Acquired Tastes: or, On Acquiring Tastes

This Old Hausfrau grew up in the Northeast, specifically, in southern Connecticut, and this means many things in many ways, but probably not what the average American who might get lost and land here might think.

I did not grow up eating WASP home cooking, as it had evolved to be by the 1970s; there were no tuna noodle casseroles or Jell-O salads or desserts in my upbringing, unless they were served to me at school. I am the child of New Yorkers, who came to Connecticut in the 1960s, and I grew up in a college town. Hence, as my brother once observed, we were weaned on won ton soup (there were at least three decent and two excellent Chinese restaurants within a five block radius of our apartment building). I thought bagels and bialys and knishes were normal; I never once regarded Italian food as “ethnic” food — I really don’t understand it when people have a hard time twirling spaghetti; and while I knew there were people who ate lobsters and clams and oysters, I grew up eating none of these things, because my parents, while perhaps not particularly observant of the laws of Kashrut, never served these things at home or urged us to consider eating them when out in the world. I cannot prove it but I believe that the only way I ever ate clams, until I was in my 20s, was by having them on white clam pizzas from Sally’s or Pepe’s in Wooster Square. (And if you don’t know about white clam pizza, I urge you to do a Google search, and that’s all I’m saying about that right now.)

One other thing that was entirely foreign to me was okra. To say I grew up in an okra-free household is a vast understatement. I imagine if you’d asked my mother, “Can we have okra for dinner tonight?” she’d have responded by asking, “What’s okra?” and then pressing her hand to your forehead and asking if you felt okay. It was not served in any restaurant I can remember going to in my youth, it was not served in the homes of any of my friends. As I grew up and began to read cookbooks I grasped that many people regarded okra as a normal thing, but it wasn’t until I was in my 20s and a place called Jaylyn’s Fried Chicken opened on Park Street in New Haven that I understood what this was all about.

Jaylyn’s had two booths you could sit at; it was really a takeout place. They had excellent fried chicken, but the reason I went there (and I went there often) was that they had the best sides in town. It was kind of embarrassing to order food there because I didn’t really want the chicken. What I wanted was biscuits and macaroni and cheese (which was not Kraft, but some seriously good stuff of the béchamel school) and greens and FRIED OKRA. They would sell you a Chinese takeout box of fried okra; you could get a small carton for two dollars and a big carton for $3.50 and believe me I always got the big carton, after realizing that the small carton was simply not sufficient.

Jaylyn’s closed, and I’ve never found another place nearby where I could get fried okra. I can now occasionally find good okra dishes on the menus in Indian restaurants, but it hasn’t yet reached the tables of the fancier joints in town. No pizza place has decided to put okra on their pies (which is understandable) and the gastropub type places haven’t decided to add fried okra to their lists of appetizers, on the theory that if people will eat fried pickles, by God, they’ll surely eat fried okra.

And frozen okra, I learned the hard way, is pretty vile.

So I have been leading a largely okra-free existence for the last fifteen years or so. The occasional treat, when I can get it. But not much okra. The Gourmensch doesn’t like it, so I don’t cook it at home. But a few months ago, on a shelf of jarred specialty items at the local Italian grocery store, among the jars of giardiniera and pickled onions and pickled eggplant, I noticed a fat, obviously not-from-Italy, jar of pickled okra. I automatically reached for it and brought it home. I had this idea: wouldn’t it be great to use these as a garnish in mixed drinks?

But not everyone agreed with me. And so the jar languished in the cabinet, until the inevitable day when I finally decided, “Damnit, I’m just going to eat these things on their own, for the sheer pleasure of it.” And I offered one to my daughter, who takes after her father, and loves most pickled things.

“Yuck,” she said, turning her head.

“Dude, you can’t be serious,” I said. “These things are great.”

“No!” she said. “Can I have some crackers?”

Months went by. Once in a while, when I was really hungry but didn’t want to eat something substantial because it was too close to dinner, I would take the jar out of the fridge and eat maybe two or three pieces of pickled okra, thinking of Julia Child. Apparently, when she was starved between meals, she would eat a dill pickle or two to stave off the hunger pangs. It does seem to work — you don’t eat a lot of pickle, but just a little will keep you going.

The jar’s contents dwindled. I was down to the last six okra pods a few days ago when I pulled out the jar; I was cooking dinner and needed to eat something lest I start eating large hunks of cheese intended for the macaroni and cheese I was preparing. My daughter was sitting nearby and saw me pull out a pickle and bite into it. She heard the crunch. “What’re you eating?” she asked.

“Okra,” I said. “Pickled okra.” I took another bite. “These are so good, it’s ridiculous.”

“Yuck,” she said.

“No way. You do NOT know what you’re talking about,” I said, biting into another piece. “Plus,” I added, “they’re cute. Look!” I showed her how when you bite into it, it looks like a little bitty wagon wheel inside.

“What is it like?” she asked me.

“It’s sharp and a little bit crunchy, but not crispy like a potato chip; and then the seeds kind of crunch in your teeth,” I said. “Do you want to try a little bite?”

She nodded, but slowly. I held out a pod and she took a tiny bite. She looked unconvinced. But then she asked for a second bite. I let her have one, and then I popped the rest of the pod into my mouth. I saw her look longingly at the jar.

“Do you want a whole one for yourself?” I asked. She nodded. I pulled one out and gave it to her, and then I noticed at the bottom of the jar was one very small, baby okra pod that had somehow fallen to lay flat across the bottom, instead of standing upright like the rest of the okra.

“And I tell you what,” I said. “You can have the last one, that little baby at the bottom.” She smiled at that. I fished it out for her and she gobbled up the okra pods.

The jar was finished. She looked at it and asked, “Will you buy more?”

I said I would. “In the meantime,” I said, “what if we sliced up a cucumber and put it in the jar to soak in the okra pickle brine?”

