Sugarplum Fairy, Somewhat Late

Some months ago I received a lovely e-mail from a women named Molly who said she wanted very much to send me some POM Wonderful pomegranate juice. Just because. I shrugged my shoulders, thought "why not" and replied that she was certainly welcome to do so - I adore pomegranates and their juice alike - and said that she should not engage in any breath holding regarding posts because 1) am pretty lazy about posting obligations, perceived or actual and 2) I was as likely to make jelly or pour the juice over a turkey or somesuch before I did anything as straightforward as actually drink it. She wrote that she thought that was just fine and several days later I took delivery of a box of these.*


Isn't that just the cutest?


Pomegranate jelly was among the first of my canning experiments way back in the distant mists of 2003. I recall it as successful, although I ended up with way more jelly than I could have used at the time. These days I'm sure that I could make better use of the output and decided to, with the gift of the juice, revisit the project.


Making jelly from juice is really the only method I'm willing to tolerate. I simply do not have time to mess with crushing and draining fruit, worry about clarity, measuring and blah blah blah. Not when it's possible to make a year's worth of jam in less than two hours or go the juice route with similar achievement. There are lots of good, wholesome, natural (and -ish) juices on the market these days and I don't feel any need to drain anything from anywhere into whatever else when it can be successfully avoided with nothing traded in exchange. (I have similar feelings about manual vs. automatic transmissions. There may be benefits to the former, but with the availability of the latter, why would you?)


So, juice is really where it's at, jelly-wise. Not that I actually made the jelly. No, friends, as 2009 wore on and on (and...) and I became enmeshed eight weeks we call The Holiday Season it became clear that no there would be no jelly making. So I looked to glazing the Christmas turkey (please, do not get me started on why there was no roast beef this year - telling the story now can come to no good) and felt little to no guilt about keeping those cute little bottles waiting. I knew the glaze would be great because pomegranate anything is always great and skipped merrily along having absolved myself of any and all jelly-making responsibilities. I started dreaming about POM reductions with shallot and thyme or maybe sparked with Sichuan pepper. There are zillions of possibilities when it comes to these things. Including drinking, as it turns out.


Flash forward to Christmas Eve. Brainiac had just bought an enormous bottle of vodka (and also one of rum, since he could not remember which went into egg nog and there was no way he was going back to the liquor store just as the merriment countdown began so best to stock up on everything possible while the moment was at hand, right?) and my sister-in-law was coming over with her son for our customary Chinese food and Christmas cookie dinner. The day had been a delightful one, full of wrapping and singing and baking. Feeling celebratory, I cast about for a specialish cocktail that we could enjoy together. I remembered the planned glaze. Turkey? What turkey? I had some POM and a tanker truck's worth of vodka. In the face of such festivity there is only one thing a girl can do to make judicious use of such resources.


Behold the official cocktail of 2009-2010 twelve days of Christmas (literally so, having finished up the last bottle sent by my good friend Molly just the 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany**). Each of the sweet little bottles held enough juice for three martini-ish cocktails which, with sugared rims and iced cranberry garnish, kept me and mine in tremendously good spirits right up until the last carols were sung on Epiphany.** Does this cocktail have a name yet? What about the Sugarplum?

Neither I nor the nice folks at POM couldn't have known back when that the contents of that little box would end up being such fun. It just goes to prove that, sometimes, the most obvious thing to do with juice is to just go ahead and drink it.

* See what I did there? Not for nothing do I make my living as a compliance professional in my non-blog life, engaged in keeping my employer aright of various federal laws, regulations, statutes and whims. In keeping with recent handwringing relating to a certain type of blogger (female, mom, etc.) preying on the trusting good natures of innocent Internet-goers everywhere, I have now informed you that I am in receipt of free stuff and you are able to adjust your expectations of my further statements on the juice accordingly. I'm so glad we had this chat.

** This is the day when observant Episcopalians everywhere drain the bottom of their glasses, look about, and say, "Can we please take these decorations down already?"

*** I swear, that cooper tray doesn't look nearly as tarnished in real life as it appears to be in that pic. No, really. I'm a terrible housekeeper in many ways but polish is one thing that I am on top of. I need me some Photoshop skills, it appears.

Take Note

Take one youth football season (with it's thrice weekly practices and twice weekly games) and throw in with it a long-gestated corporate acquisition the scale of which will haunt me for years, four weeks of some kind of odd, exhausting respiratory illness for three-quarters of the domicile's inhabitants, and the further destructive machinations of another company that I never really did like all that much and what you get is a home cook that just hasn't been feeling it.

My name is Marsha (hello, Marsha) and my kids are eating an awful lot of hot dogs. Sure, they're local, nitrate-free hoity-toity dogs but that only gets you so far when they're on the menu as much as has been recently. Life hasn't been so terribly bad, I don't think, after all it's not as if they haven't been treated to a (swanky)PB&(homemade)J now and then. On bread that has 4 grams of fiber per slice! So there is that. (This is just between us, right?)

In the last day or so something seems to have snapped loose and Brainiac found me last night preparing a shopping list while sitting on the sofa and nearly buried in cookbooks. Some (Bistro Cooking and and the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook) were old friends, some (Make it Fast, Cook it Slow and Modern Spice) were newer favorites. For some reason it seemed terribly important to immerse myself in print rather than bytes for, although I considered running to Epicurious or All Recipes, I couldn't quite drum up the interest in what seemed at the time to be a very sterile, almost transactional, activity. I wanted to hold those books, cross-reference, sticky-mark, note the messages I've left to my future self reminding me to up the borage or leave out the tamarind or cook for ten minutes longer than specified or whatever.

I emerged two or three hours later filled with plans for, well, not hot dogs. Pho! Agrodolce! Amanda Hesser's Pasta with Yogurt! Rice and beans! (Yes, really.) Like the cookbooks that inspired them, so of the dishes on the list are old reliables to which I'm returning after a long break while others will be new adventures. The family is always a little suspicious when I start trying to shake things up (remind me to tell you about my very project-managed midlife crisis some time). As we shopped today and the kids tripped over each other to help pull ingredients off shelves, I talked about each and what we would do with it - the red curry and the walnut oil and the ginger all have a story to tell - and they took my ideas and my list and my recipes and threw back at me their own. Can we make a focaccia or maybe a socca? What about the dolmades? Can we make our own instead of buying from the "tapas bar"?

It looks like there is, indeed, life after hot dogs (and PB&Js).

Summer In the Kitchen (or Not)

Laurie Colwin related in her delightful cooking memoir Home Cooking the story of a friend who wondered about the herald-of-spring quality in the picnic staged by students at the seminary across the street from Colwin's apartment. "What is it about Episcopalians," the friend asked. "Is it their genes to barbecue?"

