Twists on Tradition

On the eve of Thanksgiving or Christmas, I like a simple supper like oyster stew or clam chowder – not a fast, certainly, but a meatless restraint that will be thrown to the winds on the following day.  And then there are the cranberries: my husband likes them raw and chopped up with oranges, orange juice, and orange peel, while I confess I love a sweet, cooked, jellied sauce. We did not exactly break with our traditions this year, but I did put a few twists on them, and we were both pleased with the results. 

 

The first twist was the Christmas Eve soup. Rather than any kind of New England seafood meal, I went out on a cultural limb to make Spiced Chickpea Stew with Coconut and Turmeric, as featured in the New York Times on November 28, 2018. The recipe was one I’d found appealing enough to save for over two years before trying it. Chickpeas are crisped in a pan that holds garlic, onions, and ginger already cooked in olive oil until translucent and enhanced with turmeric, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper. 

To the chickpeas is added coconut milk and vegetable or chicken stock (in my kitchen on Thursday, the latter was the chicken Better Than Bouillon) and then begins a long, slow simmer, with greens added late in the game. My last-minute inspiration was to add cubed tofu, also. It worked! A good cheese and some hearty crackers are all that’s needed to make this rich, creamy, mouth-watering soup a satisfying and yet modest Christmas Eve supper, and that was good because I had other things to do on Christmas Eve. I’d been hampered by migraine the whole day before, unable to get an earlier start, and didn’t feel quite out of the woods yet, so I was working slowly, with frequent stops for rest.

The cranberries! Again, it was a recipe published years before, this one in the Thanksgiving issue of Bon Appétit, November 2017. The cranberries in this recipe were raw (a nod to husband’s preference), but no fruit was involved. Instead of oranges, walnuts were the complement, and the remaining ingredients were mustard seeds, shallot, chile (omitted), dried currants (raisins substituted), maple syrup, sherry or red wine vinegar (Balsamic vinegar substituted), allspice, and salt. Fresh parsley was to be added for serving, but He-Who-Prefers-Cranberries-Raw is not a big parsley fan, so that was left out, too. What would the single important reviewer say to the result? I got the cranberry-walnut relish done the night before our holiday dinner.

Christmas morning, after a big holiday breakfast was out of the way, there were two major kitchen jobs to be undertaken: homemade noodles and an experimental pear chutney. I’ve made noodles many times before but would be winging it this time around with the chutney. Fortunately, after looking at several recipes involving much more fruit than I had on hand (or even would have wanted at the time), I managed to reduce the various recipes to a simple formula 3:1:1. That is fruit:vinegar:sugar. My fruit was cubed fresh pears and a much smaller amount of raisins. Apple cider vinegar and a mix of granulated and brown sugar then completed the formula, with only spices left to add. A real chef, I’m sure, would not have used allspice and red pepper flakes in two recipes for the same meal, but I did, and I also repeated chopping shallots to simmer with the fruit. 

The rule for a chutney is that it’s done when you can drag a spoon through it and have a path remaining.

Choosing a pork roast instead of beef or turkey was another twist on tradition but one I knew would meet with approval in our household.

The menu, then, for Christmas dinner was as follows:

 

Pork roast

Pear chutney

Homemade noodles with mushroom gravy

Brussels sprouts with sauteed, sliced almonds

Cranberry-walnut relish

 

I’m happy to report that the dinner was a complete success, although it’s good we were alone, because the roast took much more than the 2 hours, 40 minutes I’d worked out from The Joy of Cooking. Advice to cook: Even without a meat thermometer, you don’t even have to stab the roast to see if the juices are still running red or pink if no drippings have yet run into the pan beneath the rack. No drippings means you’ve got a long way to go. So take that pasta water off the boil, and hold off on cooking your vegetable. It will be worth the wait.

Kitchen Memories and a New Specialty From the Oven

Winter arrives, and the kitchen beckons. Holidays approach, upping the ante. Holidays increase both a slightly anxious pressure and the happy or bittersweet weight of memories. The other morning, the first text of the day from the younger of my two younger sisters was this: “It’s been three months, sisters.” Three months since our mother died, that is. That loss, still sharp, is now accompanied for us by all our family memories of holiday kitchen projects: cookies we helped make and decorate from the time we were little girls; our mother’s amazing marzipan; her special coffee cakes; those intricate, magical sugar cube houses that sat on the sideboard, nested in a bed of cotton “snow” and surrounded by candles in the shape of pine trees; her inimitable peanut brittle; and so much more. I get out her old, old cookbook and turn the pages, where the most meaningful recipes to me are not those cut from magazines and taped in but the ones she copied out in here own hand. Handwriting on paper! How could anything “digital” hold so much of a person’s essence?

