Weekend Update May 11, 2014

"She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone."Joe Hill

Congratulations, you have  navigated the complicated  holiday other wise known as Mother's day and come out on the other side. Only Thanksgiving and Christmas seem to carry a bigger emotional load- you know this is true because only Thanksgiving and Christmas are featured in more movies. And if you consider how many Thanksgiving and Christmas movies could be subtitled "Crazy Holiday Moms and Their Crazy Craziness" Mother's Day may top all holidays in the emotional baggage per hour ratio.
 But by now the phone calls and/or gifts and/or cards you did or did not give or receive have or have not hit their mark-   

and hitting a bullseye on Mother's Day may have been
even more complicated than that sentence.

The instigator of Mother's Day Anna Jarvis, would have hoped that you avoided  commercialized, expensive demonstrations of  appreciation. She had a vision for a day filled with heart-felt words of love and gratitude- no pricey flowers, no high-pressure presents, just sweet and sincere sentiments. You know, like these:

Mom, you are destructive and out of control.
But really pretty
 in a concentric circles kind of way.

Mom, you are my favorite prison in the whole
wide world.

Or maybe your a mother,and today you  had the proverbial table turned on you. The breakfast table, to be specific- maybe today some one else made sure that you went off into the day with a good breakfast. Around here, there was a good breakfast on the table (nearly) every day of the week, and the very best part was, no one had to wake up from a night's pleasant rest to enjoy it. 

Ah, breakfast for dinner! So strangely comforting, so vaguely naughty, so incredibly cheap! 

And pretty yummy too. Here how a week of Mother's Day breakfasts for dinner worked out:

First up,Buttermilk Pancakes.  Okay. If you like pancakes, you will probably love this recipe. If you're used to using a boxed baking mix, just stir up the dry ingredients and zip them into a  plastic bag until pancakes minus 20 minutes, then combine the dry mixture with the eggs, butter and buttermilk. Easy Peasy. 

This recipe has been a go-to favorite for years in this kitchen and even works when you substitute half of the flour for either whole wheat flour or a gluten free flour blend. Grilled sausages and asparagus and pan-roasted tomatoes on the side, and the week was off to an easy and delicious start.

Next, the heretofore untasted Deep South Soul food wonder, chicken and waffles.  I had often wondered what it was about the (sort of strange) combination of chicken and waffles that could spawn entire restaurants. Well now I know. The leftover pancake batter was thinned down with a little more buttermilk waffled up and topped with shredded rotisserie chicken and an amazingly simple mustard sauce. A quick saute of mushrooms, bell peppers an onions while the waffle iron did its thing, and

Wow. just wow.
I love chicken. I love waffles.
I love chicken and waffles.

 And here's a neat discovery: Baked Huevos Rancheros. You know that half a bag of corn chips in the back of the pantry that no one's going to eat but you can't throw away? And that can of tomato sauce, jar of salsa or cup or two of red sauce leftover from lasagna? Toss it all together, top it with cheese and eggs and throw it in the oven for about not very much time and do you know what you'll get?

You've got dinner, you kitchen magician you!

Here's a sort of cross section- I made the mistake of baking it too long, so we didn't get the runny egg goodness that would have made it better, but still- this was a super fast, super easy dinner.

And that half bag of stale chips is gone!

It's a funny thing about breakfast for dinner. It feels so...nurturing. And maybe that's why making breakfast (or lunch or dinner) became the thing to do on Mother's Day.

 Because maybe what most mothers want on Mother's day is to feel, well, mothered. 

(Even if we know that we don't always mother all that well.) 

And I hope that this week once or twice, you feel well mothered.

Even if you're not a mom.

Even if you don't have a mom. 

I hope that this week you're close to people who love you.

 who know how to be present with you.

who care about what happens to you. 

who know how to make you feel safe

and how to help you be brave.

people who every once in a while

(even if it's ever so unlikely) 

 give you all the good mothering you need.

weekend update

Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth.

Calvin Trillin

The Home Audience has returned from weeks of work and a few hours of play in green and lovely England, and among my souvenirs has brought me a  word-nerdy treasure. He has brought me the knowledge that much like the peoples of the frozen North have entire vocabularies devoted to the description of snow, the English have seven separate words for rain. 

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday....

It's drier in Texas (at least today) yet how dreary our little suburb must seem when  peeps are returning from sights like this:

Bamburg Castle. Really. for real. A fully functional castle.
With a dungeon and a gift shop and everything.

