Tag Archives: Baking

Breakfast for Messiaen’s Nephew

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Him | Leave a comment

Painted in Waterlogue

I had a summer job in a church a long time ago where the pastor had apparently been burned by bad improvisers. “I don’t care what you play,” he said, “but you have to have music in front of you.” I knew he didn’t quite mean that; he would most assuredly have been unhappy with “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” as an offertory. I agreed to do as he wished, though I thought it was a pretty ridiculous restriction. One day, feeling a little cranky about it, I finished the communion hymn and saw that there were still people processing to the altar. I turned the book upside down and, reading the music as if it had been intended that way, slowly and carefully played the same hymn upside down and backwards.

She came into the kitchen this morning and found a Mason jar of soup, containers of grapes and pretzels, a hard-boiled egg, and her travel mug filled with tea. “Wow, this looks amazing!” she said. “And you don’t know the half of it,” I replied. I gestured to a baking rack on which four chocolate croissants were cooling.

“You…made…chocolate…croissants?!”

“Well, when a guy can’t sleep he has to do something…”

Then I fessed up. I’d slept pretty well. I woke up once, checked on the cat, and wondered if it was time to put the croissants in the oven. The cat was fine; at 4:00 AM, it wasn’t baking time, so I went back to sleep.

“But you baked them.”

Yes. While I was baking cornbread to go with last night’s chili, I opened a package I’d bought at a national market and set some frozen croissants out to rise overnight. I set the oven to start pre-heating 20 minutes before I came downstairs. The croissants looked awful last night: pasty white folds of frozen dough, like sloppily folded comforters for a dollhouse. Overnight they’d risen beautifully. I brushed them with a little egg-wash, and baked them while I finished breakfast-and-lunch prep and she got ready for work. It was astonishingly simple.

Out of the oven, they looked exactly like I’d hoped they would: beautiful golden brown pain au chocolat. When it was cool enough to handle, I put one in a paper-towel-padded container and asked her to leave the lid off until just getting on the train. (Personally, I wouldn’t have had the willpower to refrain from eating it on the way, but she’s very disciplined. Also, she hates getting crumbs on her clothes.)

One chocolate piece had fallen out of a croissant on the parchment that lined the baking sheet. I tasted it. “Hm. Sweeter than I remember, but still good.”

My memory was of the pain au chocolat I’d had on my trip to France. The chocolate inside the croissants there was fabulously bittersweet. This chip was better than Hershey’s, but that’s not saying much. The ones she’d had on a trip to London probably weren’t authentically French either, but she said these looked just as good.

Croissant, safely arrived at the office.

There was respectful silence after I finished the hymn-in-retrograde-inversion. The priest stood for the post-communion prayer, looked up to the choir loft, and called my name.

I am so busted, I thought.

“Was that one of yours?” (He knew I’m a composer.)

“Well…it was an arrangement.” I said meekly.

He loosed a contented sigh and smiled at the congregation as if his summer-substitute organist was the grand-nephew of Olivier Messiaen. “Just like Paris, France.”

My croissant was assez bon. The chocolate was sweeter than I’d like, but the pastry was flaky and light-as-air. It wasn’t as good as if I strolled to the patisserie on the corner, but we didn’t have to take a transatlantic flight. Even Messiaen’s nephew couldn’t argue with that.

Painted in Waterlogue

Know-How

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Him | Leave a comment

I don’t know when it became clear to my father that I was going to be a musician, but when it did, he gave up any thought of my taking over his garage door business. Some of their parts, and the tools used to install and service garage doors and openers, are dangerous if an accident happens. Dad didn’t want to risk my losing the ability to play while I was learning a trade, so he simply never invited me to go with him on a service call again.

I barely noticed. I wasn’t drawn to his business. I enjoyed being with my dad, but I didn’t especially like being in other people’s dirty garages or handling the heavy tools, door parts, and hardware. It wasn’t until long after his passing that my mother told me about that decision. Dad knew how to do things, and how not to press an issue.