I think that when the friend in the story said barbecue she meant grill, although I cannot say for sure because I knew neither party to the conversation. The key to understanding what she meant, I suppose, is knowing whether or not the noun or verb form of barbecue was meant. Given the context, this Episcopalian is going with the verb and is very happy to do so. Grilling may not be in my genes but it's certainly among my preferences for getting good food on the table with a minimum of fuss, a maximum of flavor, avoidance of burgers and dogs where possible, and leaving ample time to pursue some of the other great joys of summer (swimming, gardening, sitting on the back porch watching fireflies, and - shocker! - canning).

In the warmer months, I rely upon three tools (a grill basket, a small cookie sheet that was perhaps meant for a toaster oven, and a set of skewers), a selection of condiments (if you're wondering what on earth made you concoct a batch of jerk sauce now you know) and two bread products (8 inch flour tortillas and garlic bread). From this modest list of necessities, great things can be achieved.

The basket can hold diced potatoes or cauliflower spears or mushrooms or whatever. Sprinkled with a bit of olive oil and seasoned with salt, pepper and/or some of that Adobo spice stuff (the bitter orange is really great) and plunked right on the grill, you've got a side dish fit for all comers. The skewers make short work of cooking any combination of meats/fish or veggies, all marinated overnight in Chiavetta's Italian Dressing or the jerk sauce (or even the Hot and Sweet Dipping Sauce). Thread 'em up and put them right next to the basket. They'll cook in minutes in a well-heated grill.

The teeny cookie sheet holds more fragile veggies - zucchini ribbons, say, or maybe red onion strings - salted and peppered and sprinkled with a spare amount of red wine vinegar (or that cheapie balsamic stuff in the green bottle). That, too, can go right on the grill. As for the bread, wrapped in foil (or not), either tortillas or garlic bread will warm sufficiently within minutes.

And that's dinner, prepared and served in roughly 40 minutes, with little cleanup in terms of pots and pans (the foil, once cooled, can be rinsed and used again and again and...). Salsa or steak sauce (Helen Witty has a recipe I've been meaning to try) are nice, as is a bit of yogurt with mango pickle or diced hot peppers. If I've got some good fruit, I might add a bowl or maybe a plate of sliced tomatoes and cheese for company, but these are frills and not at all necessary. A glass of wine, however, improves even this wonderful meal immeasurably.

When the dishes are cleared away and the minor post-dinner cleaning chores are done, it's no small gift have time to spare, something that I suspect even the grilling-suspicious Laurie Colwin and her friend would understand.

Not a NY Times Review Site

So, yes, that canning article was pretty interesting, no? I loved the inclusion of Edon Waycott, the woman who acted as my canning gateway drug so many years ago (and who, honestly, covered the same territory as the piece's focus but better and first) and the mention of community-based preserving co-ops. Lovely! And, like Ace Commenter Catherine I appreciated the nod to resisting the temptation to profile home canning as the next big retro craze.

I did chafe at the bit about canning being a "quasi-political act" if only because there is little more polarizing in our world than politics and even people who share wide swaths of common ground fall out all too easily when politics are brought into the act. You like to make jam, your neighbor also likes to make jam and although you may make it for different, unfathomable-to-each-other reasons (perhaps you're a locavore while he's feverishly preparing for the zombie apocalypse, say) make it together anyway. You might find lots of stuff will taste better as a result.

In other New York Times news, I was fascinated by a recent Op-Ed concerning Michelle Obama's off-the-cuff remarks that, now living in the White House, she doesn't miss cooking. Now, I adore the piece's author, Amanda Hesser, and have gone to great lengths to defend her whenever the opportunity arises (you'd may be surprised how often this actually happens, it's strange the lightening she attracts). But! I think she's off base on this one.

Not that she didn't touch on the right notes. Frugality, health, self-reliance all get shout outs, and rightly so. And I've said often enough (here and here and here and here) that I bemoan the current state of family cooking and wish more kids could be lured into the kitchen, of which the happy byproduct would be less of a burden (yes, Amanda, even for someone who loves to cook the process can be a chore) for the one person who usually finds herself with the job. (For the record, Michelle Obama and I both have two children, full-time jobs - although I'm willing to cop to the fact that hers is a wee bit more demanding than mine - and husbands whose work takes them out of the house more often than not. There the comparison of our lives breaks down - I rarely travel, I have near complete privacy and I seldom am held up as a role model of anything but, still, if someone offered me a highly trained chef to "help" on a daily basis I would require less than a heartbeat to accept. And I really like cooking.)

I don't think this is really Michelle Obama's fight. As much as I share the desire for a very charismatic roll model showing families the way back into the kitchen together, I don't think the solution is to tsk-tsk women who admit that it's just not their thing. Moreover, reading that Obama's well-documented toned arms somehow prepare her for whisking duty leaves me with the same faint queasy feeling I get whenever I hear someone demand of my very tall brother-in-law why he never played basketball. Poor form, that.

And? I'm uncomfortable with the idea that there is one way to be First Lady. Is it really so hard to work with the idea that First Ladies, just like us regular, er, ladies will come with some variety?

Finally, and on a completely different topic, I've been for some time mulling a post about my enduring but conflicted love for All Recipes. Enduring because I almost always find a good starting point for whatever it is I've got a notion to make. From flourless chocolate cake to fish tacos, All Recipes has never let me down. Conflicted because, my word, is there any other site out there which has user reviews so consistently useless (if entertaining)?

Turns out I don't have to write that post because the New York Times did it a little over two years ago,making all the points I'd make if I were going to write about it, which I nearly did but now won't. Go read the article instead. Very entertaining.

Sue responded to my onomatopoeia post with a note wondering if I had been having a migraine. I don't actually know much about migraine headaches - my own kinda, sorta, we don't really know what's wrong with you diagnosis is that I get cluster headaches. One of the hallmarks of clusters is that one might have several in a given period of time followed by time headache-free. Mine, assuming they are cluster headaches (which seems to be the best guess), are unusual because they include the flashes of light and often nauseate me - two things more characteristic of migraines - and they can last more than 15 hours. I was lucky because from the time I became pregnant with the Boy up until about a year ago I rarely suffered from headaches of any kind. I seem to be in a cluster now and, although it's not the worst I've experienced, it's still kicking my butt. Badly.

With the backdrop of feeling frazzled from a newly dissipated headache (the pain is gone, but the general rattledness associated is the gift that keeps on giving) coupled with arriving home later than expected this afternoon meant that my planned dinner of pasta shells with crab and peas (in cream sauce - yum) wasn't going to happen. So here I was, late, with the kids in smash!boom! mode and no thought what to do about feeding them. I managed to pull it off and after dinner it occurred to me that my own personal methods for dealing with these kinds of situations might be useful to someone else.