She thought this was an excellent idea, and we’ve been eating those cucumber slices up. Now the cucumber slices are gone, and today she announced to me, as I sliced another cucumber, that at Thanksgiving, we ARE, ABSOLUTELY, going to have pickled okra and pickled cucumber slices on the table.

Fair warning. Now, if only we can get the Gourmensch on board.

March 10, 2016 0

Akbar & Jeff’s Crunchy Corn Gobbles: or, Just buy a bag of Fritos and call it a day.

The previous post on Fritos and Cheez-Its caused me to ponder homemade junk food as a category. I know it exists. I know there are a billion websites that perkily tell you that YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN FRITOS and that even the New York Times has provided its earnest readers with a recipe. I decided that in the name of being an honest writer, I owed it to my readers, all six of you, to report fully on what that would involve, and whether or not it is worth it.

I want to start by saying that I have made cheese crackers many, many times, using many different types of cheeses, and that while they never are quite like Cheez-Its, they are all good and they are all easy to make and they are all worth doing, once in a while, when you want to have something really snappy to serve at a dinner party or to give as a gift in a little glass jar. So that’s a subject for another time, perhaps. Here, I want to focus on Fritos, because, frankly, I just spent three hours working on Fritos. The kitchen is cleaned up, mostly, and the results are in.

http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/12326-homemade-fritos is the recipe I worked with. I followed the recipe, mixing up the ingredients precisely — I even took out the kitchen scale.

It takes very few ingredients. You’re looking at what it takes. Corn meal, salt, oil. Takes about 30 seconds to put that together. I didn’t include the boiling water in the picture because that’s stupid. But there was water mixed in with the corn meal, salt, and oil. Then I rolled out the dough, as instructed, between two sheets of parchment paper.

I don’t usually post a lot of photos, but I was specifically asked to document this process, so I’m doing the best I can, here.
I scored the corn dough with a bench scraper and put the pan in the oven as instructed: 375° for 12-15 minutes. At 15 minutes, these things were nowhere near done. They looked flabby. I added another five minutes to the timer. Same. I finally set my stopwatch and left the kitchen and went about my business for a while and came back about 15 minutes later. Still looking kind of pathetic. The recipe says to bake until golden brown. The chips were starting to curl up a little at the scored edges, but… nowhere near golden brown. They finally began to get golden brown around the 35 minute mark. I took them out of the oven and this is what I had:

I’m using a photograph with an Ocean City mug to try to convey to you how goddamned few corn chips resulted from all this work. That’s supposed to be TWO to FOUR snack size servings, people. I don’t know who they think is snacking, but that’s just delusional. This wouldn’t have made a sufficient snack for my daughter when she was two; and now? Forget it.
And they don’t even taste very good.

So then I thought, “Ok. The recipe gives you an option for baking and an option for frying. I should try to fry another batch.” So I embarked on a Plan B and Subset B-2, which was this: I’d mix up another batch of the corn batter, and fry half of it in hot oil (something I hate doing, frying things in oil), and bake the other half but in a hotter oven, at 425°.

The second round of baked “Fritos” came out pretty much the way the first batch had — quite unimpressive, with a slightly shorter baking time — and the fried Fritos were a whole other thing entirely. Because it turned out that I had no ability whatsoever to get a nice, neat, rectangular mini-slab of corn batter into the pot of hot oil. I gather that proper Fritos are extruded somehow, from some kind of big pipe into vats of hot oil, and I suppose that if I were more dedicated to this project I could have taken a pastry bag and a flat-tip nozzle and figured out a way to extrude my own Fritos, but seriously. Even I don’t have time for this. So I did the best I could, and what I had in the pot was this:

This looks like…. well, it looks like scrambled eggs, but what it ACTUALLY is, is a small batch of Crunchy Corn Gobbles.

Sorry for the fuzzy photo, but trust me, it’s not any more attractive when in focus.
This would be a variant form of Dried Corn Gobbles, available as one of the Six Tempting Toppings at Akbar’n’Jeff’s Frozen Yogurt Hut:

Now, Crunchy Corn Gobbles don’t taste bad, certainly not compared to my baked homemade Fritos, but they aren’t exactly good, either. God knows they’re not worth making an effort to produce. I’d rather eat a Peanut Butter Chunklet.

I spent most of my morning working on this. I still have to wash the greasy frying pan (and I’ve thrown out all that oil, because I just don’t think I’ll want to reuse it for anything), but this experiment is over and done with — finit0 — and the results are these pathetic things.

On the left, the first batch; in the middle, the Crunchy Corn Gobbles; and on the right, the second baked batch, which are sort of leathery and awful. Two batches of homemade Frito batter, and, even if these things tasted good, which they don’t, it still wouldn’t be enough to make for a satisfying snack for two or three people.
The moral of the story is, my instincts were correct. Fritos are like Grape-Nuts. Don’t try this at home. Pay the corporate people their money, and just buy the thing that tastes the way it should.
I think I’ll buy myself a Snickers bar on my way to pick up my daughter at school. After all this work, and so little payback, I could use some junk food that works.

February 26, 2016 0

On Great American Snak Klassiks: The Cheez-It, and the Hideously Underrated Frito

In general, the Hausfrau does not keep a lot of junk food in the house, not because no one likes it, but because I view it as a waste of money. If I don’t spend money on crap food that has no expiration date, then it means I can have a budget to do things like go to Ashley’s Ice Cream and get some really, really, really good ice cream. This is sound logic. Once in a while I will buy some potato chips (to go with sandwiches, a summertime phenomenon mostly); at Thanksgiving, we’ve come to view Bugles as a traditional part of the hors d’oeuvres platters (they go well with pimiento cheese). But these are treats; they are not standard everyday fare.

I’ve worked hard to get my kid to grasp that things like potato chips (and Ashley’s Ice Cream) are treats, and she’s cool with it. That said, when you have a toddler, it’s almost inevitable that you’re going to have Goldfish crackers around. To me, Goldfish are a waste of time: they are unsatisfying as either food or junk food. But toddlers love them. Our Goldfish phase lasted about two years. We bought giant cartons of them. They got eaten, but hardly ever by me, and as soon as I could get away with not having Goldfish crackers in the house all the time, I stopped buying them.