My hands were safe from the big stuff, but there was a lot Dad didn’t have the chance to teach me. He instilled in me a respect for electricity, and I knew abstractly how to use a hammer and screwdriver, but the rest I’ve had to pick up on my own. I don’t want to install my own garage door, but I’d like to rewire a light switch or a door bell, or maybe repair a leaky faucet. Do-it-yourself manuals and YouTube videos have been my friend.

We’ve hired a contractor to do most of the work of getting the Country House ready for the market, but I’ve tried to do small things on my own. The light switches are pristine white to match the pretty walls. New smoke detectors are mounted and hard-wired into the house’s system.

The glowing green LED was the most beautiful sight I’d seen in ages; and, although the cat who’d been sleeping nearby disagreed, the sound of the alarm when I pressed the Test button seemed sweeter than children’s laughter.

I’d like to think Dad would be pleased, even if he would also have been amused at my floundering. If he would have been frustrated by what he didn’t get to teach me, I’ve been at least as frustrated at what I didn’t learn.

There’s a faucet I want to replace, but I simply can’t get the old one out. Maybe it’s a question of strength or leverage, or maybe there’s something I just don’t know. Same with some electrical outlets that are supposed to be controlled by a wall switch. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but the switch is, literally, out of the loop. One of the lessons Dad didn’t get to teach me was lessons was probably When to Call a Professional.

I re-tightened the old faucet’s supply lines. I put covers on the outlets to protect them and turned turned the power back on. I baked a loaf of bread, and a batch of brownies for her birthday celebration. I’ll spend the rest of the day teaching children to sing, writing a choral piece, and conducting a performance of a musical. There are things I know how to do that my dad didn’t. I try not to beat myself up about the things I don’t.

That might be the most important lesson of all.

The marshmallow peeps melted beautifully, but didn’t brown as much as I’d hoped. Still, they are tasty brownies.

How Firm a Foundation

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Him | 1 comment

A slushy, messy snowstorm began just as it was time to head out for Sunday afternoon errands. March was arriving like a very frosty lion. Still, we made all the stops we needed: groceries, pet supplies, and a new sink for the powder room were acquired without incident. In fact, our trusty Prius fared better than many all-wheel drive vehicles we saw sliding around.

Home and safe, unloaded, we set to work.

She stirred together a marinade of soy, Worcestershire, garlic, and spices in which a small London Broil was bathed.

I chopped aromatics while she browned some sausage; then the vegetables sautéed in the drippings. She added beef stock, water, and a simple-and-tasty red wine, red lentils, shaved carrots, and probably a spice or four. The whole lot simmered, then chopped kale was added. Half an hour later, she asked how it looked. I fought off the urge to stop what I was doing and eat the entire pot.

I’m not sure which spices or herbs she’d added to the soup, because I had moved onto my next project. Strawberries had been on sale, but in a larger container than we usually buy. “Well, you could make shortcake for dessert,” she said. She may have been kidding, but I thought it was a good idea. Besides, there was a little cream left in the fridge, and there is a new immersion blender. Whipping the cream was a snap. I added a little powdered sugar and a drop of vanilla to the whole batch, served a bit of it sprinkled with cocoa powder as a treat for her, and stowed the rest in the fridge.

I made a batch of biscuit dough, dividing it in half and adding a little sugar to one portion. I was improvising, here, because I had forgotten that the actual shortcake recipe is slightly different than the one for biscuits. I patted out each section of dough and used different sized cutters to differentiate the ones for shortcake from the unsweetened biscuits. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to make a breakfast sandwich on a sweetened biscuit, but the first bite might be a little strange. Both sets came out well, though a little darker than I’d intended, due to an oven-timer-setting error.

She scrubbed and roughly chopped some potatoes and set them to boil. When they were tender, she drained the pot, added butter and sour creme, and “smashed” them with a potato masher.

“Should I do the lamb now?” she asked.

Ground lamb, cooked in a tiny amount of oil and spiced heavily with cinnamon, cumin, coriander, black pepper, and paprika, will be topped with toasted pine nuts and accompany a batch of hummus made from the chick peas that spent hours in slow cooker. Scooped with bits of pita or crackers or really good toast, it’s one of our favorite Middle Eastern dishes.