My only actual baking this year, however, came from a recipe on the inside of a box as, for only the second time, I set out to make peanut butter cheesecake brownies. On the first trial, a few months back, I had baked the brownies in muffin tins and was happy enough with the results that I wanted to experiment further in that direction. Hence the mini-muffin tins, with individual cups the perfect size to duplicate bite-sized cheesecake brownie treats (well, more like three bites each) that I’d discovered in a grocery store bakery in the Southwest.

(Measuring spoons for scale)

The recipe on the box was clearly written for people in a hurry, because it told me to melt the chocolate and butter in a microwave oven. Call me old-fashioned (you won’t be the first), but I prefer to use a double boiler, especially with the other changes I was making to the process. While chocolate and butter were melting, you see, I had time to grease my muffin tins. Of course, the recipe people had not foreseen the use of muffin tins so cannot be faulted, I suppose, for trying to rush the process. 

*** Excuse me, though, because here I have a thought that is a complete digression from memories and brownies but important enough that I want to interrupt myself to get it in. All these “quick” recipes that call for “instant” mashed potatoes and “instant” oatmeal? Please, please, please don’t do that! You might as well just sit down and eat a bowl of sugar! You think “it’s good for them in a casserole or a cookie”? No, not that pre-digested stuff: it leaves your digestive system nothing to do and does nothing for you but prime your system for more sugar. End of lecture. ***

Baker’s Chocolate instructions were at first somewhat confusing to me when it came to the eggs. They called for five eggs, “divided.” I never heard of “divided” eggs. Did they mean separated? Well, clearly not, because further along the eggs, not egg yolks and egg whites, were to be added — but not all at once to the same bowl. What the recipe had intended to forecast was that four eggs would be added to the chocolate mixture and one to the cream cheese and peanut butter mixture. Okay, that's settled!

Then there was the matter of swirling the peanut butter and cream cheese and sugar mixture (2-1/2 cups of sugar were also “divided,” 2 cups going into the chocolate/butter mix and 1/2 cup into peanut butter and cream cheese) into the chocolate mixture that also had flour added last. In a pan, swirling can be done with a knife, but in the tiny muffin tins only a toothpick would do the job. 

Do they look messy in the pans? I had moments of doubt at this stage.

Time in the oven for the different variations had to be adjusted by guess and by gosh, since brownies in the large muffin tin did not need to bake as long as those in a traditional cake pan, and those in the mini-muffin tins baked fastest of all. A watchful eye, initial short baking period, and an additional five minutes here and there seemed the recipe for success. It would depend on your ovens and your pans. 

In the end, all variations produced acceptable results, and though my mother never used this basic recipe, as far as I can recall, I could easily imagine her sitting at the table nearby, following the entire procedure, getting up to examine the brownies as they came out of the oven, and eventually giving them the taste test and pronouncing them “Very good, sweetheart!” 

My sisters and I returned to our morning text-fest, remembering a year when our grandmother was with us for the holidays and we had an old-fashioned taffy pull in my mother’s little kitchen. Small, that is, but not as small as the one I call my “Paris” kitchen. Still, my mother’s kitchen was probably good training for not letting lack of space get in the way of cooking and baking. 

My mother and grandmother are with me still when baking season comes around, as they are with my sisters, and we are fortunate to have memories to share.

Chestnuts Won't Be Rushed

It isn't home without a little clutter

The Artist and I no longer travel on holidays, not wanting to chance heavy traffic and possibly treacherous driving conditions. My son and a couple old friends were with us for Thanksgiving, which was very pleasant, but December brought winter in full strength, and all I wanted for Christmas Eve and Day was time at home in front of the fire. So after our holiday breakfast of waffles, and after I’d treated Sarah to a morning holiday bath (“Some treat!” she seemed to say with her eyes) and settled her in front of the fire with a good, fresh beef bone, and after I’d made the cranberry-orange relish and stashed it in the fridge for later, I settled down to work with chestnuts.

