My Mother's Recipe File

Although my mother wasn’t much of a cook when I got older, in the early days of her marriage, she loved to cook and entertain. The evidence I have of this is in part the stories she used to tell me of having people over, and in part in the accordion recipe file I have that belonged to her. This file is easily 35 or 40 years old, and its sides are split, not unlike the bellows of a real accordion that has seen better days. On the front of it is a colored sketch of some fruit—grapes, peaches, a pear, some grape leaves, and the word RECIPES is in a rather narrow, austere typeface. It has an “aged” tint to it, which when it was new probably made it look charming and old fashioned, but now makes it look as though it had tea or coffee (or both) spilled on it repeatedly over the last 30 years. The picture and word on the front are oriented for a “portrait” presentation; I presume that the assumption was that the file would be stored upright like a book. Because this file has been bulging with recipes for as long as I can remember, it has never passed so much as a day in an upright position. It has always rested on its bottom wherever it lived.

For a long time it lived on my mother’s desk in our kitchen in Washington, D.C. This was its primary residence for many years, perched on a shelf at the end of the kitchen that was remodeled in 1979 in a brown and white color scheme that my mother, always one to take things to extremes, even carried down to her pots and pans. Le Cruset no longer makes brown enameled cookware, for which I think we should all be grateful. I don’t recall her ever using the recipe file for reference. It seemed as though she had done all her recipe collecting in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was content to consider her collection complete. She bought cookbooks—I recall The Good Cook collection by Time-Life, which was organized by topic (Poultry, Vegetables, that sort of thing, and I remember the Desserts book had the least-appealing looking dessert in the whole world on the cover, a sort of anemic molded blancmange/pudding thing festooned with blackberries that was having a berry colored syrup poured over it) that she bought over the years, several of which disappeared along with a few thousand dollars and two catering partners in a business deal turned sour (if I’m not mistaken, these folks are now running a hot dog stand in Denver). The others in the series have disappeared over the years, gradually given away as I decided they were just too dated (now I kind of wished I’d kept them, just for the sake of amusement; I’ve seen a complete set sell for around $85 on eBay).

But the recipe file, though just as dated, I still have. In my early 20s, when I became interested in food and cooking, and felt the urge to move to the “adult” world of learning how to prepare my own food, instead of having it prepared for me, I began collecting recipes and adding them to this trove. I’m amused to go back and flip through those recipes, and see not only what my mother collected, but what I added to the collection. In both cases, there are some strange choices, either because of the culture of the times, or because of the idiosyncrasies of the collector. For example, I have many handwritten index cards for such basics as Hollandaise sauce. Evidently I was under the impression that I had one shot at finding a recipe for Hollandaise sauce, and since I had found it, I’d better write it down. I must not have realized that there was a Hollandaise sauce recipe in just about any basic cookbook I cared to open.

The folders are labeled with food categories. There’s nothing terribly remarkable about them: Appetizers, Soups & Sauces; Salads & Salad Dressings; Fish & Seafood; Meat; Poultry; Omelets & Casseroles; Vegetables; Cakes, Pies & Baked Goods; Desserts; Miscellaneous. Although my mother didn’t have much of a sweet tooth, the section on Cakes, Pies & Baked Goods is by far the fullest. In fact, my mother used to say that what she had was a “fat tooth”—her weakness was for fatty, salty things like potato chips and dip. Vegetables appear to have the least representation in this collection. In Miscellaneous we find such gems as a recipe pamphlet called “Cooking Made Easy with a WEAR-EVER Pressure Cooker” which is kind of interesting because to the best of my knowledge my mother never had a pressure cooker. I have a suspicion this booklet came from my grandmother, because the date in it is 1946, and in 1946 my mother was about ten years old. A tad young for experimenting with a pressure cooker, I’d say. But why did she keep it for so many years when we didn’t even own a pressure cooker? It’s too late to find out now.

And that’s the joy, and at the same time the frustration, of this recipe file. It even applies to the recipes that I cut or copied. Because I no longer have access to my mother, nor do I really have access to the person I was almost twenty years ago, I can only guess why certain recipes are saved, while others were discarded. In a couple of instances I might recall something about why I clipped a recipe, or see what the appeal was (or is), but there are so many that are just mysteries. My mother was a big gatherer of recipes, almost a chronicler of a form of cultural history, although she never did anything with her artifacts. I recall having seen in a scrapbook somewhere a handwritten note from some dinner guest she’d entertained in about 1960. It went something like this:

Dear Mrs. Langston,

I know you collect recipes and I thought I would send you this one for [whatever it was]. I hope you enjoy it.

All the best,

[The Author of the Note]

I don’t know where the recipe itself is (although it could be in the scrapbook, which is in a box in a storage locker, soon to be unearthed as we move into a new house). It could be in this very recipe file. Did she ever make it? What did she think of it? If she didn’t make it, why didn’t she? Why was she such a collector of recipes? Why am I? Is it genetic? You see how this could go.

As an exercise in, well lots of things, I am setting forth to make recipes from this file. I’ll work my way through from Appetizers, Soups & Sauces, back to Miscellaneous (don’t expect to see anything from the pressure cooker pamphlet any time soon). This will be a source of discovery about food, of course, and food of specific times (mostly the 1960s, 1970s, and into the early 1990s). Along the way I expect to do some self-discovery, as well as learn a few things about my mother. I will, at the very least, speculate on some things about my mother, since I can’t really say with any confidence that I’ve unearthed her true motive, or thought behind any given selection.

I’ll be keeping a record of this experiment over at mymothersrecipefile.blogspot.com. I’ll still be posting here, but on a weekly basis I’ll be selecting a choice tidbit from the recipe file. Then I’ll make it and (try to) photograph it, and do a write up of it. I must offer these caveats at the outset as regards the photography: first, I’m not a professional food photographer (you probably already knew that), nor do I have a very good camera. Second, if you’ve ever flipped through cookbooks or pamphlets like the WEAR-EVER Pressure Cooker booklet, you know quite well how food was styled in those days (and if you’re not familiar with it, check out The Gallery of Regrettable Food. Actually, check it out even if you are familiar with it, because you’ll laugh yourself sick—but I digress.) In any event, the question must be asked, did food photographs look like that because they were taken in grainy black and white, and styled by people with zero talent? Or did they look like that because that’s what food looked like? I can’t say, but I will say that if it’s the latter, be prepared to be underwhelmed by my pictures. They may not be great to begin with, but if they’re mediocre pictures of weird or unappetizing foods, I hereby absolve myself of all liability.

Expect to see the first post early next week. I’m torn between Liptauer and Mushroom Hors d’Oeuvres. The mushroom hors d’oeuvres are by far the more palatable, but the liptauer has more humor value. So we shall see.

I Never...

When I was younger, my friends and I played a drinking game called “I never” in which the object was to stay something completely humiliating or bizarre that you’d never done, and anyone who had done that thing had to drink. The idea, clearly, was to discover what outlandish things other people had done. (The game should, of course, be called "I've Never" to be perfectly grammatical about it.)

Something reminded me of this game a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about the culinary version of it. What cooking-related things have I never done that I think I should have done, or that I’d like to have done? So here’s my list. As you read through it’s not necessary to drink when you come across a thing you have done that I haven’t (unless you want to, of course, in which case, by all means, do so).

I’ve never made hollandaise sauce from scratch. Or béarnaise sauce. Or really any of those classic butter-based sauces. Probably because I’ve never served Eggs Benedict to anyone. Although I have served filet mignon, which I’ve had served to me with béarnaise sauce in restaurants, but since my husband hates béarnaise sauce, I’ve never made it to go with filet at home.

I’ve never poached an egg. I don’t know why—it’s just never come up. As I said, I’ve never made Eggs Benedict, and I’ve never had any other need to poach an egg. Nor have I ever really craved one. I’ve eaten them, but I’ve never made them.

I’ve never made pudding from scratch. As a child of the packaged food generation, pudding was powder out of a box mixed with milk. My mother never made pudding from scratch either (my mother never made a lot of things from scratch), so I guess it never occurred to me to think of how “real” pudding was made (or even considered that there was such a thing as “real” pudding) until I was an adult, by which time I didn’t like it so much anymore. I might make pudding for my own kids one day, since pudding is a very kid food.

I’ve never had any success with buttercream frosting. It always tastes iceboxy. And it’s always too…too much. I don’t know if it’s greasy or slick or heavy or rich or what the exact word is I’m looking for here, but real buttercream that I’ve made is always too much for me. I might have had other people’s buttercream and loved it (I can’t recall every single encounter with buttercream in my life), but when I make it for my own cakes, I always am not enamored of it. I want to like it—after all, I made it, and I made it with good ingredients—but I just can’t warm up to it somehow. Maybe this is just me, and not the frosting.

I’ve never made jam. I really want to, but I have a couple of things currently stopping me. The first is my four children. They don’t leave me a lot of time for picking berries, preparing them, cooking them, and putting them up. The second thing is my fear of botulism. Marion Cunningham, updater of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, assures me that my fear is unfounded, and that it’s perfectly safe to put up preserves, but I’m still a little reluctant. That, combined with my conviction that all the lids would blow off the jars as I tried to “process” them, leaving my kitchen a mess and me a scarred shell of a woman, has kept me from making jam. In the next couple of years I’ll get over this and take the plunge. No doubt the details will be recorded here (assuming I survive the explosion[s]).

I’ve never had any luck frying chicken. In spite of the fact that I think this is one of the more important things every cook should know how to do, I confess that I pretty much suck at it. I know technically how to do it, but I’ve never had any success with the execution. Just like some people can’t make pie crust, or bread, or white sauce, I’m just a Fried Chicken Failure. It’s always burnt on the outside and raw on the inside. Maybe I’ll try again someday. Better make a note to do it before making the jam, in case the exploding jars take out my kitchen.