Tonight I ended up making a crustless quiche of five eggs, half a small onion, a cup of frozen peas, a few ounces of leftover ham (diced), a chopped carrot, a bit of shredded manchego cheese and half a cup of flour. All of this mixed together and baked at 375 degrees for about 40 minutes did the trick for an entree, served with brown rice simmered in beef broth, mashed sweet potatoes (roasted over the weekend and stored in the fridge against just this kind of need) with cinnamon. My total hands-on time was well under 30 minutes and I felt fairly pleased with myself when all was on the table and with only a slight amount of trauma on my part.

Crustless quiches are a great choice for busy cooks - eggs, a bit of flour and pretty much whatever else you like are all you need. I've used kale, chard, mushrooms, olives, parsnips, broccoli, all kinds of cheeses and even salsa. Not only are crustless quiches delicious, but they have the added virtue of using up bits of leftovers that aren't enough for anything else.

I try not to feed my family too much in the way of pasta, but do rely on two forms for those days when I'm really pressed. Angel hair, orzo and couscous each cook up very quickly and take on all kinds of diced or chopped veggies easily (I like to include a bit of sauteed garlic and onion, too). A light sauce of chicken broth thickened with cream and warmed through makes a nice topping that comes together easily.

One of the chief benefits of doing as much canning as I do is that there are a number of products in my repertoire that amount in reality to nothing more than homemade convenience foods. Having roasted tomato sauce, applesauce, mixed pickles and more on hand means that, when push comes to shove, there is something that can be relied upon to dress up a quickly produced and more humble offering. Scrambled eggs with applesauce isn't an unheard of dinner plate around here and nor is a lightly seasoned roasted chicken breast with mixed pickle and fruit salad. Knowing I have a cupboard full of ready-to-go foods made by me with ingredients that I either grew, picked or purchased in season is the ultimate in dinner planning.

With these simple meal solutions generally at hand I can cope with just about anything come the dinner hour, whether it be a headache, a late meeting or just your standard-issue energetic offspring bouncing around the kitchen demanding to know "is dinner ready yet?"

This woman has much more ambition than I. Much more. She has resolved, in that New Yearsy kind of way, to use her slow cooker every day and post the results every day. Stunt blogging can be really fun and interesting (see also: the original Julie/Julia Project) or boring and sanctimonious (see also: No Impact Man). This has some potential, I think, for hitting me in a few interesting spots: cooking, family, money, creativity, etc., etc., etc. I like that she, so far at least, uses real food (marshmallows for the sweet potato casserole notwithstanding) and seems to avoid cream 'o whatnot condensed soups and the like. Definitely some possibilities there.

Finding the blog was good timing since I have been trying hard to cuddle up to my own slow cooker without much success and if it weren't for tonight's modest triumph with a sausage and potato experiment, I might have abandoned the thing altogether. It truly is amazing how one can throw some quartered red potatoes, a diced onion, a few sausage links and a bit of veggie broth into a ceramic pot and come home to a dinner that's, more or less, completely prepared.

Of course, after nearly six years of blogging (six years!) I'm still wretched about remembering to take pictures of things. Trust me, though, it was actually kind of yummy and not at all the sort of shredded-meat-with-soft-carrots thing that I've well mastered and come to dread. Yes, I'd say the slow cooker thing is looking up.

On a long ago Monday morning I arrived at work to find my boss dabbing at tears and sniffling. Being the wretchedly self-centered person that I am, my mind turned to things that could make me share her sadness - was our department being eliminated? Was the bonus pool smaller than expected? No. She'd argued with her fiancé. Phew! Comforted that I shared not her problem, I inquired as to the nature of the quarrel.

"He laughed at me because I think we shouldn't add stuff to the spaghetti sauce. I mean, if the company wanted it there they'd have put it there in the first place, right?!" she wailed.

Turns out the happy couple had been making baked ziti for dinner on Friday evening. My boss' intended added some herb or spice to the jarred sauce and she objected on the aforementioned grounds. Now, this was my boss. On the one hand, if she wanted to assert commercial spaghetti sauce purity, I was going to line up right behind her (saving my battles for issues affecting the bonus pool, say). On the other hand, I was utterly stupefied by the intensity of her opinion on the matter.

I asked if she'd never added salt, pepper or butter to frozen corn (leaving aside that it's possible to buy preseasoned frozen corn), or red pepper flakes to pizzeria pizza. In fact, I pointed out, with this line of reasoning one could argue that if the ziti company had wated its product enjoyed with sauce of any kind it would have put it there (leaving aside also that it's possible to buy canned and frozen presauced pasta).

I don't remember if I convinced her that a little oregano in the Prego was no reason to argue. I do remember thinking that if no one ever messed with commercial products to make them closer to personal tasts then few people were likely to learn to cook at all these days, what with home ec being eliminated from school curricula and the knowledge not really being handed down generationally as it was in the past.

Futzing around with the offerings of Kraft, Lipton, et. al., may well be the path to relying on those companies less. It's not that far a leap from adding garlic to a rice-and-butter mix to realizing that one can add both garlic and butter to plain rice, resulting in a healthier, tastier and cheaper meal. Lately I'm excited about learning to make my own cheese and hamburger buns. But I couldn't even consider these projects if I hadn't myself back in the day added a bit of something to a jarred or canned whatsit and worked forward from there.

I've made it plain here that I'm not among Sandra Lee's greatest fans. Truthfully, though, my feelings are complicated. "Semi-homemade" may not be a long-term goal I'd advocate, but I'd say that these days it's a totally honorable path to journey on the way to "I made it myself."

One of my pals adheres to the financial advice dispensed by Dave Ramsey and through her I've been exposed to a bit of his recommended method. Ramsey's approach to these things can be summed up by debt = bad which, although simple, is probably generally accurate. While my exposure to his actual output (despite covering any number of books, radio broadcasts, podcasts, written columns, textbooks for his "Financial Peace University" and so on - he's like the Martha Stewart of money) is almost non-existant I am familiar with his saying that one should live on "beans and rice, rice and beans" until the family debt is completely eliminated.

The message encourages frugality and responsibility, although I never thought that "beans and rice, rice and beans" was all that tough a prescription, as catchphrases go. Beans and rice is a lovely meal. Rice and beans, too, for that matter. As I ruminated on why such a delightful, nutritious, native-to-many-cultures dish was being cast as a pennance for financial irresponsibility - said ruminations happening as I was preparing last night's dinner of, natch, beans and rice and rice and beans - I realized that the way Dave Ramsey means beans and rice is probably much different than the way I, and most home cooks, actually prepare them.

I think that what he's after is this notion that, until one has paid off one's debt - a good and worthy goal - one should eat plain and uninspiring food. I envision Minute Rice and a can of store-brand beans, doled out to the miserable hoards looking forward to the day when mom is allowed by Mr. Ramsey's advice to buy a steak (with cash!) and they can all be happy again.

