Everyday Miracle

I baked a lot yesterday. I made these pumpkin chocolate chip mini muffins for a gathering this morning and they just turned out kind of strange. They tasted good but they were made with egg whites and yogurt (healthy, yes) but the consistency was, in Max's words, peculiar.

I set them aside and baked some cookies. I tasted them again last night and thought that if they still seemed weird this morning, I would stop on my way and buy some replacements. I was disappointed. I thought they were going to be so good.

This morning (after a well-deserved and lovely eight hours of sleep) I popped one out and tasted them again and you know what? They are good, spicy from the cinnamon, with tiny little bursts of chocolate. They transformed themselves while I was sleeping.

So let that be a lesson to you. Never give up on a project until you've slept on it. Always give whatever it is you are working on a chance to sort itself out... while you are sleeping.

Our Little Food Revolution

We recorded every episode of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution and watched them with Max. In the past few weeks we spent a lot of time talking about the food we eat and what makes a healthy diet. We have always been advocates of moderation with Max. "It's okay to have a cookie. Cookies are full of sugar and not particularly good for you, but they taste yummy. Eat your cookie - enjoy it." We talked about the importance of fresh ingredients vs. processed foods.

Max attends a public school and I think the lunches there are better than most. They offer some healthy options along with the ubiquitous pizza and chicken nuggets. There is a vegetarian option every day. Max brings his lunch from home, so I know he's getting a pretty healthy lunch. I'm still putting chips in to go with his sandwich and fruit, but I've cut the amount in half with no complaints.

The show inspired Max to enthusiastically try new ingredients and dishes. In fact, he's disappointed if he gets to the table these days and there's nothing new to try. He also decided to learn how to cook and we've been reading through piles of cookbooks together, choosing recipes to try. On Friday, he made shrimp scampi with angel hair, practically by himself. He used kitchen shears to cut the herbs and smashed the garlic with the back of a frying pan. (I am not yet ready to hand him a sharp knife.) All I did was help him find things and drain the pasta. The scampi was delicious! The following night he shadowed me in the kitchen while I tried a new curry recipe. He tasted curry for the first time and loved it. Sunday afternoon we baked a pan of brownies together and he claims they are the best he's ever tasted.

Along the way, he's learning the little lessons of the kitchen, attention, patience, persistence, stamina.

The show sparked some questions I did not expect. Questions like this: can one person make a difference in the world? Why do people choose to be negative? Why are we afraid of change? Heady conversations to have with a nine year old - I know I will never forget them.

Thank you, Jamie.

Bread

I have been baking bread for years and I am pretty good at it. Even when a loaf comes out looking funny, it usually tastes good. ( This is my own personal baking curse. Things that I bake taste delicious but they often look like crap.)

My first foray into baking was brought on by a vegetarian I was dating who pressed Laurel's Kitchen into my hands with a fervor that should have sent me running right then and there. The loaves I produced from the Laurel's Kitchen recipe could very well have doubled as bricks. Really, I could have built a house out of them, a sturdy house. They were dense, heavy as a door stop and virtually inedible. I sawed through a loaf or two and was so demoralized, I gave up, dumped the vegetarian and made friends with the guy at the bakery.

Enter Frank. He gave me a copy of The Tassajara Bread Book early on in our relationship. The bread baker in me was completely reborn. I baked bread for anyone who would take a loaf and it was very good bread.

So it was these two books that shaped my ideas of bread-baking and over the years I've cobbled together a pretty successful way to do it. I've learned what I can disregard in a recipe and what I can't, when it is okay to throw in a half cup of leftover mashed potatoes or a little bit of cornmeal for crunch.

I have used bread machines. We would never have had bread when Max was a baby if I hadn't. I own a perfectly fine one right now. They can create a loaf that's tasty, serviceable but bread machines cannot create a proper crust.

All this brings me to Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day: The Discovery that Revolutionizes Home Baking. I mixed up some dough using their rather unorthodox protocol of very little mixing, no kneading, only one preliminary rise and then the dough goes into the fridge. I've taken chunks of dough out to bake on two separate occasions and the bread was fantastic! The book claims that the dough takes on a bit of a sourdoughish tang and I didn't believe that for a minute, but it is really true. The bread has a beautiful chewy crumb with a crisp crust that looked as good as it tasted. I've only tried the basic boule recipe but I can't wait to try some others.

I'm sorry I don't have a photo for you – and I'd love to say oh, we ate the bread up so quickly I didn't have time to get a shot but alas, I did have a great shot that disappeared this morning in an ill begotten attempt at cleaning up my desktop.

Pie

We're getting ready...

Food and Childhood

My early childhood was spent in the Deep East Texas backwoods, in a farmhouse we shared with my great grandmother. My mother took care of my "Grandma" who was very old with long white hair and skin like tracing paper. I remember distinctly her small, green bottle of smelling salts. I also remember the kitchen, my mother and Aunt Willie (who was a true saint and is a story for another day) cooking together.

We had cattle so there was almost always beef, fried chicken and cornbread and big pots of collard greens. I remember shucking corn by the basket and shelling black eyed peas by the bushel. There was a lot of salty, a lot of fried. The women in the kitchen were the emotional constant in my chaotic and sometimes violent little world. Is it any wonder I grew up to love cooking and being in the kitchen?

