Pears

My grandpa and uncle sent us some pears for Christmas. And not just any pears... Harry & David Pears.

Sweet, juicy deliciousness.

I remember my grandparents used to send these to my family when I was little. They were always such a treat because they're so tender and sweet. If you can't tell by the picture, we got about 2 dozen of them. I was afraid they would go bad before we would have a chance to eat them all, but luckily Arlond's family had come down to visit, so they helped us work on them.

When Arlond was little, his family put together a cookbook and Arlond's contribution was a recipe for Pear Pie. So, naturally, we made it:

6-8 pears

3/4 cup sugar

2 tablespoons flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

dash of salt

Peel pears and cut up. Mix sugar, flour, salt, and spices, and add to pears. Fill a 9-10" pie crust base with pears and dot with butter. Cover with top crust and sprinkle sugar on top. Bake at 400°F for 50 minutes.

Check out my fancy cut-outs. Yep, I did those by hand!

 

In addition to the pie and eating them by hand, I also added them to quesadillas and in fruit smoothies. Then when we finished them off, I used the boxes to store delicate Christmas ornaments, which was probably the best idea ever.

TV Cooking/Home Cooking

A while back I found this really great Michael Pollan essay about cooking shows. It's pretty long, but basically he makes a point about how incredibly odd it is that people are cooking less and less, yet they are watching more and more food and cooking shows. Pollan suggests that this infatuation stems from a conflict between a general fear of cooking (e.g., the unknown) and a general love of food. Cooking shows allow people to become familiar with cooking from a safe distance and zero chance of failure. A great analogy Pollan gave was that cooking shows are like sporting matches: A lot of people watch them, but few actually do it themselves.

I never really understood cooking shows. When I was little, before the Internet was as far-reaching as it is today, I didn't know how people could possibly keep up with the likes of Martha Stewart and Paula Deen. Why would people watch these cooking shows if they can't make the food? Now, with the Internet, they can preview the show and pick out their favorite recipes online, so it makes a little more sense.

But then we get to cooking competition shows. I can't taste the foods they're making, so how do I know if it's any good?! This was the question I always asked with these shows. Other competition shows, like American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and Project Runway have results that I can see and hear, so I know if the winner is actually good or not. And yes, presentation is important (and so I can get down with cake decorating and other art-based food competitions), but bottom line is that it can look horrible and actually be pretty tasty, or it can look beautiful and taste like plastic.

Last summer, a couple of my friends were really into Top Chef, so we got together each week to watch it and have dinner. I didn't really care that much about the show (Most of the good parts were the bits of "drama" between the contestants), but I liked that we'd each take turns cooking dinner and eating together before the show. Since then, our group shifted and merged into another group and now we do Movie Night instead. Each week we watch two movies that are related somehow and make a dinner that fits with the week's theme (i.e., The Hunt for Red October, Red Dawn, and Russian cuisine). It's pretty fun and forces us to get creative sometimes and try making new things, like syrniki.

However, Pollan fears that actual, legitimate cooking may be lost forever. With the far-reaching availability of pre-packaged, processed, and fully-cooked "food," who needs to cook anymore? Further, who even knows how to cook? Does heating up a can of soup or making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich count? It shouldn't, but it does.

Young adults like me learned very little about cooking from their parents. I can work my way around the kitchen, but I can guarantee you that I was offered nowhere near the same expertise from my mother that she had from her mother. My mom gave me a few favorite family recipes and showed me the basics for cooking, but most of what I cook now I learned from the Internet, cookbooks, other cooks, or from having the courage to try something new.

My husband is the same way, though he doesn't have quite as much enthusiasm for trying new things as I do. His father doesn't know how to cook anything more than making a sandwich or heating up leftovers in the microwave. I've often wondered what he ate for the ten years that he lived alone before he met his wife, but I'm too shy to ask. Or I'm afraid to hear the answer. But anyway, as a result of my father-in-law's complete and utter lack of cooking knowledge, my mother-in-law forced my husband and his brother to learn how to cook, though I think his little brother may have gotten off a little easier because I'm not sure I've actually seen him cook real food on his own, but I could be wrong.

So I guess we're two people that give a sliver of hope to future cooks, but I know way too many people that rely heavily on pre-packaged, processed food that requires little more than water and heat. The sad thing is that their kids won't know the difference because no one's mom or dad will actually cook from scratch. Hell, they might even think boxed cake mix is cooking from scratch, rather than just buying a pre-made one from the store. What's even worse is the stigma associated with cooking from scratch. It seems to be fading somewhat, but there was definitely a time in my life where it was kind of uncool to have your parents cook from scratch. When you had a birthday, you wanted Pizza Hut and store-bought cake for your party, not a homemade three-course meal with Grandma's red velvet cake. You wanted to go to McDonald's for dinner, not Mom's goulash. Homemade food seemed so...simple. If you could afford the luxury of already prepared food, why should you bother cooking? You could have your food now, instead of having to go to the trouble of making it over the next hour.

Pollan's advice is simple: Cook more. Eat whatever you want, as long as you cook it yourself. When you do, it's fresher, healthier, and hopefully tastier (though who knows what your cooking capabilities are). It's also cheaper and, if you shop wisely, better for your local economy and the environment. So that's what I'm trying to do. I'm not perfect, but I'm getting better.