But no! I say to all Ramseyites that your days of beans and rice can be lovely, not punishing, largely because the reason that beans and rice came to be such a staple of peoples all over the world is precisely because it is both healthy and relatively inexpensive, and can be augmented by bits and pieces of whatever condiments, leftover meats and veggies might be on-hand. A bit of pepper, onion, grated carrot, diced squash, kale, vinegar, sausage or some of all of these and you've got a dish to please kings and paupers alike.

These days I start by rehydrating beans in my rice cooker on the "soup" setting, although I do keep some canned black and kidney beans and chick peas around for speed on the days we need it. Lentils and split peas don't require this treatment and are also nice for times when we're running in a thousand directions. Once you settle the question of what bean(s) you'd like and what you need to do to them to get ready, work on the rest.

I start by dicing some onion and mincing a bit of garlic, and sauteeing them in whatever I've got - olive oil works, as does bacon fat or broth (or a combination). If I've got bell pepper, that gets chopped and added, too. I've also been known to add grated carrot at this point or shredded cabbage or kale. This is a good time to add meats as the onion begins to become translucent - sausage like chorizo or kielbasa is nice, as is chopped leftover beef or pork - but meat is not a requirement of a tasty, filling outcome. If you've only got onion, that's fine. If you've got half an onion and an inch of carrot and the bottom half of a pepper, that's fine, too. Or whatever. There are few rules other than you use what you have and like.

When the veggies are heated, add the drained beans (remember when working with dried beans that, like rice, the end result will be much more in volume than you started with) and perhaps even some fresh or canned diced tomato (or not) and stir. Just before taking off the heat, season to taste with salt and pepper and whatever other spices seem appropriate (adobo can be nice or maybe some curry or garam masala with lentils or peas) and add any fragile greens like spinach.

Serve hot, over rice, with any condiments that might taste good. Last night we had no meat in the pot, but salsa, plain yogurt, pepper sauce and grated cheese rounded things out nicely. On other occasions mango pickle and - a recurring theme at our house - plain yougurt was nice. Once I had only a bit of homemade paneer from a friend but diced up very fine and used with lots of peas and spinach it made a very nice dinner stretched for seven people.

The point of all this is that "beans and rice, rice and beans" needn't be thought parismonious. It is, of course, but not in any way that I think Dave Ramsey means it. Messing around with a bit of this and a bit of that as ingredients are available is honest home cooking as performed by millions of cooks throughout time. Beans and rice should be an end, and one we're happy to be at, and not a means to an end to be endured until something better comes along.

A few quickies:

- Today is the first day of first grade. Despite the familial roundabout over homeschooling, the Boy reported for duty this morning at our neighborhood elementary. He asked to attend, a fact that weighed heavily against our inclination to pull him out. Actually, what he asked for was to 1) go to school and 2) still have "family school". We figure we can learn something from his view of these options as being not of the zero-sum nature that most grown-ups would assign. He would miss his buddies, we know, and that he had such a cheerful aspect in looking forward to the start of the school year must surely count for something. As I pointed out to a friend recently, the television show Family Ties had years of good ratings based on nothing other than the notion that sometimes kids will desire to create almost exactly the same kind of life that their parents would have rather not had. Go figure.

- You know I had fun packing his lunch, right? I am addicted to Cooking Cute and the thousands of Bento pics available from Flickr and have happily shared my addiction with both kids. Hello Kitty silicon cups? Yes! Lightning McQueen fruit picks? Of course! It's not consumerism, it's Bento! This morning I placed a BBQ pork sandwich, apple slices (some cut thin and then made into rocket ship shapes with a cookie cutter), a diamond-shaped Rice Krispie treat (a fun, sticky project with kids) and locomotive-topped skewers of alternatiing black and green olives into his little lunch carrier. Bliss. Lunch packing may just be the salve that gets me through my kids' schooling.

- The apple was from one of our backyard trees. Brainiac is consumed with apple picking lately and seems to have rather high expectations with regards to my ability to deal with them all. He has constructed an apple picker out of an empty coffee tin and some extenda-pole thing that is able to reach all but the very highest samples. Luckily, the kids don't hold their unsprayed and not-ready-for-Superfresh looks against them and eat them by the dozen.
- I am sick of tomatoes. You will remind me of this, won't you, when come February I yearn in poetic terms for last month's bacon and tomato sandwiches? I still have about 20 pounds to deal with and I am fighting my preference to fling them into the compost and turn my back on the whole affair. But, no, I am a responsible sort and will manage another dozen pints or so. I swear, I am NOT picking anymore other than the cherry varieties that I've been drying. Oh, but I might pick some of the remaining unripened for fried green tomatoes (use bacon grease for the frying and salsa for topping). That I could cope with.

- The geese have been flying the last few days and there's a distinct chill in the morning air. Since I am not among summer's biggest fans these are cheering developments. September is pleasant and happy month, being as it is the time when both my wedding anniversary and the birthday of my oldest fall, but its real purpose is to serve as the gateway to October.

Earth Day seems to have influenced the Boy Wonder: "Mom, when I'm a grown-up, I'm going to make a law that says that people need to make sure they recycle and stop buying so much stuff. Oh, and quit buying big big cars to drive when they don't really need to. And so they stop littering. And share more, 'cause the earth is the only place we have to live and we shouldn't ruin it for everyone."

The downside of his enthusiasm is that I'm having a hard time getting on board with his youthful optimism that me remembering to bring my cotton bags to the farmer's market (met with an arm pumping "YES! Go mom!!") is going to do all that much to further his goals. The upside is that I now have a much easier time convincing him that running out to the compost pile twice a day is something both important and useful and he's actively whittling down his "wish list" of hoped-for possessions ("Mom, I don't really need magnet toys since I already build with my Legos and they seem more useful for having fun.") He's more eager than ever to help in the garden mulching and weeding and generally helping our little sprouts along. Our conversations on the matter of environmental issues have been a useful lesson to me in taking joy from small events in the face of larger and vastly more grave concerns.

One of my abiding interests, conservation-wise, also fits nicely in with my general obsessions regarding food and food preparation. To wit, we're building a solar cooker. I've long found the idea tempting, for we don't air condition much (by U.S. standards, anyway) and I am always motivated to reduce generation of additional heat during the long and humid Philadelphia summer. Now seems like a good time to act on the interest.

On the one hand, I think that using a solar cooker could be a useful tool for busy family cooks much in the same way that slow cookers are in the sense that even less time could be spent fussing and monitoring food as it cooks. On the other hand, there is a greater need to let go of control, to eat the food when it is ready and not demand a certain time for dinner, that could prove problematic for families that rely on split second timing to accommodate everyone's work, sports schedules and general busyness. Because Brainiac and I have promised each other that we'd actively avoid this approach to life - so far quite successfully, I think - I have high hopes that adding solar cooking to my food preparation repertoire will be highly successful experiment.