I said she should go ahead. The kitchen was so fragrant by this point that one more batch of something wouldn’t make me any more likely to swoon than I already was. Besides, I was pretty sure that once we cooked the steak, the day’s cooking events would be all over. Better to delay gratification a little and finish our homework.

She cooked and drained the lamb, and set it aside to cool, but we decided to make the hummus another day. She went off to fold a load of laundry while I turned my attention to tonight’s dinner.

I heated the cast-iron skillet, adjusted the temperature of the still-warm oven to 325F, and removed the steak from its marinade. It wasn’t a huge steak, but it was too long to fit in the skillet. She cut it in half using the chef’s knife she was still holding after washing; she washed the knife again–probably the sixth or seventh time it had been washed during the afternoon–then dried it and finally put it away. I seared the steak on both sides, then slid the skillet into the oven and set the timer for 15 minutes. And checked to be sure I had set it correctly.

While she folded a load of laundry, I got the chef’s knife again to trim a bunch of asparagus–then washed and dried it and put it away again again. The asparagus was wrapped, burrito-style, in a moist paper towel, and microwaved for a minute. We reserved a quarter-cup of the marinade when putting the steak in the rest of it; this reserved portion went into a skillet to reduce and be fortified with a bit of butter. While the sauce-to-be did its thing, I washed, hulled, and sliced some strawberries–using a paring knife for a change–and sprinkled them with a little sugar and a few drops of balsamic vinegar.

Halving the steak had a side benefit: I could cook the halves to different temperatures. The rare side came out and was tented with foil to rest while the rest stayed in the oven for another few minutes. When the second half came out and began its rest, I stirred the pan juices from the steak into the sauce, wiped the skillet and used it to slightly brown the par-cooked asparagus.

It was, at long last, dinner time, and the first time either of us sat down in many hours. We had juicy, spicy sliced steak, a mound of smashed potatoes, a lineup of intensely green asparagus spears. And the makings for lunches and quick dinners for days to come.

We enjoyed a little Sunday evening television, pausing during what would have been a commercial break save that we watched streaming video rather than broadcast TV for dessert assembly and kitchen tidying.

Late nights of work and rehearsal, takeout food, and exhaustion had left us a little dietarily grumpy last week. We had resolved that this week would be better, and Sunday was the foundation on which that resolution would stand. We didn’t end up listening to the audiobook she’d suggested. I’m sure there are plenty of things we didn’t get done, but we also didn’t cook so much food that anything is likely to go to waste. Even if we weren’t completely ready to face every challenge the week might present, we were well-fed, and we had spent the day in each other’s company. The snow might have stopped falling by this point. We didn’t look.

All the things: (Back row) Sausage and kale soup, chickpeas, spiced lamb, shortbread and biscuits. (Front) London Broil (rare and well-done), steak sauce, smashed potatoes, pan-grilled asparagus, whipped cream, macerated strawberries.

Every night does not warrant a fancy dessert.
All things in moderation. Especially moderation.

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Baking, Batch Cooking, Beef, Cooking Together, Dessert, Fruit, Lamb, Middle Eastern, Pork, Soup, Sunday, Vegetables, Wine

By the Numbers

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Him | 1 comment

It was so easy to make No-Knead Bread: 3 cups flour, 1.5 cups water, a teaspoon of salt, a pinch of yeast–put it in a bowl, stir, and wait. 18 hours later, you have dough ready to shape into a loaf.

Well, usually.

According to one of my collaborators, the worst home-baked bread is better than the best supermarket loaf. But on days when the dough is too sticky to handle, or the resulting loaf feels like it might be better for holding open a door than making sandwiches, I wonder. I believe he’s right in principal, but I wish the bread could be a little more consistent from one loaf to the next. I wish it could be as perfect as those biscuits were.

Oh, right. Maybe scoop-and-level isn’t the best plan at bread-baking time.