Yeast, Hot Cross Buns, Homemade Pizza

I finally got the ingredients together to make my great grandmother's hot cross buns. I had never made anything that used yeast before or anything that needed to rise before I made it, so I was pretty intimidated by this less-than-helpful recipe. Nonetheless, I am never one to let fear stand in the way of my cooking adventures, so I bought a couple yeast packets and went to work.

Lucky for me, my Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook also has a recipe for hot cross buns (p. 157), so I pretty much followed the entire second half of that recipe as a guide for the missing half of my great grandmother's. Interestingly, the Better Homes and Gardens recipe started with "These slightly sweet rolls often are served during the Easter season," which made me realize that they are actually hot CROSS (as in Jesus) buns. More information about traditional hot cross buns can be found here.

Anyway, here is my modified recipe all in one piece:

1 c. scalded milk
1/2 c. sugar
1/4 c. butter
1/3 tsp. salt

Combine above and cool to lukewarm. Mix 1 tsp. sugar with 1 yeast cake, dissolve in 2 Tbsp. warm water. Add to above mixture, then add:

1 beaten egg
1/2 c. raisins
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. allspice
3 1/2 to 4 c. flour

Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead in enough remaining flour to make a moderately soft dough (3 to 5 minutes total). Shape into a ball. Place in a lightly greased bowl, turning once to grease surface of dough. Cover; let rise in a warm place until double in size (about 2 hours).

Punch dough down. Turn dough out onto lightly floured surface. Cover; let rest 10 minutes. Meanwhile, lightly grease two baking sheets; set aside. Divide dough into 20 pieces. Gently pull each piece into a ball, tucking edges under to make smooth tops. Place balls 1 1/2 inches apart on prepared baking sheets. Cover; let rise until nearly double in size (about 1 hour).

Preheat oven to 375°F. Using a sharp knife, make crisscross slashes across the top of each dough ball. Brush egg whites over rolls. Bake about 15 minutes or until golden brown. Immediately remove buns from baking sheets. Cool slightly on wire racks.

Tada!

Not gonna lie, this is pretty much what you would get if you made cinnamon raisin bread into buns, but they are delicious (particularly when they're fresh from the oven). Also, yeast is not that bad to work with (other than the smell...). I took the remainder of my batch to work the next morning where they were quickly gobbled up.

But before that, I decided to use my remaining yeast packet to try out Better Homes and Gardens' homemade pizza recipe (p. 150):

2 1/2 to 3 cups all-purpose flour

1 packet active dry yeast

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1 cup warm water (120°F to 130°F)

2 tablespoons olive oil

In a large mixing bowl combine 1 1/4 cups of the flour, the yeast, and salt; add warm water and oil. Beat with an electric mixer on low speed for 30 seconds, scraping bowl. Beat on high speed for 3 minutes. Using a wooden spoon, stir in as much of the remaining flour as you can.

Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead in enough remaining flour to make a moderately stiff dough that is smooth and elastic (6 to 8 minutes total). Divide dough in half. Cover; let rest for 10 minutes.

Preheat oven to 425°F. Grease two 12-inch pizza pans or large baking sheets. If desired, sprinkle with cornmeal. On a lightly floured surface, roll each dough half into a 13-inch circle. Transfer dough circles to prepared pans. Build up edges slightly; prick dough with a fork. Do not let rise. Bake about 10 minutes or until light brown. Spread pizza sauce onto hot crusts and top with desired meat (pepperoni), vegetables (skip), and cheese (smoked mozzarella). Bake about 10 minutes more or until bubbly. Cut each pizza into eight wedges. Makes 8 servings (2 wedges). 

NOTE: You can take half the dough and freeze it to use later and just make one pizza.

Now, this recipe was ridiculously easy and I didn't get a picture because I gobbled up that pizza so fast there was none left to photograph. This happened both times I made it. It was that delicious.

Also on the subject of breads, the co-op was having a sale on extra-ripe bananas, so I decided to remake my banana bread. This time, I baked it at 325°F for about 80 minutes and it came out perfectly. So, now we know.

Also, after much thought, I've decided to retire my goal of cooking one thing out of my grandmother's cookbooks each week. The main reason being that upon further inspection, they were not the best cookbook choices for this experiment. The PTA cookbook and my grandmother's handwritten cookbook were almost nothing but desserts, the omelets and crepes book was just omelets and crepes (and all of them had too many weird ingredients), the Pomeranian cookbook was hardly Pomeranian at all, and my Julia Child manual was more a lesson in how to cook than what to cook (and, quite honestly, I seem to do better developing my own style of how to cook than listening to Julia, or anyone else for that matter). Also, I'll be moving for school in the next couple months, so I'll probably have to give the cookbooks back to Grandpa before long anyway.

I think, in the stead of this goal, I'll make a new goal to make one new recipe each week, regardless of its origin. The point of the previous goal was to make healthier food, and I can better make that point if I have more sources available to me.

Oatmeal Crispies

For this week's recipe from my grandmother's cookbooks, I finally pulled a recipe from the PTA cookbook. I chose Mrs. John Palmer's recipe for Oatmeal Crispies because I had all the ingredients and it looked simple enough. The instructions were not fail-proof, but I was feeling adventurous. Here is the recipe (I halved it because I always make way too many cookies!):

1 cup fat (I used butter)
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
1 1/2 cups sifted flour
3 cups quick cooking oatmeal
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla

Make into roll and chill or form into balls and press out with a fork. This recipe makes about 4 dozen cookies, and they are good.