I’ve never made fish stock. I’ve never really had a need, to be honest. We don’t eat much fish, we don’t eat much fish soup, so I’ve never had either the components or the need. There are a few things I’d like to make that call for fish stock, such as bouillabaisse. As my kids get older, one of my goals is to start introducing them to more fish so that we all become more fish eaters (it just seems a crying shame to live a ferry ride + a short walk away from Pike Place Market—Home of the Heaved Salmon—and not eat more fish), so no doubt I’ll remedy this at some point.

I’ve never cooked a whole fish. See above. Also, the idea of a fish with its head on kind of ooks me out. I have a friend who insists that she doesn’t eat anything that ever had a nose (which I think is kind of an overly cute way of saying she only eats chicken and fish, and I’d like to point out that chickens do have noses, just not in the traditional sense that we as humans do, but whatever), and I for one am somewhat put off by a dish that can actually look me in the eye. Which isn’t to say that I won’t eat it, or I have a rule about not eating food that can stare back at me or anything like that. I just have some reservations on this one, and it’s going to take me a little time to get over them. I think we’re looking at a lot of fish filets and steaks until I can work through this one.

I’ve never made puff pastry or croissants from scratch. I’m a bit intimidated by this kind of dough, frankly. I, who stand as a mighty soldier before yeast, am a tad cowed by the whole butter-flour-fold it-turn it-refrigerate it type of dough. It just seems there’s more chance for me to screw it up. With bread dough, I toss in the yeast and it does its thing. As long as it’s not too old or too hot, it complies. With puff pastry, there’s more of me involved in the process, and therefore more chance that my fallibility will reveal itself.

I’ve never made pasta. This is something I’ve always wanted to do, and think it would be such fun, but I’ve heard that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, and this would be one of those things that I would try to make for a dinner party, and my guests would arrive to find me sobbing uncontrollably over a misshapen pile of goo. They’d try to comfort me: “Really, it’s great looking linguini!” and I’d wail, “It was supposed to be tortellini!!” Maybe one day when I’m feeling brave, and cavalier about the possibility of dumping a couple of pounds of flour right into the trash, and just have a few hours to do absolutely nothing at all, I’ll give it a try.

There are plenty of other things I’ve never done—made pate from scratch (my mom was big on doing this, for some reason--she never made pudding, or dinner, but she'd grind up chicken livers and wrap them in bacon...go figure), cooked on a woodstove (my aunts have both done this), tried brains or sweetbreads (I have an uncle who has eaten just about everything deemed edible by any group of people in the world). On the other hand, my aunts and uncle have never roasted a whole pig.

So You're Thinking About Throwing a Holiday Party This Year...

I once I read the menu for a holiday party someone threw and it was incredible. It must have had fifteen different items; several dips with both crackers and vegetables, a smoked salmon, cheeses, individual hors d’oeuvres, desserts, the works. The party was, as I recall, for about 25 people. I thought as I read about how much work that person must have put into making all that food, and wondering how much they had left over.

Many years ago BC (Before Children), my husband and I used to throw a holiday party every year for between 50 and 100 people. Also many years ago, I sold catering services, and a major component of selling the services was developing menu proposals. When the glamour of food service (ha!) faded, I moved on to project management. So with this combination—experience in catering, experience in project management, and many parties thrown for my own friends (as well as total strangers)—I’d like to share some of (or, you know, a lot of) the things that I learned on the subject of How to Throw a Party.

To define what I mean by party: a gathering of more than 8 people whose final destination is not the dinner table. I’m thinking of more of a cocktail party, although some of the planning suggestions could be applied to a dinner party. Planning is planning for almost all types of cooking, after all.

I was taught to think of planning a buffet of “heavy hors d’oeuvres,” which is usually what a cocktail party consists of, in much the same way one thinks of a meal. Or more accurately, in the way we used to think of meals—meat, starch, vegetable, etc. Transport yourself back to 1950s and 60s sitcoms when you start this exercise—channel your inner Aunt Bee. Break out that old Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook from the late 60s and check the section on “Meal Planning Tips.” There should be a protein dish or two—chicken, beef, or fish. An egg or cheese dish is good in case your guest list includes vegetarians (if it includes vegans, you’re on your own—I don’t do vegan). Then add a vegetable or two, something starchy, and perhaps something sweet and you’re all set. Really, seven items is plenty. If there are many more than that, several things happen—there are always one or two popular items you’ve never made enough of because you didn’t have time, so you run out of them; you always end up with tons of leftovers of one or two of your choices; and you drive yourself completely bananas trying to schedule the prep for all the things you decided to make.

In making choices, think about prep. A catering manager I worked with once sold someone a menu that included stuffed cherry tomatoes. We had to hollow them out with a paring knife, and then pipe herbed cream cheese into them. This would have been a terrific vegetable component, and a really nice change from the usual “crudités with random dip served in a hollowed-out cabbage.” I even recommend you consider them as a possible choice for your own party. But not if you are serving 150 people. Since you need to provide two to three of each individual hors d’oeuvres per person, that meant stuffing between 300 and 450 cherry tomatoes. I won’t even go into the horrors of transporting that many cherry tomatoes to the party site, with their artfully swirled herbed cream cheese atop them, and how the artful swirls get smashed down by the plastic wrap that is critical to keeping them upright on the sheet pans so that they don’t all fall over like so many drunken Weebles and go sliding into each other, smearing their herbed cream cheese all over the neighboring tomatoes…but I said I wouldn’t go into it.

So the moral of this story is, think about the degree of labor intensity. Does the preparation of any one item require you to fiddle around with each and every piece to some degree? If so, consider having only one, or at most two, of something like this if you’re hosting more than about 15 people. This is the reason why things like vegetable platters, slabs of smoked salmon, bowls of olives, and cheese boards are so popular. They rate almost a zero on the fiddle scale. On the other end of that spectrum, we have things like those cherry tomatoes (curse their souls), or something-on-party- toasts that need to be assembled, heated, and garnished, or the famous shrimp-wrapped-in-a-pea-pod. If you have to handle each component of an hors d’oeuvres for more than a couple of seconds, it’s going to be pretty labor intensive.

The question, though, is “What can I serve to a fairly large group that’s not a boring old cheese board, but is also not a fiddly thing requiring hours of individual attention?” There are some choices. One thing that I like to do is sausage in puff pastry. These look impressive, but aren’t really very time consuming. Cook Italian sausage (pork or turkey) in boiling water until they’re pretty well cooked through (10-15 minutes). Drain the sausage, and remove the casings. Cut thawed puff pastry into rectangles—about 3” wide, and about as long as your sausage. You want a little bit on either long end to tuck down over the end of the sausage. Wrap the rectangle of puff pastry around the sausage and press the seam firm, possibly using a little water to seal it. If your puff pastry is getting sticky, you can put the wrapped sausages in the freezer for 10 or so minutes to firm up. Using a serrated knife (I’ve found this works best), cut the wrapped sausage into ¼” slices, and lay them on a baking sheet. Bake them off in a 400 degree oven for about 12 minutes, or until the pastry puffs and browns a bit.

Really what you’re after is something where you’re making one part of the item in bulk, and doing a little fiddling with the finished product. Curried chicken salad in phyllo cups (you can buy these and they’re fine; if you’re determined to make them yourself, make them a couple of weeks in advance and freeze them so you’re not tearing your hair out making phyllo cups three hours before your guests arrive). Biscuits or muffins (either of which can have cheese, nuts, or herbs added to the batter) stuffed with a little meat of some kind (roast beef, turkey, ham), and served with a couple of interesting condiments—honey mustard, herbed mayonnaise, chutney spread. Homemade cheese “crackers” in which the dough is made, rolled into a log and chilled, then sliced and baked. These could be served with a fun dip or spread. Baked polenta “fries” dusted with grated parmesan and served with a warm marinara sauce for dipping.

Think about entrees you like and consider ways to make them into hors d’oeuvres. We did an office party for which the client requested a “holiday meal” theme. We served cranberry muffins with sliced turkey (an idea borrowed from Martha Stewart’s Entertaining book), mini stuffing balls served with gravy for dipping (prepare your favorite stuffing recipe—not one with tons of nuts or fruit in it, nor one in which the bread is in big chunks; it won’t hold together in balls—and using a melon baller, make little balls of stuffing, bake at 350 until crisp on the outside, about 10 to 15 minutes; serve with toothpicks for spearing and dipping), twice baked new potatoes (steam new potatoes and cool until they can be handled comfortably, cut in half, scoop out the top of each potato with a melon baller, reserving the “scoops.” Combine the reserved potato with butter, sour cream, chives…your favorite baked potato toppings. Using a pastry bag, pipe back into the hollowed out potatoes and heat in a 350 degree oven until hot through, about 20 minutes), baked sweet potato wedges dusted with a brown sugar-orange zest “glaze,” and a crudités platter with a blue cheese dip. Dessert was mini pecan pies (full disclosure: we bought these from a bakery. Never be afraid to supplement your own menu with something from a really good bakery; better to do that than to have your guests find you in tears because the fat wasn’t hot enough when you were frying the mini donuts and you wound up with a pile of half raw oil sogged donut dough.)

Another consideration is the various flavors, and, for lack of a better word, nationality of the food. The polenta fries with marinara sauce, on a buffet with tortellini skewers with pesto dipping sauce, and cherry tomato-and-mozzarella salad with a basil vinaigrette would be too much Italian (unless you were going for an all-Italian theme). For a holiday party that doesn’t have a specific ethnic theme, make sure that the flavors harmonize without being repetitive. If you choose an obviously ethnic dish—sautéed shrimp with Indian spices, or miso glazed beef skewers—try to keep the rest of the menu ethnically neutral. America is a melting pot, but the flavors of all cuisines don’t always blend as harmoniously, and in some cases may actually clash.

Once you’ve got a menu in mind, the next steps are to think about how to assemble it, and how to serve it.