“No-knead bread by weight,” I typed into Google, and the first link on the result page gave me what I wanted to see. 430 grams of flour, 350 grams of water, 8 grams of salt, 1 gram of yeast. That’s not quite as memorable as 3-1.5-1-and-a-pinch, but I’ll find a way to remember it.

I found the scale on the first try, pressed the unit button to display the metric measurement rather than English, and scooped away, watching the numbers. Zeroed out the scale and added the salt. Another zero for the yeast. And then the water. Stir. Maybe the expectation of the result leads to the result; maybe I was fooled by what I wanted to see, but this batch of dough looked good already. I covered it and went about my day.

Morning came; time for the first shaping. The dough did not say, “Dude, this is going to work out,” but it looked terrific, and shaped easily and without mess. Two hours later, and it looked even better. I’d like to say that the perfect little dough ball went uncomplainingly into its pre-heated pot, but it was a little sticky on the bottom; still, nothing like the problems I’ve had in the past.

An hour later, the loaf sat on a bread rack, its golden crust looking exactly like I’d hoped it would, and surprising me with little crackling noises as it cooled. Eventually the loaf was cool enough to cut. The crust was delightfully crisp; the crumb sturdy but soft. There are a few air pockets, but smaller ones than scoop-and-level gave me. And, most importantly, the bread is delicious–dangerously close to being good enough to eat a loaf all at once.

It might be that the baker who first described the no-knead method can get consistent results with volume measurements. I’m willing to bet he can detect variations from one batch to the next and make adjustments without any difficulty at all. But he bakes bread all day long; I bake one or maybe two loaves a week. I’m still an improviser at heart, but not when it comes to this bread recipe. From now on, I’ll do it by the numbers.

No-Knead Bread, the next morning, after a slice for a snack and preparing an egg-and-cheese sandwich for her breakfast.

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Baking, bread, Thursday

Breakfast During Hockey Season

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Him | 2 comments

She asked if I would make biscuits sometime.

Of course, I said; it isn’t difficult.

It is for her, she explained; they come out hard as hockey pucks.

I suspected that the problem might have been one of measurement. If she took flour from the canister by the scoop-and-level method, it would be easy to get too much, and end up with a weightier biscuit than she wanted. Or maybe I have very low standards where biscuits are concerned, and mine come out hockey pucks, too.

After ascertaining that the gold standard against which all biscuits would be measured were not her beloved Nana’s, I agreed, and planned to bake them for Saturday breakfast.

The hardest part, it turned out, was finding the kitchen scale. It wasn’t on the small-appliance shelves. It wasn’t with the measuring cups, or alongside the baking tins, or even in the back of the knife drawer. I knew we’d put it somewhere logical, but the logic eluded me. About to give up and do the best I could with scoop-and-level, I pulled the flour canister from its cupboard and —voila!—there it was.

Our scale is a simple device–one button to turn it on and tare (a function that re-zeroes the scale to allow for the weight of the container set on its platform), one to switch the display between ounces and grams, and, of course, the weighing platform. Ours may not be quite as accurate as I hoped; I could get 15.99 ounces of flour or 16.03, but nothing in between. Perhaps I could use tweezers to add the flour one grain at a time, or perhaps I should not worry about such incredibly fine distinctions.

The key to biscuit preparation, says Uncle Alton, is to handle the dough as little as possible so as not to warm the butter and shortening. His grandmother’s hands were colder than his own (probably due to poor circulation), so her biscuits were always lighter than his. Although my hands are frequently cold, I took no chances; I stowed the fats in the fridge while roasting some bacon to have with the biscuits and fruit.

Breakfast was served. “I should do the biscuit baking from now on?” She nodded enthusiastically, far too polite to speak with her mouth full. I don’t know if it was the precise measurement or the chilled fats, but the result was most decidedly not a pan of hockey pucks.

And she’d know. While she probably has never tried to eat one, she’s certainly seen plenty of them; her father used to take her to games every weekend as a child.

We stopped for burgers on Saturday evening, and I noticed her glancing at the Notre Dame-Indiana game on big-screen TV above the condiment counter.

