Month: July 2016

A voice of reason and … crackers!

/ eponine3 / 1 Comment

Hankerings come in handy. Yesterday in the afternoon a colleague called me. “I have a personal favor to ask. I need about an hour of your time. Things with my daughter right now are…let’s just say…I need a voice of reason.” I said How about dinner? We settled on tonight.

Last week we had had a conversation about who pays for dinner when friends go out. We had agreed that the person who holds the ball and runs with it is the one who asks or suggests in the first place. I realized I did just blurt out How about dinner? A case could be made otherwise, but I owned this one.

The simplest, most straightforward thing to do would be to just go out. Most people would just go out. It would be good sometimes to be like most people. I might have been able to in this case if I had not had a hankering for crackers.

Crackers had been a lifesaver for me during a particularly demanding stretch of months some years ago when I was writing my book on my old laptop, comfy on the couch next to a good fire, poring over sentence and paragraph construction and dealing with the too-hot computer resting on my lap which was burning the tops of my thighs more and more as the fan in it became less and less effective over time. I remember the red marks. I graduated to using a pillow between my lap and the steady warmth. It was a happy day when I got a new laptop. Thank you, Mom and Dad!

But not just any crackers. Back in the day I had been one of the lucky ones who got a first edition of King Arthur Flour’s 200th anniversary recipe collection in a smart three-ring binder. And one lucky day Ken Haedrich’s recipe for Cheddar Cornmeal Crackers on page VI-43 had caught my eye. Samuel had fatefully experimented with that recipe one day, found a clear winner (you never had store-bought crackers like these), and obliged himself henceforth to provide them as sustenance when I was too occupied with transcribing interviews or piecing together disparate pieces of text to have time to cook dinner. To be fair, he did enjoy cooking and did volunteer for this service. I will remember his willingness and skill fondly, always. The crackers hit the spot on numerous occasions before the book was done. I especially liked the darker ones — still do. When you make them yourself you can take them out of the oven at exactly your choice of the right golden color. Or you can tell the very kind and loving son who is making said crackers for you the exactly goldenness you are longing for, and he will take them out at the right time. Bless him forever.

For a long time after the book was done and after Samuel left home, I did not make these crackers. Fond as my memories of them were, it was as if they were his crackers, not mine, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I elevated them in my mind to a place where they downright intimidated me. My crackers couldn’t possibly be as good as his. One Christmas I hinted that he might fill a tin of them for me, and oh joy! He came through! But those didn’t last overly long, naturally, being as good as they are, and I finally realized that if I wanted these, I would have to make them myself. And did, now and then, over the last year or so.

So, dinner with a friend combined with a hankering for crackers. The grocery store is not far away, but I like working with what I have on hand. The recipe calls for cheddar cheese, but suggests you can also use swiss, monterey jack or parmesan. How handy that I had just — the very night before — grated (with the very fine grater) a hunk of parmesan enough to nearly fill a quart mason jar. The image of this jar in my fridge triggered my Brain of Debatable Reason to say Well, I’m halfway there already, so why not make crackers?Serve them with some good cheese, a few nice salads, a bottle of wine and a bit of chocolate for afterwards, and voila — dinner!

Anyway, I had had a rough day and there is nothing like getting busy in the kitchen as a means to decompress. I started with the cucumber salad because they were still warm from having sat still attached to their vines in the hot sun all day. Cucumbers don’t get fresher than this, I assure you. I grated them with the not-so-fine grater, layered it with salt and put the bowl in the fridge to cool.

On to the cracker dough. Having already grated the parmesan saved me all of five minutes in this process, but hey, we count our blessings. All I had to do was dump the contents of that jar into the bowl with all the other ingredients and carry on. Thankfully there was a bag of whole wheat flour in the freezer, which is of course where you keep it when you use it infrequently. I tripled the recipe and therefore did not have enough corn meal, but just put that much extra regular flour in instead. It worked out fine. Here is the recipe. I forgot the pepper but it worked.