Look at the recipes for your chosen hors d’oeuvres. Are there parts that can be made ahead? Can the whole thing be made ahead? If everything requires absolutely last-minute preparation, you might want to rethink your choices. Empanadas, for example, can be made in stages. The filling can be made a couple of days ahead and refrigerated. They can be assembled (I use the pre-rolled pie crust dough from the grocery store for these) a day or two ahead of time and kept covered in the refrigerator. They can be baked off right before everyone shows up, but they also taste fine at room temperature. Dips can be made a couple of days ahead. Biscuits need to be cooked at the last minute. See how timelines can slot together so you’re not trying to cram everything in the oven at once. It may be more realistic to buy some things already made. As nice as the idea of baking your own ham for ham biscuits is, Honey Baked is just as good and far easier to work with.

Storage space is also a consideration. If you don’t have a lot of room in your refrigerator, you may want to consider things that can be stored at room temperature, or in the freezer. Of course, if you live in a part of the country where it gets cold enough, and you’re throwing your soiree during the winter months, you may be able to use a garage as additional cold storage. This was the case at my in-laws’ house in Western Massachusetts (average winter high temperature: 0 degrees Kelvin). We could make baked goods or sauces, wrap them up well, and store them in the garage in a cooler for a day or two. Even if you don’t have a garage, if the temperatures are cool enough, an Igloo cooler sitting in the shade could be used for storage for a short time. When thinking about what to make ahead, think about where you’re going to put it until you’re ready for it again.

Another catering manager I worked with was always shopping on the day of the party. She was pretty badly organized and somehow she always realized that she lacked a platter, bowl, or pitcher for some critical menu item on the very day of the event. She would then bop off to the local Crate & Barrel, or Linens & Things or whatever and spend a couple of hours buying serving items while the rest of us toiled in the kitchen. From her I learned to think about what to serve and what to serve it on (or in) at the same time. Then I’ll know a couple of weeks before the party that I really don’t have a suitable sized bowl for a dip, or I’ll remember that the platter I’m thinking of using got broken two years ago at Thanksgiving and I need to replace it. It’s much easier to find just the right thing if you’re not in a rush, and if you’re working with someone to get everything ready, you won’t piss them off by being gone for half the day while they work themselves into a froth cooking and cleaning and decorating.

Look at each menu item and think about how people are going to eat it. Is it something fairly tidy that can be eaten in two bites? Or is it something that has a filling that might slip out so that someone might want to be holding a plate under it? For anything being served on a skewer, there are some special considerations: how are your guests going to get it off the skewer (if it’s chicken or beef, consider cutting the meat into pretty small chunks so that the teeth can be used to pull it off; you don’t want your guests to spear themselves in the soft palate while trying to gnaw the satay off of the stick), and then what will they do with the skewer when they’re done? Will there be a trash can right there (perhaps a very small one discreetly tucked under the edge of the tablecloth), or will you provide a tray or plate for “used” skewers? If you do this, I always recommend “seeding” the used skewer plate before everyone shows up. Eat one or two, make sure the skewers are recognizable as used, and put them on the plate. Either that or make up a little tent card that says “Used Skewers.” Some things are really better eaten with a fork—anything that might be drippy or sticky. I’ve served soup at hors d’oeuvres buffets with great success. Just provide small Styrofoam cups and spoons, and someplace convenient for people to toss them when they’re done

If you’re having enough people and want to rent china, it’s not terribly daunting, but know that most rental places are very busy around the holidays, and you’re generally required to return plates rinsed; they don’t have to be washed, but they shouldn’t have food clinging to them. Rental linens are generally pretty bad. Most of them are a polyester blend. Given the choice between rental linens and good quality paper napkins from the grocery store, I’ll go with the paper. Of course, you can always buy pretty printed napkins at party supply stores. These may cost a little more, but you may not want just a plain solid colored paper napkin. If you have enough of your own linens to provide for your guests, even if they don’t all match, I say go for it.

Be sure to have lots of napkins on hand, even if that means putting out your “nice” cloth cocktail napkins and having a backup pack of paper in the kitchen. People generally go through several napkins in an evening and you don’t want to run out. A tablecloth makes the easiest table covering (yes, yes, banana leaves stitched together would be hugely fun for a tropical theme, but if you’ve got time to do that…then do it. I don’t have that kind of time). Cut flowers are nice as decoration, but so are pots of herbs, or blooming plants. I’ve found that I got so into arranging the flowers that I got behind on food prep. One holiday we bought three dozen white roses, and when I got them home from the florist (the day of the party, mind you), I must have spent two hours wiring all their little heads to keep them from drooping. They looked outstanding, but I wound up feeling frazzled as the seconds ticked down to the arrival of the first guest and I was still putting the finishing touches on food.
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Probably the most important rule of party-giving is: everything is going to take about 50% longer than you think it is. If you think it’s going to take you 20 minutes to chop the onions for the dip, and you’re making dip for 75 people, figure on 30 minutes. The only area where this is not the case is in baking times. Generally speaking, baking times tend to be pretty close if you’re using well-tested recipes. If you’re sautéing or browning, I’d suggest using the 50% rule, because it always seems that between the difference in the stove I’m using, and the variations in cookware, sautéing mushrooms until their liquid is evaporated for example, can take longer than a recipe recommends. Also, if you’re doubling or tripling a recipe, stovetop activities may take longer because of the increased volume of food.

I could probably go on for another page or two. Or twenty. After all, whole books have been written on this subject. This is only my 2 cents (or maybe 5 or 10 cents). I love throwing this kind of party, and I love to think about what to serve at this kind of party. Sometimes I’ll see a recipe in a magazine and plan an entire party around it. This is fun for me. People tell me I should become a caterer because I enjoy this kind of thing so much. These are mostly people who don’t know that I’ve already done that. I’d never do it again because it’s hard, hard work, and anyone who does do it has my utmost regard. I’ll just keep planning menus, and someday serving them to my friends and family for them to enjoy. And maybe pratting on about the logistics of it in blog entries.

The Most Interesting Part of My Day

When you look around and realize that the most interesting thing you’ve done during the day involves Murphy’s Oil Soap (even if the dining room table is extremely clean now), you feel like maybe something a little nice for lunch is in order.

Since this is pretty much a summary of my day, I looked to a new cookbook I got recently. I’ve long been a fan of Bill Granger through my subscription to an Australian cooking magazine called delicious. and I have two of his cookbooks (biils food and bills open kitchen). About a year and a half ago I read of another one that had been published in Australia, bills sydney food. I looked and looked for this one, but with no luck. Finally, about two weeks ago on a trip to Elliot Bay Book Company, I stumbled on it. It wasn’t cheap, but I had to complete my collection.

Thank goodness I bought it, because this morning when I realized I wanted to make a nice lunch, Bill had just the recipe: Spiced Lentil Salad with Prawns and Mint Yogurt Dressing. As I’ve said, I’m of the opinion that lentils are a wonderful transition food from summer to fall. Today was a dreary, gray day with lots of yellowy brown trees, and some rain. Also some sick kids.

Did I mention that? Three of my kids have high fevers—103+. They’ve had them all weekend. The fourth one seems interestingly immune to whatever it is that the others have. I started making this recipe at 10:30 this morning, and finished up about 1:30. That’s not to suggest that there’s anything time-consuming about it. Quite the opposite—it’s really a pretty quick fix. Cook and dress lentils, cook shrimp, make dressing, assemble. But when you’re interrupted every 10 minutes to give a baby a bottle, change a diaper, change a DVD, or dispense Motrin (did you know children’s Motrin comes in cherry, grape, and bubble gum flavors??), things tend to drag out a bit.

So this recipe had the autumnal lentils I love, plus some flavors that have hints of summer in them—shrimp, mint, spring onions. The shrimp, bathed with olive oil and turmeric, have a bright yellowy orange color that can either be reminiscent of summer, or a reminder of the bright leaves outside that today are dripping with raindrops.

My lentils took longer to cook than the recipe directs because they were old. Instead of taking 15 minutes to cook, they took more like 25. I also omitted the green chili that it called for because I don’t care for things that are too spicy, and because I didn’t want to take the time to chop it. I left out the blanched green beans, again on the grounds that I was hungry and wanted to eat before Thomas the Tank Engine was over.

I made the dressing in my mini chopper, which worked beautifully. I used nonfat yogurt, which was OK, but I think it would have been even better with whole milk yogurt, or even that extra thick Greek yogurt that’s available now. Once the fish sauce and lime juice are added it would be a nice creamy dressing.

All in all, a bright sunny lunch on a rainy day filled with taking care of children, cleaning the dining room table, and little else of interest.

Spiced Lentil Salad with Prawns and Minted Yogurt Dressing
From bills sydney food by Bill Granger

1 cup du Puy lentils
¼ cup finely slices scallions
½ cup olive oil
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
1 green chili, finely chopped
Sea salt
Fresh ground pepper
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
¼ cup cilantro leaves.
1 tsp turmeric
20 raw prawns, peeled and deveined, tails intact

To Serve
1 cup baby spinach leaves
3 1/3 oz green beans, blanched and refreshed
Mint yogurt dressing

Place lentils and 1 ½ cups of water in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Drain the lentils.

Place warm lentils, scallions, 4 Tbsp of the olive oil, vinegar, chili, salt, pepper, ground coriander, cumin and cilantro in a bowl. Stir to combine, and set aside.

Place remaining olive oil, turmeric, salt and pepper in a bowl and stir to combine. Add prawns and stir to coat with oil.

Heat a non-stick frying pan over high heat for 2 minutes. Add prawns and cook until just opaque, shaking pan frequently.

To assemble salad, divide lentils among 4 plates, top with baby spinach leaves, green beans, and prawns. Finish with a drizzle of yogurt dressing. Serves 4.

Mint Yogurt Dressing
1 cup yogurt
2 Tbsp lime juice
2 tsp fish sauce
4 Tbsp finely chopped mint

Place all ingredients in a bowl and whisk to combine.

Bag It

When my husband and I first moved from stage 1 to stage 2 of our relationship (that is, from the talking-on-the-phone-having-dinner-together-regularly stage to the more serious indication of commitment, the going-to-the-grocery-store-together stage), he spent a lot of time fussing about how the groceries were loaded in the cart, how they were distributed on the belt, and how they were bagged. What a lot of nonsense, I thought; much ado about nothing. Over time, he has educated me and opened my eyes to the ways of correct grocery bagging. It’s like being initiated into a cult, only without having hand out flowers in airports.