“We’re not far from Yale,” she said. “We should see a hockey game before the season ends.”

I asked if she was sure she wanted me to see her at a hockey game.

“What, afraid you won’t love me any more?”

It wasn’t that at all; I was just recalling that she’d told me once, “I’m convinced I’d be a pacifist if I weren’t a hockey fan.” Apparently I looked at her gape-mouthed, and she explained: at one of those games she saw when she was four, she yelled, “Daddy, make those skater mans fight again!”

Fortunately, we don’t fight. But I’ll make sure to remember where the scale is stored in case things get ugly; that way our biscuits will be too light to cause any damage if they’re thrown.

The bacon was pronounced good, too. And her apple butter, on that biscuit half, is pretty superb. (Sadly, the steam rising from the biscuit when it was split did not photograph well.)

2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Baking, Breakfast, Family, Saturday, Sports

What Would Laura Do?

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Him | 1 comment

Every year, she reads Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, a story of hardship during seven snowy months in South Dakota. The coal runs out, the woodpile expires, and food is scarce, but the heroine and her family survive.

We’re a week away from the start of winter, but, even more than usual, ’tis the season of work-nights and event-nights; ’tis also the week in which renovations will reach the open-plan living room and kitchen. The combination of late hours and a fine layer of plaster dust on every surface can be as daunting as the forecast of a blizzard. It’s the sort of schedule that demonstrates incredible potential to leave us ordering lots of takeout food or ending up with pints of ice cream and spoons on our nightstands. We wanted to avoid those contingencies for obvious reasons of economics, nutrition, and just plain good sense.

While I was at work last Sunday, she prepared a menu and a shopping list; we marketed together, and then we spent the late afternoon and evening chopping and cooking and packaging.

I spatchcocked a chicken and roasted it. The backbone went into the slow cooker along with onion, celery, and carrots to make stock. When the chicken cooled enough to handle, we ate a little and distributed the rest. The breast meat went into a curried chicken-and-rice soup that was more like a stew. The dark meat was tossed in a bowl with celery, grapes, pecans, shredded spinach, and a not-at-all gloppy dressing to make a bright-but-hearty salad–the sort eaten with a fork, not spread for sandwiches. The rest of the bones then joined the stock. The last of a loaf of Italian bread from her favorite bakery was toasted into croutons that she mixed with ground beef and pork, spinach, and goat cheese to make a meat loaf that is way more interesting than anything I grew up with. Root vegetables were roasted to accompany them. The chicken’s giblety-bits were sautéed with onion, red pepper, and a few grape tomatoes and packed with the last bit of rice for one day’s lunch. Crisp, sweet pears were softened just a little with a bit of water, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a cup of cranberries from the freezer, then tucked into triangles of pie crust and baked into turnovers for breakfast, with a pot of overnight oatmeal for alternate mornings. The house smelled fabulous, and nothing was wasted.

By bedtime we knew we’d miscalculated a little: the fridge was stocked for a family of four rather than two, but that’s a better problem than the other way around. There’s enough variety that we haven’t gotten bored with our choices. The power wasn’t disturbed and the home microwave is in good working order (as are the ones in our workplace kitchens), so breakfasts and lunches were well-organized and we never felt helpless to do anything but call for pizza delivery.

The calendar shows that our next seven nights will be just as busy as the last. And now that the ceiling has been repaired, the painter will start on the kitchen and living room walls. It’s time for her to start reading her yearly reminder of courage in the face of adversity. But we have electricity, insulation, and we live along an emergency route to a hospital; in case of a storm, our street will be cleared of snow right away. If they could survive that winter, we can make it ’til Christmas…

We didn’t have time for a cookathon yesterday, but the toaster oven is set up in our office, and I could put the slow-cooker on my dresser. We can hitch up the wagon and get to town for provisions before The Long Winter sets in. There’ll be more daylight soon, day by day. There’s no cause for despair.