But the fact remains that some members of our household often require a snack and they want it to be salty and crunchy. As a result, in the last several years I’ve become someone who clips coupons for certain brands of crackers (yes, I clip coupons to save money on purchases I view as frivolous; if I have to buy these things, I shouldn’t spend too much money on them. Though I also clip coupons for things I use all the time, like our brand of coffee or toothpaste or whathaveyou, because why the hell not). I try to not read the lists of ingredients for these crackers, because the purist in me would probably faint if I absorbed the data.

The preferred brands of crackers, as of this writing, are: Cheez-Its (not Cheese Nips, which I’ve been informed are distinctly inferior). I had thought there’d be a list to put there, but the truth is, there isn’t. I do also keep Ritz crackers around, because they are just nice enough to serve to company, should we have any; but if there are Cheez-Its in the house, the Ritz crackers go uneaten. If I buy Wheat Thins or Triscuits, those will get consumed, but not with the same vim or vigor. Maybe they’ll get eaten quickly if there’s some delicious cheese around, like Beemster, or if I have pimiento cheese in the fridge, or tapenade. But no one wants to eat those crackers just on their own, for their own sake. Come the end of the day, when the husband and child need something to see them through to dinner, the preferred cracker is the Cheez-It, often served in a bowl with a tablespoon or two of peanut butter, because it turns out that dipping Cheez-Its in peanut butter is really good.

There is another junk food that I purchase with a certain level of calm acceptance: the Frito. My mature appreciation of Fritos began when I bought a bag of them on a whim, to have with a deli sandwich. I ate them and thought, “Man, Fritos are good. I’d forgotten how good they are.” They tasted clean and uncomplicated compared to the fancy potato chips we inevitably got when we decided to make cold cut sandwiches for dinner (something that happens in the summer, when it’s too hot for me to want to cook). Horseradish and cheddar potato chips are all well and good, but Fritos seemed honest and unpretentious in comparison. Furthermore, they’re good with pimiento cheese, good with chili, good with just about everything I can think of to dip them in. My husband also likes Fritos, because who doesn’t, so I resolved that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to buy a bag of them once in a while. They occasionally go on sale for something like $1.50 for a large bag; if you happen to have a coupon that gets you some money off, that’s a very affordable treat.

It was when I bothered to look at the list of ingredients that I realized the Frito-Lay people were missing out on a golden opportunity. I posted to Facebook, on October 17, 2011: “wonders again why uptight overeducated parents who spend a fortune on “healthy” snacks for their kids don’t embrace Fritos. You know what the ingredients are in Fritos? Corn; corn oil; salt. I don’t think I have ever seen such a short list of ingredients on an item we think of as “junk” food.” The thread that followed was long, passionate, and had far more people commenting on it than I would have expected. Everyone loves Fritos, but they do it silently, in private, ashamed, like it’s something you’d have to confess to a priest about. As if Fritos are as fundamentally disgusting as, say, Funyuns. But it shouldn’t be that way. We should eat our Fritos with pride, knowing that there’s no polymonodextrosorbaglycophol in them. Assuming the Fritos people haven’t been lying to us all these years, we can eat our Fritos with pride, impunity, and pleasure.

But: the people at Frito-Lay are missing out on a golden opportunity. If they were smart, they would focus on re-branding and get the demographic that shops at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s to accept Fritos as the ultimate and perfect junk food, a junk food that is almost of such high quality that it is no longer junk food. Because it almost already is. The difference between polenta — a foodstuff no one dares insult — and Fritos is, when you get down to it, merely a matter of cooking technique, and marketing. If someone made Fritos but called them Polenta Crackers? They’d be selling them at Dean and DeLuca, or, in my town, at Romeo’s and P&M and Edge of the Woods and the Elm City Market. Selling them for $3.25 for a 2 ounce bag. They make organic Ruffles, for pity’s sake — why not have a similar option for Fritos?

Because the ingredients in Fritos are things we might even have in our own kitchen at home, it was inevitable that I should pause to wonder if they could be made at home. I definitely have corn(meal), salt, and oil. Could I make, like, artisanal Fritos? Would the average person, with average ingredients at his or her disposal, and a perhaps slightly above-average tolerance for kitchen mishegas, be able to pull this off? And the answer, I’m going to tell you right now, is “Yes, you can make artisanal Fritos, but seriously, don’t bother, it’s like the homemade Grape Nuts. Don’t do it.” The New York Times helpfully provides a recipe for those of us who are just nutty enough to want to give this a roll, at http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/12326-homemade-fritos. I leave this for you to contemplate at your leisure.

Back to reality, in which you don’t make your own Fritos: As long as you’re buying the basic, original flavor Frito chips, not some kind of honey-barbecue style, then you’re on solid moral ground, as far as I’m concerned. Because I’m not someone who actually cares much about GMO food, and I don’t eat enough Fritos to feel that anything in them is real likely to affect my well-being anyhow. But I think Frito-Lay would do well — expand their their hold on the market — to revisit their production system and start making Fritos with organic, free-range, non-GMO corn and organic, free range, non-GMO oil and sea salt harvested from someplace fancy-sounding. What’s holding them back? It’s a real mystery to me. Think what the Pirate Booty people did with Cheetos. What Smartfood and Annie’s did in the 1980s with snack-pack bags of crappy cheese popcorn, the kind that you got out of vending machines in the 1970s. Some of which are probably still there, dangling from a curved hook….
I won’t go so far as to say Fritos are actually healthful, but for god’s sake, in the context of American snack foods today? They are comparatively healthful; they are straightforward; they appear to have no tricks up their sleeves. And they are very, very good with chili, which is a healthful dish, properly made. So as far as I’m concerned — and, please remember, I’m a hausfrau, not a doctor or nutritionist — you can have your Frito pie and sleep the sleep of the right and just.