About two months ago something happened that doesn’t very often. We went to the grocery store, and the bagger did an outstanding job of bagging our groceries. It was as though they hadn’t been taught what seem to be the unspoken rules at my grocery store: “Make sure there’s something cold in every bag,” and “Make sure there’s something soft on the top of every bag.”

An article in today’s Seattle Times echoes my trials. It also reports on a grocery bagging contest, which I know that almost none of the baggers from my regular grocery store would stand a pint of Ben & Jerry’s chance in an oven of winning. In the contest, they bag the groceries, and then the bags are cut apart with a box cutter and the groceries are supposed to stand there by themselves! What a joy that would be!

My shopping trip is highly organized. I make my list by section: Produce, Meat, Canned, Pantry, Dairy, Frozen, Bakery, Deli, and Other. Other is comprised of things like cleaning supplies, paper goods, cat food, and drug items. Pantry is anything not produce and not refrigerated that isn’t canned—flour, spices, crackers.

We go first to the produce section, so that the produce can be safely stored under the baby seat area where it won’t get crushed. Then we go around to meat and dairy. The baking needs aisle, and the canned goods aisle are next, followed by things like cookies and crackers. Then we do cleaning supplies. Wine, frozen food, and bakery are last. I’d rather do frozen food right after meat and dairy, but the layout of the store is such that it’s easier to do panty goods before frozen. I suck it up.

With this method I can unload the cart in the following order: pantry goods, bakery, cold foods (frozen and dairy), meat, cleaning supplies, and produce last. In spite of the fact that I group all the cold foods together, all the meat together, and all the produce together, it still winds up spread through every single bag. And to add insult to injury, they manage to put a package of bread or letuce on top of every single bag. This means that when we put everything in the car, the bags can’t be stacked on top of one another. They all require their own space on the floor.

This whole experience is a combination of maddening and entertaining. It’s almost amusing to see how the bags will be put together this week. Will all the cheese from the deli section be on the bottom of a bag again with the apples and pears on top of it? Will the box of aluminum foil be stuck down into the bag that has the tomatoes and mushrooms? Will there be one bag with nothing but six cans of beans and orange slices in it? (Hint to grocery store baggers: the hot dog rolls can go on top of something like this.) Can they manage to get one cold thing in every bag?

Then one week we had a bagger who got it all right. I was floored. I took the bags to the kitchen, and began pawing through for the cold things. There wasn’t anything in the bag with the produce. Nothing in the bag with the canned goods. Why…why…here they all were—together, in one bag! I’ve never seen that bagger again.

I think the reason that the quality of the bagging is so low is because it’s usually kids who are employed to bag groceries, and kids don’t usually spend much time unloading groceries, nor are they well schooled in food safety, on subjects like cross contamination. This seems to be the case most of the time at my usual market—the baggers are mostly high school kids. However, I will say that one of the worst baggers I know is a woman at one of the other grocery stores I go to occasionally, who is by far old enough to know better. I think some people just don’t get it, period. And I’ll grant that it’s not the most fascinating topic for a cocktail party conversation, but if you love food, you care about what you’re choosing, and you care about what condition it’s in when it reaches your house. That makes the bagging process important.

I did stop at the Safeway last week, and I bought five things: carpet cleaner, a magazine, cream of tartar, baking soda, and a plant. Because I went through the express lane, the checker was also the bagger. While she did put everything in a single plastic bag, she took great care to wrap the carpet cleaner in a couple of smaller plastic bags, and even remarked that she thought that way even if it leaked, it wouldn’t contaminate my pantry goods. Clearly she was in training for the contest.

He Liked It!

This weekend I bought a pumpkin, which inspired my son to beg for pumpkin pie. The kid has an insatiable sweet tooth (he’d eat sugar straight, if I’d let him), but since pumpkin pie is one of the healthier desserts he could ask for, I agreed that we could make it on Sunday.

In fact, I’ve decided to take a slightly different tack on trying to curb his sweet tooth. My plan is that on Sunday he will be allowed to choose a recipe, and make the sweet thing of his choice with Mom or Dad. He can indulge all he wants in the finished product on Sunday. After that, whatever it is gets put up out of sight, and will be distributed on a very limited basis. We were getting a little out of hand with dessert every night—gummy worms, Rice Krispy treats, cookies, candy corn, marshmallows. Not all of that in one sitting, of course, but that was perhaps the catalog of a weeks’ worth of desserts. Too much crap, too often. I’d far rather have him satisfy his sweet tooth with something homemade, and I’d like to encourage him to make it himself (with our help) so he gets a feel for cooking. And we’re not talking about cake from box mixes here—if we’re making cake or cupcakes, we’re starting with flour, sugar, eggs, etc.

I did not, however, force him to make the crust for the pumpkin pie. I think that would be a little cruel, especially since the recipe I originally chose (from the Bon Appetit cookbook) included the instruction “refrigerate dough for 30 minutes” at least twice, and involved the cutting out and scoring of pie crust leaves, then scattering them across the surface of the baked pie. That’s hard on a little kid who just wants some pie. It was hard enough getting him to wait until the one we made cooled down. But we did find a good recipe for pumpkin pie that involves few ingredients, and little measuring, and so is ideal for small children to help with. The recipe comes from the back of the little container of McCormick’s Pumpkin Pie Spice that I bought at the grocery store on Friday. It goes like this:

1 15oz can pumpkin puree
1 14oz can sweetened condensed milk
2 eggs
1 Tablespoon pumpkin pie spice
1 frozen pie crust

Combine pumpkin, milk, eggs and pumpkin pie spice in a bowl. Pour filling into pie crust. Bake for 15 minutes at 425. Reduce heat to 350 and bake for another 40 minutes. Cool. Eat.

Couldn’t be simpler. The next time I would blind bake the crust, at least half way. It was a tad underdone for my taste, but the recipe did clearly call for a frozen pie crust. Otherwise it was perfectly fine, and even the twins at age two could help. Matthew cracked one egg, Chris cracked the other, and Chris, Patrick and I each lent a hand (or a finger) to getting the mixer turned off and in an upright position. This actually does require some tricky manipulation because of my lame duck mixer.

Everyone had a slice with whipped cream (made by all interested parties with the help of Dad) for dessert. Chris loved it, Matthew liked it, and Patrick was a little unsure. He’s the pickier of the twins anyway. Matthew pretty much shovels it all in and looks around for more.

The other great food event from this weekend was that I actually made something from scratch (well, OK, mostly from scratch) that my kids would eat. You simply cannot imagine my delight. Granted, what I made was bean and cheese “burritos” made with canned refried beans, but hey, it’s a start! It didn’t start life as a brick of ice that spent two and a half minutes in the microwave before hitting my dining room table. I actually assembled and baked them in the oven, and my kids ate them. In fact, when I coaxed Chris into trying a bite, the first words out of his mouth were:

“It’s yummy! Can I have some more?”

It brought tears to my eyes.

I put burrito in quotes here, because I didn’t have burrito sized tortillas, so they were kind of funny looking. Also, because the tortillas I started with were cold, they broke when I tried to fold them around the filling. But since they get cut up into little squares anyway, appearance isn’t that important to my kids. And I didn’t hear, “It doesn’t taste like at school.” This is the sentence I so dread, because I know what I’m competing with is processed, over-sugared, over-salted, lacking-in-nutrient crap. Of course it doesn’t taste like at school—it has actual food in it, instead of a laundry list of chemicals!

So between the semi-healthy pie (healthy, that is, as compared to something like gummy worms), and the warmly accepted bean and cheese burritos, it was a good food weekend. For someone as food-obsessed as I am, my children’s acceptance of my food is one of the keys to my happiness. I know I need to work on this—I can’t dissolve in tears or become angry when they reject something I’ve made. Food shouldn’t be the only way I have of showing them that I care about them. And I do try. I do my best to shrug and think, “In a few years—they’re just little kids.” I also remind myself how downright finicky I was as a child. I must have driven my mother completely around the bend. I guess this is what they mean when they talk about karma. I’m getting as good as I gave.

Lessons Learned

What I learned today

Tomato Lesson #1
Tomato sauce made with really fresh tomatoes (ones grown in someone’s garden) really is way better than anything you can buy, or even make with excellent canned tomatoes. As I mentioned, I had these tomatoes sitting around that were just giving the fruit flies something to feast on, so this morning at 8 a.m. I dug out my food mill, ran the tomatoes through it, and cooked them down.

All I can say is, WOW. The resulting sauce was sweeter than anything I’ve ever tasted (leaving out the jarred sauces that are sweetened with sugar—and now I see why, since it’s clearly to compensate for crap tomatoes), and not the least bit acid. It needed nothing—no herbs, no onion, no olive oil, not even salt. I’m sure I’ll add all those things when I use it as a pizza sauce, or a pasta sauce, but it was pretty darned good just plain.

Tomato Lesson #2
It takes a lot of tomatoes to make sauce. I had maybe a dozen of varying sizes, and I started with probably a cup of tomato puree, and it cooked down to maybe a third of a cup. I have new respect for those 28 ounce cans of tomatoes on the grocery store shelf.

Tomato Lesson #3
You can’t make sauce out of green tomatoes the way you can out of red tomatoes. As I was cranking the food mill this morning to push the red tomatoes through it, I happened to think of all the green ones that I know aren’t going to ripen between now and winter. I went over and picked an armload of them, and brought them home to push them through the food mill.

This is really, really hard. The skins aren’t the least bit soft, and I cranked on four tomatoes for probably fifteen minutes and only had about 2 tablespoons of puree in my bowl. I’m not done yet—I might try cooking them down a bit in some olive oil and then running them through the food mill and see if that works. Or I might just give up on green tomato sauce, dig out my copy of Fannie Farmer, and see if there’s a recipe for green tomato pickle.

