Wasting Time and Ingredients: My New Hobby

Today I vowed I was going to get the last of the holiday-type baking done. I had grand plans.

Now it’s 2.15 and I’m conceding the race; I’m also thanking God that because I have leftover Cincinnati chili in the fridge, I don’t really have to worry about cooking dinner, because if I try to make anything else today I am positive it won’t come out right.

I was going to make caramel-covered shortbread. This is the kind of thing I can normally do almost in my sleep. Because I couldn’t resist messing things up, I decided to try a new shortbread recipe, and I have to say it is a very good recipe but boy you have to watch those pans like a hawk because the cookies will burn in a nanosecond. (The trick is to use oatmeal you’ve whizzed up in the food processor and confectioner’s sugar and cornstarch along with the flour and butter. The result is wonderful thing very similar to an English digestive biscuit.) I found the recipe at the Serious Eats website but I’m not going to bother posting a link because I basically ignored the recipe beyond thinking, “Oh, adding oat flour, that’s a good idea.” Go find whatever shortbread recipe you like and take out a little bit of the regular flour. Substitute in two parts oat flour and one part cornstarch for whatever amount of white flour you took out. Whizz everything together in the mixer for an incredibly long time. It seems like this will never turn into a cohesive dough but after about ten minutes in the mixer at medium speed, it will come together. This is a very soft dough, you have to be gentle with it, but the texture of the baked product is wonderful.

The caramel, however, was my downfall. I’m not going to say too much about it but I will tell you that it is imperative that you pay attention to this detail. After you have dissolved your sugar in your water, and cooked it until it is the shade of gold you want, and you are ready to add in your vast quantity of heavy cream — do NOT just pour the heavy cream into the pot assuming that all is well.

Because I currently have, sitting on my stove, a big Le Creuset pot filled with caramel made with cream that’s gone bad. I am taking this pretty well; I haven’t thrown anything in anger. I’ve washed all the other dishes and things that need washing, I’ve wiped down the counters, I’m ready for the next thing. But I can’t yet just pour this into the trash. I’ll wait till five p.m. today, I think, before I admit total defeat. And tomorrow I will make caramel with a can of sweetened condensed milk, which, in my experience, is never, ever off.

December 21, 2015 0

Baking Can Be Discouraging

Even when you think you’ve got it nailed, even when you are sure you can get it right, things happen.
The other day, I thought I had rugelach down. I produced these. They looked perfect and they tasted perfect.

Then this morning I made more rugelach. Granted, the filling was slightly, slightly different. But I used the exact same technique and this is what happened.

The good news is twofold. One: the burnt chocolate filling smells and tastes great. Two: no one in my family will mind eating these.
The bad news is, the failure means I had to come up with something else to bake, fast, to mail to people this week. Fortunately, I was able to put together the Chocolate Crunch Shortbread from last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, and I’ve baked them, and they came out of the oven looking the way they’re supposed to. So I can wrap and ship this afternoon, once they’ve cooled.
I think I’ll stop baking for a couple of days. I think I need a break.

December 17, 2015 0

This one is my husband’s favorite.

Chapter 8 of The I Hate to Housekeep Book, “The Rest of the Pea Patch,” addresses some pretty mundane matters, but it has some of the best lines in the whole book, and a few really good pieces of advice. Oddly, I come to it after a moment of great domestic minginess. Today is a dark day — it looks like it’s going to rain soon — and I’ve spent the morning waiting for a large delivery of groceries, receiving it, and then putting the groceries away. Needless to say, despite ordering $160 worth of stuff, I forgot to order a large jar of mayonnaise and I also forgot cottage cheese and eggs, so I’ll be heading out to the store this afternoon anyhow. On the bright side, though, all the canned goods were delivered, and those are the things I hate carrying the most. One conserves energy where one can.

Having received said delivery and put it away, I thought the thing to do was go upstairs and tackle Chapter 8, here, but on getting to the top of the stairs, I noticed I’d left the hall light on downstairs. Though I didn’t feel like trotting back down — I’d set up my workspace, I was ready to go — I thought, “No, I’ll feel guilty if I leave that light on. I’m wasting energy. Even if it’s JUST ONE LIGHTBULB.” So I went down, flicked the switch, and came back upstairs feeling very virtuous. And sitting down with Chapter 8, I see that I was being a very good girl indeed: Mrs. Bracken would approve. Chapter 8, you see, is, in large part, about saving on your electric bill.
Peg Bracken is a big fan of knowing what you’re spending on things that seem like little things but surely do add up. There’s much talk of kilowatts and fuse boxes and having a man show you how to do this or that, and having a man call the electric company when you have a problem, because men get taken more seriously over the phone. I don’t dispute any of this, personally, but there’s no question it could be a bit of a turn-off to the more adamant of the feminists who’d pick this book up today. Regardless, for those of you who want to pay attention to energy consumption, there’s probably a good deal of validity found here, though of course appliances and our notions of energy-efficiency have evolved dramatically in the last fifty years.