February 25, 2016 1

So Efficient, I’m My Own Worst Enemy

Some Monday evenings, I produce better-than-usual dinners because I’m on top of things: I’ve made it through the day, the kid’s in one piece, and I’m feeling relatively cheerful. It helps if I’ve gone shopping in the morning, and have nice fresh vegetables and maybe some meat in the house.

Other Monday evenings arrive, and I’m not so lucky. I’ve been doing Good Works in the morning instead of grocery shopping, and I have to be at a meeting at seven o’clock in the evening. Mid-afternoon arrives — as it is, this very moment — and I still don’t know what we’re having for dinner. This is a less-than-ideal situation, but it’s only two p.m. In other words, there’s still time for me to turn it around.

But I’ve looked into the fridge, and basically, what I’ve got in there is this:

a lot of condiments; a pint and a half or so of really good beef broth I made a few days ago; and rather a lot of cheese.
Can I ask my family to drink beef broth and have cheese on bread for dinner? No, I cannot. This is one of those moments when I wish I hadn’t so efficiently used Friday night’s leftovers during the weekend. If I still had some of that chicken sitting around — it was wonderful, by the way — I could make some chili out of it. (That’s what I did Saturday, though.)

Can I make a risotto? I could, if I had arborio rice, and some nice vegetables; however, I have neither. I could fake the risotto with regular white rice, no one would complain, but the lack of vegetables remains a sore point.

Can my family overlook the lack of fresh vegetables with dinner, if I simply serve them a pot of macaroni and cheese? If I served them macaroni and cheese and succotash, made from handy-dandy frozen lima beans and frozen corn, they’d be happy. I wouldn’t be — I’ve never eaten a succotash I actually enjoyed — but I’m not the primary audience, here. Last week I made succotash, and while I ate my serving dolefully, my husband and child cooed over it and my daughter asked me petulantly why I don’t make succotash more often. “Because I don’t like it that much,” I said.

“But WE like it!” she said. “Who doesn’t like lima beans?”

“Well, a LOT of people, as a matter of fact,” I said.

My daughter was unimpressed. “What do they know,” she said. “Lima beans are one of my favorite vegetables.”

Let’s move away from pondering the way in which my child is demented, because I just had a sinking thought, which was, “What if I’ve used up all the lima beans?” This could happen. I’m not someone who buys lima beans in bulk. There must be someone who does, but I have no idea who. Anyway, I just dragged myself to the freezer in the basement, where I keep the frozen vegetables, and discovered that while, yes, I do have two bags of frozen lima beans there, and lots of frozen corn, I also have something that means that I don’t have to make succotash for dinner if I don’t want to. Forsooth: I have frozen peas. One lonely bag of frozen peas.

What this means is that I can make a fake risotto — put in a slice of duck bacon, the beef broth, and frozen peas — and serve that as a one-pot meal, and leave for my meeting with a fairly clear conscience at 6.45; and the succotash can wait another day. Thank god, too, because I really don’t want to come home from a meeting at nine o’clock and face eating succotash for dinner. Meetings are hard enough without coming home to something grim for dinner. Risotto: that’s something I can look forward to.

February 22, 2016 0

Two Chicken Breasts, Some Idle Thought, and Goal Achieved

It is, every week, a bit of a challenge to devise a nice Shabbat dinner. “Nice” doesn’t have to be particularly elaborate, and often, here, it is not. I have been known to make a giant tray of nachos for Shabbat dinner; in fact, Shabachos are regarded as a big treat.

But the truth is, I feel it’s not quite cricket of me to do things like this. I much prefer to come up with a plan that has some element of the traditional Friday night dinner about it. Chicken. Rice. A vegetable.

This morning I awoke and wondered what I would make; I really had no idea. However, determined that I could come up with something if I just wandered to the store and bought some chicken, I went to the store, and purchased two boneless, skinless chicken breasts, a very large cucumber, and some fresh broccoli. I took all these things home and set them on the counter and then I stared at them. It was a quarter to three.

At three p.m., I was standing at the stove sautéing onions in olive oil and searing the chicken breasts. I had at my side an opened can of whole-cranberry cranberry sauce I’d purchased by accident last month, and a small jar of Colman’s mustard also purchased by accident (I had thought it was dry mustard, but it turned out to be the pre-mixed stuff, not what I wanted). At 3.15, the Dutch oven was in the oven, and it’s now 3.45, and the house smells wonderful. In the fridge, furthermore, is a little bowl filled with cucumber slices that are soaking in a pepper vinegar-brown sugar marinade. These two things will be served alongside plain sides: boiled broccoli and white rice. But it will be a sterling meal, I am absolutely positive. (Yes, there will also be challah; I bought a loaf of the best challah in Connecticut, as far as I’m aware, which is made by Bread and Chocolate in Hamden. Infinitely better than Judie’s, and really worth whatever they charge for it.)

CHICKEN in CRANBERRY MUSTARD SAUCE

Preheat oven to 275°.

Slice one small onion into slices about 1/2″ thick. Saute in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil heated in a Dutch oven. Pat chicken breasts dry with a paper towel, add to pot, sear both sides of chicken pieces. Remove chicken from pot, and lay on the inside of the lid of the pot (saves some dishwashing effort later). Set lid aside (it will balance on the knob nicely if it’s a Le Creuset pot). Add four fat cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced so that there is a flat side to caramelize in the pot. Continue to stir onions and garlic for a couple of minutes until the bottom of the pot begins to show browning and deglaze pot with some rum (light or dark, it doesn’t matter; about 1/2 cup). After pot is deglazed, add to pot the contents of one can of whole cranberry cranberry sauce and about two tablespoons of very sharp prepared mustard (I used Colman’s but you could use whatever you wanted). Stir to melt the cranberry sauce, adding about 1/2 cup of water. Add a teaspoon of salt and one bay leaf; stir; then carefully move the chicken breasts back into the pot. Bring contents of pot to a boil, then stir once, turn heat off, cover pot, and place in oven.