Not to mention all the new recipes to try (did you see? Beer bread!). There's not to much making a virtue of a necessity when I think I'll enjoy the process so much, eh?

February, my bloggy friends, was a really terrible month in ways large and small around here. I, for one, am glad to see the last of it.

To celebrate the coming of spring and the end of a stressful winter I have been buying garden seeds, leafing through the endless catalogs showcasing this year's new varieties in annuals (despite my constant intention to use more perennials I am regularly seduced by the flash and color of the here-today-gone-tomorrow) and learning the ins and outs of my brand-new (to me - a virtual friend bought it and never used it and so very generously gifted me) dehydrator. Oh, and Brainiac bought me a meat grinder - yes, it's true. Odd and true, come to think of it, but that's the kind of spur-of-the-moment guy he is and I'm happy to have another toy to entertain me in the kitchen.

Now, about that cornmeal. Because there's not much I'm willing to buy food-wise if it only has one use (the notable exception to this is my zester which is pretty much only good for zesting but is so spectacularly good at it that I forgive its monotasking nature) I wanted to find more uses for cornmeal besides just making the odd bit of cornbread or muffins. Cornmeal is fairly new to me as an ingredient and pantry-staple so imagine my surprise to find out that it's actually flexible, not to mention useful. Within the space of a few days upon setting out to find more uses for the quite large quantity I purchased for the cornbread I made cornmeal waffles, empanadas, and spoon bread (sort of a cross between a pudding and cornbread). Each was delicious and worth sharing.

The empanadas in particular are easy and quite tasty. Not only are they good for using up leftovers because they can take up almost any kind of meat, veggies, fruit or cheese (I used thick leftover black bean soup and grated cheddar cheese), but they can be frozen unbaked - making them great for last minute meals and fast-food avoidance. You can make lots of teeny-tiny ones in advance of a party or large ones to serve as an entree with perhaps a green salad. They can be savory or sweet and if you happen to have kids around who like working with play clay, as I do, you can enlist them to help and in no time you'll have a couple dozen ready for baking or freezing.

To produce a good number of empanadas (how many you make from this recipe will depend upon the size you make them), mix one cup each corn meal and all-purpose flour. Add in 1 teaspoon each of baking powder and salt and blend well. Melt a quarter cup of butter and add to the flour mixture along with a half-cup of water. Mix the dough thoroughly - it should be soft, but not sticky and easily pliable. Add a bit more flour or water as needed, and then knead the dough by hand for two minutes. To make an empanada, pinch off some dough - I used a bit about the size of a golf ball - and press it into your palm so that it's flattened into a disk. Place your filling inside (for this amount of dough, this would be about a tablespoon of filling, but you may need to experiment a bit) and fold the disk over so that a little crescent-shaped "pie" results. Put the empanada down on a prepared cookie sheet and press the seal closed with the tines of a fork. Brush with an egg and water wash. At this point, the empanadas may be frozen on the sheet and moved to a bag when solid, or baked at 375 for about 25 minutes, or until golden and hollow sounding when tapped.

For fillings, pretty much anything goes. I used leftover black bean soup and grated cheddar cheese, as I said, but you can chop up some cooked steak and mix in some sauteed onions or maybe some mushrooms and thyme would be nice. For sweet empanadas, stewed apples are lovely, as it pumpkin butter (sprinkle a just bit of sugar on top of sweet ones for added crunch and flavor).

Like so many of the best things to eat, empanadas have cousins from all over the world. Ravioli, pirogies, piroshky, pyrizhky, and any number of dumplings are all evidence of cooks' zeal to package up bits and pieces of things in pastry. Given the general lack of authenticity in my own recipe, but for the cornmeal (for which one may substitute a second cup of flour), what we have here can be called more or less accurately any number of things. No matter what you decide to call yours, enjoy them, for seldom will a recipe allow so much leeway for such a consistently delicious result.

Despite living for most of my adult life in and around Philadelphia, I somehow managed to avoid direct personal contact with scrapple, a food that, like the cheesesteak and soft pretzel, is strongly associated with the region. (Right now I feel I ought to advise you that you may want to think twice about clicking that scrapple link. Like sausage, law and perhaps also reality television, some feel it best to remain ignorant of scrapple's makings.) It's not that I had what you'd call a strong position on scrapple, just it always seemed like the kind of thing that I was probably better off avoiding if possible. Which it was.

But earlier this year we invested in a stand-alone freezer and accessorized it with shares in both a steer and a pig. The pig arrived with several packs of organic, hormone-free, free-range scrapple. Brainiac and I both felt tested by its presence at our house and resolved that it would not be wasted. Yesterday morning we acted on our resolve and I sliced and fried (in a well-seasoned cast iron pan) the very first scrapple of my life.

No one could be more surprised than I to discover that scrapple is actually quite good. Properly prepared, scrapple has a texture somewhat akin to polenta* - browned and crispy on the outside, meltingly tender on the inside. It is earthy, meaty and very, very rich - as befits a dish made with bits of the pig that I ordinarily pass with only so much as a shudder. I couldn't eat more than two small slices, but Brainiac and the Boy Wonder both managed to pack away more.

I'm chalking this up to a growth experience. While I am no longer afraid of scrapple and will certainly enjoy the remainder currently in my possession I can't imagine a time when I'll seek it out. Still, I am pleased to be in the scrapple-eating side in a world that is highly unevenly divided between Those Who Will and Those Who Won't. I am a girl who will.

* One of the ingredients in scrapple is cornmeal, which serves as a kind of mortor for all the bits and pieces of other stuff. When I described the texture of scrapple as polenta-like I had a giggle, because in my grocery I can buy "polenta" for something north of $3.00 a pound whereas cornmeal mush - the exact same thing, but for being a slightly finer grind - is more like $1.50.

I learned two things while making tonight's dinner:

1) Italian sausage bounces, and;

2) Reheating couscous on the stovetop is not the best idea for best results

What the rest of the household will learn from my making tonight's dinner:

1) I always keep a can of the cheap spaghetti sauce on hand "just in case", and;

2) I'm not afraid to use it

More little tidbits about meal assembly joints:

1) They have their own industry association. On the one hand, I can see the need for such an organization - who else to discuss the critical question Is this a fad? No word on the website about how much the answer to this - and other - questions costs. Maybe, like dinner assembly itself, you get the answers for 6 to 12 questions for as little as $200 and change. Hmm. Somehow, I doubt it.