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If you decide to make these, remember olive oil is the best. And add enough water (which might be a little more than the recipe calls for) to make the dough just shy of sticky. It has to hold together when you roll it out, and there is a fine line between too much water and not enough water. I tried a new way to roll these out this time to save myself time. It was, after all, 7pm already when I started all this. I cut two pieces of waxed paper as big as my sheet pan, laid them flat on the counter, floured the center area, and rolled the dough right on the paper. Then I was able to slide the whole big flat piece of dough up and over the lip of the pan, trim the edges, brush with beaten egg, cut shapes with my little zigzag wheel, salt them and pop it right into the oven.

This is my cutter. My mother had marked it GRANDMA when she gave it to me because it belonged to my grandmother. You can see that the letters are wearing off, but that only makes it better.

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The recipe calls for a 375 oven, but as I said, I like them dark, so I bumped it to 400. Two of my three pans have the silicon liner,  which did not by the way affect the crackers or the clean-up in any perceivable way. Tripling the recipe gave me a lot of crackers. Having a lot of crackers is not a problem because 1. They keep. 2. They do not last long anyway. This is half of them:

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While the crackers were baking, I used the not-so-fine grater to shred the beets that Sandy had pulled from the garden the night before. They had been rinsed, boiled in water until soft (skins and all),  put in a bowl, covered with water and chilled until I decided what to do with them. It was handy that they were there waiting there in the fridge for such a time as this. I love sticking my hands in the water and easing the skins off. The beets are smooth as velvet underneath. Now shredded, they again sat and waited. Next thing was to squeeze the water from the grated cukes. It’s a good thing vegetables are patient.

I smiled as I thought about this upcoming dinner that would include cucumbers and beets from the garden made into yummy salads and crackers that brought fond memories. As I grated the veggies and squeezed the cukes and rolled out the stiff dough, I looked at my bare arms (it is summer after all), realized how much they were working, and thought This is how women burned calories in the old days. Who needs a gym when you have an agenda like this?  

Over the weekend, in my favorite grocery store in Charlottesville, Food of All Nations, I had bought two items that also evoked fond memories. Beemster is a hard cheese with little pockets of salt and sharp, delicious flavor. It used to be a staple on the cheese board during Villa Lunch at Keswick Hall. Quark is a German dairy product that makes the best cheesecake you ever had. It’s like a cross between yogurt and sour cream. This one comes from Vermont besides. Be still my heart.

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The word here is Providence. There is not a lot in my fridge, but there was Beemster and there was Quark. Slices of Beemster would be handy to go with the crackers along with Jarlsberg and Manchego. Quark would work in the dressing for the cucumber salad. Quark plus lemon juice and a bit of salt, pepper and sugar. The beet salad I dressed with olive oil, cider vinegar, salt, pepper and oregano which, shame on me, I did not go get fresh from the garden (it was dark by then, really).

Into an old tin went the crackers. Into a basket went said tin, two plates, two forks, two knives (for pushers), two wine glasses wrapped in white cloth napkins, a wine key, a bottle of pinot noir (always keep a bottle of red on hand), and a small cloth for the tabletop.Into the fridge went a small container of cut up cheese, a mason jar of cucumber salad and a mason jar of beet salad.

I am ready for dinner. There is a park in town that has a pavilion with picnic tables. It will be quiet there and hopefully a good atmosphere for good conversation.  I hope I can be a voice of reason for my friend. One could argue that I did not demonstrate much reason in the preparation of this dinner. It would have been easier to go out. But I had a hankering. 

Boys

/ eponine3 / 4 Comments

It’s easy to think that by the time you reach a certain age (we don’t have to say what age) you have learned a few things. But to a point we are still trapped in our own experiences and our own understandings. As I recently came to appreciate anew, I am not a boy. I do not see or understand things the way boys do. I had four of them. I watched them closely for many years. But I am not one. And some things I don’t remember well.

Boys were coming to the cottage. Two boys, seven and ten. I did the logical thing and asked my 22-year-old son for help. “You are seven, and you are ten,” I began. But I did not get far.