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Baking, Batch Cooking, Chicken, meat loaf, winter

Including Moderation

Posted on November 25, 2014 by Him | 1 comment

Her new phone functioned perfectly on Thursday’s overnight. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the rest of the technology her team uses–nor, even more unfortunately, of one of the subcontractors they employ. She woke from a nap on Friday afternoon to news of an epic failure that might have meant another sleepless night or two. She was understandably furious. And maybe a little comically so, but I knew better than to point that out. Eventually she calmed enough to speak in complete sentences, and reassure us both that we would not incur the expenses of a new laptop computer and additional repairs to the newly painted wall at which she wanted to chuck the old one. She made herself a mug of tea. A cat settled at her feet, and I left them for a while.

After I returned from a run and showered, I started to bake a batch of brownies. I wasn’t sure what dinner might be, but thought that after a long night and a terrible afternoon, a little sweetness would be welcome.

While the brownies baked, I started to assemble the last piece of furniture for our office, a cute little rolling cart with many drawers that would hold office supplies and various doodads. She finished her work for the day and came to join me–possibly attracted by the chocolaty goodness wafting from the kitchen. We worked together happily on the cart (again proving that we pass the Ikea Relationship Test). By the time every Tab A was fitted into every Slot B, every screw was accounted for, and the cart carried to its appointed place in the office, the brownies were ready to cut.

We aren’t doctors or nurses. We aren’t dieticians. We know perfectly well that brownies are not an appropriate dinner. Except when they are. We didn’t eat the entire batch, any more than we’d eat the entire Thanksgiving turkey in one sitting. Just one lovely, rich, still-barely-warm brownie each.

Sunday’s dinner, after her very productive knitting class, my many masses played, and our shared garage clearing, was far more balanced and moderate. She marinated chicken breasts in lemon and olive oil, and served them with sautéed asparagus and rice. Very different from a brownie, but also delicious.

Sometimes there’s a brownie for dinner. Sometimes there’s a bowl of popcorn. All things in moderation. Including moderation.

Baked chicken, sautéed asparagus, rice. Nothing immoderate about that.

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Baking, Chicken, Dessert, Friday, Sunday

Babycakes

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Him | 1 comment

On a Friday night not long ago, we’d been looking forward to watching the PBS broadcast of a theatre production that featured some people we know. Unfortunately, she fell asleep on the couch before the show started. I puttered around on the internet for a while, surprised at how many programs PBS made available as streaming video. A series of short cooking videos called Kitchen Vignettes caught my attention. Beautifully shot and set to lovely music, they were educational, though there was no voice explaining the recipes being demonstrated.

I was especially intrigued by one called “Groaning Cake.” I wasn’t sure what sort of cake might groan, but the soundtrack–a recording by the folk singer Heather Kelday–held me. I learned from the text displayed in the video, that Groaning Cake is a traditional postpartum food. It’s a very rich, calorie-dense spice cake made with whole wheat flour, carrots, zucchini, and apples. It might even be considered healthy, save for the great deal of butter, the many eggs, and the gobs of honey and molasses.

In the video, a woman is shown baking the cake. She’s very pregnant, a fact which the filmmaker apparently wants us not to forget for a second. Every shot that isn’t a closeup of ingredients going into a bowl is of her swollen belly or breasts. In the last moments of the video, we see the beautiful child, and a fellow who is likely the father; then the new mother feeds her partner the first slice of cake.

That’s where they lost me.

The idea seems to be that a new mother will have neither the time nor energy to cook after giving birth, so this cake would keep her fed while she regains her strength. If I followed the timeline, the woman baked the cake, gave birth, and then fed the cake to the guy. Was he not capable of turning on the oven, grating some zucchini, and measuring the cinnamon and cloves? Was he, at the very least, not up to the task of cutting a slice of cake for the mother of his child?

Maybe it’s all the breakfasts I’ve made and lunches I’ve packed, but it just seems fair that she would get the first bite. Of course, what do I know? I’m not a father. Maybe standing around while someone else does all the really hard work is harder than it seems. A guy can probably burn a lot of calories by pacing.

