Peanut Butter dips

fancy cookies

I don't make fancy cookies. I have a secret ambition to learn to make a dozen really pretty cookies that could be laid out on a fancy tiered serving dish for a tea with friends, but what happens when I make cookies is that I eat them all. Every last crumb of them.

This is not good for us thick ladies.

However, I have had some peanut butter sitting around in the fridge for months, shunned and neglected. The kid is extremely picky about the peanut butter he will eat and it periodically changes. So what to do with it? If you leave peanut butter in the fridge long enough it will either go rancid or it will fossilize. Since one of the things I'm trying to reduce around this homestead is waste, I decided to make peanut butter cookies and see if the kid would eat them. I followed a recipe from a book called "Once Upon A Tart" by Frank Mentesana and Jerome Audureau and then I embellished.

Instead of doing the traditional cross hatching with a fork, I left the cookies smooth. Then while the cookies were cooling I put about 1 cup of white chocolate chips in a glass bowl over a pot of simmering water and let the chips melt. If you have a double boiler, use it. When they were completely melted and the cookies were cool I dipped each cookie in the chocolate about a third of the way in and covered the front and then did the same with the back. If you are doing big batches and melt more chocolate at once you might be able to dip the whole cookie in deep enough that both front and back are covered evenly.

Place each dipped cookie on a sheet of wax paper to cool. If you want to speed up the cooling you can put them in the fridge for an hour.

The cookies were a hit. Now I'm thinking I might have to play with the drizzle effect using a fork.

If you have any melted chocolate left over, just put in a plastic lidded container to cool and store in the cupboard.

Baking With Buttermilk

on a cold winter day

Something about a day dusted with snow that makes me want to bake. I'm not a big baker but I do make corn bread, one of the few things Max will eat that doesn't come in a package. About a week ago I bought some low fat buttermilk with the plan to make some twice baked potatoes with buttermilk in place of butter to see if it would be good. I don't have much experience with buttermilk and it kind of weirds me out because of it's thickness. Thick milk seems wrong.

However, I made the corn bread in Deborah Madison's book "Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone" and they are a hit. I substituted the milk with buttermilk and it worked very well. They didn't rise a lot, but that may be because I substituted half the white flour for wheat flour (since that's how Max likes cornbread best). Small but good.

I also used the buttermilk for the twice baked potatoes and I hear they were good. I didn't have one myself but Philip said they were very good and I have the word of my dog Chick, who ate four of them when I wasn't looking, that they are not lacking at all in allure. Now I'm wondering what else I can use the buttermilk in. I don't make pancakes much though that would be the obvious use for it.

A totally bizarre affect of my new increased dose of Paxil is sleepiness. I went to bed early Sunday night. Then I woke up early Monday morning all fresh faced, yet by eight am I was hardly able to keep my eyes open and so fell asleep for two more hours. I woke up in time to take Max to school late which is lame because school had already been delayed by snow for two hours. I trudged him to school, came home again, and fell promptly asleep for another hour. Last night I was sleepy by five pm but hung on until 9pm at which time I fell fast asleep. That's a lot of sleep for a person who doesn't sleep well or generally much. I hope this isn't a permanent feature of an increased dose of Paxil with a decreased dose of Welbutrin. Getting some sleep is good stuff, but I hate sleeping too much, it makes me feel queer, as though time was slipping away from me and it makes me feel slightly disconnected from life in my waking hours.

I'm really hoping the change in medication will result in me shedding my inertia, not adding constant drowsiness to the table of contents. Often the side effects of phyche meds are temporary. I hope that's true here. What I desperately need is ENERGY.

Here's what I'd like to do today: make bread, make duvet covers. Somehow I cannot seem to get these kind of things done. Why? I must do it today. I must not let anything get in my way! Bread and duvet covers. New duvet covers would make me feel so happy. Most of mine are covered in Max bloody nose stains (have I mentioned recently how bad I am at doing laundry?*) or they are worn out to the point of being depressing. Not to mention not being very attractive.

Speaking of bloody noses, Max has been having them again. We did get a respite for about a month and a half. Not many of them and very mild ones now replaced by lots of bad ones. I dread having to put Max through the nasty (and expensive) nose cauterization he went through in the other side of his nose but it was effective. I don't have any bed linens without blood stains on them. I'm going to need to buy one set just for guests that must never be on the guest bed except for when guests are over. Very embarrassing to present the guest bed and have to explain that those dubious looking stains aren't from me having messy menstrual cycles but from the kid's nose. Like that's so much more comforting.

I cannot seem to get a handle on my house. On organizing it, putting it together, putting everything in a place, or on clearing things out, so I can actually clean it. My house should take between 1.5 and 2 hours to clean with the laundry only taking one day. I can barely make a dent in it in that time. I didn't come up with that time frame arbitrarily. That's how long it used to take me to clean it at my old place where everything more or less had a place to go so that I could straighten up quite easily. Now I start straightening up and three hours later I've barely made a noticeable change.