2) Foodmomiac details her experience with Dream Dinners in this series of posts. To be fair, I have looked around for positive reviews of dinner assembly meals other than those published in traditional, mainstream media outlets, to no avail. Lifestyle reporters in particular seem to love dinner assembly, but no word from the food pages. Other than a few negative discussions, of which Foodmomiac was just one, bloggers' mentions seem to be just that they went with friends to one or another such franchise with no follow up as to their feelings about what they ended up eating as a result.

I remain interested in trying a session for myself, in the interests of self-experimentation, of course. Tell me what you think: because I have blogged on this subject and will more than likely do so again, should I share my thoughts, why I'm there and my intention to blog about the experience? I'm not exactly Dooce or Julie here so it's not like my little corner of the internet is going to single-handedly bring down an entire nascent industry simultaneously giving rise to the rebirth of the rice-packet eschewing home cook. (But, goodness, wouldn't that be cool?) I wonder just where the blogger/ever-so-slightly journalist (however faux) line is. Thoughts?

Is it July already? My, how time flies when you're busy spreading aloe on your sunburn and picking charred bits of fireworks cardboard out of the zucchini patch.

Anyway. For those of you who celebrated the Fourth of July I hope the day was a haze of happiness, as only a holiday dedicated to freedom, beer and (irony!) chips and salsa can be. For those of you who had, uh, Tuesday, I hope it was similarly lovely.

Last night as I put dinner on the table I realized that I had once again committed one of my most hated culinary crimes. Specifically, everything I had prepared so lovingly was a shade of white - the mahi mahi, the orzo, the sauteed (peeled) squash and onions, the sourdough bread. Ugh. A delicious dinner, sure, but not terribly appetizing on the whole and quite disappointing. The looks of food go a long way in our enjoyment and a tasty meal that is also beautiful is much nicer than one without visual interest.

So, yes, recent rants notwithstanding, I am not perfect cooking-wise. Last night's dinner was wonderful for ease and quickness of preparation. But in my zeal to make something nice and simple - but also nutritious and yummy - on a busy, hot day I somehow lost track of another food virtue that I hold dear. Ah, well. Tonight I'm making nachos with seasoned meat and refried beans left over from Wednesday, as well as the garden's first tomatoes and jalapeños.

Nachos make a great quick meal, especially on a mid-summer night when you'd kind of rather go out to eat (and would probably order nachos) but won't because there's a long vacation coming up and you're trying to save money in the face of $3.50/gallon gas. Plus, although not super good for you, they can be made more healthful by adding lots of tomatoes and black beans, being somewhat moderate on the cheese and subbing drained plain yogurt for the sour cream. Nachos have the added benefit of making my kids (and, lets be honest, Brainiac) think that they've gotten away with something, dinner-wise. Here's how I do mine:

Spread a bag of white tortilla chips on a 9 X 13 rimmed cookie sheet/jelly roll pan. Top chips with seasoned ground beef (leftover from tacos, say), refried beans, chili, drained canned black beans - or some combination. On top of the beans and meat, sprinkle diced tomatoes and finely sliced jalapeños (you can also use pickled jalapeño slices), finely diced red onion and a few spoons of salsa and finally grated cheese - I use a combination of cheddar and monteray jack - use what you like and melts well). Cook in a very hot oven (say, preheated to 400) just until the cheese has melted - any longer and the chips could get soggy. When done, place the entire pan in the center of the table (on top of several tea towels laid down for protection), along with bowls of more salsa, drained plain yogurt* and guacamole.

* The yogurt doesn't strictly have to be drained, but doing so makes it seem a little more sour creamish. I drain mine in a paper towel lined mesh strainer for about 20 minutes while I prepare and cook the nachos. There are special draining tools you can buy for this job, but they seem kind of pointless to me when they can be replicated so easily and cheaply.

In my last post I promised I would talk a bit about those dinner-assembly franchises like Let's Dish, Dream Dinners and My Girlfriend's Kitchen. They're popping up everywhere like the proverbial toadstools. The Washington Post recently printed an excellent primer on the subject (you may need to register for this, try BugMeNot for help). Quickly, the idea is that one makes an appointment to go collate ingredients for 12 or so recipes from pre-prepared ingredients by following recipes posted at each station. At the end of assembly, the meals - which serve 4 to 6 - are put into freezer-friendly containers and carted home. For about $200, the assembler has roughly two weeks of meals and, at least according to the marketing, has enjoyed a lovely wine-filled girls' (for, lets face it, the men of the house aren't really being spoken to here) night out cavorting with friends and yet still managing to fulfill her duty to family and home.

I find the idea behind these stores very attractive. Who wouldn't love to cook with friends, share the work, double the fun and come out of the whole event with delicious food to eat for days to come? Sounds lovely to me. Actually, it must sound lovely to a lot of women, because since Dream Dinners opened back in 2003 the industry has racked up billions in annual sales and competition has sprung forth like zucchini in July.

I can't help but wish, though, that moms had social permission to go out with friends without having to also multitask their way to through one of the most burdensome household tasks - making yet another dinner on yet another busy day. There seems to be something a little naughty about moms heading out on their own to think only of themselves for a couple hours. Or is going out with friends reserved for those selfish singles who viewed Sex and the City as aspirational television? There is something culturally going on that does not really love to see mothers indulging in some non-family related downtime - I guess I'm not surprised that womens' social time has now expanded to include dinner preparation duties. Moreover, I don't think it's too picky to point out that where individuals are pictured on the companies' websites, they are white. "Family" seems to be fairly narrowly defined here as caucasian, two-parent and fairly affluent. And, please, don't get me started on the "The best idea since the invention of the wife(R)" tagline - Brainiac nearly collapsed of rant-induced boredom the last time I even mentioned it.

But even beyond the socioeconomic issues, I'm troubled that businesses that are positioning themselves as offering solutions to a family problem may well actually be worsening a social problem. Most of the major franchises don't allow children to attend an assembly session - citing local and state laws about children in commercial kitchens - and some of them only permit couples under certain conditions and at certain times. So even while these companies are claiming to make things easier for women responsible for meal preparation, I think they are really reinforcing the social pressures that resulted in women maintaining sole responsibility for feeding their families in the first place. A woman who turns to any one of these establishments with frequency may well get food on the table but she also is going to have family members who are not learning to cook and share the job but who are also completely removed from grocery shopping and preparing food for cooking. It's one thing to not really love to cook or not totally get how it's done, but it's another altogether different story to not even be sure how to chop a fresh bell pepper, tear lettuce or know which end of a scallion is used. Or what constitutes a good buy on chicken, for that matter. Dinner assembly out of the house increases the risk that our kids' generation will be even less connected to their food than our own.

