Bread, Wine, Salt

I had several days where things just went wrong in the kitchen. J from A Half-Baked Life came down with her family to visit. I had planned soup and rolls for lunch but both failed. The rolls didn't rise as they should have, and the soup was a disaster. I couldn't serve it, so lunch was out instead. On Christmas day I kept the dinner plans simple, with eggnog and cookies planned for dessert. The red wine gravy for the Beef Wellington failed. (The Beef Wellington itself was lovely, and I'm sure the gravy was my fault.) Both cookie recipes I mixed refused to roll out and cut out properly. Despite my best efforts at tempering the eggs the eggnog curdled. I served a friend's gift of Austrian Christmas Bread and the box of chocolates my mother brought. I used a stick blender to revive the eggnog, and there was enough rum available that folks didn't seem to mind. I had planned roasted balsamic carrots with Christmas dinner, but I realized far too late that I di...

Years ago, when my parents married, my mother asked my father what he would like her to make for Christmas. He asked for Julekake, a Scandinavian Christmas bread. It was common in the bakeries in my father's childhood Chicago, but it was more difficult to find in the small Army towns where my father was posted, so my mother found a recipe, and baked her own. We ate it with eggs or bacon or sausage every Christmas breakfast of my childhood. My mother baked simple round loaves studded with raisins and candied cherries. When I grew up I swapped out dried cherries for the candied ones. I baked it in the oven of my boyfriend's apartment before I went to share Christmas with his family, inhaled the scent of them to make it Christmas when the traditions around me were not my own. I've discovered that the fruit is not mandatory, though I'd never leave it out. A braid is traditional, and I'll make a braided loaf when I have time, though for gift giving I ...

I will be back tomorrow with bread for Christmas breakfast, but I have been muttering to myself all morning and I have to share with you lest the nice people at the craft store have me arrested later today when I start screaming "I mean, what is it all FOR anyway?" in the trim aisle. I have pretty plates covered in pink flowers.  I inherited them from my grandmother.  I store them in weird plastic pouches which have the appearance of quilting.  Just recently I had the good sense to label the weird plastic pouches so that I don't have to open 10 of them before I find the soup plates. Because, you see, I sometimes have to find the soup plates.  Sometimes I have people over for dinner, on Christmas, or on random Tuesday night.  Sometimes I have enough of my everyday dishes and I just use those.  Sometimes I need more dishes, or I'm feeling fancy.  Once I pulled out my pretty pink-flowered dessert plates and the spare yellow-flowered dessert plates ...

Waffles have become a Saturday morning tradition at my house. We have waffles, fruit, and sausage or bacon. Normally I make buttermilk waffles which are lovely things. When you have one really good waffle recipe, do you need another? No, but I don't need another pair of shoes either, and that has never kept me off of Zappos. The thing about baking bread is that before you know it you've started buying yeast in bulk, and then you've got this big container of yeast in your freezer and you start looking for excuses to use it. I have a friend who swears by his yeasted pancake recipe, and I have every intention of trying it as soon as he actually shares it with me. (I just emailed him about it, in fact.) I've been playing around with things that you can mix up when things are quiet and then bake when you're ready. Waffles that rise overnight seem like just the thing for busy Saturday mornings. You do most of the work Friday night after you've...

I kind of hate pizza delivery. It's never fast enough, it's never very good, and if you're ordering for a crowd it's always about compromise. Have you ever had pizza with someone who wanted exactly what you wanted? I also prefer baking with whole grains most of the time. Some pizza places will offer a whole grain crust, but they're not serious about it, so it's terrible: more biscuit or cracker than yeasted dough and too sweet. Blech. This dough makes it easy for me to make pizza at home because it takes just a few minutes to mix up and then it sits in the refrigerator waiting for me. The only downside is that you can't start when the craving hits and have pizza half an hour later. The obvious solution is to eat pizza once a week, and make a new batch of dough while you're cleaning up. I'm not from New York or Chicago and I do not claim to be a pizza expert. There are plenty of pizza experts out there who will teach you how t...

Lunch in the Park , a novel about love and family, is available for sale in multiple electronic formats at Smashwords , for the Kindle at Amazon.com and for the Nook at BN.com Wherever you buy it, it is DRM-free . The delicious recipes that Kate and Jeff cook up are right here on my blog. I hope you'll read Lunch in the Park , you'll love it, and you'll feel the overwhelming urge to write a review on one or more of the sites above. And of course I'd love to hear from you here on the blog, too.   When my husband read the Dinner chapter of Lunch in the Park his response was “It made me hungry.” He tried to tell me it was because I had written the scene of Jeff cooking so well, but the fact is it doesn't take much skill to use words like “ginger” and “garlic” to make someone hungry. When I announced on Google+ that I was thinking of put Kate and Jeff's recipes here the response was “ooo, ginger beef?” So here is Jeff's ginger beef recipe, a big hi...