Not gonna lie, when I first read the recipe, I said to myself: Oh cool. I don't even have to bake them.

But then I thought about it some more, because there's raw egg, baking powder and baking soda in the recipe. Wait a minute, I thought, why would you put baking powder and baking soda in something you weren't going to bake? And why does she call them cookies later? Cookies are baked.

So after a short debate with myself, I decided these were, in fact, meant to be baked cookies. Then I gave my best annoyed face to the more-than-likely-late-Mrs.-John-Palmer for not giving me some kind of baking instructions. Any kind of baking instructions. Seriously, who bakes cookies by chilling them?!

After looking at a few more cookie recipes, I decided to just wing it. I put them in the oven for 9-10 minutes at 350 degrees, and they came out perfectly. Win. And they were good. Double win.

I do want to try to make my great grandmother's hot cross buns recipe, but I need to buy raisins, yeast, and allspice beforehand. Maybe next week I'll be feeling that ambitious.

I started Food Politics this week, but it's been slow-going and I'm not even out of the introduction yet. I think I'm going to like it though, once I get enough time to sit down and enjoy it for an hour or two.

Poached Eggs and Hollandaise

For this week's recipe from one of my grandmother's cookbooks, I chose to make poached eggs and hollandaise sauce from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I made deviled eggs last night, which my husband and I nearly instantaneously devoured, so I was kind of on an egg kick already.

I loved the scene in the film Julie & Julia where Julie attempts to make poached eggs, and I thought there was no way it could be that hard. My cooks at work do it all the time and it never turns out like that soupy mess she made. But I hadn't yet done it myself, so I figured now was the time to learn.

I felt like the poached egg thing was kind of cheating because I already knew the basics on how to poach an egg (just break the egg over boiling water and wait til it's done cooking), and so it wasn't much of a recipe. So, I opted to do two "recipes" this week and finally learn how to make hollandaise sauce as well, because, let's face it, I wanted to learn how to take angels and unicorns and make them into the most delicious elixir known to man.

Surprisingly, Julia's recipe did not call for angels, unicorns, or any other mythical creatures. I chose the blender recipe (p. 81-2), which is actually incredibly simple and still tremendously yummy. Julia claims an 8-year-old child could make it, and I'm fairly certain that's still true. Here is the recipe, it makes about 3/4 cup:

3 egg yolks
2 T. lemon juice
1/4 tsp salt
Pinch of pepper
1 stick butter

Place the egg yolks, lemon juice, and seasonings in the blender jar (or the Magic Bullet).
Cut the butter into pieces and heat it to foaming hot in a small saucepan (or microwave).
Cover the jar and blend the egg yolk mixture at top speed for 2 seconds. Uncover, and still blending (or not, in my case), immediately start pouring on the hot butter in a thin stream of droplets. (You may need to protect yourself with a towel during this operation.) By the time two thirds of the butter has gone in, the sauce will be a thick cream. Omit the milky residue at the bottom of the butter pan. Taste the sauce, and blend in more seasonings if necessary.
(*) If not used immediately, set the jar in tepid, but not warm, water.

Done. 3/4 cup of Heaven ready to go. This recipe is much more lemony than the one we use at work, but it's quite amazing and I have zero complaints. However, since it's on the lemony side, I would not be opposed to halving the amount of lemon and focusing on the delicious buttery goodness.

Next I began to make my poached eggs. Here is Julia's recipe:

Pour 2 inches of water into the pan or skillet and add 1 tablespoon of vinegar per quart of water. Bring to the simmer.
Break one of the eggs, and, holding it as closely over the water as possible, let it fall in. Immediately and gently push the white over the yolk with a wooden spoon for 2 to 3 seconds. Maintain the water at the barest simmer and proceed with the other eggs in the same manner. After 4 minutes, remove the first egg with the skimmer and test with your finger. The white should be set, the yolk still soft to the touch. Place the egg in the cold water; this washes off the vinegar and stops the cooking. Remove the rest of the eggs as they are done, and poach others in the same water if you are dong more.
(*) The eggs may remain for several hours in cold water, or may be drained and refrigerated.

Alright, I said, this seems simple enough. I broke my first egg and, mere centimeters from the water, I dropped it in. I went for the wooden spoon, but it was already too late. The whites had gone everywhere. I tried to keep them together, but it just would not happen. Here is the final result.

I'd like to call this style of egg "Poached Scrambled"

So, that was an utter failure. For the second egg, I ditched the wooden spoon and went for the larger silicon spoon thinking, the only reason Julia didn't use a silicon spoon was because she didn't have one. I decided this time to put the spoon in the water so that it would be immediately ready to rein in the wily whites. I tried to get even closer to the water when I dropped in the second egg, and once again the whites went everywhere. I did manage to keep the egg intact, though, as you can see below.

This one actually looks like it could've been served at the restaurant, but certainly not one of our best.

So Egg #2 was a solid improvement, but I wanted more. This time, I thought, what if I crack the egg into the spoon and then put the spoon and egg in the water simultaneously? Brilliant, I thought. So I set the spoon down on the stove top, cracked open the egg over the spoon and then...