Friends of ours recently had a baby–a beautiful son. Of course we had a bear to give to the new baby; every child should have a good, sturdy bear to keep him company. But we thought we should do something more.

We baked them a Groaning Cake.

The cake takes its name from a woman’s cries during labor–which, some say, is induced by the preparation of the cake. Somewhere around the third stick of butter (or maybe the fourth egg, or the half-a-jar of honey) I began to think the name had another meaning: when I felt how heavy the pan of batter was, I may have let out an involuntary grunt. At least I didn’t spill it on the way to the oven.

On Sunday afternoon, we wrapped up the cake and went to visit the proud parents and meet the baby. It tasted as swooningly good as it had smelled while baking (a fact I learned after the new mama got the first bite). It was also, it turned out, slightly underdone. It wasn’t hazardously soggy, but it is likely that I added too much of the apple-carrot-zucchini trifecta, and the batter was simply too moist to ever fully set.

The new mom and dad were too sleep-deprived to notice any baking issues. The baby was happy, calm, and snuggly–and he wasn’t going to get any cake, anyway. At least not today.

There aren’t any babies at the Country House. It would be a nice place to raise a child, but it’s too far away from her office, and from where much of my theatrical work is, to be practical. We’d spend all of our time commuting and either never see the little one, or never see each other. That might change one day, but for now, we try to be good and loving examples to the children in our friends’ lives.

And if it does change, you can bet that she won’t have to bake her own cake.

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Baking, children, Friends, Weekend

Our Weekend Condition

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Him | 1 comment

Work had been miserable for us both on Friday; serious food was called for. I pan-grilled a steak, made a batch of macaroni and cheese, and steamed some asparagus. She added sea salt and chopped pecans to a batch of dark chocolate caramel brownies, and tried not to be too disappointed that the peaches she was hoping to turn into jam had been waiting too long and were more mush than fruit. We sat at the table like grownups and relaxed into a weekend that would be far more full of activity than either of us expected. (She relaxed more than she planned to, falling asleep on the couch before the brownies were cool.)

Adding a little dijon mustard, paprika, and shredded muenster to boxed Mac and Cheese takes it slightly out of the realm of comfort food for some–but puts it more in the realm for others.

Fortified by a breakfast brownie, we started a gardening project first thing in the morning. This was about cleaning up, not planting. The forsythia on the hillside had overgrown, big branches of a fallen tree had become ensnarled in it, and the ivy that was supposed to be ground cover at the bottom of the hillside was tangled in everything, along with tendrils of some other weed that was the only thing really thriving. I took breaks for two church services, but she kept at it, sending me texts periodically asking that I bring home more leaf-and-lawn bags.

Dainty food was not going to cut it. Scrambled eggs with peppers and cornbread for lunch. Chicken and dumplings for dinner. Kahlua milkshakes for dessert, while we cheered on our friends who performed in the PBS telecast of Sweeney Todd. (Dumplings, yes; meat pies, no.)

While I started Sunday’s massathon, she climbed back onto the hillside; she was accompanied by our neighbor, and I joined the two of them between masses 4 & 5. By the end of the weekend, there was plenty of space for the ivy to do its thing, just the right amount of forsythia for the space, three Prius-loads of filled-to-the-brim leaf bags bound for the city’s lawn-waste site, and the satisfaction of a job well done and without injury.

(The first three bags were already in the car.)

We ordered takeout from a terrific and very authentic Mexican restaurant: soft corn tacos filled with steak and pork, pickled onion, and cilantro; chicken flautas; rice studded with bits of pea and carrot; creamy, rich refried beans. (Too much food for dinner, to be sure; we’re both having leftovers for lunch, and the guacamole and chips will be a post-theatre snack tonight.)

I preheated the oven while we ate, and with the energy conserved by ordering dinner, I gathered ingredients and she mixed a batch of cranberry-orange muffins for this week’s breakfasts. They’re not exactly the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook recipe; it turns out she improvises, too (and then carefully notates how well things work).