There’s one tip in this chapter — and when you get down to it, Chapter 8 does seem a bit random in its selections — that I’ve always meant to take on, but have never done, which is that every room in the house should have a Useful Box. In my own case, I think every room would be a bit excessive, but you basically have to take her point. Bracken’s useful box is an old cigar box, or tin, or shoebox, in which you keep the following items: a pair of scissors; a roll of cellophane tape; a pencil; a ballpoint pen; a notepad; spools of thread in black, white and beige, each with a needle (ok, I’d skip that one, personally); and a nail file (GOD yes, an emery board SHOULD be in EVERY ROOM in the house).

The point of the Useful Box is, obviously, that these are things one always needs, and at the moment one needs them, one shouldn’t have to trot downstairs or upstairs or to anywhere, really, more than three paces, to get to them. We keep our fingernail clippers in the bathroom, which makes sense, for the most part. Except, the place I am, 95% of the time, when I need a nail clipper, is in the kitchen. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to figure this out, but a few months ago I began to keep a nail clipper (and an emery board) in the box on the kitchen table where I keep postage stamps and spare keys. Now, when I need to trim a nail that I’ve messed up while cooking, I can do it without leaving the kitchen. I felt like a genius, when I figured out that I could do this. I mean, no one’s stopping me from spending $2.50 on another nail clipper; and I can keep it wherever I want! It’s small; it’s not bothering anyone. But it saves me a lot of time and effort, having the clipper right there. So, bully for me. I am sure Bracken would approve.

Bracken points out that the Useful Box is even good to have in the bathroom, and I have to agree. Some day, when I am a good person, I will arrange for a Useful Box to live in the bathroom. I do have a roll of Scotch tape in there, and a pair of scissors; but the scissors are the ones I use to cut my daughter’s hair, and I probably shouldn’t use them for more heavy-duty messy jobs. Similarly, in the bathroom’s useful box, if I were really good, I’d keep a really long pair of tweezers, because they are useful for fishing things out of the drain, like disgusting clogs of hair which we should really be grateful for, because they trapped the nice earring that I just dropped down the drain. Don’t ask me how I know this, by the way, just take my word for it.

There is a very long section in here on the matter of ashtrays, which would have been a pressing domestic concern in Bracken’s era, but is no more, since pretty much no one smokes anymore. At least, no one smokes inside the house. I have attended more than one PTA-based party and noticed small covens of guests huddled outside on the back deck smoking cigarettes, but I’ve never seen anyone openly smoking indoors. The day of the ashtray has come and gone. It’s a shame for the fans of mid-century modern design, because some of those ashtrays were pretty cool looking items, though I’m more of an Art Deco person, myself. I wonder if people will start to collect ashtrays again but use them for something different, like holding their jewelry or as candy dishes or something. Except I don’t know anyone who keeps candy dishes around, what with people caring about diets and stuff like that. On the other hand, people do smoke pot legally these days. Maybe the shelter magazines have articles about Bringing Back the Ashtrays. I wouldn’t know, since I don’t read shelter magazines, but if anyone reading this has links they want to share, feel free.

Speaking of ashtrays: The last paragraphs of Chapter 8 advise us on what to do with our fireplace in the seasons when we’re not using it. (The fireplace is, of course, really nothing more than a very, very large ashtray. The issue, of course, is that while you can always just wash an ashtray and put it away, you can’t just wash and put away your fireplace.)
I get that fireplaces are seldom the most fascinating things to behold, when there’s no fire burning in them (and even then, I don’t find them that interesting, though I do find them a source of angst, because I worry about the house burning down). Our current residence has a fireplace, and it gets used maybe five times a year, but I really don’t spend any time wondering, “how can I figure out how to make that gaping hole look better between April and November every year?” If I decided to get artsy about making the empty fireplace look nice, my husband would probably think I was off my rocker and trying to kill us all. So I don’t worry about the fireplace. Frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time, like perfecting rugelach.

December 14, 2015 0

I declare Rugelach Victory.

It has taken several tries to get this right, and some of the attempts have been dismal, but I think it’s been a worthwhile enterprise, figuring out the right combination of recipes to make the rugelach of our dreams. These will not make everyone happy. There is no jam, there are no nuts. There is no trick. However, the winning combination is this:

You use the rugelach dough recipe from the green Gourmet cookbook, slightly altered (this is basically a brick of cream cheese and two sticks of butter, blended till smooth and then combined with flour and a few other things), and then you make a chocolate filling along the lines of the one given by Yvonne Ruperti at Serious Eats. I say “along the lines of” because it isn’t that I followed her directions precisely, but they were the guidelines I used to figure out proportions.

