Moving Day

This blog has now moved to The Last Jar, www.thelastjar.com. See you there!

Wealth

It's Guest Post Poet day! Charla Kramer, Chief Farmbrarian at Echo Bend farm, has graciously offered up some inspiration today. You can follow her on Facebook or Twitter (@Echobend). If you are ever in Northern Michigan you can find her farm stand just off scenic M-22, where she provides fresh vegetables, jams, and delicious homemade bread.

Wealth

Oppressive heat and glaring sun of August

Would send me creeping

Into cool, dusky depths of the basement.

Grabbing hold of the colorless thin curtain

Pulling it back, crick crick, in its ball bearing track,

To reveal cool, shining jars

Full of garden jewels.

Rubies and garnets of tomatoes,

Deep jade greens of Shellie beans,

Amethyst blueberries,

Carnelian and opalescent jams.

A wall of beautiful jars

Stretching the height and length of an entire wall,

Representing the richness that my mother created for our

family through hours in the garden and over the hot, boiling

canning pot.

I would drag my child's finger,

Thunk, thunk,

Along the rows of chilled jars,

Visions of my own stocked pantry

Of goods and memories, preserved,

In the cool heart of my own home

Just beginning to take root.

In a single jar, there, in childhood,

It began.

Kitchen Fail: Molasses Cookies

Not every cookie can be perfect

Lucie’s recipes often list “flour” with no measurements as if to say “If you know what you’re doing you should be able to figure it out”. At first this really freaked me out. After a couple of successes by adding just a cup at a time, I was comfortable with it. Maybe a little cocky.  

Then Molasses Cookies happened.

This recipe called for “enough to roll”, which meant I was to cut them out with a cookie cutter. Challenge accepted. But after four cups the so-called dough was the consistency of a mud pit. In went more flour, which merely bumped it up to spackle.

 “But it says you have to roll it out!” I whined to the voice in my head telling me to give up. If I tried to roll this monster out it would just smear like newborn baby poo on skin.

By this time I was committed. I was going to roll out this freaking dough. In the end I think I added 10 cups of flour. I’m not sure because at some point I gave up and just started pouring flour straight from the bag, muttering my disbelief.

Finally I was staring down a mountain  of taupe-colored dough that would have been better suited for a science fair project than cookies. But when I was a kid, whenever something I was learning in the kitchen didn't turn out (more than a few times), my Dad always implored my Mom and I to cook it anyway. After all, we lived just outside Cereal City, where everyone knew the story of how Dr. Kellogg’s kitchen fail led to the first ever Corn Flakes™. So I put those buggers in the oven and cooked them.

What came out was no eureka . It was edible, if a bit floury. Thankfully my kids aren’t too picky when the word “cookie” is involved,  so the flop wasn’t a total waste. Even when you aren’t perfect, someone might just appreciate it anyway.

Home from Oz

All of my chickadees are under one roof again. Two flew away for summer camp and a business trip, and to celebrate their homecoming I made the long awaited Crullers for breakfast.

Crullers are a forgotten standby of American farm life. When I first happened across the recipe in Lucie’s collection, it didn’t exactly jump out at me. But then I watched the Wizard of Oz.

In the beginning of the movie after the farmhands help Dorothy out of the pigpen, Auntie Em enters the scene with a plate of what looks like biscuits. But she calls them something else:

"Here, can't work on an empty stomach. Have some crullers. Just fried."

Which then meant that my family had to wait while I replayed the line five times to make sure I heard her right. What are the chances:  a fictional Midwestern farm wife with Crullers in a movie set in 1939, and an actual 1930’s Midwestern farm wife with a recipe for Crullers? This was a thing worth looking into.

Everywhere today, a Cruller is described as a fried doughnut with ridges and a hole in the middle. Recipes call for a thin batter that can be squeezed out of a pastry tube, sort of like a fancy funnel cake. I don’t like pastry bags. The idea of cleaning them makes me nervous. I will not be making those at home any time soon.

But what Auntie Em hands out and what Lucie’s recipe describes is a biscuit-like fried dough, a cross between a biscuit and a doughnut. A bisnut, to quote my friend Ronne. In short, a stiff dough that is rolled out, cut, and fried. The small amount of dough was easy to handle and surprisingly quick to make.

Clearly these are not the same thing.

It strikes me that something so simple has evolved into something entirely different that few people recognize. Isn’t that what we do with things though? We take something utilitarian and add to it to make it better. This is good, but sometimes we get so caught up in our own invention that at some point this basic thing changes into an unapproachable masterpiece. So we quit trying. We quit using it.

I encourage you to try these Crullers sometime soon. Because searching beyond what we know is good and necessary. We reach, learn, grow, and hopefully come away all the wiser. But sometimes, when things get too complicated, it’s good to go home again.

Recipe:

 Ingredients

1 Tbl. Sugar

3 Tbl. Buttermilk

1 egg

¼ tsp soda

¼ tsp salt

1 ½ cups flour

2 cups lard, shortening, or vegetable oil

Instructions:

Heat 2” of oil over medium heat in a deep skillet. Mix all of remaining ingredients and roll dough to ¼” thickness. Cut into 2” biscuits or 4” doughnuts.  Fry for 3 minutes on each side. Drain on paper towel. Eat while warm. 

