The Tortoise Taught Us

Barbecue Sauce

2014-06-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

Here's my recipe for barbecue sauce. It's adapted from "Southern Barbecue Sauce" in Craig Claiborne's The New New York Times Cookbook.

BARBECUE SAUCE (click here for a printer-friendly version)

INGREDIENTS

2 tablespoons unsalted butter
6 tablespoons cider vinegar
1/4 cup water
1-1/2 cups ketchup
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1/2 to 1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder, or 1 teaspoon finely chopped garlic (I usually use garlic powder these days)
3 tablespoons vegetable oil, such as canola
1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
3 tablespoons molasses
1 lemon
salt (I don't add any) and pepper to taste

DIRECTIONS

In a saucepan over low heat, combine everything but the lemon. Add the juice of the lemon, then cut the lemon into quarters and toss it into the pan, too. Heat the sauce thoroughly, but don't let it boil. You don't have to "cook" this for a long time--just heat it enough to blend everything. You can make the sauce while the meat is cooking.

Brush the sauce onto chicken or ribs in the last few minutes of cooking; otherwise, it will burn.

To save leftover sauce: discard the lemon. Store the sauce in a covered container in the fridge or freezer.

A FEW NOTES:

I have increased the Tabasco and red pepper flakes, which makes the sauce zippier but by no means really hot. Adjust it to your taste, of course. The original recipe calls for conventional paprika and much less of it. I like the character and depth of smoked paprika, which is now widely available. I think it adds a lot of character to the sauce.

The original recipe called for 2 tablespoons of sugar instead of molasses. For years, I left that out altogether. Lately, though, I have liked the Kansas City-style sauces I've had, most of which include molasses. That too has seemed to add some interesting flavor notes. After a little futzing, I found that I liked it with 3 tablespoons of molasses, but again, feel free to experiment and add more, less, or none.

Here's a trick with molasses: warm it briefly--like 10 seconds--in the microwave to make it easier to pour. (But be sure you've removed anything from the bottle that has foil in it! I ignited the bottle of molasses the other day because the top of the bottle still had a bit of the foil seal on it. It was very dramatic.) To measure the molasses, use the spoon that you used for the oil without washing it in between: the remaining traces of oil will let the molasses slide easily out of the spoon, and you won't waste any.

I try to be careful to keep this from burning. Low heat (indirect, if possible) is the key. Watch it closely. I often apply the sauce a couple of times, though for ribs, I will usually just coat them once thoroughly.

We usually have bowls of this on the table for people to use to dip their meat into if they choose.

A method for cooking ribs

2014-06-08T17:45:00.000-07:00

The title is quite deliberate: A method. I would never presume to have the method. But I have worked on this for a long time, and I am finally satisfied with the results. Judging by the rate at which they are consumed, I think my family agrees. I think I've come up with a reliable way to make good, smoky ribs at home that rival most of the ones I've had at barbecue joints.

The Benchmarks

For me, excellent ribs should be juicy and fall-off-the-bone tender. At the same time, the meat can't be overcooked--it should neither be hard nor mushy. It should hold its shape and not be stringy or crumbly. The ribs should have a smoky flavor. They should be well-seasoned but not overpoweringly so.

I've made ribs by various means: smoking, baking them in the oven then putting them on the grill, just on the grill, you name it. But I never quite achieved the balance between keeping the integrity of the meat and having it come easily off the bone that I was looking for, until now.

The Basic Secret

I'll go into excruciating detail in case you want to know exactly what I do, but I'll give you the short version up front (sort of like an abstract in a dissertation--the metaphor is apt): the key is slow cooking over wood (to get the smoky flavor). I like to use a barbecue grill rather than a smoker. The key to the proper use of the grill is indirect heat that is high enough to cook the meat but low enough to have it happen slowly. That's all there is to it. Sort of. I've picked up a lot of tricks and tips along the way. I will give all the steps here. Cooking ribs takes about five hours, start to finish.

How I Did It (the Young Frankenstein reference is deliberate)

Here it is. My step-by-painstaking-step instructions for really good ribs. I hasten to say that I think what's important here is the method: slow cooking over a charcoal fire. The particulars of how you season the ribs, whether or not to use sauce, what the sauce is like, and so on, are up to you. I will tell you what I do about seasoning and sauce, but don't feel bound by it. My family and I like them this way (with a dry rub and a Kansas City-style sauce), but you may not. I think the method will work well no matter how you season and sauce the ribs (or don't sauce at all--a la Memphis).

1. Prepare the grill.

Coals lighting up.

I start the grill for ribs the same way I do for any other cooking--nothing special here. I use a Weber kettle, and for a project like this, I start with all fresh coals. (For other applications, I might reuse coals from the previous outing, but since these have to last a long time, I prefer to start with all new ones.) I also like to remove all the ash and debris from the bottom of the grill before I start.

I long ago dispensed with lighter fluid (too scary) and self-lighting charcoal (just icky). So I use a chimney, pictured at the left. You put newspaper in the bottom (two full-sized, double sheets--each sheet is four pages from a big paper like the New York Times, loosely crumpled up) and the charcoal in the top, then light the newspaper. Be sure all the vents are fully open at the bottom of the grill (this is no problem for me: the bottom vents on my grill got stuck long ago in the open position and won't budge). Allow plenty of ventilation and air circulation around the grill, and keep it well away from anything that could burn. It takes about half an hour for the coals to be ready.

What kind of charcoal? Kingsford has a line of charcoal with hickory or mesquite wood embedded in it, and I like this a lot. I think it really does add more smoky flavor. (I bought a bag of the regular stuff recently, because the bag was bigger and it was less expensive. I thought the flavor was noticeably different and less interesting.) I know it's not as fashionable, but I prefer briquettes to lump charcoal: they burn slower and more evenly. But if you're skilled with lump charcoal and prefer it, by all means, use it.

2. Prepare the meat.

I emphasize, this is what I do. You can approach this very differently if you want! You might like seasoning your ribs earlier (I haven't found that it makes a big difference, but go ahead if you want!). You might like a different style of ribs. It's all OK. I'll note the steps that I think are crucial.

OK, but what kind of meat?

Yup. Here's the first bone of contention. I could also have said, "Aye, there's the rub." All puns are fully intended. Feel free to rib me about it.

But seriously, there are different styles of ribs, not to mention different meats altogether. I should probably have said right up front that I'm cooking pork ribs here. If you want to make beef ribs, you'll have to figure that out for yourself--I've never made them.

There are two basic styles of pork ribs: baby back ribs and spare ribs or St. Louis-style ribs (more about this in a second). The baby backs are smaller, leaner, and have shorter bones. The spare ribs and St. Louis-style ribs are longer and flatter; they're also fattier. Left to my own devices, I'd more often cook spare ribs: the greater amount of fat means that they are more likely to be tender and juicy if you cook them properly. But my family generally prefers the leaner baby back ribs, and I'm proud to say that this method has yielded excellent results with both types. The ones pictured throughout here are baby backs, and believe me, they were tender, juicy, and succulent. I liked them a lot. If your family is indifferent on this topic, you may want to start with spare ribs until you master the techniques, as they are more reliably tender and juicy.