It's appropriate then, that this morning we breakfasted like kings. Rather, we breakfasted like the well fed peasantry who work hard to grow and make the stuff that kings breakfast on. Today for lunch?

The Full English Breakfast:

Well, I forgot the baked beans, forgot the bacon,
 and we don't have black pudding,
so this English Breakfast is really only half full.
Or maybe it's half empty...

Scrambled eggs, Fried eggs, fried tomatoes, fried mushrooms, fried sausages ( noticing a pattern here?) and in their dazzling this-house debut:

TATTIE SCONES!!!!

 Let's count the reasons to love tattie scones

1. The name. Tattie (rhymes with batty)  is a nickname for potato. I like food, I love breakfast, and I adore nicknames- nicknamed breakfast food? This is about as fun as a meal can get without a box full of sugar and the addition of tropical-colored food dyes.

2. The gluten free-ness. The recipe calls for a cup or so of flour, but with most of the work being done by potatoes, the substitution of a gluten free flour mix doesn't change a single important thing
3. The taste and texture. Something like a potato pancake or potato gnocchi turned into a biscuit.
4. The way they use up leftover mashed potatoes. 
And mashed potatoes, if slang and nicknames followed rules of logic, should be called mushy tatties.
Except that sounds all kinds of unappetizing. 
Of course, mushy peas also sound all kinds of unappetizing. So gross, in fact, that they almost weren't invited to Wednesday night's  fish and chips party. A commitment to authenticity prevailed, and am I ever glad! Mushy peas are so yummy! They are so yummy that after two bites, their name becomes cute and comforting. Perhaps all they need is a marketing genius strong enough to help them leap the Atlantic, and perhaps they, as so many immigrants did, should change their name. If Pomme frites can cross the ocean and turn into French Fries, can mushy peas turn into Mashed Peas?   Here they are with both the oven baked fish and chips and the beer batter fish.

In a tail to tail match up,  the oven fried fish scored
a surprising victory.
No kidding- it really was more full of flavor than the deep fried versifison.
And did I mention mushy peas

It's all well and good to eat like the castle-dwelling English of yore if one lives like the English of yore- if one is prone to walking half the day on the moors, or riding to hound, if one is spending 19 hours a day hard at work being the salt of the earth, or a miner of it's coal or a tiller of its soil.
Even the straight backed beauties of English legend could eat a legendary breakfast and maintain a willowy figure, what with all that constant gathering of rosebuds while they mayest.

Hmm. Well, maybe not just the gathering of rosebuds.

  This may be the menu that created a power of world conquering proportions, but when the world one has to conquer is a modern one, eating English style too often makes one take on the shape of a potato. And not just any potato, but a potato from whom all the stiffening starch has oozed. One feels full and stodgy, and understands why English of the aristocratic set sometimes float across the channel for something light and French.

an omelette maybe.
or a nice little salad.

So what's a legend to do when it's threatened with antiquation? Is the full cooked breakfast the next member of  the support group for the superseded?:

  
Nope.
A real legend remembers what made it a legend. In the case of English food, that would be a straightforward, unpretentious, home-grown way to feed hard working people. 
A real legend keeps serving up the stuff of legend. 
Even if the serving changes style. Case in point? Smitten kitchen's favorite breakfast in England, Spinach Pizzettes

See? A simple protein, a stalwart veg, and some starch to mop it up with. Yummy. And if you use frozen spinach and a ready made crust, an easy straightforward way to feed hard-working peeps.
Legends change, and legends stay the same.
And I hope that this week, it's the same for you.
I hope that you know and understand 
the things that make you amazing.
And if ever once you wonder
whether there's still space in this world 
for the best you have to offer,
I hope you'll look deeply into the fires that make your life
the wild, precious thing it is,
and know that the passion, curiosity, wisdom and love
that form the core of you

will never be obsolete.

Menus, November 6, 2013

To eat well in England, you should have breakfast

three times a day.

W. Somerset Maugham

Did you know that institution otherwise known as The Full English Breakfast (after only a few hours of research, I can assure you that it deserves to be spoken of in capital letters) has an entire society devoted to it's preservation? 

And not in the creepy Miss Havisham preserve a meal
by letting it fossilize way.