Baking Powder Lesson
It’s super easy to make baking powder. I kind of might have guessed that, but today I made it. Now I need to find out if things made with homemade baking powder are better than those made with commercial baking powder.

Spice Lesson
None of my spices are more than fifteen years old. Most people don’t have to do any research to discover this, but I did. Anyone who does things like keep ancient bottles of Liquid Smoke needs to do the research. There’s this ad—which you may have seen—in which McCormick is trying to let you know that you may have some seriously old jars and cans of their spices hanging around. Obviously they want you to run out and replace them as soon as you realize how old they are. Anyway, the two ways they give you of identifying their older spices are that they’re labeled as being from “Baltimore, MD” and/or that they’re packaged in a tin (with the exception of black pepper). So I went through all my jars and they all say “Hunt Valley, MD” on them. I must have gotten rid of the really old ones.

Camera Lesson
I really, really want a digital SLR camera for Christmas. My little point and shoot number just isn't going to cut it. Fortunately, I already told Santa what I wanted.

Job Lesson
I think I need to get a new job. Something where taking all the fresh tomatoes I picked in my cousin’s garden and running them through a food mill, then cooking the puree down into sauce, actually counts as work. I need a job in which going through all my old jars of McCormick spices and reading the labels to see if they say “Baltimore, MD” or “Hunt Valley, MD” is an employer-sponsored activity. I need to get paid to find out if biscuits made with my homemade baking powder are any better than those made with commercial baking powder. It would help if writing about it was part of the package too. While there are jobs like that out there, I’m afraid they’re not going to bring in enough at the outset to pay for the new house, the daycare, the electric bill. So maybe that will just have to wait.

They're Putting in the KITCHEN!

I had to post this because I found out this afternoon that, as we speak (or type, whatever), they are installing the kitchen cabinets in my new house! Appliances are expected early next week! When they start putting in the kitchen, I start to think of it as a real house!!! Don't have the bathrooms tiled? Oh well. No baseboards, no trim around the doors and windows? Eh. No lockset on the front door? Call it keyless entry. If there's a kitchen, it means I can live in it!

UPDATE: Actually, turns out the appliances won't be delivered until Halloween...it seems they need to call the electricians back in to actually install the plugs. The wires are there, but there are no physical plugs to plug things into, so we need to wait for that. Plus based on how many cabinets we have, they're not all going to be fully installed by next week. It's going to take a little while. But progress is being made!!!!

Love Lentils

Now that Fall is officially here, with grey rain, grey water, and piles of grey clouds, I’m reading many odes to Fall foods. Squashes, pumpkins, apples, pears. All of these are wonderful, and add a splash of color to days that are now noticeably shorter and darker (and grey—did I mention grey?). But I’d like to chime in with a personal favorite Fall food, a quiet, unassuming little legume that generally neither brightens nor adds color. Lentils.

Lentils do come in red, of course, but they are not the lentil of autumn to me. Autumn lentils are green or brown. Like the tree leaves that just turn brown, they provide a neutral canvas for all those splashy bright fruits and vegetables. On a bed of colored leaves, a pumpkin competes for our attention. On a carpet of brown ones, it dazzles.

One of my favorite ways to eat lentils isn’t necessarily confined to Fall, but it certainly makes an excellent lunch. Cooked lentils with a little chopped red onion, served with baby rocket and some really high quality Italian tuna (in olive oil, please—no spring water in this dish). The whole is dressed with a simple mustard vinaigrette that unifies everything and gives it a spark. After my twin boys were born, I think I ate this for lunch for three weeks in a row. The lentils were easy to make in large batches, and would keep well in the refrigerator. One can of tuna would provide four servings. It was easy to put together when they were down for one of their many naps (most of which only seemed to ever last twenty minutes—just long enough to get to that last bite).

This dish was inspired by something we had at an Italian restaurant. We used to live near a busy intersection, but it hadn’t always been a busy intersection. The addition of an overpass had pushed what was once considered a sophisticated and elegant restaurant onto a little triangle of land, surrounded on three sides by busy highway, and flanked on the fourth side by an old and dumpy Giant Food store. On a night we didn’t feel like cooking, we tried the now-fallen-from-grace Italian restaurant for dinner. The only thing worth eating, we found, was a lentil salad that they served on their Antipasto Bar. My husband had about four helpings of it. We never did know how the restaurant stayed in business, because the rest of the food was truly deplorable, but perhaps the constant stream of mid-1970s model Cadillacs and Buicks that were always in the parking lot explained it: people who had loved the place when it was sophisticated and elegant still clung to it, remembering it as it used to be.

Lentil soup is another comfort food. I like it with Indian spices like garam masala. I make it sometimes with pancetta, or regular bacon. Before we had kids, my husband and I used to host a holiday party every year, and we liked to have a pot of soup (or two) in the slow cooker so people could have a little cup of soup to warm them up when they first arrived. One year it was lentil soup with Indian spices, and there wasn’t a drop left at the end of the evening. The logistics of serving the soup were never very fancy—just little Styrofoam cups and plastic spoons, but it was always welcome.

Both lamb and flank steak seem to have a natural affinity for lentils too. Many times I’ve ordered a rack of lamb in a restaurant that came with lentils. Once, when I was a tourist in the town in which I now live, we had lunch at one of Tom Douglas’s restaurants, Etta’s in Pike Place Market. He served a trout that came with lentils, and although I don’t really think of fish and lentils together (other than perhaps salmon, which almost doesn’t even seem like fish to me anymore because it so often seems to be treated like meat), this particular dish was excellent.

I’ve never tried lentil puree, although I’m very fond of white bean puree. Somehow lentils are so small and innocent, it just seems mean to puree them. On the other hand, in soup I feel like they should be pureed. They make a nice creamy soup, but it’s possible to make it very low fat (that would be in the versions with no bacon, of course).

Lentils are filling, friendly to cooks because they’re ready so quickly, good hot or cold. Fall is a perfect time of year for lentils, when you can’t decide between soup or salad because the weather is cold and rainy one day, sunny and warm the next. They’re great as a co-star, or as a supporting player. This may just be a lentil soup weekend. It’s supposed to rain.

Let's See How This Looks

I've never done this before--never had a camera handy when I finished making something. But this weekend, the camera happened to be lying around when the pear and granola muffins came out of the oven, so I figured, what the hell...I'm not sure Everyday Food would claim these as theirs, but here's my version of them...a little heavy on the shadow, it seems to me. I need some tools that I haven't had time to obtain and/or fabricate. Maybe I'll try this again when I've had the chance to do that.

Let Us Eat Cake...and Cobbler...and Muffins

We had a dessert-heavy weekend. Alex made an apple cobbler, and a chocolate zucchini cake. I made pear and granola muffins. Actually the muffins aren’t so much a dessert, as a mid-morning snack item, but I’m grouping them with dessert (hey, the twins called them “cake”; work with me on this one).

The apples and the zucchini both came from our new house. Until about two weeks ago, my cousin lived in a rental house near where we’re building our new house, and they planted a garden in the spring. Now they’ve moved into the house they built for themselves, and the garden of the rental house has been left untended. My cousin told my husband he was welcome to whatever he could find in it (which to date is a really big zucchini, and a lot of tomatoes that need to have something done with them fast).

The whole island we live on was once strawberry fields and apple orchards. There are still a few apple trees (OK, more than few—a lot of apple trees) scattered around on various properties, including ours, so he picked a few and brought them home. I have no idea what kind of apples they are. Red ones. Ones that made a really good cobbler.

The cobbler was Saturday night’s dessert. He had asked me to find him a recipe, so I pulled out The New England Cookbook: 350 Recipes from Town and Country, Land and Sea, Hearth and Home by Brooke Dojny, on the grounds that a cookbook that focuses on the food of New England should have an outstanding apple cobbler recipe. Brooke didn’t let me down, but somehow things didn’t work out as planned. Not realizing what I was marking, he looked at the page, saw a recipe title, assumed that was it and dismissed it because it called for whole apples (it was Maple Baked Apples or something; he’d already started cutting them into cubes).

I suppose this proves the rule that the human eye falls to the right. The recipe I was marking was on the left facing page, although admittedly the title was not. The title appeared at the bottom of the previous page, just under the headnotes. I think this is a layout problem with that book as a whole—it’s the case in more than one instance—but I’m willing to overlook it because the recipes in general are pretty good. Not that the recipe he ended up making wasn’t good—it was, very—but it wasn’t the one I picked out for him to make.

So Alex pulled a recipe from the Bon Appetit Cookbook, which was supposed to be a pear cobbler, but for which he substituted apples. I would like to take a moment here to encourage everyone who has their complete cookbook collection unboxed and under one roof to pause and give thanks for this. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have had to cull down my collection to almost nil because we’re in a teeny little rental house. The only cookbooks I really have accessible are the twenty or so I deemed critical to my survival, and the ones I’ve collected since we moved (a frighteningly high number, actually—let's just move on).

Anyway, the cobbler, served with vanilla ice cream, was an excellent dessert after baked pork chops, Brussels Sprouts with Balsamic Glazed Red Onions, and oven roasted Yellow Finn potatoes. Very autumnal and perfect for a rainy night in late September.

The chocolate cake was also a Bon Appetit Cookbook recipe, and used two cups of grated zucchini (sadly, our monster zucchini made about four cups shredded; we may be having some kind of fried zucchini cake for dinner one night this week). This my older son adored, because it was chocolate cake. Of course, he did ask what the green thing in the cake was. In typical dad style, my husband stumbled and stuttered, not wanting to tell him it was a vegetable, but not sure how else to get out of it. Mom, of course, always knows what to say.

“It’s part of the flour. Flour sometimes does that.”

Say anything in an authoritative tone, and people will believe you, even skeptical four-year-olds.

The muffins were from an old issue of Everyday Food. I noticed them a couple of weeks ago, and decided to make them to have as a morning snack. Every morning around 10 a.m. I feel the need for a snack. I often eat an apple, but I’m finding I’d like a little something more to carry me over to lunch (which keeps getting later and later as I get busier at work). So I made the muffins, using the last crumbs of a box of Kashi Go Lean Crunch cereal. I’ve found that once you get down to the small pieces of that cereal, it’s just not worth much on yogurt (which is how I usually eat it), and besides, it’s usually stale by that time. So making it a muffin ingredient worked out well.