If you buy spare ribs, chances are they will be untrimmed. It is just fine to cook them just as they are, but if you want a more elegant presentation, you can trim them into St. Louis-style ribs. There are good directions on how to do this here. (Personally, I'm not convinced that anything about barbecue needs to be elegant, but again, this is a matter of taste.) Be aware that packages of meat labeled "St. Louis-style ribs" may actually be untrimmed spare ribs. If you want St. Louis ribs, you'll need to do a little cutting. It's easy to tell if the ribs have been trimmed or not: the untrimmed ones have an irregular (rhomboidal) shape. If all the bones are neatly the same length, the ribs have been trimmed.

Getting the meat ready for the grill:

First, remove the membrane.

Whichever kind you get, chances are (unless you have a very special and careful butcher) that the membrane will still be attached. While it's a bit of a nuisance to get it off, I think it's worth doing. This is the ickiest part of the process.

Removing the membrane.

To remove the membrane, set the ribs meat-side down (the underside of the bones is exposed) on the counter or board. With a small knife or your fingernail or whatever, get under the membrane at one end. It will resist you. Once you get it going, though, it will peel off fairly easily and usually in one long piece, as in the photo above. (I had the ribs in one hand and the camera in the other. Kinda tricky.) Pull it off completely and discard it.

If you're having trouble finding an edge, make one by making a small, shallow slit in the membrane between the bones. Try not to cut into the meat, though it's certainly no big deal if you end up poking into the meat a little. Pull the membrane off in one direction, then go back and get the other side. As I say, this is the messiest and least pleasant part of the whole enterprise. I've never skipped this step--I feel that the seasonings penetrate better without the membrane and that the resulting ribs are tenderer, but this could be my imagination. If you find this too hard to accomplish, I don't think it would be the end of the world if you left the membrane on. Just don't enter your ribs in a competition in that case. (Frankly, the only prize I need is delicious ribs. I have no interest in contests.)

Pat the meat dry with paper towel.

Patting the meat dry.

While this too is icky and leaves you with a pile of really gross paper towels, resist the urge to skip this step. The seasoning will work better if the surface is dry, and the meat will cook better, too. Just get yourself a big wad of paper towel and pat the meat dry on each side.

I was cooking three slabs of ribs on this occasion. In the photo, one slab is already seasoned, and I'm drying the second one. In the upper right corner is the unspeakably gooey towel from drying the first rack of ribs. (None of this is for the faint-hearted, and it's also why Sue will be a vegetarian once I'm no longer around to deal with the nasty chores involved with cooking meat.)

Season as desired.

I suspect you could just salt and pepper the meat, and it would be delicious. I like to use a dry rub that I got from Saveur magazine some years ago. You can find the recipe here. I keep the rub (which you don't rub into the meat at all--you just sprinkle it on) in a quart-sized plastic container, like from yogurt, then I transfer it to an empty seasoned salt bottle that I use as a shaker. The seasoning mixture isn't only for ribs; it's also good on things like chicken. Sprinkle the meat generously with the rub on both sides. Despite the name, you don't need to rub it in. And while you want to cover the meat thoroughly, you don't need to bury it in dry rub. The rub is pretty salty, so keep that in mind.

I haven't found that there's any benefit to doing this way ahead, but I know that some people feel as though they're doing more if they get the meat ready a day or so before. Go ahead and try it if you want! My ribs come out fine if I just do this while the coals are lighting.

Three racks of ribs, ready to go.

3. From the counter onto the fire.

The coals are ready.

By the time you're done cleaning and seasoning the meat, the fire is likely to be ready, or nearly so. Since you're going for long, slow cooking here, there's some merit to emptying the coals from the chimney a little earlier than you might do if you're direct-cooking steaks or burgers. My signal that they're ready is that the coals on top are just tinged with ash. The ones on the bottom will be fully lit, and the ones on the top are getting going. This will give a fire that is plenty hot but that will burn for a good long while. For other kinds of cooking, I usually wait until I see flames coming from the top of the chimney and all the coals are fully gray.

Coals on one side, water pan on the other.

At this point, you'll build your indirect fire. And here's a place where I do something different from what the Weber Company suggests. They will tell you to scatter coals in two heaps, one at either side of the grill, and to leave the center open for cooking. But I find it gives more space and is easier if you heap all the coals on one side of the grill: just dump them out of the chimney right at the edge of the kettle. You can make a heap that will come just under the grate. This will give you much more cooking surface--about half the grill or more. While it's true that it's a little hotter closer to the heap of coals, it's not that big a difference. Once you've heaped the coals on one half of the kettle, place a pan of warm tap water in the other half. Since it will get really messy, I like to use disposable aluminum pans for this purpose. You could also use a pan from your kitchen that you're not too in love with and cover it with several layers of foil. Set the cooking grate on top, leaving the flap over the coals open, which will make it easier to add stuff later on.

Circulation of heat and smoke is important.

In order for things to cook evenly, there has to be good circulation of heat and smoke under the dome of the kettle, and this took me some figuring to achieve. If you're just cooking one slab of ribs, it's no problem: just set them on the grate. But if I'm going to all this effort, I want to cook a couple of slabs, and this is where some ingenuity is required.

I suspect you can get a gadget that would let you set racks of ribs on their side on top of the grill (I think I've seen this in catalogs). But that would be a bulky object that wouldn't see much use. I found that I could improvise something that works pretty well.

A roasting rack can be used to arrange your ribs on the grill.

I just use my roasting rack--the folding rack that I put under my turkey at Thanksgiving. It will get messy, but you can clean it up pretty easily (the rack in the picture has been used frequently for cooking ribs for years and doesn't look bad). Soak it for a while in the sink after you use it, then scrub off as much as you can. If you're still not satisfied, pop it in the dishwasher. As you can see in the photo, I set the rack to a fairly open angle. I then set this on top of the grate in the grill and lay a slab of ribs onto each side. The slab that's closer to the fire slightly risks overcooking, so I make sure that the bone-side of that slab is on the outside nearest the coals. Since I was cooking three slabs of ribs, I put two on the roasting rack and laid one directly on the grill, bone-side down, behind it. I'm showing you two views of the ribs on the grill below, right at the beginning of the process. (Click on the photos to enlarge them if you want.) Note that the flap on the grate is open.

One more little trick: add some wood chips or chunks to the fire just before you put the lid onto the grill. I used mesquite in this case, but I've also had excellent luck with hickory. You may like a different kind of hardwood--that's all up to you. No need to soak the wood: it'll smoke just fine.

Add some wood chunks to your fire for more smokiness.

4. Now, be patient!

Set the lid on the kettle and partially close the top vents--I keep mine about halfway open. You can futz with this, since I'm sure a lot depends on the kind of charcoal you're using, the ambient temperature, etc. You want a fire that is hot enough to cook the meat, but gentle enough to do it slowly. The water in the pan, which probably helps to keep the meat moist, most likely also keeps the temperature down a bit. Plan on the meat cooking for 3 - 4 hours.

Try your best to resist peeking. Every time you open the lid, you're letting heat and smoke escape. I try to limit my fussing with things to about once an hour or so. (OK, maybe 45 minutes.)

Here's how they looked after an hour:

After one hour on the grill.

