I'll try them again some day.

Or maybe not. I'm feeling a little defeated right now.

The Taxman Cometh, with Recipe

2007-04-06T03:15:00.000-07:00

Last night I found myself again staring at TurboTax, watching it rack up how much money we owe. Which is ludicrous as we live modestly, make a relatively modest income, claim no deductions, and have two kids. I was tempted to put off the task for yet another night, but Phil had taken the boys to dinner specifically to give me time to finish them, so I felt it would be in bad form to be reading a novel, eating risotto, and drinking a martini when he got home. I buckled down, tried to ignore the mounting debt in the upper left corner of the screen, and got through another April. I only learned later that night that the due date this year isn't Saturday, April 14, as I'd thought, but was moved to the next Tuesday. Had I known there was extra cushion, Phil likely would have come home to me with a martini.

For comfort, I made a super-simple, low-calorie, low-fat, low-fuss cauliflower recipe my friend Kim made up. Cooking cauliflower down to the consistency of mashed potatoes got trendy, I believe, with the emergence of The South Beach Diet. The cool thing is that cauliflower really does taste like mashed potatoes, on some level, when cooked down. So this recipe is comforting, lets you get in one of the purported superfoods, and can get you through tax time without alcohol. We both make it (of course) in a pressure cooker, but I'm sure you could also just boil the cauliflower on the stove for about 30 minutes or so.

Faux Mashed Potatoes Cauliflower

1 head cauliflower, preferably organic
2 cups water or vegetable, chicken, or beef broth
A couple sprinklings of paprika
A little butter or buttery spray (like Earth's Balance spray), if you're so inclined

Break the cauliflower, by hand, into big chunks and place those in the pressure cooker. Pour in the water or broth. Sprinkle with a couple shakes of paprika. Cook on high pressure for 5 minutes. When the timer goes off, use a slotted spoon to get out the cauliflower, and, if you want, add a bit of butter or spray on some buttery spray. Enjoy while deciding if you have a receipt for the sweaters you gave to Goodwill last summer.

In meatier news, Phil is heading to a local parking lot tonight to pick up our meat order from Nicki Royer at Royer Farm; I imagine there will be Sopranos-like looking around and talking on pay phones. Nicki and her husband are local farmers who are regular fixtures are our local farmer's market in the summer. During the off-farmer's market months, they make monthly or so appearances around town to sell meat from a vehicle. I called her around dinner time to reserve some stew beef and thick-cut bacon, and asked her if it was a bad time to call; they have twin boys around two years old who I figured might be eating or needing some attention. She said it was a great time to call -- the boys were out feeding the animals with their daddy. That almost made me misty; farms have become such huge, industrial organizations viewing animals as simply commodity, it's nice to think of some ruddy-cheeked toddlers helping their dad feed the pigs their corn.

A New Kind of Superhero: Garden Man and Seedling

2007-04-05T03:13:00.000-07:00

Sunday (if I need to point out the irony: April Fool's Day) the weather here in Indiana was just amazing. We were all wearing shorts, drinking iced tea, and talking of picnics. Ignoring both the calendar and the fact that I live in Indiana where New Year's was too warm to keep champagne cold on the porch but July can require wool, I interrupted the boys' saving the world to herd them to my favorite garden shop and get a jump on the season.

I haven't grown anything but a little basil and a lot of weeds since T arrived a couple years ago, but I'd been promising that *this* year we were going to have tomatoes out our ears, carve a Jack-o-lantern from our own bounty, and try a rhubarb-strawberry crisp from garden rhubarb. The woman at the garden shop clucked disapprovingly while I selected our Better Boys and Early Girls, but we ignored her and confidently gathered up our purchases, headed home, and got to work resurrecting the neglected Earth Boxes.

(As a note, for those of you who haven't gardened with Earth Boxes, you need to try them. A very experienced gardener at my office got me onto them, and I've never looked back. And while you're at it, check out the mind-boggling number of heirloom tomato options at Totally Tomatoes.)