Chocolate Chip Cookies

originally published in the Battle Creek Enquirer & News

These recipes are magic, and this one proves it. I am cursed in the chocolate chip cookie department. No matter what I’ve tried, they come out like flat, crispy pancakes. But this recipe is the first one ever to break the curse. I’m not sure why—at first glance it doesn’t look much different than any other chocolate chip cookie recipe. But tucked into the instructions it calls for dissolving the baking soda first, something I’ve never seen. Is that the trick? Or is it the all-bran? Who knows. But my family is enjoying the change.

Straight from Lucie's collection:

Photo by Arnold Gatilao

Ingredients

½ pound semi sweet chocolate*

¾ cup shortening or softened butter

¾ cup brown sugar

¾ cup granulated sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp baking soda

2 Tbs. hot water

2 ½ cups flour

¼ tsp. salt

1 tsp vanilla

½ cup chopped nutmeats

½ cup all-bran (or wheat bran)

Chop chocolate coarsely. Blend shortening and sugar well. Add eggs and beat. Dissolve soda in hot water and add to mixture. Sift flour with salt. Add flavoring, chocolate, nut meats, and all-bran. Drop on baking sheet and bake 7-10 minutes at 375°.

*Or 1½ cups chocolate chips, and omit the instructions for chopping the chocolate. Nestle didn't start selling chocolate chips until 1941.

If you try these I'd love to hear how they turn out. Now go make some magic!

The Last Jar

It’s July and we are down to our last jar of tomatoes. Woo hoo! That we have made it this far without running out is a sign that it’s been a good year. There are times when I don’t have the time or money to get more than a couple of batches finished. When that happens, every trip to my parents’ house ends with me lugging a box of quarts home from my Mom’s overflowing pantry.

I vividly remember many days sitting across from Mom while she shook the water out of a jar of tomatoes before adding them to a pan of spaghetti sauce or goulash. Draining tomatoes in the jar is an art form; you have to simultaneously block the tomatoes from falling out and keep them from trapping the water inside. She would place one hand over the mouth, one hand on the bottom, and shake it into the kitchen sink, staring in concentration out the picture window that overlooks the farm.  It’s a constant memory of my childhood.

Now that I’m on my own I stick to the basics that Mom taught me: blanch ripe tomatoes and slip off the skin, pack them tight, and use the end of a rubber spatula to get out the air pockets (the plastic doesn’t tend to pierce the tomatoes). 

But since those early days I’ve learned from other women along my way. Sue told me about putting a little diced onion, garlic, and bell pepper in each jar for an even easier way of cooking, and now I do almost all of mine this way. Meg taught me to zip them in the food processor for a smooth kid-friendly sauce.

And my repertoire has expanded beyond spaghetti and goulash. Coconut chicken curry, eggplant parmesan, pizza sauce, and a multitude of soups-- canned tomatoes are the most versatile thing in my pantry.  It’s funny the things that you can learn, how a solid foundation can lead into so many good things.

So with this last jar waiting to be enjoyed and tomato harvest only a month away, I feel like I’ve made it, at least this year. When Mom asks if I need any of hers to take home, I can stand on my own two feet and say “Thanks Mom. I have plenty.”

Strawberry Day Part 2: Kids with Knives

I thought about writing something like “10 Easy Steps to Making Jam with Young Children”, but that would be a lie. Kids cooking in the kitchen is not easy. It takes patience, and remembering your yoga breath is helpful. But if it were easy, everyone would do it. AmIright?

Nice, but not real.

If there were 10 Easy Steps, the first would be to adjust your expectations. As in, “As long as there are no trips to the ER and we don’t have to call the fire department, it’s a success.” This isn't about the perfect batch of jam, folks. It’s about the process.

The second tip, which I assure you will not show up in any Cooking for Kids! cookbook, is to keep your children up late in the nights before your day of jam-making. 

This way they are used to sleeping in. On the day of, you get up early and have your first batch of jam finished by the time they come yawning out of their bedrooms. Later, when you are getting frustrated by your lack of progress, you can remind yourself “Hey, I already have a finished batch. This is EXTRA.”

First batch-- DONE.

Also, they will see the jam when they wake up and get a taste (literally) of the fun that is about to happen. Trust me, they will want to help make more.

And be flexible. Just about the time you want to pull your hair out because of their  s l o w n e s s, they will get bored and want to go play with the dog. Let them go. You will all be glad, and your kids will come back after burning off some steam.

All joking aside, we have a steadfast No Tomfoolery rule in our kitchen. 

Hot stoves and bubbling sugar do not mix well with little faces that are at eye level with the stuff. Playing tag in the kitchen gets you kicked outside.

 For a true adventure, hand your child a big knife:

Deep breaths, Becky

 Then follow it up with something less challenging (for her and your nerves), like mashing fruit, to keep up her confidence.

And without them even knowing they are getting a science lesson, you can explain the physics behind creating a vacuum when doing this:

Not USDA approved. More on that later.

And to really make a memory out of strawberry day, nothing beats Strawberry Pie. My kids insist on it every year. The best part is that you have to do it in stages ahead of time in order for everything to cool properly. It’s the perfect kid-friendly thing to make.  And really, who needs a Cuisinart when you have small humans thrilled about pounding on plastic bags of graham crackers with wooden spoons?

The perfect end to Strawberry Day

All in all the best way to teach kids to cook is to start them young, little bits at a time. When they are very young it will slow you down (not always a bad thing, to tell the truth).

But if you’re lucky, by the time they’re 10 or so they will surprise you by actually helping, like my daughter did this year. Without being asked, she jumped right in to help jar up the last batch of jam. Her extra pair of hands surprised me and warmed my heart.

What are you favorite memories of cooking as a child?