Lunch in the Park , a novel about love and family, is available for sale in multiple electronic formats at Smashwords , for the Kindle at Amazon.com and for the Nook at BN.com Wherever you buy it, it is DRM-free . The delicious recipes that Kate and Jeff cook up are right here on my blog. I hope you'll read Lunch in the Park , you'll love it, and you'll feel the overwhelming urge to write a review on one or more of the sites above. And of course I'd love to hear from you here on the blog, too.   Sometimes I'm here talking about food.  Sometimes I'm chasing my kids around.  Sometimes I'm serving women in labor . If I'm not doing any of those things I might be checking in on the lives of the fictional people who live in my head. Before you run away, no, I'm not hearing voices.  I've just always have a story or two that I'm writing in my  head.  If I have a few minutes I try to get the story out of my head and onto paper.  Sometimes ...

I'm almost cheating, because of course granola can taste like oatmeal cookies.  It's already oatmeal, after all.  The rest is just details.  But details matter.  I've often said that the world can be divided into two kinds of people based on what they choose first when faced with both a chocolate chip cookie and an oatmeal raisin cookie. Which side are you on?  Do you like the chewy sweetness of raisins in your cookies, or do you think it's not a cookie without some chocolate chips? Cookie love is serious business. Some people even wear shirts declaring their allegiance .  Like the chunky vs. smooth peanut butter battle, this issue can divide households.   This granola recipe is here to help.  Whether you're a raisin household, a chocolate chip household, or a mixed marriage, this will work for you.  Unless you don't like cookies, in which case I can't help you. Ingredients:  8 cups oatmeal 4 cups walnuts 12 Table...

Granola is a strange thing.  It's generally fairly high in sugar and fat but it's thought of as health food.  You can pay a lot of money for it even though it doesn't require any exciting ingredients or any skill except stirring.  It lives on the continuum of breakfast foods somewhere between a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal and Cookie Crisp .  It is infinitely flexible and will take on a huge variety of ingredients.    I've been toying with the idea of making a series of cookie inspired granola recipes, and since this is December, the month of cookie madness I decided this was as good a time as any to try it out.  Today's granola is a simple sugar-cookie granola, the only add-in is almonds.  I chose almonds because almond extract is a common flavoring in sugar cookies.  It took me less than 10 minutes to get this in the oven, and yet I have two full cookie sheets of granola that taste like cookies.  What else gives so much ...

These were a riff off of the roasted apples at Remedial Eating .  I roasted mine at 450 instead of 400, used only 1 Tablespoon each of butter and brown sugar and roasted them for 45 minutes instead of 60.  I also skipped the cinnamon and used a full teaspoon of freshly crushed cardamom.  I love cardamom, and just like I think you should grate your own cheese I think you should grind your own cardamom.  In this case I just crushed the seeds on the cutting board with the back of a spoon, no special equipment required.   If you don't want to use them on top of waffles, you could use them on top of ice cream, or just by themselves.  

On the second night of class we sat around the table marking slabs of clay. My slab of clay was not behaving. I kept carving, stamping, rebuilding. We chatted as we worked, getting to know each other. I put down my tools and stared at the clay. It was wrong. “Nope” I folded the slab in half. Sandy, the teacher, gasped in horror. I reslabbed the clay and started over, building where I had carved. It was better. I built my slab into something useful. It was declared “cool.” I kept making things that were not as cool. Objects cracked and broke, dried with waves in places I wanted flat. The carving I put on a box didn't come out at all the way I'd hoped. I achieved far less than I had hoped.  Several objects were crushed into small pieces to be recycled. Weeks later we glazed. The glaze on my useful object dried and I left it on a shelf in the kiln room. I retrieved it this evening, pleased with the results. Sandy told me it has created quite a stir when...

A trip to the grocery store not withstanding I didn't have dip on hand, so this is a mix of buttermilk, sour cream, and a salt-free spice blend.  It's a small step up from making french onion dip from soup mix. There are roasted pumpkin seeds in the bag. All this fiber and vitamin filled goodness is brought to you by the big bowl of Halloween candy in the closet.

I'm pretty sure trying to post something every day will end in tears (mine from stress and yours from boredom), but a solid percentage of the uncool kids are doing it (the cool kids don't need to do it because they already have readers.)  So I shall dip my toe in the water and see what happens. I made a chickpea curry tonight (more on that later) and needed two onions cut in large dice.  My v-slicer is perfect for that task, but I hate (and/or lost) the guard that is supposed to hold the food and protect my hands from being sliced by the many sharp blades.  Fortunately I have watched enough Alton Brown to know that the correct answer is a pair of Kevlar gloves . I bought mine from Amazon in a size Large which are just the right size for my perfectly average sized hands.  (I think they're average.   Nora , do I have meat hands and no one has told me?  And remember, this is for posterity, so be honest.)  They are not perfect.  I managed to ...