I planned to make them while Alex took my older son to the (indoor) swimming pool, and the twins and the baby napped. What I didn’t bargain on was one twin taking a scant hour long nap. Thus, I measured, peeled, chopped and folded, all the while answering the same three questions over and over—What are these? (Muffin tin liners); Where is Matthew—is he in time out for throwing toys? (No, he’s napping); and We’re not supposed to throw toys, right? (Right).

In the end, they were a success (the twins ate one each, Chris said they weren’t as good as the chocolate cake, Alex wasn’t sure about the crisp topping, but said the flavor was good), and I’d make them again, but I think I might pulse the pears in the food processor. Even though I cut them into the ¼” chunks the recipe calls for, I still found the pieces to be a little big. Otherwise they were fine, except that the topping did burn a little bit. I’m not sure how to get around that. Using the topping the recipe called for, as opposed to the Kashi Go Lean Crunch, might help. I might try it the next time I make them.

So I have my to do list for this week: find something to do with remaining shredded zucchini, make notes on pear and granola muffin recipe to chop pears finer and figure out how to keep topping from burning, and make tomato sauce with the tomatoes before we become a headline in the local paper: Family of Six Consumed by Swarm of Fruit Flies.

Cooking Lessons

Last night my husband made something for dinner that reminded me of one of the first meals I tried to make when I was about 12. When the smell started wafting out from the kitchen, I was reminded of the small, brown and white galley kitchen in our house in Washington, D.C. My mother had been on her sausage-and-tomatoes-with-pasta kick, and I had begged to be allowed to make it for Saturday night dinner. I was left unsupervised, and I think I can safely describe the outcome as a total disaster.

The actual recipe goes like this: Italian sausages (sweet, hot, or a combination, which is what my mother used, and at the time turkey sausage was unheard of—it was pork all the way, baby) are cooked in boiling water for about 10-12 minutes. They’re then drained, and the casings removed, and they’re sliced into approximately ¼” rounds. Penne pasta (or ziti, or any tubular shape, or yes, dammit, if you insist, bowties) is cooked in the usual way.

Chop one or two onions (depending on their size), and in a pan large enough to ultimately hold the pasta and sausage and still have room to stir, sauté the onion in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Add the sausage and let it brown up a little bit (for purely aesthetic reasons, since you’ve already cooked it in the water), then add a couple of cans of diced peeled tomatoes. Salt and pepper can be added at this point, and while ground pepper adds to the dish, the sausage is often salty enough to negate the need for additional salt. This is purely a personal choice. This should be allowed to cook down a bit, until it’s no longer soupy, but not dry either. What you’re after is something just shy of a true sauce; it should still need to be spooned, but shouldn’t actually require a ladle.

Once the desired consistency is achieved, the pasta is stirred in (because the way my mother always made this, by the time the sausage and tomatoes were ready, the pasta was cold; this step heats up the pasta, as well as ensuring that it gets well coated with the other ingredients), and then a couple of tablespoons of chopped parsley get sprinkled over everything, and it gets served. If, once the pasta is stirred in, it seems too dry, a little water or broth could be added to loosen it up, and then the parsley stirred in.

Two packages of sausage (one hot, one sweet), two medium onions, a one pound box of pasta, and two 14oz. cans of diced peeled tomatoes makes enough of this for six people with reasonable appetites, or four very hungry (or very piggy) people. Amounts can be adjusted to make more or less as desired. Although not part of my mother's original rendition of this dish, some chopped garlic could be added about the time the onions get soft and translucent. I think when I was young she skipped the garlic for my sake. Either that or she used it and I never noticed, so that when I attempted to make it, I didn't realize there was supposed to be any garlic in it.

Actually, in thinking about it, this would make kind of a nice dinner party dish. I’ve never made it for that, but it could be largely done ahead, and heated up just before serving. The parsley would have to be added at the last minute, or it would suffer, but everything else would be fine. The water-or-broth strategy would probably need to be employed, but it would be doable.

Anyway, that’s the ideal series of steps, which at almost 40 years old, I’ve now obviously mastered. At 12 I think what I had firmly in mind were the ingredients, but I was a little hazy on the execution piece of it. And I was, as I say, left unsupervised to do this.

What I did was this:

* Cook, remove casings from, and slice sausage
* Cook pasta
* Chop and sauté onion
* Stir pasta, sausage, and tomatoes into pot with sautéed onion

The result didn’t quite look like my mother’s, but i wasn’t totally sure why. Clearly I had done something wrong, but in the way of 12 year olds, I figured it was good enough, and maybe no one would notice the difference between my version and my mother’s version. I called my mother to the kitchen to have a look.

She frowned, peered more closely into the pan, and asked if I had browned the sausage, and cooked down the tomatoes. Reply in the negative. She frowned harder and tasted a spoonful (I’m not really sure why—my recollection of what the finished product looked like at that point is that it was pretty obviously a far cry from the intended, so why she felt the need to actually taste it is a little beyond my comprehension; perhaps she felt she was giving me the benefit of the doubt).

“But this isn’t even good!” she cried.

Thanks for your sensitivity, Mother.

Somehow she managed to separate out the ingredients—I think she took out the sausage, and then just rinsed off the noodles. She remade the onion and tomatoes, and stirred it all back together and we had it for dinner half an hour or so later than originally intended.

It was a long time before I was allowed to make dinner without being monitored.

I did, however, learn a valuable lesson about the layering of flavors, and increasing depth throughout the entire process. The experience also planted the seed for the lesson that some things just can’t be rushed. It took awhile for the latter to really sink in. For many years after that, my strategy when I got impatient with something that I was making was to just crank up the heat. I was teased by a college friend for doing this (my roommate and I both did it, and she mocked us both for the smoke filled kitchen that always seemed to result in any effort on our part to make something cook more quickly than was really reasonable).

Now I’ve developed much more patience as a cook. But the smell of sautéing onions and sausage still reminds me of the image of that pan of pale flabby pasta with raw canned tomatoes clinging desperately to it like survivors of a shipwreck clutching at splinters of the sunken ship, awaiting rescue from the cold dark ocean.

Eating Habits

My week got off to a difficult start yesterday. I forgot my Diet Coke for the ferry ride. It’s not so much that I really need the caffeine, as much as that I enjoy the experience of drinking the Coke while relaxing on my commute, reading select sections of the Sunday New York Times.

And then when I toasted my English muffin for breakfast, part of it got a little over done. I don’t like dark toast at all—it tastes too burnt to me, even if it’s just slightly overdone. I like it just barely brown. Then when I put the peanut butter on it, it was still a little too warm, so the peanut butter melted too much and was runny and dripped on my hand, and onto my plate.

So you can see things are off to a bumpy start for me foodwise. The sad thing about all this is, it makes me realize to what degree I am such a slave to habit when it comes to food. Take the English muffin: when an English muffin is split, there is a “greater” half and a “lesser” half, if you will. The greater half is more of a concave, while the lesser is more of convex, meaning that despite the nooks and crannies, the lesser half is more likely to let toppings slide off. For reasons that I can’t explain, I always eat the lesser half first.

When we got out for Mexican food (something that happens damned infrequently, because we have so many kids), and they set the chips and salsa in front of us, I always begin eating all of the broken chips first. I’m not sure if this stems from the old “diet rule” back in the early 90s that dictated that cookie crumbs had no calories, because the breakage causes caloric leakage, and that subconsciously I adhere to that, or if there’s some other factor at play here, but either way, that’s what I always find myself doing.

In any bowl of peanuts, I pick out the ones that are separated into halves and eat them first, then go through and eat all the whole ones. Peanut M&Ms are divided by color, and I eat the colors that I have the most of first, saving the lone red or yellow M&M for the last. I remember telling a coworker about this one time, and him coming to me later and, with great irritation, informing me that he now found himself doing something similar. If I’m eating the little candy bars from the jar at my office, I’ll get three—two of one kind, one of another, and kind of sandwich them. First, for example, I’ll eat the Twix, then the Snickers, then the other Twix.

I break the bottoms off of muffins and eat those first, then eat the top. This isn’t uncommon, I don’t think, but it’s not for the reason that some people do it. Some people, as I understand it, don’t actually like muffin bottoms, and only want the tops. In my case, it’s really just a neatness issue. It’s hard to open one’s mouth wide enough to accommodate an entire muffin. Cupcakes are the same—especially if they’re thickly iced, biting into the cupcake whole results in a “frosting mustache” that is fairly messy and unattractive.

When I eat a McDonald’s cheeseburger (which happens infrequently these days, but used to happen a lot more often), I make every effort not to bite into the place where the pickle is. I just don’t want that slightly acidic pickle taste in my first bite of burger. The interesting thing is that inevitably I manage to bite directly into the pickle almost every time. It’s uncanny. If I had the same experience with lottery tickets, I’d have won the jackpot over seven thousand times by now, by a conservative estimate. Maybe I’m using the wrong strategy for the lottery—perhaps I should be trying not to pick the winning numbers.

I used to be far worse about these strange eating patterns. As a child, I wouldn’t allow any of my food to touch, and would eat one thing at a time. The meat, which was not touching the mashed potatoes, would go first, then the potatoes, which were not touching the vegetable, then the vegetable last. Now I try to mix things up, and make each thing even out so my last three bites are one bite each of protein, vegetable, and starch. I still don’t like my food to touch, though.

I’ve been watching my own kids lately for signs of this weirdness, and I’m coming to the conclusion that they did not inherit my weird food habits. They had pizza Sunday night, and not one of them did what I always did as a child—I would eat all the toppings first, then the cheese, then lick off the sauce, then eat the crust. This was about as appealing as it sounds. I think I’m grateful my kids didn’t get that gene.

I guess that for all my weird food habits, it could be worse. I’ve known people who ate the same thing for lunch every single day, and ate it in the same way. That is, ate a peanut butter sandwich and always took the first bite from the upper right hand corner of the bread.