Slow-cook in the oven for three and a half to four hours, stirring occasionally, turning over the chicken so that all sides of it soak in the sauce.

Serve with plain side dishes, as this is highly flavored and will not need much embellishment. Any chicken leftover will make for really fabulous chicken sandwiches for lunch on Saturday, too…

February 19, 2016 0

One Night of Making It Up As I Went Along

The other day was a snow day. Schools were closed and I had to spend a lot of time getting things done despite also having to keep my daughter entertained, or at least keep her from either braining herself while playing and see her through to the end of the day. The weather was sufficiently unpleasant that I carved my list of errands to a bare minimum and once we were home at noon I said, “OK, that’s it, we’re not leaving the house again today.”
One challenge was dinner. Well, to be honest, lunch was a bit of a challenge: neither of us ever ate a proper lunch. We got home and grazed our way through the day. A few grapes, some peanut butter on toast, some pistachios. It wasn’t really so great. I knew I had to come up with a better plan for dinner. While I’d gone to the store and bought milk and eggs and a head of lettuce, I hadn’t bought anything obviously delicious for dinner, like a chicken. I had this vague faith that I could make us dinner without spending any money on new ingredients.
Once home I opened the fridge and thought. There was, I knew, a Ziploc bag in the freezer that had enough dough for one pizza. If I thawed that out and figured out some toppings, that would be half the battle there. A tub of leftover red sauce from Sunday night, when I made stuffed shells? Excellent. A few ounces of mozzarella that miraculously hasn’t yet gone moldy? Great. Leftover boiled broccoli? Fabulous. I had a can of black olives and a can of chickpeas.
“OK,” I said to my daughter. “We’re going to have a broccoli, olive, and chickpea pizza, and a chickpea and macaroni salad on the side.”
“YUM!” said my daughter of infinite faith.

So dinner was thus assembled: the pizza looked great. I made up a pasta salad by taking a spoonful of pickle relish, some parsley, and some capers, and mixing them up with mayonnaise. I boiled the half pound of elbow macaroni that was sitting in a jar in the pasta cabinet (yes, I have a pasta cabinet), drained a can of chick peas, and put that all together. It smelled pretty good, even if it didn’t look particularly attractive.

I had baked, during the afternoon, a pan of what I thought would be peanut butter/chocolate marbled brownies (this done because I wanted to bake something with peanut butter, but I also wanted to use up some of the leftover chocolate babka filling that’s been taking up space in the fridge a few weeks). The pan of brownies looked great, though when we cut into it we could see that it looked more cake-like than brownie-like. My husband wasn’t too impressed. “Too dry,” he said. “It’s like a cake,” I said sadly. “But it’s ok. I’ll fix the next batch.”
Because a peanut butter/chocolate anything isn’t going to go wanting for consumers, I’m not feeling too bad about this particular flop. Our daughter thinks it’s wonderful, and she can I could easily eat the whole pan up within two days.
So the moral of the story is, once again, if you give your leftovers in the fridge some thought, or even a negligible amount of thought, you too can wind up with a meal that looks like this:

February 16, 2016 0

The Terrifying, Death-Defying Feat of Making Chicken Soup

On a date in January I will not name, I roasted a chicken for dinner. No big whoop. Came out fine. We consumed roughly half of the chicken that night, and put the rest of it, still on the bone, in a Ziploc bag, and put that in the fridge. I had this idea we’d make chicken sandwiches for lunch the next day, and then I’d use the carcass to make stock.

Not sure what happened the next day, but we didn’t make the sandwiches, and the chicken stayed in that Ziploc bag for a bit longer than I intended. Partly out of my own apathy, and partly because we got sidetracked by a vast quantity of beef shanks that overtook the fridge for a few days. It’s my fault. But after ten days, I noticed the bag of chicken and I thought, “Ok, I’ve really got to do something with that. On the other hand, it’s been ten days. Is this bird viable?”

So I opened the bag and gave it a good sniff. Everything smelled fine. I took a piece of white meat off the bird and tasted it. Tasted fine. I took the bird from the bag and began to separate off the nice meat that would look pretty in a soup. It didn’t have that slimy feel that bad meat has; everything seemed dandy. But I was worried. Was I about to unwittingly create a nice, big pot of hot poison, which I would then serve to my family as chicken soup?

To assuage my fears, I sent a message to a friend of mine who’s a former professional cook-turned-nurse. “Hey,” I said. “If, like, three days go by, and you don’t see any posts from me on Facebook, it’s cause I’m dead ’cause I made chicken soup out of a chicken that was too old.” She wrote back, “What’s going on?” I explained the situation — ten day old roasted chicken, plans to make stock — and asked, “is this just, categorically, a bad idea?” She wrote, “it’s probably going to be fine, I’d do it myself, but probably you shouldn’t do it. But go ahead.”

Maybe my mother should stop reading here. Or just skip to the last paragraph.

So I made stock. I boiled the carcass, hard, for just over ten minutes. It was in the pot with two heads of celery (see previous entry on Celery Problems, which were solved in part by putting a whole lot of celery into the freezer) and some onion and peppercorns and a lot of parsley stems and some mushroom stems…. the vegetable parings and old bits that I always bag up and throw in the freezer to use when I’m making stock. The leftover half baked potato in the fridge, that went into the pot too. I brought all of this to a vicious boil and then simmered it for a couple of hours and when it was cool enough to me to get near the pot, I dealt with it. The pile of dead veggies and bones went into the trash, and the remaining liquid was decanted into bowls and jars to cool in the fridge. I tasted it, before I put everything away, and it was fine. “All right!” I thought.