I want to be clear about one thing. I am not blaming women in general or dinner assembly customers specifically for their dinner-related issues. I know all too well what it's like to stare into the fridge at 6:30 p.m. wondering what on earth to feed the cherubs dancing about my legs chanting that they're staaaaarrvvvviinngggg. And I've certainly known the frustration associated with paying good, hard-earned cash for a larder full of fresh vegetables, meats, fruits and lovely condiments only to throw away shameful amounts because we were too busy to cook and eat at home and so grabbed a dog at Target. Further, I understand more than I care to the pressures associated with owning a lovely kitchen in a nice exurban town, only to have to leave it empty all day while out paying for it. Really, I know and know there really is a problem here in search of a solution. But this solution isn't really because it will only make the problem worse for having institutionalized not addressing the root causes of the dinner problem and making it o.k. to leave them unaddressed as long as food's on the table and mom's getting out once in a while.

It would be fair to challenge me on what I'd recommend to a busy woman with bacon to bring home if she can't quite find the time or energy to fry it up in the pan. If not Dream Dinners or it's siblings, then what? Well, as it happens I do have a few ideas. And, within the next three weeks, four dinner assembly joints are to open within 10 miles of my house. Despite the impression I may have given, I'm keeping an open mind and plan to give one or two a try. Like I said, I do find something attractive about the idea of hanging out with other women, having a laugh or two, and cooking up many evenings' worth of dinners. I just wish that instead of doing it at My Girlfriend's Kitchen I was doing it at, you know, my girlfriend's kitchen.

The Boy Wonder, looking out the window of the Ford Tri-Motor he rode in last Saturday.



I've written before about the differences between my mother's experience in home economics classes and my own. To recap: she and her classmates learned to cook and then catered sports banquets. I learned to make pudding pies and English muffin pizzas and then ate them in the 4.5 minutes after the bell on my way to the next class.

Leaving aside the sexual politics involved in classes of exclusively young women preparing and serving meals for banquets honoring (most likely) exclusively young men, I don't think it's a mistake to say that her experience was the more useful by far. She actually learned to cook, after all, whereas I learned nothing in particular that I couldn't have absorbed from reading the back of boxes or can labels. I have my theories about why my class was so different, so useless, so watered-down. In no particular order, these theories are:

1) Pudding pies, snack pizzas, and other pre-fab simple foods, were ideal for teaching a generation of latch key kids how to prepare something easy when they were home alone, while also managing to avoid burning down the house.

2) The 80s marked the start of marketing disguising itself as curricula. Most of the materials we used in our home economics classes were written and distributed by major food processing companies. It is, of course, in these companies' best interests that young cooking students don't actually learn to cook.

3) Prevailing and developing cultural norms at the time suggested that girls would not grow up to be "just" moms and homekeepers but that they would inevitably avail themselves of any number of lucrative and powerful careers so cooking as an instructional topic was considered perversly out of date. (I can't help but wonder why, rather than dumbing down a topic that was traditionally the province of female students, schools did not respond to the whole career-negates-domesticity thing by putting the subject on boys' required schedules. That they did not says to me that either no one really believed that girls truly would grow up to engage in professional work, gave any thought at all as to who would be making the food we would be required to eat career or no, or could not conceive of a future in which women would not be the designated cook despite the potential presence of a chosen career. I have my suspicions which might be true, but it's all too depressing to think about for long.)

I am not a scholar (nor do I play one on my blog) so I don't really know if any of my theories are on the right track. I do know that my experience wasn't terribly unique - of all the women I know who took home economics in school, none of them credit it with teaching them anything enduring or especially valuable. And today, of course, schools are under so much pressure of all kinds and classes like home economics or life skills or whatever are back-burnered even more than they had been when I was a teen (waaaaaay back in the 80s, for those of you keeping track).

Whatever the reasons for home ec's slide, I think that cooking as a skill was further hampered by the advent of the advertisingeverywhere culture (AEC) we live in (seriously, I was thoroughly gobsmacked to discover advertisements on the inside doors of the toilet stalls in a national chain restaurant that a) I will not name and 2) I will never visit again). The AEC made it much easier for FoodProcessing Conglomerate, Inc. to convince newly careered women and homemakers alike that cooking for oneself or one's family is drudgery, a chore, something to avoided and/or reduced at all costs and - behold! - we have this handy product which you can open, warm and serve without breaking a sweat.

The result is that we now have a major food company that gives away a million dollars annually to the person who can most creatively use its frozen, boxed and canned products (last year's winner made stuffing out of frozen maple-flavored waffle sticks), any number of "cook"book authors who claim to be able to save you time and money by helping you fake out dinner guests with things like Naan-Style Flatbread made out of canned pizza dough, and an entire populace who thinks that meal preparation is either some kind of daily chore to be endured only by referencing some "meals in 20 minutes" website or an occasional thing you do for people you want to impress. And all the while the AEC keeps beating its drum...cooking is hard, cooking makes you suffer, open a box, open a box, open a box.... I haven't even thrown in yet the existence of those products the packages of which proclaim "Includes Meat!"

O.K., this is getting long and I've got to run to pick up the kids. Would you be shocked to know that I've got more to say about this? No? Good, because we haven't yet covered those mom's night out meal-assembly places, OAMC, a host of new books aimed at helping the beleagered and over-worked to feed themselves, children's cookbooks, Alice Waters, the war on poverty, or my new manifesto. Oh, and the jerk sauce I made the other day.

For a while now I've been pondering what it means to cook. Can one be a cook and have absolutely no interest in food from a creative standpoint? Can "assembling" meals be the same thing as cooking? That is, if I make a ground beef dish with dehydrated noodles and cream sauce brought back to life with a cup of water and serve it with a green bean casserole made by opening a total of four cans, and then mixing and heating their contents, have I cooked? Or, if I open a poly bag of frozen vegetables and meat into a skillet and heat them so that the frozen sauce encasing them melts and warms through, is that cooking?

As with most things, I think the lines are pretty blurry. If, that is, if lines exist at all. I certainly don't make everything my family eats from scratch, or even near-scratch in the case of the Tastykake treats that Brainiac seems to acquire whenever he leaves the house. Then, of course, there's ketchup, pasta (a convenience food that even anti-convenience-food folk seem to have no problem with), sausages, and on and on. I make some of our broths but not all, some of our pickles but not all. You see where I am going with this, right? Is there anyone out there anymore who does the Ma Ingalls thing, churning butter, salting pork, grinding wheat (although even Ma Ingalls used white sugar for company, not to mention tea leaves and commercially roasted coffee)? I make soup noodles from time to time, am interested in making all kinds of ketchups and regularly bake bread (from commercially-produced flour), although I've never made pitas, tortillas, matzoh, lavash or any of the other scores of bread products we eat. But, on the whole, I procure a heck of a lot more than I actually produce.

Then again, I have had the experience more than once while grocery shopping of having someone point out that my cart contains ingredients to make food rather than prepared foods to which one merely adds water or applies heat.