If there is a faster way to prepare fresh chestnuts for soup or purée, I don’t want to know about it. The slow, repetitious cutting with a knife of that little x on each nut, very carefully, one at a time, and then moving them, again one at a time, from the waiting bowl to the x’d bowl, ready for roasting, can be either meditative or sociable, depending on what’s going on in the cook’s immediate surroundings. In my case, on Christmas Eve, I was very aware of the Artist cheerfully working away in the bathroom to replace a faucet washer (he was wonderfully good-natured about it!) and our dog lying contentedly on a towel in front of the fire with her bone. I felt surrounded by and filled with love and contentment. Who would want to rush on from such a feeling?

While chestnuts are roasting in the oven, and afterward, while they’re cooling, the cook is free to do something else for a while -- and if it’s a holiday, and the rest of the family doesn’t need her attention or assistance, she may just pick up a book and read! Because, just as there was no rushing the preparation for the oven, so there is no rushing the roasting or cooling processes, either. It takes the time it takes, that’s all.

Peeling can be a little messy, but it can be done sitting at the table, and again there is no hurry involved. It’s interesting to see variations in color as roasted chestnuts emerge from their shells. Some are like ivory, veined with brown, others darker all over as if by a deep stain. The nuts are buttery soft, even before boiling.

Looks like a squirrel has been at work here

Finally, as the nuts simmer in chicken broth (simmering almost always gentler for anything than boiling, unless “a full rolling boil” is explicitly called for), the water gradually turns a soft brown, almost a cocoa color, and this will be the color of the eventual soup or puree, lightened with the addition of cream.

Somehow I neglected to photograph the final chestnut product in white china bowls. Instead we move from empty bowls to main dish prep to plated shrimp and sesame noodles. The important thing is that it all came together as planned, despite the leisurely pace of the day, and that made it an ideal holiday for the cook.

Thirty Years Ago Today

Thirty years ago this morning I awoke in Paris to the sounds of cooing pigeons and the voices of Frenchwomen at their morning household chores coming through tall bedroom courtyard windows. On the nightstand beside my bed was a pot of lilies-of-the-valley. I had arrived at midnight the night before, exhausted after two nights without sleep, a transatlantic flight, hours crouched on the floor of the railroad station in Luxembourg (waiting room with benches only for first-class passengers), a train ride made mostly on my feet (I had a ticket but not a seat reservation), and, after a confusing taxi ride in the dark, a climb with heavy bag to the third floor of 39 rue Vaugirard, where I found a note on the door telling me that Mme. Pillet was downstairs at a friend’s apartment. Down I trudged to find her. Back up again. Did I want something to eat? Wasn’t I hungry? No, I needed to fall into bed as quickly as possible before I keeled over onto the floor!

In the morning I woke refreshed. It was a sunny morning. The soft pigeon sounds, the flute-y women’s voices, the sweet chink of spoons against china cups—purling, murmuring--seemed too beautiful to be real.

Hélène made coffee for me that first morning but warned me she would not do so regularly. She did, however, as she realized I would not be a slovenly renter, extend to me kitchen privileges not accorded to all who stayed in the room, and by the end of the month, when it came time for me to leave, we were close friends.

Being there. Nothing at all like looking at pictures or watching a movie or reading a book or imagining! The ancient city filled with lilies-of-the-valley, pots and bouquets and corsages of them everywhere. The Seine sparkling in the sun.

And so on May Day I remember that morning 30 years ago. A day to celebrate friendship, a holiday from work. For me, a dream come true that lives on, cherished, in memory.

A New Year 1, 2, 3

A small kitchen is necessarily kept simple. There is no room for a dishwasher, for instance, and nowhere to stack all the bowls and utensils for one big wash-up later on. Instead the cook is motivated to keep dishes washed up, a few at a time, by hand, during the food preparation and cooking process. Washing dishes by hand can be meditative. For me it’s often time to begin planning out a blog post, writing and rewriting in my head before sitting down to look at words in sentences.

Limited counter and storage space keep electric appliances to a minimum. Having dishcloths, towels, spices, and utensils close at hand is a higher priority, and often, from years of simple habits, I reach automatically for a hand whisk rather than hunt up the electric mixer.

But there is no substitute for a waffle iron.

My mother, my earliest teacher of kitchen wisdom, knows this well, and it was she who gave me my waffle iron. Most of the time, it’s hidden away in the back of a cupboard, but a couple times a year, on special occasions, out it comes, and New Year’s Day morning was one of those special occasions. A holiday, of course, meant a relaxed morning at home, but besides that, I’d fallen behind in my bread baking over a stretch of unusual holiday scheduling at the bookstore. No eggs without toast for David! But he loves waffles.