Notice that the meat looks like it's cooking, but it doesn't look that much different from when it started out. The meat is beginning to shrink from the bones a bit in the middle rack. You can also see that I added a few unlit coals and some more wood to the fire at this point. You'll want to replenish the charcoal and wood occasionally. (I add charcoal maybe once and wood chips two or three times. Allow the fire to die down a bit towards the end of the cooking to prevent overcooking.) Also peek to see that there's enough water in the pan underneath the ribs and add more water if necessary. Hot tap water is fine.

After two hours, it's starting to look more like cooked meat.

After two hours on the grill.

But even though the meat has shrunk from the bones even further, they're still not ready. (Truthfully, you could probably safely eat them now. It's just that the meat will get softer if they cook awhile longer, especially if the fire is slow. I added wood but not charcoal at this stage.) My test? I try jiggling a bone. If I can move it or even pull it out of the meat, then it's done. The slabs will also seem a bit fragile, almost like they'll fall apart when you handle them. That's what you want!

If you like your ribs sauced (I do), brush them generously with sauce during the last 15 - 30 minutes of cooking. (Here is my recipe for barbecue sauce, but use any sauce you like--including a good bottled sauce.) You'll want to leave them on the grill for about 3 to 3-1/2 hours in all. If it's going quicker, it's not the end of the world--I've never thrown away any ribs I cooked! It just means your grill was too hot: try closing the vents down further next time. If it's taking longer, open them for a hotter fire. If it's cool outside, which it never is in Arizona, they will take longer, too. So the time is approximate, but I'm shooting for 3 hours in the smoke.

Here's how they looked when I took them off of the grill. They're mahogany in color, the meat is soft but still has its shape, and they're glazed from the sauce.

The ribs, fresh off the grill.

I suggest taking them from the fire with as little fanfare as possible, because there's one more step that will ensure total success, and you want to fend off the hungry hordes.

5. The ultimate secret: let them rest.

You'll notice that the ribs are in a large roasting pan. A bit before I took them off the grill, I preheated my oven to 200 degrees. (What's this??? You're using an OVEN????!!!??? For BARBECUING????!!!) I know, it's heresy. But bear with me here.

I cover the roasting pan with aluminum foil and slip the whole shebang into the oven for about half an hour. This lets the meat rest and probably even steams it ever so slightly, which in my opinion creates just that last bit of tenderness. You can also use this time to finish your preparations of potato salad, cole slaw, tomato aspic, or whatever else you're serving. I've even successfully let them cool once they're off the grill, then reheated them in the pan with the foil on, using a very slow oven (200 - 250 degrees) until they're hot and you can smell the smoke. They'll be terrific the next day, so you could conceivably cook them one day and serve them the next.

To carve the ribs, place them bone-side up on a board and cut carefully between the bones. They're more on an angle than you think, and you'll need a sharp knife to deal with any cartilage that's between the bones. Serve them up with plenty of sauce--and plenty of napkins. Don't worry about leftovers--there won't be any.

It's worth asking: why go to all this trouble? Well, for one thing, I actually enjoy it. For another, I can make the meat just the way I want it: commercial barbecue is often too something--too salty, too sweet, whatever. I have always been pleased with how my ribs taste; it was the tenderness, etc., that I found hard to achieve. And that's the one thing that barbecue places pretty reliably get right. So once I accomplished that, I knew I'd have something I liked even better than what I could buy. Which is often the case.

Do what you like, and don't apologize for it. If it ends up producing yummy food, trust me: no one will complain.

UPDATE: Lately, find it easier to take the ribs from the grill when they are done, slather them with sauce, wrap them in foil, and leave them in the 200-degree oven for an hour or so. This is easier than saucing them on the grill, and it yields a lovely, soft glaze with no risk of charring. Also, somewhere along the way, I picked up a grill rack that holds four racks of ribs more or less upright. I use this now instead of my improvised one. Be sure to put the meaty end of the ribs downward. (May 27, 2017)

Breaking a long silence

2014-06-08T14:11:00.000-07:00

My dad used to tell this joke:

There was a little boy who never spoke. His parents, who were naturally concerned, took him to every kind of doctor and specialist to try to figure out what was wrong. No one could find any explanation.

One morning shortly after his eighth birthday, the boy sat down to breakfast. He took a bite or two and then proclaimed, "This oatmeal is lumpy."

His mother and father were beside themselves with joy. They hugged the boy, they cried, they called their family and neighbors with the good news. Finally, when she had calmed down a little, his mother asked him, "Honey, why did you say nothing all this time?"

"Because," answered the boy, "up till now, everything has been satisfactory."

****

OK, so everything hasn't been satisfactory with me for the last year and a half--I mean, when and where is everything satisfactory?

BUT I've been busier than the proverbial one-armed paper hanger, and I haven't either had much spare time or--more to the point--that much to say in the while since I last posted on the blog.

So what changed? One word: ribs. I made some killer ribs a couple of times in the last couple of weeks after years and years of trying different methods. And in the spirit of sharing, I plan to explain, in excruciating detail, exactly what I do.

So stay tuned. In the next few days, I hope to have a rib post for you. In the meanwhile, I hope everything is satisfactory in your world.

Violins, Not Violence (An Open Letter to Wayne LaPierre and the NRA)

2012-12-22T08:13:00.001-07:00

Dear Mr. LaPierre,

We are all traumatized by last week's events in Newtown, Connecticut. We want answers; what's more, we want solutions. You've proposed one: put an armed guard in every school.

In itself, it's not a bad idea. You're right when you point out that lots of places and people have armed guards already, so why not our schools? As a solution, though, it's pretty naive. As some critics were quick remind us, there was already an armed police presence at many of the places that have seen terrible mass shootings (Columbine, Virginia Tech); it didn't help. The police can't be everywhere, so how many would we need? One in every classroom? One in every store, clinic, and movie theater? When would there be enough?

You pointed to the culture as a source of the problem, and that may be a better step in the right direction. (Although I must say that I thought your comments were simplistic, and I was horrified by your notion that we need to register all people with mental illness. What a terrible, un-American idea--from a group that passionately defends a constitutional right, no less!)

How do we change our culture and make it less violent? I have a suggestion. Let's give every kid in the United States a musical instrument. Let's teach every kid to play them, and let's have every kid play in bands, orchestras, guitar ensembles, steel drum bands, sing in choirs, and make music any way we can think of.

In all the things I've heard about the shooters, I've never heard that one of them was in a musical group at school. They're loners. But you can't be a loner in the choir, band, or orchestra--you have to be part of the group, and people will pay attention to you. What's more, you get to work with others--all different kinds of others--to make something beautiful and worthwhile. And if you were troubled and starting to go over the edge, I'll bet somebody in that group would notice and would do something to help you.

This isn't just a pipe dream. It works. It's worked in Venezuela's El Sistema. It works in Brazil, where the government has made music a universal requirement in elementary and secondary schools. In Paraguay, there's a town where the kids care so much about making music that they construct musical instruments out of things they find in the landfill.

Music is a way of directing energy. It's a way to show kids what they can accomplish by breaking a problem down to its component parts and working on it consistently and systematically. It's a way of developing the discipline to persevere. And in the end, you're making music. You're doing something constructive and beautiful.

Your problem, Mr. LaPierre, is that you can't see past the end of your gun. The only solution you can see to gun violence is more guns, which seems a bit like saying that the cure for alcoholism is more liquor. You want good guys to have guns so that bad guys can be stopped. I want people to be less interested in using guns for violent purposes.