“Mom, I’m not seven.”

Clearly my preface did not work, but I liked it, so I tried it again. “You are seven, and you are ten, and you are a boy.”

“Mom, I can’t be seven and ten at the same time.” He had a point.

“Samuel, work with me here. Pretend you’re seven or ten or both or somewhere in that range.”

“OK.”

“You are going to an airbnb cottage in the woods with your parents for a few days. What do you wish were waiting there for you? I mean toys.”

He did not hesitate. “G.I. Joes.”

“G.I. Joes?” Whose child was this?

“Sure. Soldier toys are the most classic toy.”

Laugh now if you want, but I did say a most female thing. “But won’t that make them want to fight and go to war and do nasty things?”

There was no hesitancy whatsoever in his responses. “They want to do those things because they’re boys.” This was not at all what I had expected from the conversation. It was not improving. I had to try to turn it around.

“But you don’t like those things.” Samuel likes reading and acroyoga and coffee. I thought I had him, but I didn’t.

I quote: “No, but I understand the appeal of weaponry, engines, fast cars and things that go boom.”

I expect I looked entirely disillusioned because it is how I felt. He continued. “When I was ten, my toys were in nonstop combat. Bionicles and legos.”

“Legos? You build with legos.”

“Mom, you fight with legos. Remember all those little swords and shields?” Could this get worse? Of course it could. “The only time they weren’t fighting was when I was creating things for them to fight with.”

I cringed then. I cringe now even thinking about it. There’s way too much nastiness in the world, and here was more evidence. Images flooded my mind of bloody, cruel, heartless people doing bloody, cruel, heartless things to each other and (most awfully) to innocents.

But he redeemed himself, and quickly, and gave the much-needed upside to all this horror. “As much as the war-faring genes allow for all that, they also allow for what stops that.” Hallelujah. Now we were somewhere more comfortable for me, and I could start to relax. Better images came to mind. I could think about bravery and strength and why some people make me feel safe. I could be thankful to live in a peaceful place, thankful for those who came before me and made it peaceful. It’s not Memorial Day or Veterans Day or any other day set aside for remembrance and thankfulness. Holidays like that are good. But I wish our moments of remembrance and thankfulness were not confined to them. I wish more people realized every day how very fortunate they are.

This was a completely unexpected outcome of airbnb cottage guests coming for the weekend. A seven-year-old boy and a ten-year-old boy were on their way. If they had been girls, I would not have asked Samuel for advice. One thing led to the next. Entirely without having any idea about it, the boys brought warmth, thankfulness and reassurance.  Samuel, in his own (roundabout) way, explained a thing so simply that it makes far more sense to me than it ever did before. He balanced the images. 

“How about if you choose what to put in the cottage for them?” I asked him. “All the old legos are downstairs, and other stuff. Whatever you think they would like.”

He chose a box full of matchbox cars. I put it in the cottage off to the side by the back windows. The guests arrived and I greeted them and welcomed them in. I did not point out the cars. It did not take even 30 seconds for the seven-year-old boy to find them and sit down on the floor next to the box and begin to make one of them go fast…

My galette

/ eponine3 / 5 Comments

I never heard of a galette before yesterday, but my mom led me to think about it. We were talking about being stuck in a food rut, and that made me think about food. Thanks, Mom.

Some people, as they think about food, eat some. But yesterday was the kind of day when, as I thought about food, I wanted to make some. A week ago I bought a bag of plums — beautiful purple plums. I had a hankering for Pflaumenkuchen, a wonderful German plum cake made on a sheet pan. This is not your ordinary sheet cake, especially if you have 9×13 with gooey frosting in mind. This is a sweet yeast dough (like a giant, flatter hot cross bun without the candied fruit) rolled out to fit the big (true half sheet size) pan, then topped with sliced fresh plums and a crumbly streusel and baked till it is golden. Heaven.