There's a society logo and everything, so you know it's for real. Because I could not make up this logo. Well, I could, but I didn't :

An entire group of people committed to celebrating and maintaining
the traditions of a single meal.
 I want to go to those meetings.
I wonder what they serve.

We in this country have traditional meals, of course- the cornbread vs. white bread stuffing and jellied vs. whole berry cranberry sauce food fights of Thanksgiving are only weeks away. But the Full Breakfast isn't a yearly meal- 

this was once a daily event.

If you had lived in Britain generations ago, you too may have started the day by getting on the outside of 1200 of the most sustaining calories around, because stoking the furnace with a hearty breakfast was a good idea in a time when the day's chore list looked like this: 

All that breakfast energy is probably what gave the intrepid British the strength to spend a century or so colonizing a large portion of the world-just look at this amazing map! The areas in pink are those places that were at one time in the history of the planet British colonies:

It is possible, of course, that this compulsion to explore and conquer new territories was prompted by a deep desire (breakfast having been eaten) to discover
 somewhere where someone might be cooking something interesting for dinner.

The English Breakfast may be the stuff of legend, but it's not the stuff of all day long.

The Home Audience, who has been in England for 60 meals or so, has yet to feast on The Full English, but he has dined on curries, pizzas, kababs, lasagnas, Chinese takeaway and on one of  Britannia's great contributions to the world of dinner, fish and chips.  All that interesting multicultural cuisine  made me wonder what it is that makes British food British. And that, quite naturally, made me wonder what was for dinner.  

Wednesday: Fish and Chips and peas

Baked Fish and Chips. Is that a sacrilege? The recipe comes from the UK edition of Family Circle magazine, which gives it some authenticity, but if you'd prefer to eat your fish and chips covered with the more traditional crispy batter (and really, if health weren't an issue, isn't that what we'd all prefer?) try this recipe for beer battered fish and chips. There are apparently some vegetative things called mushy peas, and the recipe says that they are an essential part of a genuine fish and chips experience. Of course I looked them up, and they are perhaps not as weird as they sound to American ears.  Think thick split pea soup without the ham- which to these American ears, actually sounds pretty good.

Thursday:  Spinach and Egg Pizzettes 

Here's a recommendation from Smitten Kitchen, whose amazing author remembers this little spinach and egg treat as one of her favorite meals in England. I'll be using a batch of no-knead bread dough for the crust (note to self: stir up the dough on Wednesday night) (other note to self: buy some pita bread or a frozen or refrigerated pizza crust in case you forget previous note to self). Carbs, dark leafy greens and protein are all together in one happy golden circle here, but if you need a heartier meal, think of pairing this with a bowl of tomato soup or a pork chop.

Friday: Lamb Roast and Vegetables

The BBC has a cooking site! Wow! This exciting discovery comes just in time for the homecoming of the Home Audience, and the traditional meal of homecoming in this household, Roast Lamb. Carrots, onions, chunks of winter squash and tomatoes will roast along with the lamb. No potatoes for us tonight- the potatoes are being saved for tomorrow. Do those crazy metric measurements strike the fear of 5th grade math class into your soul? Never fear! Here's a handy dandy conversion chart that should get us all through the metric muddle.

Saturday:  Shepherd’s Pie

The internet and Gordon Ramsay agree: a real shepherd's pie is made with lamb, not beef. A beef based shepherd's pie ought to be called (and people get very insistent on this) a cottage pie. Which is just silly. If a shepherd's pie is made from the animals tended by shepherds, why isn't its beefy cousin called a cowboy pie? I mean, I can understand why it's not called a cow pie, but by shepherd's pie logic, shouldn't a cottage pie be made of little houses,or made of  little people who live in little houses?

Anyway. This recipe uses last night's leftover lamb and will include carrots, spinach, peas and any other leftover vegetable that's hiding out in the fridge. Extra mashed potatoes turn into something really fun tomorrow.

Sunday: English Breakfast: Sausage, Eggs, Tattie scones and mushrooms 

Well, maybe not the Full Breakfast. Maybe not the baked beans. Although, why not? Sausages,  eggs, a can of baked beans, fried mushrooms and scones made from mashed potatoes. Potatoes get nicknamed tatties, mixed with a very few other ingredients and become..... Tattie scones! That is the funnest thing to say that I've learned in a long time, and they look as fun to make and eat as they are to say. Be warned, the scones made in Britain are not much like the supersweet things we call scones in America. A British scone is like an American biscuit, and a British biscuit is an American cookie, and things just get more linguistically confusing from there, so let's stop while we can all still believe that we speak the same language.