Yeah... that's Egg #3 down there.

The egg managed to slide right off the spoon, through the heat coils and down through the dip pan into limbo. I momentarily panicked not knowing how to get the egg out of there. Will it fall into the oven? Will it just burn up when I use those coils next? What if my stove smells like eggs forever?! Luckily, the drip pan actually comes right off and I could stick my hand and a paper towel down into limbo to snatch it up.

Not to be deterred by this obviously bad idea, I tried it again. This time, however, I realized that there's more in the egg than can fit in the spoon, but I managed to keep it mostly together until it got to the water, where it once again went everywhere.

Egg #4

The end result was better than the poached scrambled monstrosity known as Egg #1, but not nearly as good as Egg #2, in which the yolk was still soft, but I figured I at least had enough egg to make a sort of Eggs Benedict with my creations.

I toasted and buttered a large piece of sourdough bread and topped it with Egg #2 and Egg #4 and then smothered the whole thing in my hollandaise (which I reheated immediately prior). It was phenomenal.

Tada!

I garnished with a little paprika, but forgot to take a picture afterward (actually, I was just really hungry). But as I said, great breakfast and once I master egg poaching, it should be relatively easy to repeat.

Peanut Butter Soup and Banana Bread

So after three weeks, I'm finally back. I could try to give you some sort of long-winded, trite explanation, but I'm pretty sure I can just boil it down to being lazy. My cooking has suffered slightly, but rest assured, I have maintained my goal of trying one recipe each week from my grandmother's cookbooks. Sort of.

I kind of wimped out the week after making crepes, so I did two last week to make up for it. I still have to do one this week, hopefully today if not tomorrow.

But on to the main dish, I say. Last week I made two recipes from the Pomeranian cookbook (and for those interested, here is more information on Pomerania). My mother's side is very German/Pommern and I believe this cookbook is our very extended family's collection of Pommern recipes. My grandpa, being the semi-pro genealogist/historian that he is, could probably give me a very detailed explanation of where this cookbook came from and who all these people in it are and more than three generations worth of information on Pomerania, but I'm behind on my blog so I'm going to skip all that today.

The two recipes I chose were Wallace H.'s for Peanut Butter Soup and Beverly D.'s for Banana Bread. Now, I know what you're thinking: Neither bananas nor peanuts are grown in Europe...how are these considered "Pommern" recipes?! I should probably clarify then that these are, in all likelihood, Pommern-American recipes, but they seemed pretty wholesome overall, so I tried them anyway.

I chose the peanut butter soup one because, well, it sounded awful. I couldn't believe someone would make something so ridiculous sounding as peanut butter soup and actually eat it. And then I thought, well, if it sounds so bad, it's probably actually surprisingly good or no one would try it. So I did try it. Here is the recipe below:

1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup diced onion
1 large rib of celery, diced
1 1/2 T. flour
4 cups chicken stock or broth, hot
4 oz. creamy peanut butter (about 1/2 cup)
1/2 t. salt or to taste
1 1/2 t. lemon juice

In 4 quart saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Add onion and celery. Saute till limp, 3-5 minutes. Stir in flour all at once. Cook, stirring constantly, 1 minute. Gradually whisk hot chicken stock, bring to boil, then reduce to simmer for 30 minutes. Remove from heat. Strain soup to remove vegetables. Stir peanut butter, salt, and lemon juice into strained liquid. Return to saucepan to reheat to serving temperature. Makes about 6 servings.

I did end up sauteing the onion and celery very well done, but since I was straining them out later, I wasn't too concerned and figured the burnt-ness might add some extra flavor. I used organic peanut butter instead of traditional to make it a little healthier, and I don't know if it was that or the fact that it was peanut butter that made it kind of hard to fully stir it into the soup, but I think with more heat it would've been a little better mixed.

Bottom line though, it was interesting. I didn't hate it, but I didn't really love it. I enjoyed the nutty flavor from it that you don't really taste in soup, but because it was essentially broth, there really wasn't much to it and I didn't find it very satisfying. I considered adding things to make it more filling, but I didn't have any great ideas about what would taste good in a nutty soup like this. If anyone else has an idea, I'd be willing to retry the recipe. Otherwise, I think once was enough for me.

The banana bread recipe was chosen because, let's face it, who doesn't love banana bread? I don't think I've ever made it, but I know a lot of people do it all the time and so it's something I've always wanted to make. Plus, this recipe doesn't call for nuts and I hate nuts in my baked goods. There's just something about having crunchy bits in my soft and moist breads and cakes and cookies that just ruins it for me, so to have a recipe on hand that excludes them seemed perfect. Here is Bev's take on banana bread:

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 large or 3 small bananas
3 T. milk or cream
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups flour
1/2 t. baking powder
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt

Mash the bananas. Mix in the order mentioned. Bake in a moderate oven, 350 degrees, for 45 minutes. More milk may be added if the batter is too stiff. This bread is nice if baked in empty tin cans to make a round loaf.

The recipe was easy enough. I didn't even use especially ripe (re: BAD) bananas. They were on the brown side but still very much edible. I didn't really understand the bit about tin cans so I just put it in a glass pan about the size of a medium loaf and cooked as the directions called. When I pulled it out of the oven, it looked perfectly brown on the outside and light and tasty on the inside.