I don't really know where I am going with all of this. I wish I had a point, but I'm not there yet. I do know that I am a moving target, cooking-wise. Since I work at home in somewhat sporadic bursts I have a great deal of control over my own schedule and am able to make chicken broth or pizza dough or a batch of mango jam in between my other daily activities and responsibilities. It's easier for me than, say, a single mom working two minimum-wage service jobs or a woman who sits at a desk writing briefs for 12 hours a day, to put a "cook" meal on the table, as opposed to one for which many boxes and cans are opened and contents heated.

On the other hand, some of the things that I make which my family loves to eat the most are ridiculously easy and scarcely qualify as cooking. Roast chicken, comes to mind. With roasting chiken all you really need is a chicken and time, heat application at its most sublime. Soup's the same way - leftover veggies cooked in seasoned water, what could be simpler?

So, maybe time really is the magic ingredient rather than being invested over who made the broth. And it's something that is so scarce anymore. I know from experience that four not-over-programmed individuals can still result in one over-programmed family. If, on top of our over-programmedness, I added a full-time out of the house job I'd do a heck of a lot more assembling and heating.

Hm. As I said, I wish I had a point, but I do not. These are things that I've been thinking of for a while now and I'm no closer to understanding the various inputs and methods involved in cooking for one's family than I was at the beginning. I should say here that I'm not looking in all of this to judgment - there is no way on earth I'm going to come down on a mom who is just looking to get through the day sanity intact and trying to get some food on the table in the bargain. I, too, can be a master assembler. To wit, my chili recipe, a triumph of assembly and heating:

Brown however much ground beef or finely chopped steak you want in a large saucepan. When about half-way browned, add a couple fistfull's of chopped onion and a couple cloves of chopped garlic. When the onion is translucent, add two drained cans of drained kidney or black beans (or a can of each) and a drained can of petite dice tomatoes. Add a packet or a couple tablespoons of chili seasoning and a squirt or two of Frank's RedHot (the lime variety is particularly nice). Allow to cool slightly and taste to adjust seasonings. May be served over biscuits or rice, if desired.

Cookbooks are like anything else that someone might enjoy - as every golfer with an assortment of tee-bedecked ties or second-grade teacher with a cupboard full of apple-shaped coffee mugs knows - in that, once one's interest in cooking and cookbooks is found out by friends and family at large, one invariably receives as well-intentioned gifts all manner of odd, duplicative or even plain old icky examples right alongside the true treasures. And so it has been for me.

Recently I decided to cull my cookbook collection, both as a cookbook-specific effort to retain only those with true personal value and also as part of a broader intent to reduce the amount of stuff in general that we're currently carrying. Culling required me to engage in the thoroughly enjoyable task of rereading many books I hadn't cracked open in some time to decide where they fell in the culling sweeps. Some, once special favorites, were no longer right for my kitchen, but I knew another cook who might enjoy them. I felt good about these knowing that they'd remain in my world even if under different ownership. Others I could see no clear use for - they were either too strange, too narrow in subject, contained too many errors or were just in some other way unkeepable. (Aside: Why do cookbooks seem to be the least edited of any genre of book? I swear that some people believe that writing cookbooks involves nothing more than slapping some recipes on a page.) These were put into the free box at a neighbor's yard sale and then moved onto a local thrift. The collection remaining consists of cookbooks that I feel comfortable will carry me through another decade of cooking. They are solid, practical, well-written, instructive and, in more than one case, sentimental.

In August of 1992 my youngest sister and I traveled to San Francisco together to visit family and celebrate our graduations, hers from high school and mine from college. We visited with our father's sisters and our grandmother, skulked around the city, and thoroughly enjoyed being so far from our typical routines. Our grandmother had moved to the Bay area when we were very young and visits were few and far between (in those days, even calling long distance really meant something - remember when you'd get off the phone to take another call if it was long distance?).

Grandmommy, as we called her, was a home cook in the best sense. We eagerly awaited her Christmas box every year, not so much for the knitted scarves it inevitably contained (although now I treasure those I still have) but rather for the jams and jellies, candies and nuts they contained. She dried apples picked from her apple tree - years before Ron Popiel tried to get us all to buy dehydrators off early morning television. And on our visit her kitchen talents did not disappoint. Her peach tree was producing well and we enjoyed homemade peach daiquiries before dinner and her famous, memorable peach pie after.
Less than three months after the trip, Grandmommy was dead. In retrospect, it's clear to me now that she had been dying even as she served us dinner but I'm still not sure if she knew it herself. No matter, really, I suppose.

My only request of my aunts handling her estate was that I might have some of my grandmother's recipe files. A few weeks later I received in the mail an accordian file full of clippings, scribbles and pages torn from magazines along with three community cookbooks from her near four decades of living in and around Pittsburgh. The cookbooks remained unopened by me all these years until just the other day. Each of them, for different reasons, remained in my "keep" pile. And one has original recipe, enhanced by my grandmother in her characteristic loopy script and customary green ink, for peach pie.

Isn't it funny how a book can sit totally unreferenced and unconsidered for, oh, 13 years before all of a sudden becoming an heirloom? Peaches are still more than a month away for me but I can say with some certainty that my kitchen will offer forth at least one pie this summer, with many thanks and much love.

Questions asked by a three year old while making chocolate chip cookies:

What is that? Why is it flour? Where is your bowl? Oh, there it is. Why is your bowl yellow? Why is that a bowl? What is that? Why is it brown sugar? Why isn't it white sugar? Where is the white sugar? What is that? What is vanilla? Can I smell the vanilla? Why is it vanilla? Why do I like vanilla? Why doesn't it smell like chocolate? Where are the chocolate chips? Why are they chocolate chips? What are those funny spoons? Why do they measure? What do they measure? Why is that salt? Are cookies salty? Is sugar good? Do we eat sugar? Why are you putting the oven on? Is the oven hot? Why is that an egg shell? Where did the egg go? Why do cookies have eggs? Do cookies taste like eggs? Why do you have to stir it? What are those? Why are they cookie sheets? Do cookies go on them? Why do cookies cook on them? Why are they rectangle? Why are they gray? Are they metal? Why are they metal? Why are you putting the cookies in the oven? Will the cookies cook there? Why do I have to stay away from the oven? Why don't you want me to get hurt? Are the cookies done? What is that? Why is it an oven timer? What does it do? Why are you turning the oven timer on? Are the cookies done? What is that? Why is it a spatula? What color is it? Why is it beige? What are you doing? Why do the cookies have to cool? Why are they hot? Are the cookies done? Are the cookies done? Are the cookies done? Can I eat a cookie? Can I eat a cookie? Can I eat a cookie? Can I eat a cookie? Can I eat a cookie? Can I eat a cookie? Can I eat a cookie? Can I eat a cookie? Can I eat a cookie? Can I eat a cookie?