My idea is no more a panacea than yours is, but it's a lot more positive. We will need a variety of approaches to make our culture less violent and less dangerous. So put more armed guards in schools if you want, but put more violins there, too. Maybe then, the only gunfire our kids will hear is the sound of the cannons at the end of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.

Respectfully,
David Schildkret

(I teach music at Arizona State University and direct choirs in Arizona and Maine.)

ADDENDUM (Corrected version): The earlier version of this referred to armed military personnel at Fort Hood as an example of a place where people with arms couldn't always help. A commenter pointed out that soldiers don't carry weapons on military bases.

A Christmas Tradition

2012-12-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

One sign of Christmas at our house is the smell of stollen baking. This sweet, delicate bread is a German tradition, and the recipe we use comes from Sue's family. It goes back at least to Sue's great-grandmother and is possibly even older than that.

Since I'm the baker/cook, the actual making of the stollen has fallen to me. It's a bit of a quest, because I make it every year, and I always think that the ones from Sue's family are better. Best of all are the ones that Sue's Aunt Anita makes. Anita is now in her 90s and still going strong. She bakes stollen every year, and hers are the nes plus ultra of stollen--delicious and with a delicate, moist texture that I envy.

We got the handwritten recipe years ago from Sue's mother, but there was an immediate problem: the recipe called for "1-1/2 pounds of flour (7 cups)." The problem is that 7 cups is more like 2 pounds of flour, so something was off. This meant that I was fudging with the amount of flour for years, and I do mean years. Eventually, I settled on something like 9 cups of flour--much more than originally called for. But anything less seemed to make a dough I couldn't manage.

Then a summer or two ago, I asked Anita about this. She mentioned something that wasn't noted in the recipe: she sifts the flour. Three times. It occurred to me that sifting, which would aerate the flour, might affect how much liquid it would absorb. So I tried it, and while the dough was very soft, I was able to make it with something like the 7 cups called for in the original recipe. The results were wonderful.

So how much flour should you use? It depends on your bread-making skills and how you assemble the dough. If you're an experienced bread maker, and if you mix up the dough by hand (and not with a mixer), you can probably manage with 7 or 8 cups of flour. If you find this too soft to handle or if you mix the dough in a machine, add more. The bread will be a little stiffer and more substantial, but it will still be wonderful.

The other secret to great stollen is to bake it until it just done, and no longer. This year, I baked it at 325 for 1/2 hour (I had been doing 350 for 20 - 25 minutes). Again, the results were more delicate and delicious.

One last thing: Sue's mother, Marie, was adamant that the fruit shouldn't be mixed into the dough (as most stollen recipes require). In her family, the fruit was put in as a filling, with the dough wrapped around it. The idea is that it resembles the baby Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes. The fruit filling, by the way, can be any dried fruit you like. We prefer a combination of raisins, sliced almonds, glace cherries, and candied pineapple and orange peel. Some people like citron. Whatever fruit you use, be a bit sparing. If you put in too much, it will just fall out when you slice the loaf. Here's the recipe. (Click here for a printer-friendly version.)

BECKER FAMILY STOLLEN

(originally from Sue's mother, Marie Picker Griffin, who got it from her mother, Martha Becker Picker; adapted over the years by David Schildkret)

Ingredients:

7-10 c. flour (I use unbleached all-purpose flour; I do not recommend bread flour in this recipe. Sift the flour up to three times after measuring; use the smallest amount of flour possible.)

1 c. sugar

1 t. salt

grated rind of 1 large lemon

1 lb. butter, softened

3 eggs

2 c. milk

3 cakes, packages, or 3 T of yeast

1/2 c. warm water

brown sugar, cinnamon, candied fruit, and nuts for filling

confectioner’s sugar and milk for glaze

1. Scald the milk and allow to cool. (I put the milk in a 1-quart measure and heat it in the microwave at 50% power for 4 minutes.)

2. When the milk is cool, dissolve the yeast in the water. Add a bit of the sugar, and allow to double in volume.

3. Combine the yeast and the milk, and add 3 cups of flour to make a sponge. Allow this to stand until it is puffy and risen to almost double in volume.

4. While the sponge is rising, cream the butter. Add the remaining sugar, salt, eggs, and lemon rind. Combine this with the sponge.

5. Add remaining flour until the dough is soft, but still substantial enough to knead.

6. Knead the dough for a few minutes. It will still be sticky, and it will probably never really be smooth and elastic like sandwich bread dough.

[Let's pause here. I found a handy tool a few years ago, and it makes dealing with soft dough like this much more manageable. It's called a bench knife (pictured to the right and available from cooking supply stores like King Arthur), and it's useful for lots of aspects of bread making. You can use it to lift the dough while kneading--I just keep it in my right hand and scoop up the dough with it, sort of fold it over, and push down with my other hand. It's also good for scraping up the dough from the work surface and for dividing the dough into loaves.]

7. Place the dough in a buttered bowl covered with a towel or plastic wrap. Set in a warm place and let rise until doubled in bulk (2-3 hours). (One way to get a warm spot is to turn the oven for 30 seconds, then switch it off and put the bread dough in the oven. Just be careful not to turn it on again for some other purpose!)

8. When it has fully risen, punch the dough down and form it it into a ball. Let it rest on the floured counter under a towel for 10 - 15 minutes. Sprinkle with flour if necessary and knead a few times. Divide the dough into 4 parts (this number has gradually changed in my wife’s family. I think they started with 2, then went to 3; we find 4 an ideal size, but we do go to as many as 6 when we are making gifts). Roll each part into a rectangle and fill.

9. To fill: roll the dough into a rectangle of about 3/8” - 1/2” thickness (for four-part dough, the rectangle is roughly 14” x 8” or 9”). Sprinkle the whole surface with a tablespoon or two of brown sugar, and then with a generous sprinkling of cinnamon. Spread these evenly over the surface--to the very edge--with your hand. Now, have the long side of the dough horizontal and imagine it divided into 3 columns vertically. Sprinkle fruit and nuts rather sparingly down the center column (I use raisins, candied orange peel, candied cherries, candied pineapple, and sliced almonds. Resist the temptation to be overly generous: the filling will just fall out when the bread is sliced! I use only about 3 or 4 cherries on a layer, for instance, and I cut them in half. Similarly, I use only 2 or 3 pieces of pineapple and slice them each into 2 or 3 bits. A small container of orange peel easily fills all four stollens.). Then fold one side over to cover the filling and press down gently. (You are folding almost like you would a business letter, except that you are doing it from the side.) Sprinkle the sugar, cinnamon, and goodies over the new top, and fold the second side over.

10. Place on a greased baking sheet and allow to rise covered with a towel for 1/2 hour-45 minutes. Proceed to roll and fill the remaining dough.

11. After they have risen, bake the loaves at 325 - 350 degrees F. for 1/2 hour-45 minutes, depending on the size.

12. Glaze: If you prefer a clear glaze, mix 1 c. confectioner’s sugar with a few T of water or milk and drizzle over the loaves while they are still quite hot. I prefer to see the glaze as white streaks, so I wait until the loaves are cool. Mix 1 c. confectioner’s sugar with 2-3 T of milk, and drizzle off the end of a tablespoon using a side-to-side motion across the short dimension of the finished loaf. Sue’s mother adds a dash of vanilla to the glaze, but I do not. I find that it turns the glaze a muddy color, and it does not add a noticeable flavor. It is more reasonable to add the vanilla if you are glazing warm loaves.