I know I’m not alone in all this. After all, the people who pry Oreo cookies in half and eat the “creme” filling out of them first, and then eat the cookies are perhaps the most widespread and prevalent example of unusual eating habits. (Although one must ask--if this behavior is so widespread and prevelant, does this then make it not an "unusual" eating habit, but a usual one? To ponder.) Then too there are people who count out or weigh out chips or nuts, either for portion control reasons, or because they’re just that kind of person. Or people who save the cherry on their ice cream sundae for last. Yes, I am far from alone.

UPDATE: The food aspect of my week has improved dramatically with the consumption of today's lunch. This consisted of homemade chicken salad (made with the remnants of Friday night's roasted chicken and homemade mayonnnaise), on toasted homemade whole grain bread (made Sunday), with fig jam. I know this sounds kind of weird, but it was awesome. I broke the bread into bite sized pieces, spread each with a little fig jam, and topped it with a forkful of the chicken salad. I predict that this combination will be repeated, since I have another container of chicken salad for lunch tomorrow. If things continue on this upward trend, it may completely cancel out yesterday's Diet Coke-and-English muffin incident.

No Nukes

Every now and then, as I’m getting on or off the ferry in the morning, there will be people handing out free things. These are generally samples of some new product, although sometimes they’re just a coupon for a buck or so off the purchase of a product (new or otherwise). I’ve gotten new flavors of Trident gum, dark chocolate covered Altoids (which were pretty good), a coupon for a free salad (never used it), and a coupon for some pain reliever (I forget which one—never used it).

The last few mornings they have been handing out frozen Red Baron panini. They have one flavor, chicken-bacon-ranch, and it’s a regular full size version. I ate one as a snack at 10 the first morning (my usual snack time, but I had forgotten my apple, so the panini seemed a reasonable stand-in, although it had about 250 more calories and way more fat than my usual 10 a.m. apple). On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best, I would give the panini about a 4. The flavor was OK (although not fabulous), and like any bread that has been cooked and is then reheated in a microwave, the toast was a little damp and limp. And at 350+ calories, and 15g of fat, it seemed a little excessive for what it was.

What I found most interesting about it was that the instructions were for microwave ovens only. According to Red Baron, or their parent company Schwan Foods, Red Baron panini are only intended to be prepared in a microwave. There weren’t even conventional oven directions on the box.

I’ve noticed this before—companies often put the microwave directions prominently on the back of the box, with great big pictures showing how to rip the box apart to make a “cooking platform,” which buttons to push on the microwave to input the correct amount of cooking time and so forth. They print conventional oven directions in very small type on one of the small sides of the box in rather terse bullet points with no illustrations. They could almost print on there “If you want to live in the Dark Ages, that’s fine with us, but don’t expect us to encourage you to heat our product in that slow, outdated conventional oven you insist on using. You archaic conventional oven people would probably like it if we provided instructions for heating this thing up in a wood burning stove, wouldn’t you? Freaks.” Except that that would take up more room than they’re willing to devote to conventional oven users.

I really hate microwaves and wish I didn’t have to use them ever. They’re handy for heating up leftovers, but even for that I’d be willing to use a conventional oven if I didn’t have the microwave. The problem is, I must use the microwave most nights to make my kids’ dinner, because at 4, 2, 2 and 10 months, they want to eat pretty much the instant their little sneakers hit the doormat in the evening. My oldest son even asks on the way home in the car if dinner is ready and waiting at home. Also, they go to bed early. As in 7 p.m. early. In order for me to get dinner into them before they have to start getting ready for bed, I have to be able to make it in 10 minutes. Lots of things can be ready in 10 minutes, but my kids’ palates aren’t quite sophisticated enough for such offerings as sautéed shrimp with grilled polenta and green salad, or some other things I could whip up using fast-cook ingredients and a few leftovers.

For years I was considered a weirdo because I didn’t have a microwave. When my husband and I first got married we had a pretty small house with a correspondingly small kitchen. As a result, we decided that a microwave wasn’t that important to us. We had the regular oven, and a toaster oven (not a two slice toaster—I don’t believe in those because they’re only good for toasting bread and you can’t use them for anything else; a toaster oven you can toast in, but you can also use them to melt cheese, heat up small frozen things, or reheat leftovers). We did fine, except that we had to keep explaining to people (including my in-laws) why it was that we didn’t have a microwave. We’d wave our hand around the kitchen, brushing all four walls in the process, and say “We have no room!” which was partly true, but we left out the part about not wanting one in the first place. The few times we included that statement, we wound up in long drawn-out debates with microwave fanatics.

I admit that these appliances have their purpose, and even come in pretty handy sometimes, but I don’t like them because I feel I don’t have full control over what I’m doing. When I microwave food, the container, density and contents of the food, strength of the microwave, and who knows what other factors have a direct impact on how quickly something heats up. When I put something in a conventional oven (or use the stove top), I have a pretty good idea how fast it’s going to heat up. And if I put something else in the oven with it, it doesn’t change how quickly either thing heats up.

Of course, this assumes a properly calibrated oven, but they sell thermometers so you can make adjustments if your oven is off. When I read microwave directions, they say “This product was tested using a 1000 watt microwave oven. Your cooking time may vary depending on microwave wattage.” Uh, OK…any indicator of how different it might be? Or I’m just kind of on my own here? I almost always find it’s the latter. I’ve also yet to find a place on the microwave where the wattage is indicated. There are stickers detailing where and when it was made, who made it, who inspected it, and God knows what other information about its provenance, but not a single peep about what its wattage is. Apparently this is information that the company can’t reveal to you unless you know the secret handshake. Or something.

I also don’t do very well with the idea of little waves cooking my food. I’m kind of a traditionalist—I think heat cooks food. I know, the molecules get “excited” and that generates heat, but there’s something kind of weird to me about excited food molecules. I’ll take my molecules exposed to conventional heat, thanks.

And lastly, I find microwave cooking to be of generally poor quality. The food either dries out, or becomes saturated with condensation from the container it’s cooked in and gets soggy. This was the case with the panini. Bread, or in this case toast, just doesn’t heat up well in a microwave. Cheese cooks away to nothing, meat doesn’t brown, eggs get rubbery, and noodles get leathery. About the only thing a microwave really can do with any success is boil water.

So I have a microwave, I don’t like it, and someday when my kids don’t need to eat dinner quite so early, I’ll abandon it altogether and not use it. By then, of course, they’ll be old enough to burn microwave popcorn on their own, and my house will constantly smell like scorched popcorn. I’ll have to teach them how to use the exhaust fan early on.

A Note on the Change

For both of my regular readers, you may notice that I changed my "pen name" to my initials. Yes, I did. Maybe I'm just getting bolder about this blogging thing. I decided that using a fictitious name was no longer necessary, but I'm still not ready to reveal my Whole Self to the cyberpublic, and this intital thing is something I've seen zillions of bloggers do (I've also seen first name only--maybe that's my next step).

Anyway, I feel like I'm coming out of my shell a bit blogger-wise. So, hi! There really is no Emma Shannon (well, OK, there probably IS an Emma Shannon, but I'm not her. Or them, since I'm sure there's more than one in the world). For now, I can be known by my real initials (really!), TD.

I got a free frozen panini on the ferry this morning, and have some comments to make on it, so that'll probably be the next entry I do--in the next day or so.

Blue Swoon

I recently switched over to using blue cheese salad dressing exclusively. For years I’ve been pretty much anti blue cheese in every form. It was too strong for me, and the idea that it was mold that gave it its character just ooked me out.

That I actually came to like it was a somewhat convoluted process. I had a tomato recipe from Bon Appetit that I made for our Christmas Eve dinner last year. Plum tomatoes get cut in half, seeded, and drained for 15 minutes. Then you toss them with chopped rosemary, minced garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and let them sit for another 15 minutes. They get roasted at 375 for about 65 minutes. Once they come out of the oven, the cheese (which was supposed to be Stilton—this was, after all, a Christmas recipe) gets crumbled and scattered over them, where it melts a little.

The question of why I was willing to make a recipe that called for Stilton cheese when I wasn’t a fan of blue cheese in the first place is a hard one to answer. Food photography can be very seductive, and they were being served with a Rosemary-and-Pepper Standing Rib Roast with Two-Mushroom Pan Sauce we were making, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and make the tomatoes. The worst thing that could happen, I determined, was that I’d hate the blue cheese and scrape it off.

The first time I made the tomatoes, I used Stilton, and they were exceptional, even for a non-blue cheese lover. The next time I made them (because I figured they were the perfect winter vegetable—something a little different, a nice take on tomatoes in which if they weren’t first class summer ones they were still acceptable) I guess we were out of Stilton, but we had this St. Agur that we’d bought at our local grocery store (Central Market, if you’re wondering—a fabulous place with an outstanding selection of cheeses). I used it and was devoted from that minute. I ate the tomatoes for breakfast, much to the disgust of my boss, who didn’t like the smell of the blue cheese. I invested a hefty percentage of my children’s college fund in blue cheese.

The path from tomatoes with blue cheese to blue cheese dressing is a somewhat hazy, twisting one. We needed a salad dressing for a meal, and I happened on a blue cheese dressing in Sara Foster’s Fresh Every Day: More Great Recipes from Foster’s Market that looked passable, and concluded if I could eat blue cheese in tomatoes, why not in salad dressing? It called for mayonnaise, buttermilk, blue cheese, a little white wine vinegar, salt, pepper and chopped chives. It was quick, and sounded like it would fill the need. I didn’t actually use St Agur in the dressing—in the first place, St Agur is one of the wetter, more goopy blue cheeses, and in the second place, I was running out of college tuition money (St Agur goes for about $32 a pound, or $2 an ounce, so in a recipe that called for 4 ounces of blue cheese it seemed a little excessive). We decided the dressing was everything we wanted in a blue cheese dressing, and it’s become a household standard that I now keep in an old spaghetti sauce jar in the refrigerator and replenish regularly.