It was my day to co-op at my sons' school, and I had a client meeting 25 minutes away in the afternoon. School ends at 11:30 and the meeting was at 1:00. Normally that would have been plenty of time to get the kids home, fed and safely deposited in the loving embrace of the playroom where they could occupy themselves and enjoy the benevolent neglect of their father who was working from home in the next room. But of course nothing is ever simple and I was the only co-oping parent instead of being one of two, and my older son's class let out a bit late due to some flower planting and a trapped possum. I got home much later than I had expected. I did at least have a plan. We had good cheddar and tortillas in the refrigerator, and in the fruit drawer of the pantry there were a couple of good baking apples. My goal was to make these as quickly as possible. I used an apple corer-slicer, but a knife would do just as well, grated my own cheese and had both boy...

My mother packed my father's lunch every day. He had a domed, construction worker style lunch box which always had a thermos full of coffee or soup, a sandwich, a piece of fruit and a cold pack, maybe a cookie if we had some.  Minus the cold pack, it was probably much the same as the lunches he took to school as a boy. I don't make fancy bentos. I learned long ago, and re-learn continously, that fancy and I are not friends. I'm okay with that.  Not making the fanciest lunches doesn't stop me from making lunches that nourish my family. My bentos won't become internet sensations, and possibly don't even really qualify as bentos, what with all the boring, but if 30 years from now my boys think a packed lunch includes a serving or two of vegetables (and maybe a cookie if they have one) then I'll be pleased. slightly more colorful than last week Check out the other lunches this week.

I made birthday cake for two little boys who insist on growing up and turning 5. One little boy loves all things chocolate, and one little boy will have no cake at all if chocolate is the only choice. Given the opposing preferences and the size of the joint party I made two cakes. Chocolate boy got the same chocolate cake I made for him two years ago. It was a hit then and it was just as popular this time around. I won't reproduce the recipe because I baked without adaptation from the Chocolate Layer Cake with Milk Chocolate Frosting on Epicurious. People rave about it and ask me how I got the frosting so creamy. The answer is butter, silly, lots and lots of butter. (And then a bit more butter.) Yes, it is off kilter.  You know who cares?  Nobody cares. Not-chocolate boy requested a strawberry cake. I don't know why strawberry occurred to him, since normally he asks for vanilla cake . I found a promising recipe for strawberry cupcakes at Annie's Eat...

lunch for 1 adult and 2 preschoolers This is how I get my kids to eat vegetables.* Snack at preschool tends to be fruit and some kind of simple carb.  I'm not thrilled by this, but as that's the only thing about that school that doesn't thrill me I try not to whine too much. Snack yesterday was white rice, soy sauce and pineapple, today was canteloupe and cheese quesadilla.  I try to make lunch focus on veggies since I know the starchy carbs will reappear at afternoon snack (today I made lemon millet muffins) and possibly again at dinner.   This box provides 1 hard cooked egg per person, lots of veggies and some ranch dressing for dip.  My older son, who rarely eats all the way through a hard cooked egg dipped his egg in the dressing and ate it all, along with a good number of veggies.  Dip is a good way to lure unsure eaters to their vegetables.  If you choose or make a dip with quality ingredients the bit of fat it adds will not only make the v...

I dropped a bunch of cookbooks in front of my husband this weekend and told him to pick meals for the week. He filled out a weeks worth of dinners with references so I could find the recipe.  It was very helpful.  What he didn't do was actually read the recipes.  Once of his choices was spaghetti with plum tomatoes and basil.  I didn't follow the recipe because I'm an inherently lazy cook and because I believe I am capable of throwing together a fresh tomato sauce.  You are also capable of creating such a lovely thing. So I'm not going to give a recipe, but I will walk you through the process. Start with good tomatoes. There's no point in trying this with mediocre tomatoes.  Buy enough to feed however many people you're going to feed.  Set a pot of water in the stove to boil. Coarsely chop the tomatoes, place in a colander and sprinkle with a small amount of salt.  Allow to drain.  When the water comes to a boil, drop spaghetti, ...

You may be aware than I am a big fan of homemade birthday cakes. But my husband doesn't want cake, he wants a cheese custard with a crust. Sure, we call it cheesecake, but it's not cake. I feel like I'm cheating somehow, serving up custard pie when I should be making layers and frosting them, and maybe even trying out some of the tricks I learned at the cupcake workshop I attended a while back. But no, he wants cheesecake and it's hard to argue that the layer cake means I love him more than the cheese pie he really wants. So it must be the best cheesecake possible. Naturally I turn to someone known for being meticulous about recipes, Jack Bishop of America's Test Kitchen. The cheesecake is fabulous. It is creamy with just enough sweetness. The crust holds together but doesn't require you to hack at it with the knife. We will ignore the fact that this recipe comes from gimmick cookbook Cooking with Friends where the Friends in question live...