Once the plants were in, I chopped down an old rosebush I've always hated, weeded in the front beds, and started dreaming of the Caprese salad I'd shortly be enjoying.

Yesterday we had spitting snow showers and freezing temperatures. I had neglected to cover the weak little plants the night before, as I was more interested in socializing with the friends who came to visit, so the Caprese dreams have died along with the shriveled tomato twigs. Even Garden Man and Seedling could do nothing to turn back the clock and get the unseasonably warm weather back.

Oh, Mother Nature, you fickle wench.

Food Allergies? Eggs-actly

2007-04-03T15:33:00.000-07:00

Last night Phil and I both got home late. With two hungry boys in the house and about seven minutes before a low-blood sugar meltdown, I decided to try the lightning-fast Spaghetti Carbonara recipe in Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires, a book I'm currently reading and enjoying immensely.

The recipe's a snap, largely involving cooking noodles in one pot and frying up some bacon in another, then draining the cooked noodles and adding them to a couple of uncooked eggs. The hot noodles, stirred around in the eggs, cook the eggs safely, and then you add a couple other decadent ingredients like the bacon and some Parmesan, and dinner's ready. Voila. Ruth even says she hasn't met a kid who doesn't like Spaghetti Carbonara. Sold. We'll ignore for a moment the fact that Ruth Reichl is one of the country's leading food gurus and her son regularly enjoys dishes like sushi, a meal my kids would see as a punishment.

I've been very careful introducing foods to eczema-ridden, ear-tubed, asthma-suffering T. M just got over his own toddler milk and egg allergy fairly recently, so after four years of soy milk and egg substitutes, I'm probably more sensitized to the issue than many parents. And when I was young, I was the weird kid at the birthday party who could only have Jell-o because I couldn't eat the wheat or milk in the cake and ice cream. In short, I am intimately familiar with food allergies. But at T's second birthday I cautiously started introducing baked goods with egg, and he had no issues, so thought I had the All-Clear. What is it they say about pride and the fall?

Ruth was half right: While M wouldn't touch my offering, T -- who often subsists in 24-hour periods on little more than three pretzels and a sippy cup of milk -- couldn't get enough of the Spaghetti Carbonara. It was a little culinary miracle. I was still marveling about it when M and I headed out after dinner to get him a pair of flip-flops for the coming warm months.

When we got home, I learned of the drama that had ensued during the hour we'd been gone: a couple rounds of vomiting, a 30-minute hysterical fit in the bathtub, and coughing episodes requiring two breathing treatments. Drat. The only culprit seems to be the eggs, nature's perfect food. And they were even organic. So this puts a tremendous damper on the Savory Asparagus Bread Pudding I was planning to bring to an Easter egg hunt Saturday.

To rub a little salt in the wound, I've been ogling a book for six months, deciding whether I really needed it. Friday I took the plunge and ordered it. Last night, after T was finally cleared out of the poison and settled down to a fitful sleep, I opened an e-mail notice that the book's been shipped and should be here tomorrow. The book?

Super Natural Cooking: A Book Review

2007-03-30T16:35:00.000-07:00

For seven years now, I've said that if I were on a deserted island with only one cookbook (and a fully equipped kitchen), I couldn't live without The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. This is such a delicious, basic collection of recipes, many of which are flexible enough to be made ahead and impressive enough to serve to guests. The other day Max the postman brought Super Natural Cooking, however, and I fear it's going to give Ina Garten a run for her money.

Super Natural Cooking is the latest offering from photographer and blogger Heidi Swanson, founder of two of my favorite food sites: http://www.101cookbooks.com/ and http://www.mightyfoods.com/. 101 Cookbooks was started when Heidi realized she had a million -- or at least 101 -- cookbooks and did more flagging of pages and looking at photos than actually cooking from them. In an attempt to use the books and learn new cooking skills and gain new confidence, she began cooking through her massive collection, "One recipe at a time," and chronicling her culinary adventures. She also does a lot of recipe writing of her own.