As with just about every recipe I make more than once, I’ve tinkered with it a little. The original recipe calls for a cup of mayonnaise (I use homemade), plus a quarter of a cup of buttermilk. I find this makes too thick a dressing for us, so I use closer to a half a cup of buttermilk—probably a quarter cup plus two tablespoons, if I really stopped to measure it, and then add a splash more here and there until it reaches the desired thickness. This looks pretty runny when you first combine it, but it firms back up in the fridge, and adding the blue cheese thickens it too.

For blue cheese, I confess I’ve stooped to the Danish Blue crumbles that they sell in little plastic tubs at the grocery store. I’ve tried buying and crumbling my own, but I can’t get the crumbles small enough. Whether this is because I lack experience with crumbling blue cheese, or because I’m buying the wrong kind, I can’t say, but since it’s getting smothered in mayonnaise, I figure the highest quality blue cheese is going to be suffocated anyway. I did once try putting everything in the blender and whizzing it, but the result, while blue cheese flavored, was disappointingly smooth, lacking those little chunks of blue cheese that make blue cheese dressing…well, blue cheese dressing.

As for the remaining ingredients, the recipe calls for a teaspoon of white wine vinegar, a couple of tablespoons of chopped chives, salt, and pepper. I use a capful of plain old distilled white vinegar, which I find to be perfectly acceptable. I also left out the chives one time, and then used them the next time, and I was informed that it was actually better without the chives, so the chives have now been deleted from the ingredient list. I use a few grinds of black pepper. Generally the combination of the mayonnaise and the blue cheese is enough salt, but I taste it and might add a quick grind or two of sea salt.

Once it’s done I put it all in the aforementioned old spaghetti sauce jar and keep it in the refrigerator. It’s wonderful on a spinach salad with some bacon, and we use it daily on the salad we always take along to work to accompany whatever else we’re having for lunch.

I’ve now completely about-faced on blue cheese, and love it so much that when my husband and I went out for our anniversary dinner (to a first-class wine bar called Purple), we ordered an appetizer that was slices of Cashel blue cheese, fig jam, crackers, and a wine chosen to accompany it (Joel Gott Zinfandel, 2004). We loved it so much that we sought out a bottle of the wine, picked up some of the cheese, some crackers, and cracked open the jar of fig jam we had in the pantry and recreated the appetizer two weeks later. The dinner that followed was rib eye steaks with a salad with…blue cheese dressing.

TV Dinners

A few months ago I made a kind of TV dinner for my kids. It was just before we moved, and really all of our plates, pots and pans were pretty much packed, so I didn’t have much to cook with, or serve food on. I’d seen Kid Cuisine TV dinners in the grocery stores for years, but had never tried them. Now I understand why. They’re a huge pain in the butt to make.

They feature basic kid food—spaghetti, chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese—but they tried to go a little fancy with the desserts and have things like iced cake and stuff that gets sprinkles on it. The problem with things like that is that frosting and sprinkles don’t heat up well in an oven or in a microwave, so they have to package them separately and you have to remove them from the package prior to cooking.

Even without the removing of the dessert topping step, they’re extremely complicated. I’ve made whole meals from scratch that required less futzing around than these things. First I had to remove the sprinkles or whatever, then I had to peel back plastic from this area, loosen plastic on that area, cook it for awhile, then remove it from the oven and remove the plastic from this other compartment, and re-cover that other thing. They only cook for about twenty minutes, but it seemed that I was yanking it out of the oven every five minutes to reposition plastic film over the various components.

I was remembering my own experiences with TV dinners back in the 70s. This would have been when they actually came in a little foil tray, instead of in some kind of rigid paper thing that could go in a microwave oven. I think you peeled the foil back from one section—the potatoes, if memory serves—and then stabbed holes over the meat part to vent the steam and then just chucked the whole thing in the oven for a half hour or so. Thirty minutes later you had perfectly baked horrible food.

Actually, I loved TV dinners. I wasn’t much for Salisbury steak, but I loved fried chicken. I honestly only remember three types of TV dinners—the Salisbury steak, the fried chicken, and the turkey with dressing. I guess there were probably others, but those were the three my parents bought for me. Or perhaps those were the three I was willing to eat.

The things I remember most about TV dinners are that the fried chicken was always soggy, the mashed potatoes seemed to be one solid mass of…whatever, and somehow there was always a piece of corn in my dessert. I hate when my food touches, so the piece of corn in my dessert was an abomination in my book. In fact, TV dinners were perfect for me because I didn’t like any of my food to touch, and the little sectioned tray made sure that pretty much nothing would (except for that pesky kernel of corn).

A few years later we started buying Mexican food TV dinners. These my father nicknamed “puddle food” because everything did seem to come in a sort of a puddle. A puddle of refried beans here, a puddle of enchiladas there, even the rice seemed to be a somewhat liquid plop on the tray. Mexican food isn’t really TV dinner food to me. TV dinner food really should be generic “American” food, with no loyalty to any nationality (or any nation that would be willing to claim it, for that matter).

At some point we stopped buying TV dinners and I stepped up to Stouffer’s entrees. These I do buy for my kids, and they’re not bad to make. Mostly you just peel the plastic to vent them, then cook them for awhile. They don’t require the same level of attention as a puppy that hasn’t been housebroken, the way the Kid Cuisine ones did.

In even later life, I moved on to Lean Cuisines and Smart Ones and other low fat/low calorie offerings. These aren’t really TV dinners, per se, because they come in a single tray, like Stouffer’s entrees (which also don’t count as a real TV dinner in my book). Real TV dinners come in a sectioned tray and aren’t low anything. Lean Cuisines aren’t bad in a pinch, but I’ve stopped eating them on any regular basis. I don’t like them enough to eat them more than about twice a year.

I wouldn’t bother to buy a “real” TV dinner today. Even if I cooked it in the oven instead of in the microwave, it still wouldn’t be the same. Now that they’re formulated to cook semi-acceptably in microwaves, they’re different, just like the pot pies I loved as a child. I wish TV dinners were the way they used to be, even though I probably wouldn’t eat them, but I guess everything has to change, even mediocre frozen meals.

Or Not To Make

As anyone who’s been following along knows, there are many things I won’t hesitate to make from scratch, in spite of perfectly acceptable versions being available in any grocery store (English muffins, yogurt, etc). But there are a few things that I promise never to make from scratch because I think it would just be such a total waste of time.

Marshmallows
I was reading an article about saving money, and one woman was remarking that in almost every case, she could make homemade versions of things more economically than she could buy them at the grocery store—cookies and so on. One thing she said was a flop was homemade marshmallows. They took four hours to make and didn’t taste very good, she said.

I only ever knew one other person (besides Martha Stewart) who made marshmallows from scratch. I worked with a woman named Betsy who brought them in to our office one time, and was offering some to the CIO of the company while I was standing in the kitchen.

“Homemade marshmallows!” she exclaimed, “Try one!”

I can’t remember if he did or not, but I do remember my coworker Laurie and I exchanging looks, and Laurie saying, “Why would you make marshmallows?” and my replying, “I thought you needed chemicals to make marshmallows.”

So I promise never to make marshmallows. Maybe I shouldn’t say never on this one, but I at least won’t rant about how great homemade marshmallows are if I do make them.

Dried Fruit
I’ve already said I don’t really care for dried fruit, except for dried cherries. I can also handle dried blueberries in scones. But I will never bother to make my own dried fruit, even if I do someday come around and decide I like it a lot. I knew a couple who had one of those dehydrators, and he used to make things like beef jerky (surprisingly, this was before the low carb craze) and dried apples. It seemed weird to me then, it seems weird to me now.

Tortillas
I don’t really anticipate this ever happening either. The ones I can buy at my grocery store are fine, and I don’t care enough about Mexican food to go to the trouble of making them. Along these same lines, I won’t be cutting up tortillas to make my own chips, either.

Salsa
Kind of ties in with tortillas. Newman’s Own mild chunky is good enough. I find homemade salsa to be too watery, because no one ever lets the tomatoes drain properly, so you wind up dipping your chip into a pool of water with some tomato in it. The chip just gets soggy. And the onions always taste too raw to me in homemade salsa.

Noodles & Sauce Type Dishes
I went through a flirtation with making homemade facsimiles of those noodles-and-powdered-sauce products you can buy. I will not do this again. I went so far as to research sources of powdered cheeses (kingarthurflour.com). I think I may even have made a couple of them. It won’t happen again, I promise.

Peanut Butter
Store-bought peanut butter is perfectly acceptable. I have no urge to shell and grind my own peanuts. Even the stations in the grocery store where you can grind it on the spot the way you can grind coffee don’t hold any interest for me.

Vegetable Juice
I just drink V-8 sometimes. I don’t need to buy a $300 juicer and make my own. Also, I’m sure I could never get a combination of juices I liked. It would always be too heavy on the carrot, or too light on the tomato or something. And the idea of single-ingredient vegetable juice (other than possibly tomato juice, and even that’s pushing it) makes me curl my lip. No carrot juice for me.

Chocolate Syrup
The same woman who didn’t like homemade marshmallows also makes chocolate syrup for her kids. I’m not even sure how to begin making chocolate syrup, other than to buy some chocolate. Would it just be chocolate and Karo syrup? That seems kind of disgusting, although that’s probably what’s in a can of Hershy’s syrup (note to self: check ingredients on Hershey’s syrup can when next at grocery store). Still, I don’t think that’s anything I’m ever going to bother with, mostly because I really don’t want to encourage my kids to drink chocolate milk instead of white milk. Right now the oldest one will drink chocolate milk occasionally, but the twins still don’t like it, so let’s just keep it that way. White milk is a lot better for them.

Those are the things I can think of right now that I’m unlikely to ever bother making. All bets are off on things like sausage, ricotta cheese, pasta, ketchup (although this one is unlikely, since I understand homemade doesn’t get as thick as the commercially made product), mustard. Tune in next week and you may read that I’ve made fig jam, but I won’t be serving it with homemade marshmallows.