…. which sounds like it should be one of the racier Edward Gorey titles, as I think on it, but really, this is about a ridiculous coffeecake.

A friend had a baby last week. This baby arrived a little faster than the parents expected; they’d planned to do the normal thing, show up at a hospital, have the option of an epidural, etc. etc., but things didn’t work out that way, and the proud Papa, a former EMT, wound up delivering his firstborn, a daughter, at about 7.50 a.m.

I knew this couple to be pretty badass, in a quiet, unassuming way, but this just knocked me off my feet. “I gotta bake those people something,” I said to myself. “They’re gonna be exhausted, they’re gonna need to eat something, but damned if I’m bringing them some sad lasagna or something.” First I thought I’d do an applesauce cake, which is nice and wholesome, not unlike this badass couple, but then I thought, “No. I’m having no truck with that. I’m going to appeal to their baser instincts.” And I decided on making some kind of chocolate-swirled coffee cake.

Armed with precisely no recipe in mind or on a piece of paper in front of me, I set up the base of the cake: yeast, sugar, milk, water, salt. I let this sit a while (taking my daughter to school in the meantime). When I got home, I mixed in flour, salt, sour cream, and stirred it with a spoon. When it began to come together, I threw it on my counter top and kneaded in a few tablespoons of butter. The dough felt silky and dense: this, I knew, would make a fabulous loaf of…. something.

I let it rise for a few hours and knocked it down; then I separated it into two fat knobs of dough, one for a large, ring-shaped cake, the other smaller, to be done in a loaf pan. Then I put together a filling. I toasted some pecans and threw them into a food processor with some dark cocoa, a lot of cinnamon, and a combination of white and brown sugars. I rolled out the dough, spread the filling on, and rolled up the cakes, which I placed in two buttered pans, in which I’d also put some of the cocoa/pecan filling (once it had some butter cut into it, and a little flour added, to give it a slightly more streusel-y quality). I let the cakes rise again, and then baked them at 350° for about 45 minutes. They smelled heavenly when they came out of the oven, and looked… well, not handsome, but appealing, in a distinctly-homemade sort of way.

I cut into the ring shape as soon as I felt I could get away from it, and gave one slice to my daughter and one to myself. “Ummmmmmmmmm,” my daughter said, cramming as much of it into her face as she could. “This isn’t bad,” I said thoughtfully. And it wasn’t. The crumb was soft and melting, the filling was delicious… but it wasn’t quite what I’d wanted. I felt bad. But the second loaf was still there to give away, and give it I did, on the theory that while I’m a little disappointed in the cake, a new mother is very unlikely to turn down a sour cream coffee cake with chocolate pecan filling, even if it’s not a product Zabar’s would add to their line.

I’ve had another slice today and have decided that actually this is a very good cake indeed, and that the only things to change are: add more sugar to the dough, and use twice as much filling. I was too stingy with the filling. How could I have made that mistake? But we live, we learn. Next time, I’ll do better.

Last week I had a small epiphany regarding what to get my husband for Christmas this year, and I took to my computer and with a few keystrokes, I’d ordered him a gift which was — I think — a little shard of genius. The thing I had to be careful about was its arrival: this is an item that I had to be sure to slam into the freezer as soon as it arrived. I’ll say no more.

I scheduled the delivery for today and as such after I dropped my daughter off at school, I came back home and determined to do this and that around the house to make the most of the time when I’d be waiting around for Federal Express to bring my package. A friend got in touch unexpectedly and asked if I was free for coffee, and I said, “I am, if you’ll come to my house — I’m waiting for a package and can’t go out.” So she came over, we had some coffee and chatted, and when she left a little after eleven o’clock, I decided to take some of the pimiento cheese I threw together yesterday and use it to make crackers. Because that’s the kind of thing I’ll do when I am at home by myself and, okay, I could be doing other, more important things, but… it seemed like a good idea.

I’m sure it is a good idea, too, but the crackers I produced strike me, so far, as a little bland, a little lackluster. I don’t know where I went wrong. I took pimiento cheese and blended it in the mixer with butter and chopped pecans; then I added rice flour, all purpose flour, and a little bit of baking powder. I rolled the dough into cylinders, froze them for half an hour, and then cut them into thin slices and baked them with an egg wash. Some of the cylinders were rolled in a brown sugar-spice mix; some of them were not. Some were sprinkled with the spice mix on top. It seemed like a no-fail proposition, but right out of the oven, these crackers taste bland. It’s very disappointing, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them all…. though I suspect that, if nothing else, I can give them to my daughter as an after-school snack with a cup of hot cocoa. I’d hoped they’d be yummy enough to give as gifts to friends, but I don’t think they are. On the other hand, it is sometimes my experience that things right out of the oven don’t taste right, and that it takes a few hours for their real character to come through.