I'll decide later just how much of this breakfast will actually make it to dinner-

For now

Menus, May 8, 2013

“ eating breakfast, even if it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, is a sign that the day has just begun and good things can still happen. Having lunch is like throwing in the towel.”

Johnathan Goldstein

It'll come as no surprise to most of you that Sunday is Mother's Day. And we're not really going to talk about that.
No, I'm not going to spend the week rehashing my mother's favorite meals, or dinners my mother cooked, or the favorite meals of my own children's childhoods,or get all sappy about the connection between mothering and nurturing and feeding. Because I've become curious about how in the world one particular Mother's day tradition has become as ubiquitous as phone calls and flowers. You know,this one:

Her smile is saying "gee thanks",but her eyes are saying
 "Who thought it was a good idea to wake me up?
Why did I wear red lipstick to bed?
Where did these perfectly dressed children come from?
What level of disaster is waiting for me in the kitchen?"

And, as so often happens around here, curiosity leads to cooking. And curiosity about breakfast means that this week is all about...(yay!)....

I absolutely LOVE breakfast! The problem is that breakfast so often happens in the morning, when I and all my sister muses are busy,

sleeping off all that late night inspiration.

Muses are not often morning people. Wait. Muses may not even be people. Hmmm. I'll rephrase:

Muses are not often morning mythical beings.

 But if breakfast arrives any time after, say 10 a.m., then it's absolutely, positively, my favorite meal of the day. And breakfast is going to be arriving every night this week, oh, around dinnertime.

Breakfast for dinner for a whole week! I'm nearly giddy with the naughtiness of it! And really curious about why eating healthy, comforting food that happens to be labeled "breakfast" feels so wonderfully wrong; so self-indulgently, sensationally naughty. What's up with that?

We'll be starting this breakfast in bed for dinner week with an old favorite:

Wednesday: Chicken and black bean chilaqueles

I'll be using a rotisserie chicken for this, and some canned black beans- and I'm lucky enough to have some stale tortilla chips on the pantry shelf  and some use-it-soon-or-toss-it salsa in the fridge. It's a brilliantly flexible recipe (so many of these dishes that started as a way to use up leftovers are) so have fun. I'll be pan roasting some tomatoes to go alongside and topping it with a poached egg.

Thursday:  Chilies rellenos stuffed with bacon, egg and feta

Inspiration here comes from the heavenly brunch menu of the Devil's Food Cafe in Denver. The recipe I've linked is Pioneer Woman's super easy chilies rellenos casserole, and if I use that, I may skip the bacon.

If the mood and energy align, I may try for something a little more authentic- the rellanos at Devil's Food were the real deal, just stuffed with scrambled egg, bacon and feta instead of the more traditional beef and queso. I think I want to try that. Here's the recipe I'll use if I do. If you try it, think about saving those egg yolks for tomorrow's hollandaise sauce.

Friday: seared salmon with asparagus and hollandaise                        Yet another way of cooking salmon! From what I've read, the magic trick here is starting with a heavy skillet (thanks again, Rache, for my cast iron Christmas pan!) and get it smoking hot. The internet promises that this gets the outside crispy while the inside stays moist. And we all know that the internet  keeps its promises.

I love hollandaise, though I think it tastes better when someone else goes to the trouble of making it. Here's what looks like a relatively fast and easy recipe that I think I'll try. I just get a little excited when I think of the lemony creamy goodness of hollandaise with salmon. If you gotta have carbs, try these amazing buttermilk biscuits or stir up some grits or polenta.

Saturday: Fried Egg salad and rosemary potatoes

Sigh. I love breakfast and I adore breakfast restaurants. Devil's Food  and Snooze  in Denver ,the Flying Biscuit cafe in Charlotte, NC...

been there, ate that, got the t-shirt. No, really-

I got the t-shirts

the salad is simple- make the potatoes from scratch, or use the frozen cubey hash brown potatoes, lay them on a plate, top them with salad greens, top the greens with crisp bacon, top the bacon with an egg, and add some dressing. Flying biscuit uses a balsamic vinaigrette and a chipotle aoli. Which is, as demonstrated here, mayonnaise mixed with lime juice and chipotle juice. This is just a killer salad- I could eat my way through the entire Flying Biscuit menu, and yet every time I go there, this salad is all I really want.
(I'm planning on leftover potatoes and leftover salmon from Friday night- it'll make this Salmon and potato hash an easy choice for Sunday lunch or Monday dinner)  