I'd made a couple of Heidi's recipes, like the Ravioli Pasta Salad posted on her blog; this salad is typical of her recipes -- pasta punctuating rather than overpowering a salad. I packed it for lunch four days in a row and never tired of it. So you can imagine that once I'd ordered Super Natural Cooking, I immediately started stalking the mail. This past Wednesday I had a one-day trip to New York that began with me leaving the house at 4:00 a.m. and returning near midnight. When I arrived home, the package from Amazon was waiting for me, and even though I was beat, I couldn't stand not to do a little thumbing, marking, and mental planning before hitting the hay. The book is beautiful and inspiring.

Let's be honest. You know how sometimes you can walk into a hard-core natural foods store and the whole thing smells like old curry, the bottles of medicinal herbs are covered in a layer of dust, and the books all sport curled paperback covers and amateurish designs that look like they were laid out in 1982? Not so enticing. Super Natural Cooking is the polar opposite: It makes cooking with whole and natural ingredients look luscious, enticing, and achievable. The photography is absolutely breathtaking -- food porn at its best -- and the recipes are vegetarian and whole-food based but don't look so prescribed and, well, good for you. They just look good.

This morning the boys slept in and I made Heidi's Wheat Berry Salad with Citrus, Toasted Pine Nuts, Feta, and Spinach. Rather than spend an hour cooking down the wheat berries, I put them in the pressure cooker for about 25 minutes. The rest of the salad -- including a delicious dressing of shallots, extra-virgin olive oil, and citrus juice and zest -- came together in about five minutes. I took this in my lunch today and ended up eating while finishing a conference call because I couldn't any longer hold off diving in.

I have at least half a dozen other recipes flagged: Espresso Banana Muffins (can you imagine?), Otsu (soba noodles in ginger-sesame dressing), Gnocchi alla Romana, Black Tea Spring Rolls, Hijiki and Edamame Salad, Thin Mint Cookies...

If you've been wanting to try natural ingredients but feel intimidated, check out this book. The recipes are quick, easy, and delicious, and the text explains what each ingredient is and how to use it without blathering on or condescending.

Watch your back, Barefoot Contessa.

Sourpuss Part II

2007-03-21T18:37:00.000-07:00

Teresa popped by my office yesterday bearing a foil-wrapped gift: a gorgeous round loaf of Irish Soda Bread she'd whipped up, complete with golden raisins, caraway seeds, and a Luck of the Irish sticker. I spent the rest of the day secretly ripping off chewy, sweet hunks of the bread, taking home a sort of misshapen disk that was now about 2/3 its original size. I don't believe I've ever had soda bread before -- I was mixing it up in my head with Irish brown bread -- and it was unbelievable. (For Amy's Grandma's recipe for soda bread -- or is it? -- check out the comments here.)

This coincided nicely with my adventures in sourdough, in which I'm now in a pattern of making bread on Saturday night/Sunday morning, and have decided that our family is through with storebought bread. I had it in my head that making bread at home is very complicated and time-consuming and requires gobs of flour stuck to the sweat oozing down my face. Not so. Granted, I do use a stand mixer, so it's not exactly a Laura Ingalls experience in our house. But even so, it feels a bit rustic and back-to-the-Earth and natural. And it requires about 15 minutes of time, tops, to bake for the week. What is it about breadmaking that feels so intimidating?

The pattern goes like this: Saturday evening I mix up a batch of bread and let it rise overnight. Sunday morning I punch it down, divide it into two pieces, shape it into loaves, stick those loaves in loaf pans, and let the bread rise for another four or so hours. Then the loaves go into the oven, and we have fresh bread for dinner and homemade bread for the week. And it's just so simple and gratifying. Why is breadmaking a dying art? It makes me think maybe things like cheesemaking or sausage-preparing aren't really so hard.