But come five o’clock last night, when it was time for me to really start making the soup, I worried. Was I really about to give everyone food poisoning? I tasted the white meat I had reserved from the morning. No, it was fine. So I filled a pot with the chicken broth, and began to slice and dice fresh things to add to the pot. One huge carrot, peeled and chopped finely; one half a red onion, peeled and chopped finely; half a bunch of parsley, well-rinsed and minced; and one leftover roast chicken breast, chopped. To be on the safe side, I brought the pot to a hard boil again, and cooked the hell out of the meat, but then I just let it simmer gently until my husband came home from work. Then I added some leftover rice (from the night before; don’t worry, it wasn’t ancient rice). Our daughter, sitting on the couch, crooned to herself “soup smells goooooooooood” while she read her Calvin & Hobbes book, and my husband said grimly, “Soup for dinner?” “And bread, too,” I said. “I bought some nice bread.”

I took a block of cream cheese out of the fridge to let it come to room temperature before dinnertime. At seven o’clock we all sat down to eat, and we consumed that entire pot of soup. There was nothing leftover. The entire loaf of bread was gone, too. I seldom don’t make enough food for dinner, but last night was one of those rare occasions; having finished everything on the table, my husband was reduced to digging around in the cabinet for something else to eat. He eventually found a bag of potato chips and polished those off.

I then spent the rest of the evening wondering, “So, is anyone going to throw up?” But no one did. And we all woke up this morning feeling fine. No one got food poisoning. But at the same time: I think I’m going to not let myself play so fast and loose with the chicken carcasses from now on. There’s a difference between being thrifty and being dangerously stupid. I walked that fine line this week, and I’m not proud of it, but I learned my lesson. From now on, my motto will be: get the meat off the bone and freeze the bones. Or else.

February 12, 2016 1

The End of the I Hate to Housekeep Book: On Hosting Parties

In my years as a mother, I have frequently turned to the I Hate to Cook Book when seeking reassurance in regard to birthday parties for small children. There are a lot of good tips and ideas in there. Not hacks, people: tips and ideas. And this chapter, Chapter 12, the final chapter of the housekeeping book, is to some degree a grownups-only rehash of a lot of the ideas in Bracken’s cookbook. She says this herself; she knows that her fans will recognize cleverness no matter how many different times it is rephrased. She knows that we know about her Hootenholler Whiskey Cake, we know about faking our way through a chicken curry dinner, we know about serving Irish Coffee for dessert. (I never DO serve Irish Coffee for dessert, but I know that in a pinch, I can do it. I mean, if I’m suddenly not in the mood to make a pear cake out of three slowly rotting pears I happen to have on the counter.)

But this chapter, in the I Hate to Housekeep Book, is important in a way that I find is seldom addressed in your Real Simple magazine articles about Getting Ready for Your Homemade Sushi Hoedown, or your Superbowl Sunday Soiree, or whatever kind of party you find yourself in the position of hosting at your house. Everyone knows that you don’t want to serve your guests a meal at a table that’s still covered with sticky spots from the time your wee angel spilled grape juice, and everyone knows that it’s sort of preferable to have the bathroom in decent shape (i.e., it shouldn’t look like you just bathed the dog in there). I like to think that, as civilized people, we keep our toilets reasonably clean, our sinks reasonably clean, and so on.

It is pleasing to have the place where the food is being presented be, well, presentable. If it’s your dining table, either wipe the sticky crud away or cover it with a tablecloth. If you’re like me, you use the kitchen counter as a staging area. We have a very long kitchen counter which serves as the “buffet” when we have parties, and I like to have that counter be a) cleared of clutter and b) wiped clean before I put platters of food out. Because it’s depressing to serve food off a dusty counter which is also home to the stacks of unpaid bills and overdue library books. Unpaid bills and library books are put into a grocery bag and shoved into a closet until the party’s over, and then it comes back out and is put back on the counter, where the stuff sits until I deal with it or until my husband gets so annoyed at my not dealing with it that he deals with it, whichever comes first.

Where Bracken really makes herself valuable is in pointing out the stuff that you’re likely to forget about. One forgettable housecleaning task that she emphasizes — by putting the whole paragraph in italics — is this: WIPE DOWN YOUR TELEPHONE BEFORE THE PARTY.

I know, you’re going, “huh?” Because some astonishing percentage of people no longer have landlines anymore. Wipe down the phone? Why would you clean your phone before a party? Well, I’ll tell you: there are still, in the 21st century, in the days of cell phones, still good reasons for you to clean your telephone before having company over. Because, even though folks have cell phones, someone might need to use your landline anyhow. Maybe their phone battery dies, and they want to call a taxi. Maybe their cell phone battery dies, and they need to call the babysitter to say they’ll be running late. These reasons, which were reasonable in Bracken’s day, remain reasonable now, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you have a cell phone: the fact is, you should still keep your landline phones clean. Because they look disgusting after a while. Spit and grease and dust and crud accumulates on telephones like you wouldn’t believe.

“But my friends would just charge their phones or borrow someone else’s cell phone,” you say. All well and good. But you know what? It is my own experience — and maybe this is just because we not only have a landline, but we have an interesting collection of old telephones here, and grownups and children both enjoy playing with them — that it is good to keep the phones cleaned, because even if they don’t need to use a phone, strictly speaking, people seem to find it fun to pick up a phone and pretend to talk into it. Which means it’s worth it to not have it be disgusting. So take a cloth you’ve dampened with a little rubbing alcohol, for god’s sake, and just wipe down the phone. Handset, dial, side, the little bits where the handset rests. Just wipe it down. Then look at the cloth, and see the schmutz on it? You can thank me later.

Bracken’s explanation of why you should clean the phone is also where we find one of my favorite bits in this entire book: “You know how often the telephone is used at a party — to check babysitters or call taxis or — depending on how good the party is — to say Hiya Booper Ole Socks to somebody’s old college chum in Akron, Ohio.”

Having recently re-read this paragraph, I’ve begun to address our cat by saying, “Hiya Booper Ole Socks.” He doesn’t react to this at all, but my daughter finds it uproariously funny.