Wish me luck that when I taste these again at three o’clock, I’ll think they’re good. Otherwise, I’m facing some more baking tomorrow. ‘Cause I’ve got to come up with something decent to give to folks.

In September of this year of someone’s Lord, 2014, I had to make whoopie pies for a large number of people to eat at a big ol’ fundraiser event, and in preparation for this I bought several jars of Marshmallow Fluff. This is weird stuff. I know it’s a Classic New England thing, but I never ate any, that I was aware of anyhow, until recently. When I had to start working on making whoopie pies for a hundred.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me how much Fluff I’d need, and I bought six jars of it — these are, I think, 18 oz. plastic tubs… it’s a lot of damned Fluff, is my point, and to make the whoopie pies I only needed one and a half tubs in the end (because you whip the Fluff with butter and sugar to make the filling, you don’t use it straight). Which means that since then, I’ve been keeping in the back of my mind: Ways to Use Up a Lot of Fluff.

Today I hit on one way and I killed one-half a jar that was sitting around sad and lonely in the cabinet. I made a pan of chocolate peanut butter swirl fudge. This called for 7 oz. of Fluff, which meant I still had a little bit left in the tub… and so, when I came home from school with my first grader in tow, and had to provide her with a snack, I uttered these very Yankee words: “How about a Fluffernutter sandwich?”

An item, mind you, which I did not know existed when I myself grew up here in Connecticut.

“What’s that?” said my curious daughter. “Peanut butter and Fluff,” I said. “Ooooooo yes!” she said, eyes aglow, as they say. I cut two slices of bread, slathered them with the peanut butter and the Fluff, and she gobbled it up. Then, as an EXTRA treat, I let her get a spoon and scrape out the last of the fudge from the pot. My six year old is now completely and utterly indebted to me: she cannot misbehave at all, because I have started her week off with, really, the best of all possible things.

I’m making chicken cacciatore for dinner tonight. That’s one of her favorite dinners, too, come to think of it. Really, everything’s coming up roses for this kid.

Am I allowed to sneak some fudge for myself after dinner?

There are countless recipes for soups; there are chapters in big fat books on the subject and there are entire books of soup recipes. Nearly all of them are meaningless to me for two reasons: one, I basically feel soup is silly, and almost never called for; and two, when I make soup — which I do despite my feelings about it — I am making it in order to use up dabs of this and chunks of that, things that happen to be filling my fridge and freezer.

The other night I made a pot of soup that was a perfect example of this.

We had: about half a cup of leftover turkey meat shreds; one half of a spatchcocked chicken, which my husband made two days before Thanksgiving for reasons I’ll never understand; and a pressing need to eat these things up. We also had a jar of turkey stock and about two cups of leftover corn stock. And I had to make something for dinner.

So I sauteed an onion and some garlic in turkey fat (in a measuring cup, leftover from Thanksgiving) and then I added the two stocks and the chicken and turkey, which I’d cut up into tiny pieces. I also added the contents of a little jar I’ve had on my spice rack for about five months, which is rice ground into a powder with chills — this was the result of my making homemade chili powder and then needing to clean the coffee grinder I’d sullied. The resulting rice/chili powder smelled really good, and I recognized it immediately as something that’d be really good to thicken a soup. I had, in fact, labeled it: rice powder with chili, to use to thicken soup.

This simmered for about half an hour. Then I added some frozen corn kernels. I served this soup with some bread I’d made earlier in the afternoon, which was still warm, and we ate half of the loaf — it was a big loaf of pain de mie, too, so we’re talking about a lot of bread, here — which we slathered with (leftover) guacamole and (leftover) pimiento cheese. Everyone ate a lot, and everyone was happy.

But there was one cup of soup leftover.

Loath to throw it away, and definitely not being someone who would eat a sad cup of soup and call it lunch, I realized I had to do something with it for dinner last night.