If you're feeling like trying sourdough bread, after you get the starter going, here's a really basic recipe to try:

Sourdough Bread -- Enough for two loaves

1 Tbsp. salt
1 cup water
2 cups sourdough starter
2 cups whole-wheat flour
3 to 3-1/2 cups white flour

Dissolve the salt in the water. Now mix in the sourdough starter. Beat in the two kinds of flour until it all makes a lovely, unsticky wad; you might need all the flour, a little less, a little more. Just add it until the dough feels like Playdough. Even with using a stand mixer with a dough hook, I end up kneading the bread for a minute or so to get the dough to come together nicely.

In a clean bowl, add a tiny bit of oil and rub it around the bowl (I use olive oil), stick the wad of dough in, flip it over so that the oil gets on both sides, and cover the bowl with a damp towel. Let this rise overnight; it'll double -- or triple -- in size.

In the morning after you've had a little coffee and maybe after the Sunday morning talking heads have gotten up your ire, punch down the dough. Divide the dough into two, and flatten each piece slightly, then roll those pieces jelly-roll style, tuck the ends under, and put each loaf into a loaf pan. Let the dough rise for four more hours, covered in another damp towel.

Bake the loaves at 400 degrees for about 40-45 minutes: Until they're nicely browned on top and they sound hollow when you rap on them. To keep them sort of moist and to brown the tops evenly, you can put a pan (like a pie plate) of water in the oven with the bread. This will keep everything nice and hydrated.

(To "feed" the starter after using 2 cups, add back 1-1/2 cups white flour and 1-1/2 cups water. If you cut the recipe in half, just cut the starter food in half. But you probably knew that.)

I think part of the magic of making this bread is that it incorporates whole-wheat flour my sister-in-law has ground. There's something extra-rustic about making bread from flour that's been hand-ground. Who knows? Maybe this summer I'll try growing my own wheat. On our homestead.

Culinary Heebie-Jeebies

2007-03-17T05:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at school M's class learned about St. Patrick's Day, complete with a snack of Lucky Charms topped with green milk (not moldy milk, just milk and green food coloring). In fact, he loved the cereal so much, he convinced me to make up some green milk and let him and T have cereal for dinner. So much for the homemade pizza I'd baked with pre-made sourdough pizza crusts.

Later I made him some green frosting to spread on graham crackers. He stared in disbelief. How in the world had I just *whipped up* frosting? Had I *added* frosting to the bowl, he asked, sure it was an ingredient; perhaps that frosting farmers in Mexico harvested the frosting crops every summer. I realized that for the most part I've only used frosting from a can; it's what he knows. It seemed to him insurmountable to get it any other way.

Which got me thinking about the culinary mountains I've never climbed, partially because I'm scared I'll be such a miserable failure. I think back to when I first learned to drive a stick shift. We were in Brooklyn, trying to navigate the start/stop traffic. I didn't understand how manual cars work, and was sure the car would accelerate itself and I'd go careening through someone's brownstone. I even had to stop for a quick tearful breath-catch, causing a cop to stop by our car to ensure that there was no domestic strife. These days, even with all that drama, I prefer to drive a stick. I'm hoping in a few months I'll be able to say the same about the things that intimidate me in the kitchen.

So this year I'm going to face my cooking fears head-on, including:

Pie crust. Why is it that I watch Amy whipping one up and feel it's no big deal, I've got this licked. But on my own I can't seem to get the balance right and will flirt with the Poppin' Fresh Doughboy rather than try to tackle this. No more.

Maki rolls. Back in New York on a shopping excursion with a friend to Kan Man Foods, I bought all the sushi tools one Friday night: rolling mats and a knife and even little sake cups. And they've all sat for six years. The boys recently disassembled one of the sushi mats and made swords from the bamboo sticks -- that's the extent of the action the sushi mats have seen. I love the idea of talking with dinner guests while I expertly roll up and cut perfect maki, but ultimately I get intimidated by what seems like it could be sticky and lumpy and prone to disaster. But mark my words, this year I'm making my own maki rolls.