The cooking of my childhood followed my family out of the Texas backwoods and into the cities where I grew up. I was well into high school before I tasted whole wheat bread. I knew nothing but well-done steak until I went away to college. I didn't have a bagel until my twenties.

Although my ideas about food have changed radically since I grew up, I still crave the comfort foods of my youth. If I have a really bad day, I am much more likely to reach for something fried and salty (oh, my mother's homemade french fries!) than ice cream.

The lesson I carried with me from that old steamy kitchen is this: no matter what you cook, cook it with love. With love even the worst cooking disasters can be salvaged or you can always, lovingly, order a pizza.

Thanks, Mrs. G., for giving me the idea.

The Great Grocery Experiment

I am always looking for ways to save money on groceries. Recently I read an article that suggested, if you normally shop once a week, to shop for two weeks at a time. Suggesting that you would not just spend twice as much, you would save some money. This requires pretty serious meal planning and that is not one of my favorite things to do. But I sat down yesterday, planned two weeks worth of dinners and set off to the store this morning with a long list and more than a little skepticism.

I think I did spend a little less, but there are some major drawbacks to this plan. First, two weeks worth of groceries (at least for my little family) is a lot. There was a lot of stacking and rearranging necessary to fit everything in the cart and it was heavy. The grocery checkers may look at you like you're nuts. It was also a giant pain in the lower back to haul all those groceries from the car into the house. I put things away and now the fridge is quite full and the freezer too. The only thing I should have to buy for the next two weeks is milk.

Now I know, that just physically staying out of the grocery store will save me money. I like the idea of not having "grocery shopping" on my to do list for such a long chunk of days, and there's something really satisfying about knowing the pantry's full. It also feels pretty good to have made the "what's for dinner" decisions for awhile - no more 4pm hand-wringing.

So now the question is, can I really do it? Can I stick to my meal plans and stay out of the store for two weeks? I'll keep you posted.

What Did You Have for Dinner Tonight?

I made chicken and dumplings for dinner tonight. This is a much loved meal from my childhood, and I guess it betrays my deeply southern roots. For years, I didn't make chicken and dumplings but would request it of my mom whenever I was at her house or she was at mine. She would always happily oblige and no matter how adept I get at the recipe, hers are always better than mine.

Around the time The Kid was born I started making them myself, once a year, around or on my birthday. Only once a year because while my beloved husband will patiently watch me cook green beans to death and does not cringe at my little container of bacon grease in the fridge, he just couldn't get very excited about chicken and dumplings. He ate it, often enthusiastically, but it was far from his favorite meal. I figured once a year I could indulge myself with this odd southern dish.

A few years ago, we were living in Ohio and Lefty and The Kid had taken me out to lunch for my birthday. It was snowing pretty hard but we were cash-strapped and the birthday lunch was the only real celebration of the day and Lefty insisted. We would be fine. We had a four wheel drive truck. On the way home from my lunch, a car passing us hit a patch of ice, spun out of control and hit us head on. We were all thankfully okay. The truck was totaled and when we finally got back home, battered and bruised and probably deeply in shock, I made chicken and dumplings - because it was my birthday.

A year ago, though, the chicken and dumplings factor shifted in our little house when The Kid suddenly expressed great enthusiasm for the dish and begged me to make it more often. So when my mom visited in October, I had her watch me and walk me through the entire process. I was making some serious miscalculations with the chicken and was cheating a bit in the dough by adding more milk. I was definitely not rolling my dumplings out thin enough. The batch that was a result of her master class was by far the best I ever made. I was so proud.

So I made chicken and dumplings tonight because my birthday is this month and The Kid's just passed and I had plenty of time to lavish on the process. Along the way I thought of my mom and her seemingly infinite patience with me, even now that I'm a parent myself. I though of that pot of Ohio dumplings made squarely in the face of adversity and fear. Today, when it was time to put the dumplings in, The Kid helped me throw them in, laughing as he tossed some in the pot, some on the stove, a few on the counter, one on the floor and one into the coffeemaker. I can't wait to teach him the recipe.

What Will He Eat?

The Kid has started "grading" my cooking. When we sit down to dinner at night he grades each individual item on his plate, but his grading system is completely arbitrary. For a while it was an odd set of letters like D being the best and K being the worst. Now (since he's recently fallen madly in love with math) he uses a crazy number system with scores like 35 out of 92. The carrots last night were 15 out of 92. He is not a fan of cooked carrots.

He's not a fan of much on the dinner table these days. He used to eat a crazy variety of things including vegetables that made my little heart swell with pride, asparagus and spinach. But since he started first grade, things have been dropping one by one off the WILL EAT list. For the first time since he was a baby, I find myself really scrambling to get things onto the table that he'll eat.

This weekend we spent sometime discussing Christmas dinner. Since it is just the three of us this year, we can have anything we want and after The Kid denounced every single traditional Christmas dinner idea we came up with I just had enough. I threw in the towel – at least the "trying to please this kid" towel.

I told Lefty that we would make a yummy Christmas dinner. We would be sure to include something The Kid likes, and he could fill up on that if he wanted. This was definitely the way I initially approached dinner with The Kid but as he gotten older, I've found myself cajoling him more and more at the table. No More! I am changing my supper-making ways.