13. Store tightly wrapped once the loaves are completely cooled and the glaze has hardened.

As you can tell, this is a bit of a project. I usually enlist some helpers for filling the dough--everyone has one or two things assigned to them that they sprinkle on. My oven will only hold two loaves at a time, but that's no big deal--I shape all four loaves, and then I bake them two at a time. The second two rise an extra half-hour while the first two bake, but it doesn't seem to hurt anything.

The trick will be to keep from eating a whole loaf by yourself the minute it comes out of the oven. But remember, the holidays are about sharing--so share!

The World's Simplest Pie: Key Lime

2012-12-08T17:09:00.000-07:00

A confession: I wrote this entry months ago, but I wanted a photo. I took the photo and promptly forgot the whole thing. Just now, I went to post a holiday recipe and found this lurking. So here it is. The holiday recipe (for Sue's family stollen) is forthcoming.

The actual post: The headline here isn't hyperbole--the only way a pie could be simpler would be if you bought it from the store. All you have to do for an amazing Key Lime Pie is to combine lime juice with some sweetened condensed milk, stir it up, and pour it into a pie shell. Then you top it with something. If you're really cooking challenged, it could be whipped cream. That's all there is to it. Really. And it comes out fabulous.

Of course, I do have a couple of tricks that make it a little nicer, but you could make a perfectly acceptable pie with just the basic steps I mentioned there. (And if you prefer lemon pie, you could use lemon juice instead of lime. I've done it. It's delicious.) The lime flavor will be more intense and brighter if you put a little grated lime rind into the custard, and stirring in some egg yolks gives it a nice richness. Plus then you have some egg whites around to make a meringue for the topping, which I prefer to whipped cream for this pie.

That leaves only the crust to be considered. In a pinch (and I've done this more than once), you can buy a graham cracker crust at the grocery store. This doesn't seem like much of a compromise to me: what difference does it make if you crush store-bought graham crackers or if they do? But after I discovered Galletas Maria in Venezuela and found that they're pretty easy to come by in grocery stores in the US, I decided that those might make a good crust for Key Lime Pie--and they do. Their flavor, less distinctive than graham crackers, complements the lime better. So if I have time, I'll take the extra step of making a cookie crust of my own. You could use a pastry crust if you prefer. (Click here for a printer-friendly version of the recipe.)

FOR THE CRUST

1 5-oz (140 gram) package Galletas Maria
6 tablespoons butter, melted
1/4 cup sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Pulverize the cookies in a blender, or the bowl of a food processor, or by putting them in a plastic bag and rolling over them with a rolling pin. Combine the crumbs with the butter and sugar, then press the mixture into a shallow 9-inch pie pan. (I push it in there roughly with a spoon or rubber spatula, then smooth it out by using a smaller pie pan as a press--I push the smaller tin against the inside of the crust until it's even. You could use the bottom of a drinking glass to accomplish the same thing.)

Bake the crust for about 10 minutes, until it is lightly browned.

Cool the crust completely before going on.

FOR THE FILLING

1 14-oz. can sweetened condensed milk
grated rind of two small limes (about 1-1/2 inches in diameter)
1/2 cup lime juice (I squeeze the limes I've grated, then top it off with some bottled Key lime juice--Key lime juice has a more intense flavor than the regular kind. Using some fresh juice brightens it up a bit)
4 egg yolks

Beat the egg yolks. Add the milk and the lime rind and give it a stir. Finally, add the lime juice and stir it with the whisk until it comes together. Pour it immediately into the cooled pie shell. (The citrus juice causes the condensed milk to form a custard. No cooking is needed.)

Once this is done, proceed immediately to making the meringue topping.

FOR THE TOPPING

4 egg whites, preferably at room temperature
generous pinch of cream of tartar (Cream of tartar is tartaric acid. Acid helps to stabilize the meringue and gives it greater volume.)
1/2 cup sugar (If you can get it, superfine sugar is fabulous for this.)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Beat the whites with a mixer until they're frothy. Add the cream of tartar and beat until soft peaks form. Add the sugar and beat until the meringue stands up in stiff peaks.

Carefully spread this on top of the custard in the pie. Be sure to seal the meringue right to the edges of the crust. Bake in the oven for 12 - 15 minutes to brown the meringue.

Cool on a rack, then refrigerate for several hours before serving.

It's true: this recipe uses raw eggs. If you're worried about salmonella, you can omit the eggs and top the pie with whipped cream. If you do that, wait to put the whipped cream on top of the pie until just before you serve it.

This pie--and the way people scarf it down--remind me that if things are good, they don't need to be complicated. Early in my cooking days, I favored recipes with lots and lots of detailed steps: somehow I thought it was better if I did more work. Along the way, I've learned that quality and complexity are not necessarily connected. As with so many things, if it's good, it's right.

Yogurt: Simple complexity or complex similicity?

2012-07-31T11:18:00.003-07:00

It's hard to imagine anything much simpler than yogurt: basically, it's sour milk. People have been making it for millennia without the benefit of elaborate equipment.

If you want to make yogurt, there's not much to it: add some yogurt to some warm milk and keep it warm long enough for it to turn into yogurt. That's it.

Unless, of course, you want consistent, reliable results (and you know me, I want consistent, reliable results!). Because here, you see, is the rub. There are about a million variables: what kind of milk? what starter? How warm should the milk be? Should you heat it to a relatively high heat and let it cool, or just warm it to the temperature you want? How long do you let it incubate (the fancy term for letting it sit there until it's done)?

Most people don't worry about all of this. They just go to the grocery store, buy a couple of tubs of something and eat it, probably while they're heading out the door in the morning. The thing is, Sue has eaten yogurt for breakfast for years, and I began doing so religiously about three years ago. (I had eaten it on and off ever since I met Sue.) With both of us eating yogurt daily, we were going through quite a lot of it. At one point, we were in Maine, where they don't recycle the kind of plastic yogurt comes in these days, so we were throwing away oodles of plastic. That rankled.

So I bought a yogurt maker and began the quest for (my) perfect yogurt. I've pretty much got it down, but you might want your yogurt to be different: less creamy, more creamy, more sour, less sour--you get the idea. Even so, my method has to vary depending on external factors: even the ambient temperature of the room seems to have an impact.

Here are the considerations:

1. What kind of milk?

Any kind will produce yogurt, but the yogurt will be different depending on the fat content--that's the biggie. Other considerations are organic or not, and even the brand of milk can make a difference. When you find one you like, stick to it. You'll get the most consistent results that way. We like organic 2% milk. (And though the hippie in me would like to think otherwise, I don't think the organic bit is actually what matters. Most organic milk is ultra-pasteurized, and I think the high heat affects the proteins. This, I suspect, is why yogurt made from organic milk is different from that made with your ordinary, garden variety milk.) Some procedures call for adding dry milk. I have tried this and didn't like the result. The typical amount of dry milk is usually about 2 - 4 tablespoons per quart of liquid milk. Use the larger amount if you're using instant dry milk--by far the easiest thing to find.