Pflaumenkuchen  was on the docket. It’s very tasty, and it’s been a long time since I had it. The bag of plums sat patiently in the refrigerator all week, waiting, as perfect plums do, knowing that glory is to come. Then, surprise! Thirteen (13!) cucumbers appeared before my eyes when I went to the garden to get lettuce on Friday night.  There was nothing to do but pick them.

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You don’t need 13 cukes to make a cucumber salad for dinner. Two will do, and did. (And it is really easy to make, by the way: Grate the cukes, squeeze the water out, and mix in a bowl with half an onion, very thinly sliced. For a dressing use lemon juice, sour cream, S&P and a little sugar to taste.)

After dinner, eleven gorgeous cukes remained in a row on the counter, rejected for salad but nonetheless happy to serve. I know it is not what every person would think of when faced with this image, but what came to my mind was pickles. There was nothing to do but make more pickles. I’ve made pickles three times this season already, once at Millicent’s and twice at home. Last year when I made them with my sister Lynn, I discovered how easy and yummy they are. Thanks, Lynn!

Here I am with Millicent’s pickles. I would be surprised if she has any left.

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Yesterday was beginning to look like a busy Saturday. I won’t get into the sewing, or the flipping of the cottage for new guests, or the long overdue brushing of Bridget. We’ll get right to the kitchen. I have a huge white Pfalzgraff bowl that I have used a thousand times. It is the only bowl for eleven sliced up cucumbers — one of which was a whopping 13” long on account of having hidden itself under massive leaves — all layered with salt and topped with super thinly sliced red onion. The salt draws out the water from the cukes and the red onion adds flavor and makes the pickles prettier in the jar. Millicent’s pickles had red pepper in with them, which is prettier than red onion in my opinion. But we work with what we have.

Whatever you do, don’t forget to put the sugar in the brine, which I almost did one time. Bread and butter pickles are not the same without the sugar, you can take my word. I remembered the sugar this time, and was grateful to Millicent for having gifted me with a jar of pickling spice last weekend in Charlotte.  So I had everything I needed, mixed together in a pot waiting for a flame: vinegar, salt, sugar and spices.

But you have to let the cucumbers sit a while in the bowl with the salt, and a person needs breakfast.

Three critical factors conspired and led me down The Road to Galette.

  1. It was Saturday.
  2. I was by myself in the house.
  3. Fine Cooking magazine came this week (thank you, John).

If it were not Saturday, I would not be sitting with a leisurely breakfast.

If I had not been alone, I would not have been reading while eating.

If that particular magazine had not come, I would have been reading something else.

This month’s issue has a wonderful article on both sweet and savory galettes, and wouldn’t you know, the featured sweet galette was “plum, ginger and poppy seed galette.” Well, well. So much for Pflaumenkuchen.

Seriously though, who ever heard of a galette? What is it? If you are a chef, you know these things. My chef friend Danny didn’t miss a beat when I told him what I was doing. “My favorite is an apple galette with a little almond paste in it,” he said. “But I love all of them.” The rest of us have a thing or two to learn. A galette is basically an open, free-form pie. You roll out the pie dough, lay it on a flat sheet pan that has a short rim to it (to catch any oozing goodness), put the filling in the middle of the dough, and bring up the sides any way you want, fancy or not (in my case clearly not). The dough holds (almost) everything in and has that tender/crispy/flaky combo going for it. In the case of “plum, ginger and poppy seed galette,” poppy seeds are mixed into the dough, adding a texture you don’t encounter every day, which pairs perfectly with the sweet plums touched with the flavor of ginger and cinnamon.

The pickles happened while the galette was baking and I was wishing for a bigger kitchen. Soon the jars were cooling and the aroma of sweet baking plums filled the house.

My galette is not as pretty as the one in the magazine, but for a first try, I was pleased. In fact I was so pleased that I immediately took a picture of it still on its baking sheet.

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Then I wanted to stage it better, so I slid the galette onto one of my favorite glass cake plates. I always loved the ring of hearts etched into the glass on the bottom of this one. In my mind, hearts = love. When you make delicious food, you present it with love to those you love. Anyway, this made a better photo.