We were in week five of a kitchen renovation that the designer blithely assured us would take three weeks. We had just gotten to “functional kitchen” and we'd been eating at restaurants and from take-out containers so much that I just needed to cook, and I owed a meal (or twelve) to some friends. Our new cabinets, counters and most of the appliances came from IKEA, so Swedish cuisine seemed appropriate, and I broke out my copy of Aquavit: And the New Scandinavian Cuisine Marcus Samuelsson offers up a variety of modern dishes from his restaurant that are inspired by the food he learned to cook in his grandmother's kitchen. Naturally I went straight to the cliché of Swedish Meatballs. I'm told that the Italian-American classic spaghetti and meatballs is an American invention, meant to cater to the meat loving Americans that the Italian immigrants wanted to attract to their restaurants. My guess is that my own Swedish-American ancestors were part of that crowd o...

After several weeks of blowing off playgroup (It's hot outside in the summer!) and then showing up with a grocery bag full of whatever seemed lunch like at the local grocery store, I finally got a lunch packed. One apple, one cucumber, and a handful of carrot chips with some ranch dressing for dip was enough for me and the boys. We each had a yogurt and water.  Those of you wondering where the starch is, it was at breakfast, morning snack and dinner. Don't forget to check out the other lunches at What's for Lunch

A hearty welcome to Maud's readers. She's right. This space is sadly neglected.  I actually have a couple of posts in the hopper though, including one about Swedish Meatballs that will be ready just as soon as *someone* gets the photos processed.  Ahem. In the meantime you might enjoy the following posts which seem appropriate to the changing weather: An easy, delicious chili cornbread casserole for when you need to take something to a potluck, or you want to make something on Sunday that you can portion out for lunches during the week. A lovely, moist but not oily, carrot cake , great for birthdays and any cake requiring occasions. And finally this Red Kidney Bean Stew is perfect for miserable days when you think it might never stop raining or be warm again.  It's so good it will make the sun shine in your house.  (Maybe) I hope you enjoy these, and that you'll come back for the meatballs (ooh, and there's cheesecake coming soon, too.  Y...

More than once I have gotten within half an hour of dinner time and had no idea what I was going to do about dinner. Nothing was planned, and I could not mentally survey my pantry and compound something easy. On days like that, there are only two ways to avoid a restaurant: spaghetti or having something in the fridge that I can scoop into bowls and call dinner. In the winter time that something is soup, but in the summertime it's tabbouleh or this easy to assemble salad. It also travels well to potluck lunches. photo by Rich Renomeron 2 cans black beans, rinsed OR 2.5 cups cooked blacked beans OR 1 ¼ cups dried black beans 16 ounces frozen corn (or fresh if you can get corn picked that day) 1 jalapeño pepper (optional) ¼ cup olive oil 2 bunches scallions 1 bunch cilantro 5 medium tomatoes OR a pint of cherry tomatoes juice of 2 limes salt and black pepper to taste If you're starting with dried beans, cook beans until tender . Preheat oven to 400 F. Line a baki...

I went to the pool to swim laps early this morning. Swimming laps first thing in the morning is for people who are serious about swimming. By the time I got into the pool at 6:15 the lap lanes were full. I observed the swimmers for a length before I decided which lane to join, and then I waited another lap for her to get to my end of the pool so I could ask to join her. It's a basic pleasantry of lane sharing, choose someone who seems to be at about your level and wait for the swimmer to acknowledge you before you get in and start swimming. I have the gear of a serious swimmer: a racer-back suit with no frills or furbelows, a swim cap made for folks like me who have a lot of hair to tuck up, and goggles. I can swim freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke creditably. (I can even do butterfly, though it wears me out pretty quickly and I feel self-conscious when I do it because that's a very serious stroke and everyone in the pool knows what you're doing when you try it....

Yes, this is a terrible photo. A example of how we decide on dinner plans: I went to the warehouse store this morning and brought home stuff that required a freezer rearrangement. I managed to fit everything in, but clearly we needed to start using the frozen stuff. So on the way home from lunch we considered the state of our stores. A google search later and I had settled on a curried lentil salad which would use green beans from the freezer, lentils from the pantry, celery from the crisper and some of the cilantro left over from beans and rice on Thursday night. A trip to the store was required for the tomatoes. This was a much more civilized menu planning process than I normally undertake. The salad is vegetarian, easily made vegan, low fat, high fiber, gluten free, iron rich, colorful and straightforward. It also makes plenty. Curried Lentil Salad 8 ounces dried brown lentils 2 teaspoons olive oil 1 medium onion 2 teaspoons salt 2 cloves garlic 1" piec...