2. What kind of starter?

You need a commercial yogurt that advertises that it has "active yogurt cultures." This means that the little guys who ferment the milk--I fondly call them yogis--are alive and kicking. You must use plain yogurt as a starter. Choose a commercial yogurt you like and that is closest to the way you want yours to come out. (But know that other factors, such as incubation time, will affect the results, so the starter isn't a guarantee that your yogurt will be like the stuff you buy.) I have successfully used Stonyfield, Fage, and Chobani. Once upon a time, I used to use Danon. Note that Fage and Chobani are Greek-style yogurts. They are very thick and creamy because some of the whey is strained out after the yogurt incubates. If you make yogurt from them but don't strain it, yours will be thinner than the starter.

3. How to heat the milk? To what temperature? How long does it have to stay at temperature?

You can successfully make yogurt by heating milk to about 110 degrees F and adding the starter. Because modern commercial milk is pasteurized, there is less risk than formerly of there being stray bacteria in the milk that could interfere with fermentation, so heating the milk to a higher heat isn't strictly necessary. Yogurt made from milk that has been heated to 110 will take a long time to incubate (as much as 12 hours) and will tend to be runny. It will also be on the tart side.

Most instructions tell you to heat the milk to 180 degrees F. This will kill off anything that shouldn't be in there, on the off chance that there's something that isn't yogi-friendly swimming around in your milk. If you do it this way, you need to cool the milk down before adding the starter. Anything hotter than 110-115 risks killing the yogis. Very bad. (If it's too cold when the starter goes in, it's also likely to be a flop.) Yogurt made from milk heated to 180 will take a little less time to incubate than the previous method--perhaps 8 hours. It will still tend to be runny and tart. The dry milk some methods call for is an attempt to get a better, firmer texture for the yogurt. I find that longer cooking solves this better, so read on.

I like my yogurt smooth, creamy, and only moderately tart. I especially don't like it when the whey separates from the yogurt in the jar--you know, that watery looking stuff that floats around the top and edges after you spoon yogurt out of the container. I learned that keeping the milk at a higher temperature for a longer period of time (20 - 30 minutes) alters the proteins. This means that the yogurt will incubate faster and will have a firmer texture. Because it will incubate quickly, you can stop it before it gets too tart. This is my preferred method. I bring the milk to 180 as quickly as possible, hold it there for for 20 or 25 minutes, then cool it quickly (details about all of this further down).

4. How to incubate it?

I've seen instructions for things as low-tech as putting the milk and starter into a thermos and letting it stand overnight. A time-honored tradition is to put the yogurt into a gas oven with a turned-off pilot light or on top of the gas stove near the pilot light. (I have an electric stove, so this isn't an option for me.) You need something that will keep the yogurt at a fairly constant 100 - 110 degrees F--I think 108 is the optimum. The easiest way to achieve this is with an electric yogurt maker. It's a simple appliance: it has a heating element and a thermostat in it so that it keeps things at a nice lukewarm temperature. You set the jars in it (some use small, individual-serving jars, others make a whole quart in a single container), cover it, and walk away for a few hours. Many yogurt makers have a timer that will turn the machine off when the yogurt has incubated for the time you've chosen.

5. How long should it incubate?

Ah. This is the 64-dollar question. Basically, the longer you let it go, the more tart it will be. So you want it to go long enough that it congeals--I think the correct word is "clabbers"--and then you go as much beyond that as you need for the yogurt to be as tart as you like. Once you've stopped it, you need to refrigerate it for several hours before you eat it.

6. OK, enough theories. How do YOU do it?

I thought you'd never ask.

I do have a method that I employ pretty consistently, but even this requires tweaking from time to time. What works perfectly in Arizona doesn't yield the same results when we're in Maine for the summer--doubtless because of differences in the milk and the ambient temperature in the room. Some of what I do is based on quirks in my yogurt makers. I'll explain all of that along the way.

My machine makes up to 14 6-ounce glasses of yogurt. So the amounts I'm giving here are based on that yield. You could cut it down proportionately if your machine doesn't hold as much. I recommend making small batches at first until you get the results you want. And don't be afraid to make notes. There are a lot of variables here.

HEATING THE MILK: For 14 6-oz. jars, I start with 5 pints of milk. (That's a half-gallon, plus another 2 cups; 10 cups in all.) I use organic 2% milk, but I've also used 1%. In Arizona, where I have a relatively new stove that can heat quite gently and evenly, I put the milk into a 5-quart stainless steel pot and set it directly on the stove. I set a digital thermometer into the pot and turn the heat to high. Then, stirring constantly, I watch the temperature carefully. As it approaches 180, I turn the heat down to about medium, start a timer, and stir, adjusting the heat as needed to keep it between 180 and 190 for 20 minutes. You read that right: I end up stirring the milk for about half an hour. It's worth it for the taste and texture of the yogurt.

My stove in Maine is less reliable, so here I use a double boiler. I have two 5-quart pots that nest into one another a bit. I put about an inch-and-a-half of water into the slightly larger one, set the slightly smaller one on top, add the milk and rig up the thermometer. Then I turn the heat to high, adjusting it as needed and keeping the temperature between 180 and 190 for 20 (lately 25) minutes. There's a plus to the double boiler method: while you still have to monitor it closely to maintain a steady temperature, you don't need to stir it constantly. An occasional stir will do.

A note on thermometers: I use a probe-type thermometer like the one in the picture. It has a clip that goes on the side of the pot, and you set the probe in the clip--being careful the tip is submerged but not hitting the bottom of the pot. This then plugs into a little box that sits on the counter and reads out the temperature constantly.

Keeping the temperature steady is easier said than done. Over time, you learn just when to turn your burner down so that you don't go too far past 180. You learn how low to turn it so that it doesn't dip too far below 180, and you learn when to jack it back up for a little while. Be patient. You will get better at this!

ADDING THE STARTER: I set the pot--with the thermometer still attached--into ice water. I usually fill the sink to a depth of an inch or two with ice water and set the pot in it. In Maine, where the sink is big, I find a bigger pot that will hold the milk pot and a good supply of ice water. I stir it occasionally and watch the temperature closely: it takes about 10 minutes to cool. For the starter, I use 2 6-oz containers of Chobani these days. I used Stonyfield for a long time, and that works, too. You can theoretically make new yogurt from a couple of glasses you've saved from the previous batch. I worry that the yogis will start to mutate or something, so I always buy new yogurt for each batch. I pull the starter out of the fridge right when I start measuring and heating the milk--that way, it won't be ice-cold. While the milk is cooling, I put the starter into a 1-quart measuring cup and stir it up until it's smooth. When the milk cools to 115 degrees F, I immediately pull the pot out of the cold water. (Watch the milk closely, especially when it gets down around 125: it will go fast from there. Don't let it go below 110 or you risk a failure.) With a ladle, I put a scoop or two of the warm milk into the starter and stir it up. This thins the starter so that it will combine thoroughly with the milk. I then pour the starter into the milk and whisk it to combine. The mixture will now be between 100 and 110 degrees, which is perfect.

To fill the jars, I pour the yogurt base from the pot into the 1-quart measuring cup and use the measuring cup to decant the base into the jars.