Yeah, this is why I need more energy, not LESS. Plus my brain needs to be in better shape. Not frizzy and jumping all over the place all the time.

Today is a new day. A day with buttermilk muffins and winter squash soup. Maybe today is also a day for a cup of caffeine? (We only have decaf coffee right now) Stormy, cold, grey, quiet, and I'm home. Something good's gotta happen!



*You would be proud of me Dominique for having used the Fels Naptha several times to good effect, but I cannot keep up with the blood stains around here. That would require energy that I don't have.

Sour Cherry Tart
(A culinary quest)

This is a sour cherry tart with a vanilla custard.
I will choose this as my last dessert.

Cooking, for me, isn't just about meeting the needs of the body. It's about artistry, science, and the pursuit of perfection. Not a toxic perfection that eats away at my self esteem, nor an impossible perfection such as sculpting the best ass is. I feel a great deal of pleasure in being able to do things well and cooking offers everyone the chance to make something well because of the enormous range of possibilities. If bread baking sounds like as much fun as walking across the Mohave desert barefoot and with no sunscreen, one doesn't need to bake bread. You can make soup instead.

About seven years ago I decided that I was going to master the art of baking tarts. When I say "master" I mean that I wanted to be able to make tarts consistently well, but not just well, I wanted people to eat my tarts and then not be able to stop thinking about it for long after the last crumb was pressed into a fork. There's more though, a tart should be a thing of beauty.

Tarts really aren't difficult to make. But making them well requires that you refine your skills at achieving each step. The first step is making a really good crust. Some people have trouble with this but I follow Martha Stewart's recipe, using my food processor to mix it, and the only trick I've found works well is to completely freeze the rolled out pastry dough before prebaking it. This usually prevents the crust from bubbling up. Two things, I've found, can really mess up a tart dough: adding too much water to the dough will make it hard where the dough is extra wet, and only using half the amount of butter is not recommended.

This is a vanilla custard tart with my canned peaches and my own Silvanberry sauce on top.

The vanilla custard* is the next part to master. I have found making a good vanilla custard challenging because the first time I made it it was perfect (and easy) but I could never remember which recipe I followed and I ended up trying a string of recipes that I had no difficulty messing up. A good recipe is really important. I don't like a rich custard with tons of egg yolks and heavy cream. I have finally found a recipe for a lighter custard that reliably turns out well from the book "Tartine". I used 2% milk (even though it calls for whole milk) and it turned out really well. The biggest challenge is preventing it from being lumpy and my only advice on this challenge is to stir frequently and use a whisk.

Once you have a great crust and a great pastry cream all you have to do is figure out what you want to put on top. My favorite desert of all time (OF ALL TIME) is a fresh fruit tart with vanilla custard, but this is winter, I can't buy kiwis from New Zealand, so I had to think about alternatives from the pantry. I'm misleading you there, I didn't have to think about it at all. All summer I was thinking about how my fruit preserves might be used in the winter to crown some lovely tarts. I was just waiting for the right opportunity.

Luckily I am usually the only one in my family who puts up a fight to preserve traditions like having yams every year with Thanksgiving dinner. It was not difficult to convince my mom, my sister, and Philip to let me bypass the whole pumpkin deal in favor of these tarts.

The result? My mom and my sister think that I have achieved my goal of mastery over the tart. We talked about those tarts for a full half hour after eating them. My family even indulged me in my favorite game of trying to figure out how they might be made even more perfect.

Now all I have to do is keep making them for the next thirty years (if I live that long) until I achieve fame among my friends and family for my tart making abilities. How will I know I've gotten there? I'll know when people start always asking me brightly if I am going to bring one of my tarts to the potluck? I'll know when I hear people talking about tarts past.

I think everyone should settle on one thing to master in the kitchen. Maybe you can master almost everything but you should aim to be known for making something in particular better than all else-it's great for your self esteem and it increases your pleasure in preparing food for others. It's fun to follow a food quest anyway. It's kind of like being a culinary knight only you're less likely to be impaled by a jousting stick.

Just as a side note, I can't make pie worth a damn.

Yesterday my mom, sister, and I went to the Portland farmer's market and I was impressed with the variety still available. This particular farmer's market continues through December 22. I've been meaning to buy some locally grown wild rice and was very pleased to find it there-so I bought a couple of packages of it. I also found (to my great excitement) that one stall had some gorgeous cilantro. I bought four bunches and plan to freeze it in ice cube size portions. I will report on how well it freezes as soon as I know. Cilantro isn't known to retain it's flavor well when dried. I'm sure those farmers are thinking I must be some kind of freak getting inordinately excited to have found fresh cilantro. Who cares? I thought I wouldn't find any more until mid-spring. I plan to make some black bean chili!