Lasagne. You read it right: I've never made a lasagna. I've never even purchased lasagne noodles with the intention of making lasagna. This isn't so much total fear of failure, but just never having done it. Everyone I know makes lasagna; why haven't I? I don't know. But I'm going to. I have my eye on this recipe from Adrienne of Hello Yarn.

Are there any culinary mountains you're looking to climb to climb this year? If you're intimidated by making green milk, M's got a surefire recipe you can try...

Adventures in Procrastination

2007-03-14T18:21:00.000-07:00

What I'm supposed to be doing: Our taxes.

What I'm doing instead: Eating almost-too-hot-to-consume bread pudding straight from the oven. It's burning my mouth, but I can't stop eating it. It's delicious.

My first venture into sourdough baking was a double batch of bread. We're a family of four, with two of us being under six and one of us still trying to lose the three pounds she gained over the holidays. As you can imagine, that was too much bread. So tonight during bath time, half a hard leftover loaf was made into bread pudding.

I never ate bread pudding growing up -- it wasn't part of my mom's repertoire, and it seemed one of those adult-type creations that was not only weird but tremendously unappetizing. Akin to your stewed prunes. But in the last few years I've grown a real appreciation for not only the efficiency and flexibility of bread pudding, but the taste.

Proportions between recipes differ, but it basically goes something like this:

Bread Pudding

6 beaten eggs
3 cups milk
2/3 cup sugar
1 tsp. or so cinnamon, and other spices if you like them
2 tsp. or so vanilla
4 cups 3/4-inch cubes of day-old bread
1 cup or so of raisins, dried cranberries, dried blueberries, or anything else you like -- if you're so inclined (I'm a purist who isn't so inclined)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Whisk the eggs, milk, sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla in a big bowl. Stir in the bread cubes and make sure all the cubes get coated in the egg mixture. Stir in the raisins, if you're using them. Pour this into a 9X9 pan, or a deep dish pie pan, or whatever else will hold it comfortably. Bake the pudding for about an hour -- until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean and the whole thing has puffed into a glorious mini-dome. Go cut yourself a slab before it's even had time to cool, and put off doing your taxes for another night.

A Softer Side of EFD

2007-03-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

If you're in Indy and free tomorrow (March 15) at 6:00, swing by Luna Music to hear Eisenhower Field Day's first acoustic set -- with strings, even. I'll be there with the boys, who are going to be cheering on their drumming Dad. If T isn't feeling shy, there will probably be some dancing.

I haven't seen the playlist, but I have my fingers crossed that they'll play "National Sunday Law."

Cooking to the Beat

2007-03-10T17:23:00.000-08:00

This morning, after dealing with a clogged and overflowing toilet at 6:30 a.m., I set to work making a couple meals from 2-1/2 pounds of ground beef I'd just bought. Nearly two pounds went into Cincinnati Chili, a recipe I use verbatim from The Joy of Cooking, and the rest went into a pressure-cooker Bolognese sauce my friend David made up.

As I was smashing a dozen garlic cloves, crying over four onions, and listening to the sizzle of three different pans/appliances, I craved some background music but couldn't think of anything I wanted to stop to put on the stereo. So I'm going to make a Cooking mix playlist/CD to pull out for just such times.

So a question: If music is on when you're in the kitchen, what is it? What do you like to cook to?

Yo, Baby!

2007-03-07T03:14:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of domestic shenanigans in our house lately. The angry hiss of the pressure-cooker letting off steam. Sourdough bubbling and fermenting next to the stove. Abandoned wine corks being dressed in little knitted hats and sweaters to make stockpiled ornament gifts for next Christmas. So I'm guessing Phil took it in stride the other day when he came home late from band practice to find a soup pot overturned on a heating pad warming up on the kitchen counter. I was making yogurt.

