Winter Fare: Gophers and Stone Soup

Stones at mouth of Hurricane River

I was just kidding about the gophers. What I mean is waffles.

Warming plate while waffle iron heats

In Paris, France, waffles are street food. Hot gaufres are served up by vendors in parks who sell their food out of little carts, small mobile kitchens. Like ice cream cones, gaufres are favorite treats of small children but enjoyed by adults, also, perhaps especially by visitors from the American Midwest, to whom street food is a novelty. A favorite French waffle topping – there are many, but this was my favorite -- is almond paste, smeared on like peanut butter on crackers, then sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Out of curiosity, I checked in my French cookbook to see if it even contained a recipe for waffles. Would anyone in Paris ever make them at home? Well, there was a recipe, in fact, but in the section on cakes, on the page opposite fruit cake and jelly roll. It calls for fresh yeast rather than baking powder and also, to my surprise, includes rum, an addition that would never have occurred to me.

Last yummy bite!

For Americans at home in our own country, waffles are breakfast food, but they are a sweet treat here, too. The small, square depressions produced by the iron form a dozen or more tiny receptacles for melted butter and syrup. Jam is a delicious variant topping, and then no fork is needed. Dreaming of Paris, one can pick up a waffle section with fingers, confident of capturing every last morsel of confiture de pêches (thank you, Ed!) or, when that’s gone, good old Michigan strawberry-rhubarb jelly.

We are not talking here about an everyday breakfast, of course. Not the beginning of an ordinary workday. It’s holidays and Sundays that call out for the extra sybaritic excitement only waffles can bring to an otherwise cold, bleak winter morning.

Outdoors the temperature rests, stubbornly, well below the freezing mark, and wind blows fresh snow into blinding drifts. A frigid Sunday morning in January! What better day to stay home by the fireside with dog and books and movies?

Beautiful, beantiful beans!

More stones

Meanwhile, in the big cast iron pot that rested overnight on the cold porch is the bean soup that will be the evening’s hearty peasant supper. On Friday night, as I first covered the colorful beans with water to begin soaking, I thought again, as I have so often before, that they are as beautiful as wave-washed stones on the shores of Lake Superior. Stone soup? Why not? Dry beans lose their bright colors when cooked, but the flavors that develop are worth the trade-off.

Slow cooking. David is always encouraging me to use an electric slow cooker for dishes like bean soup or stewed chicken, but I resist. There is something about that ceramic pot and the way its unlifted lid -- one is instructed rather severely not to lift the lid during cooking! – the way, I say, that lid holds in all the dish’s moisture that, to my way of thinking, prevents precisely the rich, concentrated flavors that are my goal. -- Oh, dear, my italics are running away with me, escaping from foreign words and phrases to the equivalent of a raising of the voice! Yes, it’s true, my emotions are involved!

Where was I? Ah, yes, concentrated flavor.... And besides that, I like to lift the lid! I like to stir the contents of the pot! Stirring the pot makes me think of my grandmother at the stove, and I love remembering my grandmother! I even like to leave the lid off for periods of the cooking process as the bean liquor thickens and steam rises and an alluring aroma fills the old farmhouse. These are some of the joys of winter in Michigan: tastes and smells and leisurely activities mingled with memories.

Far from Paris, you see, I carry that city in my heart, along with the U.P. and Ohio and the Illinois prairie and the Arizona cow country and every other place I have ever lived and cooked and eaten, and in my mind’s eye I see again long-vanished scenes and am warmed by thoughts of family and friends and even strangers who shared those bygone days.

What is the point of having a day to spend at home if I am to deny myself the pleasure of stirring the pot?

Well-stirred bean soup

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.