INCUBATION: I have a two-tier yogurt maker like this one. When I make a full batch, the stuff on the bottom comes out thicker and tarter than the stuff on top: there's just enough difference in temperature to change the result. (See what I mean? There are a lot of variables here, and small variations can make noticeable differences in some cases.) My solution to this problem is to switch the jars halfway through the process. It works fine.

So I set my yogurt in the machine and let it incubate for 4 - 6 hours (more about this in a second). I switch the two layers halfway through the time. When it's done, I cover the jars and refrigerate the yogurt overnight.

So why 4 - 6 hours? Well, it depends. In the summer in Arizona, we keep the house at 80 degrees F. At that temperature, the yogurt takes 4 hours, with a switch at the 2-hour mark. In the winter when it's cooler, and in Maine, where it's also cooler, it needs a total of 6 hours.

If I were making only 7 jars (one layer, in other words, without the second tier), I would probably do 3 hours in warm weather and 4 - 5 hours in cooler weather. Remember that the stuff on the top doesn't get as hot, which is why you need more time overall if you're doing both tiers.

BOTTOM LINE:

1. Choose your milk. I use 2% organic.

2. Decide on a heating method--try different ones to see what you like best and what fits best into your way of working.

3. Decide on an incubation method. Electric yogurt makers with automatic shutoffs are the easiest.

4. Try different incubation times until you get what you like.

If you want Greek-style yogurt, just line a sieve with several layers of cheesecloth. Put the yogurt in the lined sieve--about twice as much as the final quantity you're looking for. Set the sieve over a bowl and put the whole thing in the fridge. It will be creamy in as little as 2 hours. The longer you leave it, the firmer it will become. After 8 hours or overnight, it will almost be like a soft cheese. Save the whey that runs off: it's good for baking. Just use it in place of milk in muffins or in place of the milk or water in bread.

A word about flavoring: I always make plain yogurt. I'm worried about adding things that might make the yogis unhappy. I am also glad to eat plain yogurt, straight from the jar, but a lot of people aren't. If you prefer flavoring, I recommend adding honey and fruit or granola to the plain yogurt right before you eat it. That way, nothing will kill off the helpful bacteria before they get inside you! You can also sweeten with maple syrup, brown sugar, or even white sugar. Wheat germ, ground flax, and other grains can make a nice addition. Sometimes I throw a little cereal in there. This is a little moment of creativity in an otherwise routine process--always a good thing!

I'd love for you to try this. It's more complicated to write about than it is to do: all it takes is a little patience and some recognition that you'll have to fool with it until it comes out the way you like it. If you're like me, you'll enjoy that process!

Rising to the Occasion: Fresh, Fresh Eggs

2012-07-27T10:53:00.000-07:00

Years ago, when I taught at Centre College, my neighbor, Maryann Ward, used to get eggs fresh from the farm. There were more than she could use, so she shared them with me. The first time I used them to bake a cake--a pound cake, as I recall--I was astonished by the results. Very fresh eggs seem to have a power to raise baked goods almost beyond imagining.

I'm in Maine at the moment, and a friend, Marty Ward (no relation, so far as I know, to Maryann), raises chickens. When she and her husband, Dave, came to dinner the other night, they brought a dozen eggs from their chickens. Heaven! And as some of the eggs were fresh that day, my thoughts instantly turned to pound cake.

Pound cake is deceptively simple. It uses only the most basic ingredients, and the procedure isn't complicated. There isn't even a great deal of variation in the recipes. The one I used to use came with a Sunbeam stand mixer I got years ago. It was fabulous. But I'm in Maine, and that recipe is in Arizona.

So I decided to try a little variation. Some recipes call for buttermilk, and I know that yogurt and buttermilk can be used pretty much interchangeably. I've got a good supply of yogurt on hand (I make my own and will share the instructions for that one of these days), so I thought I'd try a buttermilk pound cake, using yogurt in place of the buttermilk.

There are various ways to flavor pound cake. The traditional, purest form is with just vanilla, though some recipes omit that, using only sugar, flour, eggs, butter, and milk. You can also flavor pound cake quite nicely with almond or lemon. Lemon somehow seemed summer-like to me, so I chose that. (Besides, it's nice to serve pound cake with some berries or fruit, and lemon is always nice with that.)

This is a very traditional recipe. Some more recent ones call for six eggs, but I think four is plenty. Six, in my opinion, would create something more like a yellow cake; it wouldn't have the close, dense texture I associate with pound cake. This one, made with yogurt, came out with a wonderfully moist and almost creamy quality.

So here's what I did.

BUTTERMILK POUND CAKE (Click here for a printer-friendly version.)

INGREDIENTS

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter--get the best, richest butter you can find
3 cups granulated sugar
4 eggs
3 cups white flour (I prefer unbleached)
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup buttermilk or yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla
pinch of kosher salt

optional: grated rind and juice of 1 lemon, plus 1 teaspoon of lemon extract (this is what I did today); OR 1 teaspoon almond extract. You could also omit the vanilla and increase the lemon or almond extract

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream the butter. Add the sugar, and cream it thoroughly. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Add the salt. Add 1 cup of the flour and the baking soda. Mix on the lowest speed until moistened. Add a third of the buttermilk and beat until thoroughly blended. If using lemon juice and grated lemon rind, add them now. Then add another cup of flour, stir, then another third of the buttermilk and beat to combine. Finally, add the remaining flour, stir, and beat in the remaining buttermilk. Add whatever extract you're using. Beat for 2 or 3 minutes at fairly high speed until the batter is very smooth and uniform.

Pour into a greased and floured 10-inch tube pan or a bundt pan. (I used a bundt pan, because that's all I had. It was a little difficult to get it out in one piece, so be sure to grease and flour it thoroughly. Baker's Joy, a cooking spray with flour in it, works best.) Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes to 1 hour and 20 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean. Allow to cool for 15 minutes in the pan, then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.

Things don't have to be fancy or innovative to be good. Often the basics are best, if you put care into them and use the best ingredients. There is nothing wrong with tradition lovingly and thoughtfully followed! And if you have really fresh eggs, bake.

In Praise of Peas

2012-07-17T13:33:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid, peas were grayish-green, rather mushy, and tasted like the metal can they were packed in. At some point, we began to get frozen peas: better color, better texture, but pretty starchy and bland. Fresh peas, when I finally had them as an adult, were a revelation.

And here's a revelatory way to prepare them. This comes from Pierre Franey's More 60-Minute Gourmet, a delightful book.

For every 1-1/2 to 2 cups of fresh peas (the fresher, the better), melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a saute pan. When the foam subsides, add a couple of tablespoons of finely chopped fresh mint and 1/2 teaspoon of sugar. Add the peas, then salt and pepper to taste. Give the whole thing a stir or two, then cover the pan. Cook just until the peas are done--I cooked mine for two minutes. If the peas are super-fresh (in other words, you have just picked them from your own garden), it can take as little as a minute.

The peas in the photo above came from a wonderful organic farm here on Mount Desert Island called Beech Hill Farm. It's run by the College of the Atlantic, a rather free-thinking and free-spirited place.

You won't believe how good peas prepared this way can taste. The dish will completely supplant all childhood memories of mushy, metallic legumes.

If it's summer, it must be popovers

2012-07-16T19:51:00.002-07:00

As I've written before, we spend summers in Maine, and that always means popovers. Here's a batch I baked when my sister-in-law Martha came for a visit. Taking the photo is a challenge: you have to fend off the people trying to eat the popovers.