The thing about the phone, though, reminds me of a point I’d like to make, all on my own, which I don’t think Bracken mentions anywhere, but maybe she does and I just don’t remember, which is this: while you’re busy wiping down the phones, you might want to give a swipe at things like the light switches and light switch plates in the house, and the doorknobs, and the bits of door right around the doorknobs in your house. Because those are things that get astonishingly disgusting while you’re busy leading your life. And no, you don’t think about it, precisely because you’re living your life, and what’s more, it’s YOUR filth, so you don’t really care. I get that. I would feel the same way, more or less. But when you’ve got people coming over — and maybe one or two of the guests are people who might someday be instrumental in your getting a new job, or helping you get your kid into college, or something, or, you know, maybe you just LIKE THEM AS PEOPLE AND WANT TO KNOW THEM AND BE FRIENDS WITH THEM, without any ULTERIOR MOTIVE (it could happen) — as I say, when you’ve got people coming over, it’s kind of nice to not have the people get skeeved out when they go to turn on the bathroom light.

I want to add: you don’t have to do this kind of fine-tuning to the entire house, at least, I don’t insist on it. But I will say that if the place you live in is anything like mine — say, there’s a first floor where people tend to congregate, and hardly anyone except small children (who are walking filth anyhow) will go upstairs — you want the living room, the dining room, and the guest bathroom (or the one bathroom, if you have only one) to be presentable. You want the phones in the public spaces to be not-disgusting-to-behold. It doesn’t matter if the floors are filthy, because the evening’s event will only make them filthier. You might vacuum the rug beforehand if you think people will be sitting on the carpet, but other than that, why bother? There’s no point in having your house be utterly spotless right before a party. But yes, there are certain things that should be as clean as possible. Fortunately, this isn’t hard, and it requires no fancy cleaning supplies (as we’ve already learned, almost nothing really does, no matter what Mad Ave tells you), and you, too, can host a humdinger of a party without breaking a sweat. You might break maybe a glass or two, but that happens. (And when you do, I think you can get up shards of glass by pressing slices of soft bread onto the floor, or something like that. I forget.)

February 8, 2016 0

Better-Than-Mimi’s Pear Cake

Last week I bought three pears because they smelled really good and it seemed like a good idea. I figured I could slice them up and give them to my daughter for her afternoon snacks. It turned out this was an error on my part: she would not eat the sliced pear, and the whole enterprise began to look like a bust. Saturday, it snowed like crazy, and I noticed the sad sliced pear in a little plastic tub in the fridge, and the two starting-to-look sad pears on the counter, and I thought, “I will bake a pear cake.”
Somewhere I have a recipe for a chocolate pear cake, which I know I’ve made and liked, but I couldn’t remember where it was, so I decided to be lazy and just do a Google search for a pear cake recipe that sounded plausible. The first thing I landed on was a recipe from a blog that I guess All Food People already follow, by a woman named Mimi Thorisson. Ms. Thorisson’s blog, Manger, is very elegant, just like her, and as my friend Bakerina put it, “She’s like the perfect goddess in Laurie Colwin’s chapter on Kitchen Horrors.” To use a phrase my husband employs now and then, She is the opposite of us.
But the cake recipe looked decent. So I made it, with one major alteration to the ingredients, and one total overhaul regarding cooking time, because it appears that Ms. Thorisson’s oven is some kind of magical French oven that will bake cakes in literally half the time an American oven will take to achieve the same end.

Ms. Thorisson’s recipe calls for:
3 ‘very’ ripe pears – peeled & cut into chunks
150 g/ 1 & 1/4 cup plain flour, sifted
150 g/ 3/4 cup caster sugar
1 tsp baking powder
30 g/ 1/4 cup corn flour (corn starch)
1 pinch salt
90 g/ 1/3 cup + 1 tbsp butter (slightly melted)
3 eggs
Icing sugar (to sprinkle/ decorate on cake)

The technique is simple. In a mixer, you combine the eggs and the sugar and whip them until they’re light. In a separate bowl, you’ve whisked together the other dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, cornstarch). In a small bowl, you’ve nuked your butter so that it’s just starting to melt. You add the flour mixture to the eggs, whip it to combine, and then add the butter last. It’s a little backwards seeming, compared to other cakes (where you’d normally cream the butter and sugar together and then add the eggs and then add the flour last) but whatever; it works fine. I had a feeling this cake would be too plain as is, and so I added to the flour bowl about a teaspoon of vanilla powder; I am very glad I did, because the cake wouldn’t have tasted like much without it.
Once you have your batter set up, you scrape it into a prepared cake pan (a 9″ cake pan buttered lightly and lined with a round of parchment) and lay atop the batter chunks of very soft fresh pear. (I would not recommend using canned pear with this.) Ms. Thorisson advises us to bake the cake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees; at the 30-minute mark, I decided Ms. Thorisson is on drugs, because the cake was nowhere near done. In the end, I baked the cake for just over an hour — maybe an hour and seven minutes. This is a pretty significant difference, and I don’t know how it never gets noted at Manger. (It is mentioned in one of the comments, but Ms. Thorisson hasn’t altered her instructions at all, which is not great.)
The cake that results – if you add the vanilla and bake for the proper length of time — is delicious. It is not very fancy looking, the way I made it; it could look fancier, if you made the effort to place the pears more delicately. It does get dressed up significantly if you sprinkle some powdered sugar on top of the cake, as she suggests. In fact, when I served the cake to a dinner guest, he assumed it was a store-bought cake, and was astonished that I’d made it myself.
My husband made whipped cream to serve with the cake, and this was very nice indeed; after the fact, we realized that it would have been a nice touch to whip a teaspoon or so of pear eau-de-vie in with the cream. Not enough to flavor it heavily, mind you, just enough to give the cream a touch of perfume. My daughter, who, we’ve learned, is no fan of pears, announced as she ate the cake that I had taken her least favorite fruit (who knew?) and “transformed” it into one of her top five fruits. So this was worth doing.
But bake the cake for an hour, people.
If you want to see the original recipe, and comments, please go here: http://mimithorisson.com/2012/04/24/italian-pear-cake/

or ignore the link, and know that I’ve given you everything you need to know, minus feeling guilty that you are not as perfect as Mimi Thorisson.