Cranberry Orange Muffins

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and prep your muffin tin for 12 average-sized muffins.
Zest a large orange; reserve the zest in a small bowl and then squeeze every last drop of juice into a measuring cup. Pour enough cranberry juice cocktail into the cup to bring the total volume up liquid up to 2/3 of a cup. Add 1/4 of a cup of cooking oil to that measuring cup, and stir well to combine. Set aside.
In a large bowl combine 1-3/4 cups flour, a scant 1/3 cup sugar, 2 tsp baking powder, and 1/4 tsp salt. stir to combine, then make a well in the center. Set aside.
In another small bowl (or the cup used to measure the flour), beat an egg. Pour the beaten egg and combined liquid into the well of the flour, and stir to combine. Continue stirring, scraping the bowl as necessary, until all of the dry ingredients are incorporated and the batter is smooth. Fold in one cup of whole frozen cranberries (or thoroughly chilled fresh ones) and a sprinkling of slivered almonds.
Scoop the batter into the muffin tins. Remember the reserved zest and sprinkle a few pieces on the tops of each muffin, giving a quick stir with a small spoon to cover them with batter.
Bake until the tops are golden and the tiniest bit of brown starts to show at the edges, approximately 22 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and set it on a wire rack to cool for twenty minutes, then remove the muffins from the cups and allow them to cool completely. Enjoy with butter or clotted cream.

As with brownies, waiting for muffins to cool is very much the hardest part.

We finished Sunday evening with a mini-marathon of 1950s TV game shows, confident that we would be well fed and cooking-panic-free all week, and recognition that–although there is always more to do–we’d accomplished quite a bit. Like untangling weeds from ivy, making a home takes time.

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Baking, Gardening, Mexican, Theatre, Weekend

Monkeying Around

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Her | 1 comment

On Sunday night, we completed the process of unpacking, sorting, and deciding which kitchen possessions to keep. Many hours after the work began, he held the last item in his hands, trying to decide which of two piles to place it in — those that definitely needed a home within the kitchen, and those that would be placed in a storage bin in the garage.

“How often do you actually use a Bundt pan?”

“Not all that often. I only know one recipe that requires it.”

“When’s the last time you made it?”

“Before I started dating the one who was allergic to butter, cream, and milk chocolate.”

He tossed the avocado-green aluminum pan onto the pile intended for storage and started rearranging mixing bowls, muffin tins, cooling racks, measuring cups, and saucepans, while I described this very simple, barely-home-made dessert. Before I was half-through, he had effortlessly convinced me to bake it for him this week, while vacation left plenty of time for peeling 48 pieces of individually wrapped candies.

He’ll be home from work shortly, and will find this cooling on the stove:

Pull-Apart Monkey Bread — a little drier than usual, since I skimped on the butter.

My Sister’s Pull-Apart Monkey Bread

2 canisters of crescent roll dough
48 pieces of chocolate candy (she insists on Hershey’s Kisses, I pick through whatever happens to be in the candy dish)
1/2 cup of cinnamon sugar
1/2 stick of butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Grease a Bundt pan and set it aside.
Open each can of dough and roll out the pieces. Seal the perforations by dampening your fingers and pressing them together. With a pizza cutter or other sharp, smooth blade, slice each can’s worth of dough into 24 square-ish pieces (3 slices lengthwise and 5 slices widthwise).
Place a piece of candy in the middle of each square of dough, and wrap the dough to surround the candy. Toss each piece in the cinnamon sugar to coat it, then place it in the Bundt pan*. Repeat until all of the candy has been wrapped in dough.
Pour the melted butter over the amassed dough balls, then bake in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes, until crispy and cooked through.
Place a heat-safe plate over the top of the Bundt pan and invert the pan so that the collected nuggets of doughy goodness drop onto the plate; scrape any loose buttery-cinnamon-sugar sauce over the top. Serve warm.

* I like to place the cinnamon-sugar in a coffee mug; tossing a dough ball into the cup, covering the top with my palm, and swirling it on the counter effectively coats the dough while minimizing mess.

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Baking, Dessert, Recipes, Semi Homemade, Wednesday

Tag Archives: Baking

Tags