Then I let it cool down and it became obvious that the inside was not quite done yet. I probably could've done the toothpick check and seen this, but it looked too good to not be done. If you're going to use a glass pan like me (rather than this whole tin can business), I would recommend lowering the temperature slightly (maybe 325°) and going for an hour or so. In the end, there was a bit of goopiness in the middle, but it was quite delicious despite this. I'll definitely remake this at some point and see if I can perfect the cooking time.**

I still haven't found something in the PTA book, and I think the real issue is that 90% of that book is desserts and I'm a little dessert-ed out. I will eventually make something, but I also need to find a recipe in Julia Child's holy grail of French cooking. So we'll see what I'm in the mood for today.

Also to note, my husband and I made a combined red cake and it turned out...interesting. First, we (re: my husband) dropped one of the layers on the floor right before it was to go in the oven, so we made a little cake with two layers instead of the full thing. Whether it was the missing batter in the oven or my insistence on using butter that hardened the remaining cake, I don't know, but it was not as moist as before, though it still tasted good. We compromised on one tablespoon of cocoa (to my husband's chagrin) and went 50/50 with butter and shortening. We used my recipe for frosting in its entirety and it actually turned out even better than the first time because it thickened up much more. We'll have to keep tinkering away at this until it's perfected, but I think we need a break from red cake, which is probably why I made this fabulous (and fabulously bad for me) S'mores Cake last night.

I have been keeping busy and have a lot to catch up on, so I'll post more today/tomorrow.

**EDIT: My friend (who suffers the same problem with her banana bread as I did mine) offers this advice: Banana Muffins. Her loaf recipe makes about 18 muffins, bake for 20 minutes.

Crepes

For my recipe from my grandmother's cookbooks this week, I decided to get one from Crepes & Omelets. I had the day off and it was my husband's first day of his three week break from school, so a leisurely breakfast seemed to be in order.

We only had four eggs left, so I figured omelets wouldn't work too well (plus we were seriously lacking in the cheese department of the fridge), so I decided to make crepes. It was grocery shopping day, and we basically had no food left, so I decided to use the last of the strawberries and make dessert crepes.

...Well, the strawberries apparently went bad overnight. BUT, we had a ton of frozen fruit, so it worked out. Anyway, here is the dessert crepe recipe (I cut it in half and got about 5 crepes, but mine were a little thick and I spilled some batter):

2 eggs
2 tbs. melted butter
1-1/4 cups milk
2 tbs. brandy or orange liqueur (I made some brandy crème brûlée about a year ago, and that's the only reason I had either of these ingredients on hand)
1 tbs. sugar
1 cup sifted flour
1/2 tsp. salt

Place ingredients in blender container in the order listed (I did this with my Magic Bullet and failed to realize I should reverse the order...oops. It worked out though, so no worries!). Blend at high speed 20 to 30 seconds (or 10 seconds or less in your Magic Bullet!). Scrape down sides of the container. Blend a few more seconds.

Pan preparation: If using a no-stick spray shortening, spray pan before heating. Before cooking first crepe put 1/2 teaspoon butter into pan. If the pan is well seasoned it should not be necessary to add more butter for each crepe.
Pan temperature: Crepe pan is at the correct temperature when the batter sizzles slightly when poured into the pan, and a crepe will cook on one side in approximately 1 minute. Crepes should be pale in color, not dark brown (mine were mostly pale with brown highlights).
To cook crepes: Two or three tablespoons of batter is usually enough to cover the bottom of a 6- to 7-inch crepe pan. If necessary, adjust the amount needed for the pan you are using. Pour batter and quickly tilt the pan so the batter covers the bottom entirely. If you have put in more than just a thin coating, pour excess back into the bowl. this will leave a small flap on the crepe but it won't be noticed when the crepe is filled and folded.
When to turn: The crepe is ready to turn when it begins to set and crisp around the edges. Loosen around the edge with a spatula or knife so you have a starting place to pick up the crepe with your fingers, them simply flip it over. If preferred, carefully turn with a spatula (or, if you're an expert egg flipper like me, just flip the crepe like over easy eggs). Should it start to tear when picked up, it may not be cooked enough to turn. Cook a few seconds longer and try again.
After the crepes are cooked: Stack cooked crepes on a plate. They will be easier to separate if they are not placed squarely on top of each other. It is not necessary to put foil or waxed paper between each crepe. Makes 16 to 20 5-inch crepes.

So I filled my two crepes with frozen strawberries and mangoes, and the warmth of the crepe defrosted the fruit a bit to make it just the right temperature. My husband ate his three crepes with Karo syrup. He said, "They were okay... but there wasn't much to them." I told him to put fruit on them next time... duh.

I liked this book and I thought this was a great basic crepe recipe, but there's a lot of random ingredients in most of the recipes, so I think next time I use the book I'm going to have to plan ahead. There's also recipes for blintzes and frittata, and I definitely want to try those at some point too. I think next week I'll try out something from the ancient PTA cookbook. Wish me luck in advance.

Cake-Off

For those of you living under a rock, there was a giant snow storm raging through the Midwest this week, or as I liked to call it, the Snopocalypse. Seeing as how my birthday was yesterday, my husband and I decided to have our cake-off while we waited out the storm.

To review, both of our families have traditionally made red velvet cake as a birthday treat. I recently found a copy of my grandmother's recipe and my husband obtained his grandma's recipe and we made one of each to see which was better.