February 6, 2016 1

“Eye makeup always shows that you’re trying hard.”

The illustration that heads this chapter of Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Housekeep Book is one of my favorites. It captures so perfectly how so many women I know feel about their lives. They are one thing in their heads, they are another thing in terms of their activities, and their kids see some fraction of each of these things and are pretty much terrorized by the whole shebang. I am lucky in that my kid somehow grasps that I look like one or another thing, from day to day (or more than one thing, depending on what I’m wearing) and yet remain the same person, [Redacted], all the time.

I am pretty sure that part of why my daughter knows who I am so clearly is that I apparently look pretty much the same no matter what’s going on, or 99% of the time, anyhow. I have clothes — I have a lot of clothes, actually — and while some are more dressy-uppy than others, the fact is, I always look like myself, recognizably so, every day. I have relatively few modes of attire, perhaps because I do not ever go to a gym.

A friend of mine pointed out a couple years ago that I do a good job of maintaining the look that The Preppy Handbook described as “punk prep.” This is, sadly, more or less accurate. Sometimes the punk dominates slightly over the prep; sometimes the prep dominates ever so slightly. But overall, the effect is that I am recognizable as [Redacted] no matter what’s going on. The black wrap dress I wear to fancy dinners out is the same black wrap dress I wear on Mondays when the weather is nice: in each case, I accessorize it with a pair of cowboy boots. I tend to not wear the clunkier combat boots when attending a more formal event… but you never know, because with the right coat, it might look great. Details may change — earrings, lipstick. But it’s totally normal for me to take my daughter to school in the morning and have someone remark, “Don’t you look fancy! Do you have a meeting today?” and for my response to be, “No, I’ll just be going home and cleaning the bathrooms and doing laundry; it’s Monday.”

I have some rules about what I wear, and while they are flexible in some ways, they are highly inflexible in others. It comes down to this: everything I wear has to fit at least one, and preferably more than one, of my aesthetic standards. I am not interested in fashion, per se; I am interested in projecting a certain persona, and in being comfortable. If an article of clothing does not fit my sense of who I am, it doesn’t enter my closet; similarly, if it reflects the person I’d most want to be, but is hideously uncomfortable, it will not enter my closet. Furthermore, I seldom wear sneakers in public, but when I do, I will not wear sneakers that might be worn during actual athletic enterprise.
But the system I live by would not work for Peg Bracken, at least not in the time when she was writing this book. This chapter is filled with advice that strikes me as having been fundamentally sound but that was designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Or, at least, it doesn’t exist where I live. She worries for her readers about what to do with clothes that are out of fashion; she has advice about how to learn to set your own hair — this is from an era when it was normal for women to go get their hair done once a week. Maybe someone still does that, but no one I know personally. She recommends having wigs because they’re a practical solution to hair problems. Maybe they are; I don’t know. (Neither she or I are talking about wigs to be worn by people going through chemotherapy; that’s an entirely different matter. Bracken’s wig advice is for the average woman who just feels her hair doesn’t look perfect. As Johnny Slash would say: Totally different head.)

In today’s world, peoples’ (women’s) ideas about How They Must Look are so varied and faceted that Bracken’s advice tends to just confound rather than encourage. We live in a sloppy era, for one thing. For another, these days women can wear all kinds of things in public that Bracken, at the time she was writing, couldn’t have imagined would be worn by respectable people, in public, ever. I don’t just mean t-shirts that say crass things. I mean, these days, a woman can walk down the street wearing blue jeans and a pair of work boots and a leather motorcycle jacket, and be regarded as actually well-dressed. This couldn’t possibly have been the case for Peg Bracken. That woman would have been regarded as a whole lot of interesting things, but well-dressed would definitely not have been one of them. We have options that simply didn’t exist a few decades ago.

BUT: There are elements of this chapter that could definitely be reassuring to the sort of woman who doesn’t particularly like thinking about clothes, or makeup, or hair, but at the same time doesn’t want to embarrass herself horribly every time she leaves the house. The paragraphs that open this chapter — the first few pages, really — are very kind and gentle for that sort of person. It’s a better-humored version of one of those books or TV shows that advise you what you should or shouldn’t wear because you’ll look stupid or fat or old or some other bad thing. Bracken’s nicer about the whole enterprise, though, because she knows her audience is probably very easily cowed. She points out to her readers that if you’re someone who cares about clothes and how you look, you don’t need her advice: you already know what you’re about, what you want to wear, and how to do it effectively and economically. If you’re someone who doesn’t care at all, then you don’t care, and good on you. Bracken explains the truth: It’s the woman in the middle, who cares maybe a little most of the time, but who, when facing dire circumstances, will suddenly care a lot, and then be doomed to misery because she doesn’t know how to handle the situation. She’s very calm and reassuring to that in-the-middle woman. In fact, she has moments of being downright au courant, such as right here, when, having spent a few paragraphs advising her readers on how to select clothes that will make them appear slimmer, she then becomes a fat activist:

“You see, we continue to bump into a philosophic point: perhaps looking skinny isn’t the be-all and end-all. Which brings us right up to the matter of whom you’re dressing for — yourself or your audience.”

You might be dressing for both. But the odds are pretty good that if you are, you’re one of those people who cares about clothes in the first place, in which case, you’re fine, you didn’t have anything to worry about in the first place, and you can enjoy reading this chapter just for the fun of Bracken’s writing, which is as light and effective as ever.

Now I’m kind of wondering, If Peg Bracken saw me walking down the street, what would she make of my clothes? Today I’m wearing narrow jeans, a shetland wool sweater with a crew neck, and a pair of cowboy boots. Basically I look like Fran Lebowitz, ca. 1978. This is just fine with me, and if that’s not good enough, then tough.

(I bet Peg Bracken and Fran Lebowitz would have gotten a real hoot out of each other. I bet Fran Lebowitz knows the I Hate to Cook Book backwards and forwards.)

February 4, 2016 0