Sunday:  Mozzarella Omelettes and pan roasted tomatoes and sausage

Two reasons that I'm looking forward to these omelettes: 1. Mozzarella! I think I've gotten a little stuck in a cheddar rut as far as omelettes are concerned and 2. Last winter, I planted some pansies. And then in March, on a whim, I put a couple of sage plants in the same pot. And even though I am a very bad, learn-by-killing sort of gardener,  NONE OF THEM HAVE DIED YET!!!!! See?

it's really a bit of an accomplishment.

So, I have fresh sage! We'll be using Aidells chicken sausage, which is consistently yummy and easily available, and the grape tomatoes are easy: just put a skillet full of tomatoes in a little olive oil, and cook them until they're all lovely and caramelized. 

Do you know what happens when you have breakfast for dinner? You scramble things up.

When breakfast is for dinner, it's no longer about trying to make your belly unempty before you dash out of the door. It's about fun and comfort, given and received.

 It upsets the accepted order of things, and gives you time to enjoy something that life usually requires you to rush through. 

It puts beginnings where endings ought to go.
I hope this week that you feel well breakfasted: sharp,and strong, and cared for; ready for a day full of possibilities. 

And I hope that this week, every breakfast you have, no matter when you have it,  

Feels like the dawn of a truly

 beautiful day.

Weekend update December 31, 2012

things are unchangeable, and at the same time

 are being constantly transformed

Yukio Mashima

There's a winter sport that gets alot of attention this time of year- it's called Making Resolutions.

It's a game I rarely play- mostly because it's a game I can't remember ever winning. And yet....

I do love learning, and the changing that comes from learning, and the transformation that comes with change, and I love being a transformer.

No, not this kind-

although that would be crazy cool.

I mean the sort of transformer who knows that on Christmas Day, with a little time and a little work, this

can be transformed into this

(well, it did take a little more than a little time, but we
were playing in the snow while it cooked, so that doesn't really count)

Or the sort of transformer who gets a kick out of the way that stale bread and eggs can be transformed into not only this:

Best bread pudding I ever had, courtesy of my
sister-in-law (that's about 500 calories I owe you Libby,
and about 1500 more if you'll pass along the recipe)

but this:

Alton Brown's fantastic French toast recipe.
Liz had told me it was the best- and she's
right again.





 The sort of transformer who likes to watch the word chili mix with a little curiosity and turn into

this                                        and this                                             and this

That's right! the great chili quest is in full swing, and so far the biggest surprise is that the leading contender is this Chicken and White bean chili. Easy, low cost, and a really great flavor.
Best technique discovery of this domestic chili cookoff so far? Learning how to deal with a recipe that calls for a tablespoon of chipotle chilies in adobo sauce.
Behold:
Just empty the whole, undrained can of chipotles into a food processor or blender or bullet thingy.

You may not have a friend awesome
enough to have given you  cool discarded
Starbucks pitchers. That's okay.
Just use whatever uncool mixing container you have.

then blend em up-



That's a $20 immersion blender I bought after I burned out our
traditional blender. Does the job and takes up zero counter space.Nice.


then spoon the blended chilies onto a waxed paper or plastic or foil lined tray and freeze

Once they're frozen, take them off the tray, pop them in a zip bag and....Viola! You have little frozen tablespoon sized chipotle nuggets that you can use to flavor up all kinds of things.
And in further news..... today I learned how to poach an egg, and that egg got together with some grits and tomatoes and cheese and transformed into this pretty awesome breakfast:

which was a very nice way indeed to begin the end of the year.

 And there we are. Back to the end of the year. Which is where we started.
And I'm wondering if maybe underneath all the broken resolutions of years past- all those discouraging attempts to resolve ourselves, there's a deeper wish to transform ourselves. You know, a wish to change the form  of our lives.
And you know what?
Maybe we do have the power to reshape some of the things in ourselves we long to change.
Because I'm pretty sure that right now, today, you have at least the power to transform elements as ordinary as peanut butter and jelly and bread into happiness this big:

And if you've got that kind of power, who knows what wonders you may yet perform?