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But it was a bad idea. I did this same thing a long time ago, but the lesson sat in a dusty file too far back in the recesses of my memory. I hereby pass along a simple rule to keep in mind in such situations: Don’t slide hot objects onto cool glass plates. Let’s just say it’s a good thing my mother, some time back, off-loaded some cake plates she no longer needed. The crack I heard a few minutes after the fateful transfer told me in an instant that henceforth there would be a shorter stack of cake plates in my cabinet. I then transferred the galette to a different, flat (metal!) surface and in we dug. Oh, how I wanted to share with everyone I love! Of course if they were all here, this one galette would not be enough. But that is a problem I would love to have.

This morning as I put the pickles in the fridge, I discovered two half-full jars of yeast, and proceeded to combine the two into one to be efficient with space. Two did not quite fit into one, however, and I had a little yeast left in one jar. Lo and behold, there was just enough for… a sweet yeast dough! I used the plums yesterday, so Pflaumenkuchen was out of the question, but while getting the vanilla for this delectable dough, the box of currants in the cabinet caught my eye.

These sweet rolls aren’t exactly hot cross buns, but with a little honey and butter, I am very happy. It’s a good weekend!

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Sauce and cheese

/ eponine3 / 5 Comments

This week I was reminded how words can mean such different things to different people, how easy it is to think someone else knows what we mean, how words are so little yet encompass so much.

Two little words: sauce and cheese. You know what I mean, right? I don’t have to say more. If you would look in my freezer and see a plastic container labeled sauce, you would know what is in that container and what it goes with. You would know how often I make it, how often we eat it and what else would be on the table with that meal. If we were at the table together and I was eating soup and I said This would be really good with cheese, and got up to get it, you would know before I returned to the table what I was getting. You would know what color it is, what has been done to it since it was purchased and how and where it is stored. We would understand each other, right?

When I was growing up, we ate pasta three times a week. We did not call it pasta. We called it macaroni. You boiled the macaroni in a big pot on the stove, and in another smaller pot you heated the sauce. On Wednesdays for dinner (5:00ish) and on Sundays for dinner (1:00ish because you ate Sunday dinner after church) we had our macaroni with a red, meat sauce, a.k.a. sauce. We had it so often that there was no need for modifiers. Seriously we ate this every Wednesday and every Sunday of my childhood. That’s 104 times per year x approximately 18 years, or somewhere around 2000 times. The very same meal.

My mother made sauce (not the sauce, mind you, just sauce) on a regular basis such that we were never out. It would be inconceivable to not have sauce ready to go on Wednesdays and Sundays. I am quite sure my mother would never have let that happen. The basic ingredients were the same every time, but if we had had a pork or lamb roast recently, she added these bones for flavor. Here is the recipe exactly as I wrote it many years ago when I decided it needed to be in my cookbook for reference. I did not need it myself of course. The recipe is etched in my mind’s file. But someone else might need it.

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This recipe is perfectly clear to me. You could follow it, right? You would know how many onions and how finely to chop them. You would know what chop meat means and what percentage of fat content was normal. You would know to put these first two ingredients together in a large, heavy pot over a medium flame and cook them together until the onions are clear and the meat is browned. You would know what size the cans of tomatoes are, what brand to buy, and whether they are whole, plum, chopped, diced or pureed. You would know what paste is, and how to get it all out of the can — even the parts that stick stubbornly to the sides — and why you need two cans of water per. You would know to dump all of this over the meat and onions at just the right time and stir it up. You would then know to add just the right amounts of s&p, garlic powder, oregano and basil. Strictly following tradition, it would not occur to you to use fresh garlic, oregano or basil. You would shake these out of jars you bought in the store and you knew the perfect quantities to shake and how big each little pile would need to be as it sat on top of the tomato-meat mixture in the pot. You would stop shaking when each pile was the right diameter and height. If you had leftover bones from a recent roast, you would add them in at this time. Then you would mix it all together and turn it down. You would know how low to turn the flame down, and you would let it cook for a few hours and walk away and do something else. You would know by the smell that it was done. The smell was normal. This was home.  Every Wednesday and every Sunday we had our macaroni with sauce for dinner.