The key differences were as follows:

• My grandmother had me mix my baking soda with vinegar before adding it to the batter. Hubby had no vinegar in his recipe.
• Both recipes called for shortening, but in an effort to make mine a little more "traditional," I used real butter instead of shortening. Hubby used margarine in the frosting where I used butter.
• My cake had slightly more red food coloring and much less cocoa.
• My baking time was slightly longer.
• My frosting used milk as a base (I substituted heavy whipping cream); his used water. Mine also had vanilla.

Now, I have baked one other cake in my life about 12 years ago and my husband doesn't recall ever having done so. But he is the baker of the family, and I'm the cooker, so I feel as though he had a slight advantage to begin with. However, watching him bake made me take that back. When he took his cakes out of the oven and tried to put them on the cooling rack, he managed to nearly destroy one of the layers trying to get it out of the pan and onto the cooking rack. Both of my layers came out of the pan quite easily, though he claimed I over-floured the pan.

CAKE FAIL!

Then there was the frosting debacle. My frosting looked beautiful and appetizing, while the hubby's was grainy and runny. He ended up remaking it and it still didn't turn out right in his opinion. I find this particularly interesting because my grandmother made a note on her recipe that she didn't care for the appearance of her frosting, even though it tasted fine and she rarely used it. So either I'm a much better frosting maker than Grandma, or she had some seriously high standards for frosting.

 My Cake

  His Cake

So as you can see, my cake is clearly more aesthetically pleasing than his, but what about taste?

My husband and I split our cakes in half and each took two half-cakes to work. We had our co-workers partake in blind taste-tests (they had to determine the better cake before we identified the makers).

Now here is where I think my husband cheated. I got three votes in favor of my cake, three votes in favor of his cake, and one vote for his cake/my frosting. He got four votes for his cake and one tie. When we tasted it together, we agreed his cake was more moist, but my frosting was better. So clearly, he sabotaged my cake before he gave it to his co-workers.

Despite this, I think the plan now is to combine the two recipes into a super recipe. I wasn't sure why my grandmother would have me mix the baking soda and vinegar, set it aside, and then add it last to the batter, so I tried to look for an explanation online. The best answer I got was that originally red velvet cake was made with beets rather than red food coloring (kind of like carrot cake, but with beets) and if the beets reacted with the baking soda, it would make the cake more blue than red, so the vinegar was added to try to prevent that. Seeing as how hubby's cake turned out fine without the vinegar, I think I'll skip it from now on.

Also,  I'm not sure how important the cocoa is to the flavor, so I think maybe we'll compromise and go somewhere down the middle. Then I think we'll still use the butter and cook the cake a little shorter than I did and see what happens from there.

Our downstairs neighbors were kind enough to shovel the walkways after the storm, so we're planning on trying out our combo recipe as a thank-you to them tomorrow. Meanwhile, I think my next Grandma recipe will be from the crêpe and omelet book. More on that next week.

Grocery Shopping

I just got back from a grocery shopping trip, so I thought the topic would make a good post. (Note: I've been working on this post for almost a week now, so I've been to the store about five times since!)

I remember going grocery shopping with my parents often while I was growing up. We'd frequently go after church on Sunday (just like everyone else, it seemed), and always to the regional grocery chain in our area. Both of my parents would take my two younger siblings and me, but usually only one parent would go at a time. I'm sure we made them both miserable as the three of us would beg for every sugar-coated "non-food" that we came across, but my parents remained judicious and only gave in some of the time. Money for groceries never seemed to be an issue, so our cart was typically filled nearly full by the end of the trip. However, my mom used to clip coupons when I was very young, and there were a few things my parents would only buy when they were on sale (such as strawberries or yogurt), so food prices did affect our diet somewhat. We'd stroll down every aisle unless we were certain there was nothing in it we needed (i.e., the dog food aisle), and the whole trip probably took around an hour and a half.

We didn't buy organic, but I'm not even sure there was organic food available when I was a kid. We typically would buy some fresh fruit staples like bananas, apples, and oranges, but fresh vegetables were a little more uncommon. Sometimes we would get carrots or celery, and I think my mom would usually have a tomato on hand, but not much else. My mom was slightly more concerned about healthy eating (and subsequently enjoyed it more) than my dad, so I think she was usually the one buying the fresh produce.

Most of our meat was bought prepackaged, but our grocery store was (and still is) better than most about purchasing from reputable, local sources. It had a pretty good meat counter, and we would occasionally buy steaks or bacon wrapped chicken from them. We never bought fish though, or really any seafood. I don't think my parents really liked it (or perhaps didn't know much about cooking it), but my mom buys a lot more fish now.

We always bought white bread, so there is this special place in my heart that will always love it, even though I know I shouldn't eat it. We bought whole milk when I was younger, but switched to 2% once my siblings and I were older. I think at one point we tried to switch to 1%, but no one liked it so we went back to 2% (Though if my husband would drink it, I'd switch back to whole!). The rest of our cart was filled with "non-food" items like Cap'n Crunch, Pringles, and Pop-Tarts.

While we're on the subject of my grandmother this week, I went shopping with her a handful of times too. She shopped at the same chain as my parents for her big weekly trip, and bought much of the same things (except minus a lot of the kiddie food and in smaller amounts). When she needed to grab one or two things, however, she went to the family grocer about a block from her house.