So I got out my stock pot and filled it with water. I blanched a bunch of broccoli rabe. In another pot, I fried one slice of duck bacon, and when it was cooked, I took it out and set it on a cutting board to cool. Then I dumped the soup into the pot: it immediately blended with the duck fat. I added another clove of minced garlic. When the rabe was blanched, I chopped it up; I minced the duck bacon; and added these to the soup pot to let the whole mess simmer a while. Then, in the water I’d blanched the rabe in, I boiled gemelli and used the soup and rabe as a pasta sauce. Sprinkled with Parmesan, this was a meal everyone gobbled down happily on a cold December night.

I don’t know how or why people go out of their way to make special soups. I know that making soup by the seat of your pants makes perfect sense to me. You have to be reasonable about it: you don’t want to get too creative about it, frankly, because then you risk winding up with some very deeply weird glop in your bowl. For example, it would never have seemed like a good idea to add the guacamole to the turkey/chicken soup pot. I wouldn’t have added star anise to the pot, either, in an attempt to jazz it up a little. People do things like this, thinking, “oh, why not?” but you have to keep your wits about you. Work within the framework of basic families of flavors, and it seems to me, you can turn leftover anything into a very good soup indeed, for an evening when you don’t know what the hell to make for dinner.

Another time we’ll talk, about using leftover potatoes for soup. Drives my husband crazy but he’s just wrong, it’s a good idea.

The Balabusta of Orange Street is not really a compulsive housecleaner, though it often appears that way to her friends.

What I am is someone who feels that some basic level of hygiene is mandatory, at different levels, in different parts of the house. Thus: the kitchen counter where I work — with raw meat, with butter, with sugar — is kept spotlessly clean, wiped down every night with rubbing alcohol.

Everything else, though: it’s variable. I mean, to put it politely. The rug in my daughter’s room could be home to thirty thousand fleas and I would not notice; the toilets can become quite disgusting before I’ll notice and think, “Boy, I should really swab that down, eh?”, and I have never, repeat, never washed large sections of floor in this house. I sweep them and vacuum them, when I notice a few too many dust bunnies, but the idea that I’m supposed to wash the wooden floors on the second and third floors of our row house strikes me as, frankly, infuckingsane.

But: last week was Thanksgiving, and we had sixteen people in our house, and a little bit of restorative action was necessary. Mind you: today, as I write this, it’s Thursday morning: one week ago right now I was basting the turkey. So my reaction to the accumulated filth is somewhat delayed.

A few days before Thanksgiving, I looked at the half-bathroom’s sink — this is on the first floor of our apartment, and it’s just off the kitchen, and it sees heavy use. I was in there and noticed that a lightbulb had blown out and that, as a result, there was a big, dark shadow in the sink. “Well, that’s not good,” I thought. “People need better light than that.” But then I noticed that when I moved, the shadow didn’t change, the way it should have… and I put my finger down to the shadow, and discovered that the shadow wasn’t a shadow: it was actual filth that had built up in the sink. I have no idea what it was made of; I simply know that it was sturdy filth. I could write my name in it, the way you’d write “WASH ME” in the crud on a comically dirty car.

So, you know, before company arrived, I made sure that that sink was clean. No biggie. But the rest of the house: dear god. Gott in himmel, as a balabusta ought to say.

Last night I was washing the dinner dishes and noticed a footprint on the wooden floor in the kitchen. “For god’s sake,” I thought. And then I remembered how my beloved husband, when cleaning the turkey, had been flinging little bits of turkey to the floor for the cat to eat, and that, as a result, there was an untold quantity of turkey grease, cat spit, cat fur, and lord only knew how much miscellaneous crud caked onto my kitchen floor. “This will not stand,” I said to myself, as I closed the dishwasher. And at 8.15, I cleaned the kitchen floor on my hands and knees. “One less thing to have to face tomorrow,” I said to myself. Because it was clear to me that tomorrow (i.e., today), I would have to really get down to cases. Talk tachlis with the filth.

I dropped my darling, completely tidy, no-filth-producing daughter at school this morning and then came home determined to tackle some significant percentage of this. “One hour,” I said to myself. “I am spending one hour on this, and no more.” I am very proud to report that in the space of one hour, I scrubbed the second floor (the “family,” as I think of it) bathroom, including cleaning the floor, which is, to be honest, something I don’t do as frequently as I probably should (though I sweep it daily); I took care of all three of the toilets in the house; and I vacuumed the second floor. I’ve also done, by this time (it’s 10.30 as I type) two loads of laundry. A third, bed linens, will be done soon, and my daughter’s bed will have fresh, Play-Doh crumb-free sheets.