By the way, for those of you waiting on packages from Dustpan Alley, they are all ready to go and will be mailed early tomorrow morning. Thank you for your patience! The bath bombs are doing so well I've had to make new batches and am now in need of new supplies which I better get soon. I've gotten much better at making them and if people would like a tutorial I will put one together. Though, I did find some good ones out there already (my previous searches did not yield great directions. Sometimes a single word in a search makes ALL the difference.) I think the bombs would make excellent stocking stuffers and although they can be tricky (I ruined three batches last week), I think they are still easy enough for anyone to try. Each bath bomb costs about fifty cents each to make which makes it really an affordable homemade project.

I'm off to work at the Holiday Market downtown. I hope you all have a great Sunday!

*Technically this is a pastry cream.

Greek Grandmother 101

This past Saturday we had our friends Lisa, Lawrence, and their three lovely bairns over for dinner. As far as I know, none of them are Greek. But since there isn't a single Greek restaurant in our town, Lisa has learned to make kick-ass Greek food. I once tried to make spanikopita and it was not one of my shining moments in the kitchen. The layers never browned and were dry where they were dry and mushy in other places, which should never occur with filo dough. I am also not Greek.

Lisa made baklava the last time we were at their house for dinner and it was better than any baklava I have ever eaten. You'd be surprised to know how much baklava I have actually eaten since I'm not Greek. I have to conclude that, as is so often the annoying case, baklava made and eaten fresh is far superior to the kind you buy that has sat around for a few days. Lisa agreed to teach me to make it. She took pictures of the process too and as soon as I'm done here I am going over to her blog Morning Glory Essentials to see if she actually prints the recipe. You should follow me over there.

But before I show let you in on my Greek Grandma class, observe the food in the artful picture above. Is it not scrumptious? That was my contribution to the dinner. (Lisa also made Greek salad which was superb, but my photo was not good, so I left it out.) I made Greek potatoes whose secret lies in the use of lemon juice with copious quantities of olive oil, and obviously some fresh oregano which you should have growing in your yard already. There's really no excuse not to.

I said there's really no excuse not to.

I also made mushrooms in tomato sauce whose secret to deliciousness lies in the use of white wine and dill with rosemary for seasoning. Have you ever eaten food in a restaurant that had a tomato sauce with an oily sheen and it was so good but you've never been able to figure out how to get your tomato sauce to look that way? I know how they do it. It's all in the very liberal use of olive oil coupled with the rather sparing use of tomato paste. Oh my, this dish was so good and distinctly Greek in character. I also roasted some locally grown asparagus. Very tasty.

Mise en place: I love to add a little high class talk to my Greek lessons. I've got to ask Lisa where she got this awesome little bottle of rosewater. She pulled it out of her magic bag of tricks (which she made herself, incidentally) reverently, as though it had been passed down to her by her own grandmother. Walnuts are obviously a key ingredient to baklava. I wish I had a nut grove of my own that didn't include a single hazel nut tree. I loathe hazel nuts.*

"I'm going to go float around my nut grove in the dewy hours of morning..." I just like the way that sounds. NUT GROVE. Shouldn't everyone have a nut grove?

First you cut your rolled out sheets of filo dough**and then cut them in half.

This is an action shot of Lisa brushing melted butter on the successive sheets of filo which you add in layers of two. Generous use of butter is essential to the baklava experience. If you skimp on the butter: YOU WILL FAIL "GREEK GRANDMOTHER 101". You've left your girlish figure behind by now anyway, it's time to embrace black dresses, sturdy shoes, head scarves, and you must never be seen again in public without an apron on. So go on...brush that butter on like you mean it!

Between the layers of filo you must sprinkle layers of walnuts that have been tossed with cinnamon.

After all the layers have been added you cut the baklava into the fancy diamond shapes that are traditional. It is very important that you don't go all post modern Greek and do rectangles or- gasp!- squares.

Then you bake this gorgeous mama in the oven on 350 degrees for almost an hour. Right before it's ready to come out you make a sauce of honey, sugar, and rosewater to pour over the desert which you then allow to cool for a long time before eating. This promotes the filo-soaked sweetness that is the allure of baklava. I can't believe how easy this is to make. I think I'm ready to wear all black again***and embrace my inner Greek Grandma. Which shouldn't be hard since I have a low forehead and impressive brows, by which I mean to say that they would grow as one if allowed to express themselves naturally. Which they aren't.

*this is the hazel nut capital of the country, in case you didn't know it.

**Which you only made yourself if you're way crazier than me. Which I'm pretty sure you're not.

***I used to be referred to as a "death rocker", though I never once called myself one. If you are too young to know what a "death rocker" is, it's the equivalent of a "goth".