For some home cooks, simplicity means mixes and frozen entrees. For me it usually means cooking slowly, from scratch, with fresh and organic ingredients, but I have to admit that on New Year’s Day I had a box of pancake mix in my cupboard -- pancake mix, not pancake and waffle mix, though. So out came my oldest and most trusted cookbook, because I was going to be improvising and needed to check several recipes, both for pancakes and for waffles, to see what I would need to add to the mix. And if not for that need to improvise, I would never be writing about my New Year’s Day waffles at all. From a mix? Please!

The most basic difference between pancakes and waffles is that the eggs are separated in the making of waffles, the egg whites beaten stiff and gently folded into the other ingredients at the very end. A bit of shortening is also called for in waffle batter. So I melted a couple tablespoons of butter and separated three eggs (I was flying by the seat of my pants, but two just didn’t feel like enough), and also substituted whole milk for the water called for on the pancake mix box. It all seemed reasonable, but would it work?

The moment of truth is opening the waffle iron to take out the first waffle. It is an anxious moment! Will the hoped-for waffle stick to the iron? Will it tear apart? Or will it retain its integrity but be disappointing in texture or taste?

Practically perfect! The kitchen new year is off to a good start!

Number 2 kitchen project of the day was hoppin’ john. Good ham, chopped finely, cooked up with chopped onions. (How can any dish fail when it begins with an onion?) Chicken broth from the freezer. White and wild rice. Organic (yes, canned) black-eyed peas from a company right here in Leelanau Township.

Black-eyed peas always make me think of my mother’s stepfather, who grew up in northern Florida. Wild rice carries my mind up to the Upper Peninsula, the birthplace also of the maple syrup on the morning’s waffles, gift of a writer friend. And of course I’d already been thinking of my mother, who gave me the waffle iron. So you can see, what with all those memories, it was pretty crowded in my tiny kitchen on New Year’s morning. Fragrant, too.

We were invited to a neighborhood party in the late afternoon, inspiring me to undertake NYD kitchen project #3, sour cream pumpkin cake, made entirely from scratch, with no canned ingredients or mixes. I had frozen the excess cooked, mashed pumpkin from my Thanksgiving Day pie and had everything else in the refrigerator or cupboards.

I rarely bake cakes. Pies, yes. Cakes, seldom. Consequently, every cake project is a learning experience for me, and one lesson I learned the last time around was that mixing cake batter by hand with a whisk or wooden spoon is more than I can successfully manage. My arm would fall out of its socket before the batter achieved desired smoothness, the necessary prelude to a light finished cake. 

Out came that electric hand mixer, after all. Oh, my god, the roar! I felt as if I were standing on a helicopter pad, in a war zone, surrounded by menacing airborne machines! The front of the mixer even looks menacing, doesn’t it? 

But the batter grew smoother by the minute.

I love the moment, not captured here on camera, where cake batter is poured into a pan, falling from bowl to pan in a series of graceful folds. That is a moment of grace, full of promise. And then the pan goes into the oven. A twist of the timer. (Simple, in the Paris kitchen!) [photo of timer] And gradually a spicy aroma emanates from the tiny kitchen and fills the old farmhouse. Waiting, writing....

The toothpick (test for doneness) comes out clean. The cake smells delicious. It looks a bit pale and plain, but I don’t feel like making streusel topping. Perhaps a dusting of brown sugar? Or cinnamon sugar? Let is cool and sift on powdered sugar? How about sifted powder sugar and cinnamon. I think I’ll go that last route.

Well, it’s been a good morning in the kitchen. Now it’s early afternoon and time for tea.

Postscript: Was that cake not strangely pale? Oddly flat? When it was cut into at the party (luckily, I had also taken my hoppin’ john), the peculiar texture was not at all what I’d hoped or expected. People liked it anyway, most for being “not too sweet.” But what went wrong? Baking powder too old? Around 5 a.m. the answer came to me. I remembered photographs, in that oldest of my cookbooks, of popovers at different oven temperatures. I must have bumped into the dial on one of my passes through the doorway. Oven temperature too low would give exactly the result I got.

Which goes to show that no kitchen is so small that it will not yield failures as well as successes. In that the kitchen is a microcosm of life. And in the kitchen, as in life beyond it, failure usually has something to teach. Good reminder for the first day of a new year, which will no doubt bring new challenges on many fronts.