I remember my grandmother would take my hand and we'd walk together down the street to the store. The clerks were all very friendly and knew my grandmother by name and chatted with her while she did her shopping. The store was about the size of the food section in a convenience store, and packed full of food.  They also did a lot of butchering and so my grandmother may have gotten her meat here, but I can't remember for sure. The butchering was what eventually caused them to close, because the state made some law that lumped their butchering in with the big commercial butcher businesses and required them to have a different refrigeration system that was too big and too costly for their store. Hundreds, if not thousands, of locals protested the law and begged for them to make an exception, but their pleas ultimately fell on deaf ears, so one of the last of the family grocers in the area was forced to close.

Once I started shopping for myself, I shopped much the same way my parents did. I'd go to the same grocery chain and go down every aisle until my cart was full. I don't have as much food money as my parents, so I've been more judicious about my food selection. I try to pay attention to sales and won't buy a lot of things when they're not on sale. I've also become more interested in local, humane, and organic food, so I try to buy it when I can. This is not always easy, because sometimes it is astronomically more expensive than the regular stuff. For example, the chicken breasts I like to buy are antibiotic and hormone free, but it can cost up to $7.99/lb. The regular chicken breasts are often $1.99/lb. when they're on sale. It's hard to justify spending four times the amount, and so my husband will usually win out and we'll get the cheaper, regular chicken. But when there's only a dollar or two difference, I'll usually get the better chicken instead.

More recently, I've begun shopping at the local co-operative. I paid a $60 one-time membership fee (that I can get back at any time), and I am now a share-holder of this grocery store. They buy lots of seasonal produce and meat from local, organic farmers, they bake most of the bread they sell, and offer a lot of other healthy and "healthy" foods. The share-holders get to vote on what gets put on the shelves, so since I live in a very liberal, mid-sized Midwestern college town, there are many dedicated individuals who ensure honest, wholesome food is available.

This past week, I did the majority of my shopping at the co-op. I didn't make a list, but I did have a goal: To stay on the perimeter of the store. Michael Pollan has said that in most grocery stores, "real food" is always on the perimeter of the store (p. 157, In Defense of Food), and all the other "food" is in the middle. The one striking error to this is that nearly always the baking supply aisle (with flour, sugar, spices, etc) is always a center aisle. Olive oil is also mixed in with the dressing and what not, but most of those things are not needed on every trip, so I will let this factual error slide. Anyway, I successfully accomplished this goal on my trip. Here is what I bought and where I bought it in the store:

I began in the produce section, which is right in front of the main entrance. I chose to use a basket instead of a cart because I'm much less likely to buy too much food (However, I am probably more likely to over stuff the basket beyond what is easy to carry). The co-op sometimes has Fair Trade bananas (my previous trip they were just organic, but most of the time they get fair trade), so I grabbed four bananas. My husband is not a huge banana eater, but we both like them in smoothies when we make them; I usually grab four so that we'll each eat two before they turn brown. Cilantro and avocados were both on sale and I've been wanting to try to make guacamole, so I bought two avocados and a cilantro bunch. Navel oranges were on sale, so I bought one, and I decided I wanted to try a tangelo, so I bought one of those as well. We went through the red potatoes I bought last week, so I bought a few more this week. Blueberries were still on sale, but we had a whole container at home, so I skipped them this week.

Next I walked past the juice along the edge because it is sooo expensive (about $7-8 for a smallish container of real fruit juice). I got to the eggs and dairy next. The grocery store I usually go to has free-range, antibiotic free chicken eggs available from a local Mennonite farm, and the co-op also has these available. This time, I realized, they also have an organic version. It was a dollar extra per dozen, but I decided to go for it. I bought a small container of Greek yogurt last week and enjoyed it in my smoothies, so I bought a larger container this week. I was out of 2% milk at home, so I bought a quart of organic, grass-fed 2% milk. Lately, I haven't been drinking as much milk, so I decided to get the quart instead of the half gallon because my milk was going bad before I'd finish it.

I turned the corner and walked past the wine selection (which I'll save for another day, I'm sure) and headed for the meat counter. The co-op offers 100% grass-fed beef, which is hard to find without going directly through a local farmer. I had to double check because the sign only said "grass fed" and all cows are grass fed...until they reach the feedlot. Michael Pollan says we need to look for signs that say 100% grass fed, but the meat counter guy assured me it meant 100%, so I bought 2 lbs. ground beef and a chuck roast (one of my husband's favorite meals to cook!). I also bought a whole chicken, raised cage-free without antibiotics an hormones, etc.

Then I turned the corner again and found the bread area. I bought a small loaf of 100% whole wheat and some 100% whole wheat rolls.

I then reached the front of the store and checked out. The whole trip took about 20 minutes and cost me $57.20, which is much less than I typically spend at the grocery store (although I've been going weekly to the co-op instead of every three weeks or so to the regular grocery store).

All in all a success, but the co-op does have a few things missing from it. I had to go to the regular grocery store, and unfortunately Wal-Mart, to buy supplies for the cake-off (more on that later), and to get a few things my husband insists he can't live without. But as of right now, I'm willing to break down my shopping into multiple trips, so I think this will work.

Grandma's cooking

My grandmother was an excellent cook.