I ran out of my Light N Fit yogurt this week, and after having made a crack about Gogurts last week in this blog, thought I'd try making my own. It's pretty simple. You bring a quart of milk almost to the boiling point (180 degrees F), and then let it cool to about 112 degrees F. (You need a candy thermometer for this.) The cooling takes the longest time in the process -- maybe 45 minutes to an hour -- but I had a laundry list of things to do that night, so would flutter around changing sheets and folding laundry and just check in on the milk's temperature after each task.

Then you take a small amount of the warmed milk -- maybe 1/3 cup -- and mix it with either 2 Tbsp. yogurt with active cultures or a commercial yogurt starter. I used the starter, but I think either are purported to work equally well. Then you mix this little bit of milk-mixed-with-starter back into with the quart of milk, and pour it into whatever container it will be incubating in. I used a quart canning jar.

Once the milk was in the canning jar, I just screwed on the lid, placed it on heating pad set to low, and overturned a big soup pot on it for extra insulation, a slightly kooky but effective method I read about in The Tightwad Gazette.

After that I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and went to bed. In the morning, there was a quart of yogurt.

The yogurt was runnier than I like, but tastes wonderful and fresh. I've read that you can thicken up the yogurt by adding about 1/2 cup powdered milk to the quart of milk after mixing in the starter, so I'm going to try that next time.

Because there will be a next time.

A Book Review

2007-03-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

Mix & Match Recipes: Creative Ideas for Busy Kitchens
by Deborah Taylor-Hough

Deborah Taylor-Hough knows busy kitchens. She homeschools her three kids, runs a website, and is the mastermind behind Frozen Assets, a series of methods and recipes for once-a-month cooking.

I bought this book a couple years ago and have to admit I've used it rarely. But with our new concentration on creating real food (vs. packaged "food") and our busy schedules, I've pulled it out again. This is basically a collection of universal recipes: i.e., to make a muffin, take XX dry ingredients, XX eggs, XX filler, etc. You then can determine whether those dry ingredients are oatmeal or whole-wheat flour or a combination of soy and rice flour.

The book is short (64 pages), and in many cases contains dishes that I feel I shouldn't need a cookbook for. But I love the cheat-sheet aspect of this little gem. If I have some leftover ham and broccoli, it's nice to have someone else do some thinking about how I can pull them together. (Skillet dinner? Fried rice? Quiche?) The recipes as stated are pretty basic -- several dishes use canned soup as a binder, for example -- but sometimes throwing together a couple things is all a person has time or energy for, and it still beats a Happy Meal. If you're feeling more ambitious, you can dress up the recipes.

As an example, Sunday night we had lamb sausage thawed and waiting for inspiration. I used the universal skillet recipe in the book, but skipped the canned cream of mushroom soup and instead carmelized some onions and made a quick white sauce to hold it all together. As Phil was eating dinner, he said, "Boy, this is some real comfort food." That's what this book is: Homey, easy, recipes for cooks with great intentions, a hodgepodge of on-hand ingredients, and little time.

If you're wanting to make a lamb sausage skillet, here's one variation you can try:

Lamb Sausage Skillet

Onions:
1 Tbsp. or so olive oil
1 Tbsp. or so butter
1 medium-sized sweet onion, coursely chopped
1/4 cup or so (a few splashes) white wine

White sauce:
2 Tbsp. butter
2 Tbsp. white flour
1 cup milk

And the rest:
4 good-sized links lamb sausage (about 1 to 1-1/2 pounds), sliced about 1/4- to 1/2 inch
1 16-oz can stewed or diced tomatoes, undrained
8 oz. uncooked egg noodles
1/2 cup or so (a nice handful or two) shredded cheese

Start by making the onions. Heat up the olive oil and butter over medium-high heat until the butter gets foamy. Add the onions and stir around for a while -- maybe 10 minutes, until the onions are dark golden brown and there's some lovely brownish stuff on the bottom of the pan. Pour in the white wine and scrape up the stuff at the bottom of the pan.