None of this is earth-shattering stuff, I realize. So, my reader is thinking: “The bitch cleaned her house, some. What does she want, a medal?” No, I don’t want a medal. But I want to convey that it takes genuine thought, effort, and attention to do a good job of this, and I have done a good job of it. The point, really, is that come six o’clock, when the family is all here and trying to relax, and then as the evening wears on and we’re getting ready for bed, all of that will be more pleasant, because we won’t be looking around us and going, “urgh, this is kinda gross.” In my day to day life at home — of which there is a lot — I don’t want to have the “kinda gross” facing me every ten seconds. Reading the news is depressing. Going onto Facebook is often depressing and humiliating to boot. What I want is for my apartment to be a place where we can relax and feel comfortable, and it is so much easier to do that if we’re not always looking at the floor and asking, “what is that piece of crud there?” or walking into the bathroom and seeing the shadow of filth in the place where we’re supposed to make ourselves clean.

So right now, let me invite you over: you can, if you wish, eat off my bathroom floor, even.

A few years ago, thanks to Facebook, I found myself back in touch with people I’d gone to college with. Well: I’d kept in touch with maybe a handful of college friends, over the years — but Facebook put me in regular contact with many more of my classmates, many of whom, to be honest, I had never really known in the first place. One of the funny things about Facebook life is that it gave me (and my old classmates) a chance to realize that though we’d often chosen radically different lifestyles, as adults, many, many of us turned out to be interested in food and cooking. At least two of us had worked as pastry chefs. At least one of us hunted for food. Several of us were people who apparently thought nothing of baking elaborate things on a rainy late night when we couldn’t get to sleep. And, as one might expect, in such a group (graduates of a hippie college in Vermont who like food and like being sociable, after a fashion), a holiday cooky swap was eventually proposed.

I admit: I was one of the first people to respond to the California Jewess’s proposal, in the affirmative, and start dreaming up cooky ideas.

I can no longer recall what I sent that first year. I remember that there were about six of us who came through with cookies, in the end. The idea was: a dozen cookies, no chocolate chip allowed, to be sent between December 1 and December 20.

This year, there are more people involved. There may be more than ten people to bake for. And I am, of course, racking my brain, trying to think, “What the hell am I going to do?” Last year, it seems to me, I did some cheese crackers and some coconut cookies, and the cookies suffered because their shipping was delayed by my coming down with a nasty bug and not being able to ship them out as quickly as I’d hoped.

I’ve been spending some time today weighing my options. Do I make homemade Twix bars, which I’ve done before, and are messy, but really good? Do I make a peanut butter cooky with maybe some chopped up Toblerone bar in it? Do I make Whoopie Pies, which are incredibly labor-intensive, but oh so good? I have a jar of rosemary caramel in the fridge, and I have this idea that slathering that between layers of shortbread could be very, very good indeed. But will it ship well? I just don’t know. Boxes will go to California, to Vermont, to Virginia, to Georgia.

Actually, I’m now convinced, this caramel has to be involved. I’d like to cook it again with some chopped pecans and then slather that on a very plain shortbread. I somehow believe, in my heart of hearts, that that would be a noble cooky indeed. A few dozen of those and a few dozen of something chocolate, and I should be in good shape. I’ll keep you posted, if you’re curious; and any readers should feel free to chime in with suggestions.

Well, I’ve never been a pie person. I don’t like fruit pies, by and large, and while I find the occasional pecan pie or chocolate pie very nice to eat, the fact is, I’d rather eat cake. I find piecrust not interesting or delicious enough to be worth any effort on my part.
But the fact is, there are some types of pies that I’ve read about over the years and thought, “You know, I might LIKE that. I might!” And high on that short list is something called Chess Pie.

Chess Pie is a Southern thing and it can be found in different versions. You read recipes that are based on buttermilk, recipes that involve lemon, recipes that call for a couple spoonsful of vinegar, and there even exists (clearly, for people like me) chocolate chess pie.