I might be a bit biased, but it's true.

Most of what I can remember of her cooking revolved around holiday meals. She would put together these elaborate, delicious, and filling meals, and she did it more or less by herself up until her health started to deteriorate.

My grandfather was no help in the kitchen, and to this day that is still true. My mother told me that Grandpa got this idea in his head to make himself a snack once when she was a young girl. Minutes later, there were flames licking the ceiling and my grandmother banned him from the kitchen forever. So that left Grandma to take care of business.

Perhaps the best credit I can give my grandmother is her transformation from a small town farm girl into an cultured, expert chef. My grandparents grew up in a small, rural farm town during the 1940s. Unlike most at the time, they both went to college and my grandfather went on to become a professor at a state university. This left my grandmother in charge of a lot of entertaining. Now, this is not to say that farm girls cannot cook. Rather, in that era, they had a much more limited variety of food available, and as such, much less experience with fine cuisine. Case in point: My grandmother didn't have an english muffin until she was in college (She hated it, by the way, because she was expecting a traditional muffin and got, well... an english muffin.).

At one point, my grandmother taught an international cooking class, so that should give some unbiased credibility to her cooking abilities. I recall my grandfather telling me that he especially enjoyed all of the new dishes she would try to make before showing them in class.

Now, to my knowledge, my grandmother never went to culinary school, and she didn't just whip these abilities to cook out of thin air. She had tools to teach her what to do.

Cookbooks.

My grandmother had tons of cookbooks. To this day, they are sitting in the buffet at my grandparents' house on three shelves each stacked two-deep. Since my grandfather obviously has no use for them, they sit there unloved for much of the year. My mom and her sister occasionally pull one out over the holidays to look for a particular recipe, and I have rifled through and borrowed a few now and then.

This cookbook collection is extensive, with books on all sorts of cuisines from over five decades. There is one from a 1948 PTA fundraiser. There is Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. There are cookbooks on every type of international cuisine (likely from my grandmother's class). There are family cookbooks and church cookbooks and an entire encyclopedia of cooking. And then there are my grandmother's favorites. Her Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, for example, was so worn that she took it out of its original binding and split it between two three-ring binders. Today, my edition of that cookbook is my go-to source for cooking questions, because I learned to trust that cookbook from my mother, who learned it from her mother.

The greatest treasures in those shelves, however, are my grandmother's handwritten recipes and file of clippings. She has an entire binder and a recipe box full of her family and friends' recipes. She has an accordion folder, so old and so full it won't collapse, filled with hundreds of clippings and notes. There's an empty cranberry bag in there with recipes for cranberry sauce that's easily as old as my sister.  She has recipes clipped from the newspaper older than my mother, and some from a few years before she died. Many of the recipes have notes scrawled all over them about my grandmother's opinion of how it turned out and changes she made to the recipe. She also wrote notes about accompanying recipes for sauces or sides and where to find them in other cookbooks.

I found a photocopy of a recipe for Waldorf Astoria Red Cake with a post-it reading "A copy of Grandma's 'legendary' & 'official' b'day cake (A+ least w/our family)." Now this gets interesting because my husband's family has a similar red cake birthday tradition with another recipe. We've decided to make both cakes soon and see which is better. This could get ugly.

A few days ago I decided to borrow a few cookbooks from the collection to inspire me to eat better. I selected the 1948 PTA cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a Pomeranian cookbook (because much of my family is from there and my husband's a "meat and potatoes" kind of guy),  Crepes & Omelets (because I'm a fan of both), and my grandmother's binder of notes.

These cookbooks are going to be inspiring and challenging simultaneously. I love them because there is much more "real food" contained in these books than in some of the others I own. I hate them because they expect me to actually know how to cook without instructions. For example, my great grandmother's recipe for Hot Cross Buns looks like this:

1 c. scalded milk
1/2 c. sugar
1/4 c. butter or margarine
1/3 tsp. salt

Combine above and cool to lukewarm. Mix 1 tsp. sugar with 1 yeast cake, dissolve in 2 Tbsp. warm water. Add to above mixture, then add:

1 beaten egg
1/2 c. raisins
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. allspice
3 1/2 to 4 c. flour

Mix and knead as bread or rolls.

First of all, what is scalded milk? Second, what do you mean "Mix and knead as bread or rolls"?! What temperature is the oven? How long should I put it in there? How big should these rolls be? What size pan should I use? YOU CAN'T JUST STOP HALFWAY THROUGH THE RECIPE!

I think Crepes & Omelets will be the easiest to deal with because it is new-er (1976) and still holds true to the "real foods" concept. Probably the most difficult part will be figuring out how to fold everything.

I haven't made anything out of any of these cookbooks yet, but I definitely want to try. I'm going to set a goal to make one recipe from one of these books each week. This way, I can hold myself accountable. Next week, since it is my birthday, will be the red cake face-off.

I'm not sure what's going to happen to these cookbooks in the future. My grandfather made me check out the books I borrowed library-style and leave a note of what I took. I suppose it's so they're available for skimming around the holidays. I asked my mom if she knew and she said she figured they would be divvied up among the kids who wanted them when the time came. I not-so-subtly hinted that there are probably grandkids (aka me) who might want a share of them as well, so here's hopin' I guess. Meanwhile, I'll just enjoy what I've got and maybe copy some of my favorites into my recipe box.