On Fridays for dinner (5:00ish), being Catholic, we had our macaroni with a non-meat sauce, maybe red and maybe not. The non-meat red was called marinara and the non-meat other could be onion or ceci (you know what those are, right?). In my memory we ate all macaroni meals with a salad. We did not additionally (and it never occurred to me until much later that others might) eat long thin loaves of crusty white bread. On Sundays, however, you might also have meatballs (either softened from having been taken from the freezer and heated up in sauce, or crispy from having been freshly fried in oil) or a veal or eggplant parmesan or a roast (beef, lamb or pork) on the side. Thus the leftover bones that might go into the next batch of sauce.

Onto any of these macaroni dishes you put cheese. You put imported, finely grated, sheep’s milk peccorino romano stored in a little glass jar which had little holes in the chrome screw-on lid. This jar was stored in the cabinet, by the way, not the fridge. You turned this jar upside down and shook it, and cheese landed on your macaroni. At some point prior to the meal someone had taken the four-sided stand-up grater out of the cabinet and stood there holding the fist-sized hunk of cheese in one hand and the handle of the grater with the other hand, and with well practiced vertical up-and-down motions, pressing the hunk against the sharply perforated side of the grater, created tiny, slightly curly shavings of this ivory colored, aromatic, aged wonder. I did not think of it as a wonder. It was just cheese. Cheese went on macaroni. Macaroni had sauce.

The conversation about sauce came about because Samuel was fishing around in the freezer and found a container labeled SAUCE. What kind of sauce is this? he asked. What kind of sauce? Is there another kind? I see SAUCE on top of a plastic container in the freezer and I know exactly what is in there. But he doesn’t. Oh.

Can it be that he wouldn’t know what I mean when I use a simple word? I thought everybody knew what that word means.

What about cat?

House?

Party?

Surely he knows what those are. Surely you do.

Words evoke images. Do you have a lithe, grey feline in mind, one that snags large moths and bats them around until they give up? A white clapboard Cape Cod with three dormers set up on a hill with a large stand of maple trees behind it? A lot of well dressed people in a small room, holding fancy drinks and trying to hear one another above the loud music? Or do you imagine a tiger, a brick ranch, and a wild frat house?

This gets harder when the images associated with the words are not so concrete:

Honorable.

Divine.

Patriotic.

It’s no wonder we get tripped up sometimes. I am sure you know what I mean when I use certain words and you are sure I know what you mean. But do we really? John Durham Peters in his Speaking into the Air, says that there are hints and guesses in communication, which “at its best may be a dance in which we sometimes touch.” Thankfully we use lots of words to fill in the mental pictures, and usually manage to understand and be understood. Usually.

At least we are now clear about sauce. After Samuel fished it out of the freezer and I explained it and thought I knew what we were having for dinner, he asked another question: What’s onion sauce? Ah, onion sauce!

Chop three large onions. Saute them slowly (I mean slowly) in butter until they are soft and golden. This will take at least half an hour. Turn on the pot to boil the macaroni in only when the onions are almost done. In the meantime, finely dice that wonderful aged peccorino romano till you have a handful or so. Once the water is boiling, put small macaroni like ditalini in there with some salt and stir to make sure they do not stick to each other. When the macaroni is almost done, put the cheese in with the onions and butter. You don’t want to melt it, just soften it. Some ground black pepper and a little bit of cream in there with that rounds it out nicely. By now your macaroni is done. Put your colander over the bowl you will serve this in. Pour out the pot of boiling water and macaroni so that the water ends up in the bowl and the macaroni ends up in the colander (this makes the bowl hot, which keeps the food hot on the table longer). Dump the water out of your serving bowl, put the macaroni in there, top with the onion mixture and stir it all together. The word for this is divine.