Meanwhile, in a separate, small pan, melt the butter over medium heat; this is the basis of the white sauce. Now stir in the flour to make a paste. Pour in the milk and whisk it constantly until the sauce starts to thicken.

When the onions and sauce are ready, pour both of these and all the remaining ingredients except the cheese into a big skillet or similar pan. I used a pretty good sized brasier pan. If there doesn't seem to be enough water to actually boil, add a little more water. Now stir it all around, turn the heat to medium high, and let the liquid boil. Once it boils, turn the heat to low, cover the skillet, and wait about 25-30 minutes -- until the meat is cooked through and the pasta is ready. Sprinkle with the cheese and tuck into a good family meal.

Adobo! Gesuntite!

2007-03-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday night, I went to my first book club with our friend Holly, and Phil had Holly's husband Noah over. I didn't read the book (Jane Eyre), mind you. I've been having trouble getting through Entertainment Weekly lately. But I'd read the book years ago, in my leisurely reading, pre-kids days, and I brushed up on the CliffsNotes before the group met at a local restaurant, so I was good to pontificate over my Planet Burger.

When Holly and I came back to the house post book group to meet up with Phil and Noah, we all sat around talking and I suggested that come the summer, farmer's market months, we should all go in on half a hog from Royer Farms, a local farm that sells half-, quarter- and whole hogs. For some reason, thick-cut fresh bacon seemed really appealing at midnight.

The only issues are: 1) Our regular freezer is stuffed full of I don't know what. 2) To get a dedicated freezer in our basement, we're going to have to reconfigure our laundry room, a job that's on the list but hasn't floated to the top yet.

So I'm making a concerted effort to clear the freezer before summer hits.

Last night, I thawed some whole bone-in chicken breasts I'd fished from the back of the freezer and was casting about for something to do with them. And came upon a recipe for Chicken Adobo, a classic Filipino dish. I looked through a ton of recipes and found that the dish is incredibly flexible and basically just involves cooking chicken in a mixture of soy sauce and some kind of vinegar until the chicken's done and the sauce is thick enough to spoon on rice. Some recipes were super-simple (dumping everything into a pot), some more complex (braising the chicken and then removing and grilling it while you reduce the sauce). I went down the middle on complexity. There were online comments that this dish can taste pretty vinegar-y, so I used rice wine vinegar instead of a stronger vinegar like apple cider. And some recipes included ginger, which I love, but angry commenters claimed the original dish didn't have ginger. I was more interested in taste than authenticity, so I added some.

I'll admit that the jury was hung on this. Phil wasn't wowed, but in my defense, he got home from errands later than he had expected to and dinner was about a half hour late, meaning the chicken cooked longer than I wanted and then sat waiting for another 15 minutes, so the sauce was probably too concentrated. And by the time we ate, the boys were crabby and whiny and didn't add much mellow to the dinner vibe. Even with all these strikes against it, I really liked my first taste of Chicken Adobo.

So if you're willing to trust me and give it a whirl, here's what I did:

Chicken Adobo

2 Tbsp. or so olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 medium-sized onion, cut into slices
2 pounds bone-in chicken breasts (mixed parts would also be great)
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1/2 cup or so reduced-sodium soy sauce (so it doesn't get too salty tasting)
2 bay leaves
1 tsp. sugar
2 tsp. ground ginger (1 Tbsp. fresh ginger would be even better)
1-1/2 tsp. freshly ground pepper

Over medium-high heat, heat up the olive oil in a heavy-bottomed big pan or skillet. I used my enamel-covered cast iron 5-1/2 quart Dutch oven. Add the garlic and onion and stir around frequently, softening but being careful not to burn the garlic.

Meanwhile, stick the chicken parts in a bowl. Mix up the rice vinegar, soy sauce, bay leaves, sugar, ginger, and pepper. Pour this over the chicken, and flip the chicken around to coat.