In previous attempts at rugelach, I’ve found the dough inevitably had annoying flaws. It was too crumbly, or too leathery, or not sweet enough — many rugelach recipes have no sugar in the dough at all, which mystified me. I asked my friend Susan, “Why is this?” and she reasoned that it’s because the cookies are rolled in sugar before baking. I guess that’s fair, but the fact is, I never liked these no-sugar-in-the-dough cookies much, and my friends and family found them lackluster as well.

So this time around, I added about 1/3 cup granulated sugar to the dough. We thus had: one brick of cream cheese, 2 sticks of butter, blended; 2 cups of flour; maybe 1/2 tsp. salt; and 1/3 cup sugar to make the dough. This was a bit of a pain to mix together in the Kitchen Aid, but I persevered. I molded the dough into a flat rectangle and wrapped it in Saran Wrap and then refrigerated it overnight. The next day, I cut the dough into four pieces, floured the countertop, and began to roll out the dough. It was easy to work with these small sections of dough, and I was able to cut a dozen pieces of rugelach from each section. I painted the rolled out dough with a filling I made out of melted chocolate (I used scraps of stuff I had around: about half bittersweet, half semi-sweet chocolate chips), granulated sugar, brown sugar (two tablespoons of each) and (important detail) two tablespoons of Hershey’s Dark cocoa powder. I used the microwave to turn the solid chocolate into a kind of paste and then mixed it all together. The Serious Eats recipe didn’t provide me with enough filling to do all four sections of dough — I would increase the amounts to use something more like 9 oz. solid chocolate total. But it’s the kind of thing where you can add to the bowl, melt, and go, as needed. The paste is very very thick, which is not great to work with, but it means the filling doesn’t just run out all over the place when you bake the cookies. It stays put. So don’t add any liquid to it, even though you’ll be frustrated and want to add something.

The chocolate is spread over the rectangle, the dough gets rolled up into a cylinder, and then you cut small slices from the roll. Toss the little cooky rolls in a dish of cinnamon sugar, place on a baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper, and bake 20-25 minutes.

There is probably a faster way to make rugelach, but I don’t know (yet) of a better way. Now that I have the dough recipe settled, it means I can start playing with fillings a little bit. But not too much. I’ve been told that non-chocolate fillings might not be well-received here at home.

December 11, 2015 0

Celery. You can definitely have too much celery.

It was Thanksgiving a couple weeks ago, you may recall, and that means it was one of those rare moments in my domestic calendar when celery is on the shopping list. You have to have celery in the turkey stuffing. So I bought two packages of celery and used one but had the second one leftover. “It’s okay,” I told myself. “We’ll use it up in the inevitable turkey soup or something like that.”

Except that while I made turkey stock, I never did make turkey soup. And now it’s December. And I’ve still got this package of celery in the fridge.

The other day my husband sent me a text message saying, “I’m going to the store to buy things to make beef stew.” I wrote back and said, “Sounds good. We have turkey stock in the fridge you can use, and also celery.” I came home. We had beef stew for dinner. It was good. But a day later I opened the vegetable drawers in the fridge and realized that we still had an abundance of celery. In fact, there was a significant net gain in our celery stock. It was immediately clear to me that my husband had ignored my text regarding celery and had purchased another very large head of celery. A superfluous head of celery. I discovered this while our daughter was seated at the dining table having her afternoon snack. I uttered a few choice words and spent the rest of the afternoon muttering about how the hell was I supposed to use up all this damned celery. We don’t even really like celery. We’re not people who wander around eating celery as a healthful snack. We are not rabbits or cows. The celery is a problem.

I didn’t say anything about it to my husband until dinner last night, when I remarked casually, “So we’ve got kind of a lot of celery in the house right now,” and he laughed and admitted, “I didn’t see your text until after I’d gone shopping.” “Ah,” I said. Our daughter piped up, “Mama found the celery in the fridge and SHE used BAD WORDS.” I slitted my eyes at my daughter. “I did,” I admitted to my husband.

“Oh, really?” he said. “What did Mama say?”
“She said the J word and the H word and the C word,” my daughter said, clearly enchanted by the act of reporting on my poor behavior.

“I’m sure she did,” my husband said. “Well, it’s understandable.” I was relieved that I hadn’t used worse language at the time. I think I did, in fact, cast aspersions on my husband’s character at the time, but I guess the language I used wasn’t incendiary enough to catch my daughter’s attention.

Anyhow, we have a whole lot of celery to use up. I am seriously considering making braised celery for dinner tonight, praying that we find it edible. Because it’s that or the stock pot, and we have quite enough stock in the house right now. I’ve got enough stock for seventy pots of risotto. I’ve got to draw the line somewhere. In the meantime, I’ve instituted a ban on celery acquisition. The entree tonight will be pasta with anchovies, garlic, and parsley, which everyone loves. So even if the celery is a failure, no one will go hungry.

December 9, 2015 0