This year, I was a little worried about not having enough dessert options at Thanksgiving. I had a parsnip cake with caramel frosting, and I knew it would be lovely; my cousins were planning to bring a pecan pie up from New York City; but then there’s my mother, who’ll only eat a chocolate dessert, and it really was up to me to come through. I went to bed Wednesday with no chocolate dessert on hand, and a vague sense that, if need be, I’d make brownies or something. But what happened was that I inexplicably — and cruelly — awakened at 5 a.m. Thursday morning. “Well,” I said to myself. “I might as well go downstairs and make a chocolate chess pie before I have to put the turkey in the oven.”

In a burst of ambition on Wednesday, I had gone so far as to obtain a package of Pillsbury pre-made, ready-to-roll-out, piecrust, which was recommended to me very highly by one of the best (and most ambitious) bakers I know. She said, “I use it all the time to make quick quiches for dinner. It’s pretty good. You should by all means use it with a clear conscience.” I’d also gone and bought a foil pie pan. So, by ten minutes after five in the morning, I was in the kitchen unfurling a round of pie crust, and whipping up the wet and dry ingredients for the pie. It was quite simple. Strangely, I can no longer find the recipe I used — which I found online — and so I cannot provide a link, or even a precise list of ingredients. But it was, I promise, easy. I melted butter and semi-sweet chocolate in a pot and stirred them together until it was nice and smooth. I combined, in a big measuring cup, a little flour, a little cornmeal, some sugar, a little salt, and a couple of other things I can no longer recall — vanilla powder, I think — and then I stirred it into the melted butter and chocolate, and then the whole got poured into the pie pan (which I’d placed the crust in easily). I baked it for about half an hour. It came out of the oven looking like a very, very large Stella d’Oro Swiss Fudge Cookie, the way they were in the old days, when they were baked in the Bronx, and the chocolate dominated over the cooky part. God, those were good.

It turned out that this particular chocolate chess pie was, in fact, very much Swiss Fudge cooky-like to consume, as well. It is very sweet, and very rich, and it was sufficiently good that there was almost none leftover at Thanksgiving dinner. One slice, to be exact. One slice leftover. I call that success.

I plan to explore other chocolate chess pie recipes. Some call for evaporated milk, and eggs (I think the one I used required two eggs, come to think of it, but no evaporated milk). There is obviously a world of chess pies out there, waiting for me, and who knows. I may even attempt a piecrust myself one of these days. It’d be the equivalent of hell freezing over, but…. No. That’s not fair. I might make piecrust. What I don’t anticipate is becoming someone who makes rhubarb pie. Or blueberry pie. If I ever make one of those, please dial 911.

It was February, 2008, when I began the process of becoming This Old Hausfrau. I didn’t know it at the time. Before that, I’d been only a few other things. You know how some girls have distinct phases of their lives: “That’s when I was living in Seattle and working as a bartender,” or “That’s when I was living in Altoona and working as a paralegal for that sleaze ball lawyer,” or “That was when I was living on the kibbutz outside of Jerusalem.” No, I didn’t have any phases like that. I was pretty much always a bookseller, living in New Haven, and if I wasn’t a bookseller, I was doing something that was somehow related to being a bookseller. I worked in libraries, or did freelance writing and copyediting and copywriting, or something like that. And it didn’t seem likely that I’d ever be anything else.

But then I had this baby, and it turned out that that was the start of a whole new thing. It took a while, but by the time my baby was a toddler, it was pretty clear, I wasn’t a bookseller really anymore (though I do have the legal wherewithal to sell you books, and if I have something you want, by all means I am more than happy to ring up the sale); and I wasn’t a Writer anymore (though I do still write, just not as profitably). I was a hausfrau. And it’s now November 2014, and I am an even older Old Hausfrau.

Don’t get me wrong: I was always someone who liked being at home. In the days when I lived alone, I was prone to re-arranging my apartment for fun, shoving things from one side of the room to the other, and it made me very happy indeed to change the tablecloth on my one table, according to my mood.

But who knew that someday this sort of thing would be most of my daily life? That I’d be someone who baked pain de mie twice a week? That I’d be someone who knew what pain de mie even is? Let alone owned the appropriate pan for baking it? What a shock it is, to be me, these days.

Here I am, the Balabusta of Upper Orange Street, the old hausfrau I never, ever thought I would be. If you think you’d like to hear what I’ve got to say about anything, check back. I might be talking about cooking. I might be talking about sweeping. I might be talking about books. You just do not know what’s going to come out of my fingertips next. I’m confident you won’t find me writing Star Wars fanfic here, but other than that, pretty much anything goes.