When the onion is soft, about six minutes, put the chicken pieces (but not the sauce) in the hot pan and brown for about 4 minutes on each side. (Go ahead and stir the onion and garlic around the chicken pieces so that it doesn't burn, but don't disturb the chicken pieces so that they can brown.) Now add in the sauce that the chicken had been sitting in, turn the heat to around medium or just below, and let it all cook. When the chicken is cooked through, the sauce will have reduced by about half, and you're done.

Serve rice alongside this, and spoon the thickened sauce over the chicken.

Tonight I'm coming up with some kind of something to do with the package of lamb sausage I have thawing. Maybe some kind of skillet dish? Or is that too Applebee's? Stay tuned...

Good Home Found!

2007-03-02T16:52:00.000-08:00

The Bon Appetit Cookbook found itself a loving home where it will be nurtured, cared for, and splattered with eggs, as all good cookbooks should. I'm going through my stock of cookbooks, though, so keep your eyes open for future offerings.

Free to a Good Home

2007-03-02T03:49:00.000-08:00

This past holiday season, my company gave us all an insanely good discount on the newly published Bon Appetit Cookbook. It's a monster: 1,500 recipes and some gorgeous photography in a book the size of the Oxford English Dictionary. It even comes with a complementary one-year subscription to Bon Appetit.

I bought one for myself and stocked up for Christmas gifts. One was earmarked for a good friend who's a great cook, but she made a pre-holiday comment that she understands that some people like cookbooks, but she just finds it much easier to go online to get recipes. So her copy was left without a home. It's languished on a closet shelf in my office since. It's a really solid cookbook -- Bon Appetit does a lovely job of putting tasty twists on classics while keeping the recipes manageable.

If you'd like it, just write me a comment saying so or e-mail me at cindy_kitchel AT yahoo.com, where the "AT" is the "@" symbol. And I'm happy to mail it, so don't worry if you're not local.

Bon Appetit!

Sourpuss

2007-03-01T03:13:00.000-08:00

Today marks the end of my Month of Not Spending. I decided, after looking disgustedly at all of the things filling up our little Cape Cod (CDs, action figures, books we haven't read, yarn I haven't knit) that in February -- the shortest month of the year -- I wouldn't add to the spoils. Only a month, I realize, but I'm hoping that taking little consumerism breaks will help me be a more conscientious consumer, and not pick up things thoughtlessly. ("Hey! The Footloose soundtrack for $6.99! I haven't heard this in years!") You will notice by the dates of my posts that I got that pressure cooker in just under the wire.

I wasn't completely strict with myself. February is a heavy birthday month for us, and I didn't put restrictions on birthday gifts, although I did make a couple small things to complement the purchased gifts. And my favorite yarn is being cleared out at KnitPicks so I used a gift certificate I'd received at Christmas to buy enough for a new sweater, which a friend said doesn't really count since "that purchase had already been made." (I like the way you think, Kitty!)

I was amazed at the difference in our checking account in one month, so I've been feeling very Amy Dacyczyn-like. Consequently, I thought I'd try my hand at sourdough bread, which is purported to be "the cheapest bread you can make" since it contains such a few, very humble ingredients.

This morning I made the starter, which means combining:

2 cups room-temperature water
1 Tbsp. yeast
2 cups white flour

You mix this in a non-reactive (non-metal) container big enough that the starter can expand, cover it loosely with plastic wrap so that some air can get to it, and let it sit on your counter for a couple days until it gets a bit gamey. By the weekend, I should be in the bread-making business.

I had some starter going years and years ago. That time, being the lazy cook I am, I didn't want to go to *all the trouble* of mixing up the three ingredients, so I stuck them in a quart Mason jar, twisted on the lid, and shook the dickens out of it. Then I covered it loosely with plastic wrap and went for a long walk. By the time I came home, thick starter had exploded all over my counter. So today I went through the *very* tedious process of stirring the ingredients for 30 seconds. Just like our forebears had done.