I think they turned out well! For the recipe, follow the link to the post above, or go here, which will give you a printer-friendly version.

Late to the party, but still well-bread

2012-06-27T13:11:00.001-07:00

You think this bread is good? This is all that's left of a loaf I baked yesterday. I have more rising now.

About six years ago, Mark Bittman published a recipe for bread that requires no kneading and yet comes out amazingly good.

It's not so much skipping the kneading that makes this bread what it is: it's the increased water, the reduced yeast, and most of all, baking the bread in a hot, covered pot. The smaller amount of yeast means that the bread can make a very long, slow rise, which develops texture and flavor. The high water content means that the bread expands quickly when it's baked, giving the characteristic big holes that you get with artisan bread. And the covered pot, combined with the steam that the extra water provides when it heats, gives a hearty crust.

I finally found this recipe about six weeks ago, and I think I've baked at least eight loaves since then. They've all been terrific. I've made a few slight modifications, so I'll give my formula:

2 cups bread flour
1 cup whole wheat flour (or you could use all white flour if you prefer)
1-1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon dried yeast
1-2/3 cups warm water
(for the rising loaf, wheat bran as needed)

You throw everything but the wheat bran into a bowl and stir it until it forms a very loose dough. (Be sure you incorporate all the flour into the dough--don't leave any lurking under the dough at the bottom of the bowl.) Put it in a glass or plastic bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let it sit in a draft free place for at least 12 hours. You can let it go up to 24 hours; I would say I usually let it sit for 14 - 16 hours. (In other words, you do this in the afternoon or evening and plan to bake it the next day.)

When it's risen fully, it will be bubbly on top and will smell a bit like beer. That's good! It's the yeast doing its work. Turn it out of the bowl onto a floured surface. It will be a bit of a mess, but don't worry. Work in a little more flour if it makes it easier to handle, but just knead it gently until it forms a ball.

Set the ball of dough on a clean linen towel (not terrycloth--you don't want fuzz in your bread) that you've generously sprinkled with wheat bran. Sprinkle some bran on top of the dough and fold the towel over the dough to cover it (or use a second towel). Let that sit someplace safe for a couple of hours.

Half an hour before you want to bake the bread, set a Dutch oven with its lid into the oven and turn the heat to 500 degrees (I like this better than the 450 in the recipe). The Dutch oven will get very hot, which is exactly what you want. When you're ready to bake, take the Dutch oven out (use good oven mitts!) and set it on a heatproof surface. Dump the dough into the pot (bran will fly everywhere, which is why there are brooms), and then shake the pot gently to distribute the dough evenly. Cover the pot tightly and put the whole thing into the oven. Bake for half an hour, then uncover the pot and bake for another 10 - 15 minutes to brown the crust fully.

When it's done, slip it out of the pot onto a rack to cool. Then try to fend your family off while they run for the hot bread.

Bittman later published a modified recipe that takes less time. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm sure it too would be good.

It only took me six years to find this recipe. Now I'm baking a loaf more or less every other day, because we like it so much. Better late than never, as they say.

On imagination

2012-06-25T20:39:00.001-07:00

The whole family was in New York City last week as a way of celebrating Miriam's graduation from college and, well, just because we like going to places like New York City. We visited the Natural History Museum (and got hours of laughter from imagining how a Tyrannosaurus Rex could possibly use those idiotically short arms of his) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, walked around Chinatown and Little Italy, strolled through Central Park praising Frederick Law Olmstead (the architectural genius behind it all) and generally had ourselves a terrific time.

The highlight for me was seeing the play "War Horse." On one level, the show, which tells the story of a farm horse that is conscripted by the British crown to fight in World War I, is extraordinarily simple: most of the time, the stage is nearly bare--there is hardly any set. The centerpiece is a remarkable machine (you can't really call it a puppet) that evokes the horse of the title. (If you don't know what I'm referring to, take a moment to look at this.) Three actors operate the machine so that the horse gives a breathtaking performance. It is spellbinding--there is no other word.

We first saw the machine/puppet while touring Lincoln Center. The guide said something about how he, as an audience member, had stopped paying attention to the puppeteers and came to believe it was a real horse. I didn't have that experience: I was always aware that it was not a real horse, and that was what made it so remarkable. I think it was Brecht who pointed out that playgoers don't forget that they're watching actors in a play. We don't forget that we're watching movies or television. Part of what captivates us is our awareness that we are experiencing an illusion. If it were real, or seemed completely so, it would be unremarkable: reality is all around us, and we don't need reminding of it.

"War Horse" is theater at its best because it is a kind of conspiracy between the actors and the audience. We in the audience have to work a bit: as we watch, we have to supply what's missing--although this isn't a difficult task because we're given very good cues. The actors don't create the illusion for us, they invite us to create the illusion for ourselves.

When it works--and it does, stunningly so, in "War Horse"--the experience is like nothing else. It is truly life-changing, and that, as Elizabeth gleefully pointed out, is why we do what we do when we create performances.

If you have the chance to see "War Horse" in New York, seize the opportunity. You will be transformed, and your imagination will be sparked in ways you might not have thought possible.

(PS: It's worth pointing out that only yards away from the Vivian Beaumont Theater, where they're creating theatrical magic with "War Horse" by making the audience do much of the work, stands the Metropolitan Opera. In that house, massive sets and stunning costumes cloak the music in a fabric of monumental naturalism. It is an altogether different way of firing the imagination, but it works just as wonderfully. Perhaps this is more workable in opera because the medium itself is so removed from reality: as fun as it is to sing stories, it isn't very much like everyday life. Surrounding the singing with something that looks like it could be a city street or a ballroom underscores the unreality, just as having a wooden puppet portray the emotions and reactions of a horse takes us farther from ordinary life to a deeper truth.)

Sticks and Stones

2012-03-07T16:46:00.000-07:00

There's a reason (well, several, probably) why blog posts have been so scarce here lately. It's mainly that most of what I'd post would be political rants, and heaven knows we don't need more of those. But eventually it becomes hard to hold one's tongue.

There have been so many things I could have reacted to: the various looney doings in the Arizona legislature, for one. They operate as though Kafka were in charge--actually, even Kafka would find some of what they do too weird. Then there are the various outrageous statements by politicians who hope you won't scrutinize what they say too carefully--because they don't hold up to any rational or logical examination.

What brings me out of hiding? Rush Limbaugh, of course, because I think those of us who find what he has said about Sandra Fluke to be so offensive must speak out. We can all complain bitterly about the loss of civility in our discourse, but if we don't condemn it--if we just watch it as a sort of fight to the death among gladiators--we're at least partly complicit. Edmund Burke reminded us that evil triumphs when good people do nothing (though it's hard to pin down exactly how he said it--read this interesting compilation).

Rush Limbaugh and others are entitled to believe that contraception shouldn't be part of standard medical insurance coverage. I passionately disagree with them, but I won't call them names. In fact, I won't even call Rush Limbaugh names, tempting as it is. And I won't condone calling anyone names. (One response to the outcry about Limbaugh's remarks has been to dredge up some really foul things that some liberals have said about some conservatives. Those aren't right, either, and they certainly don't make this right. In fact, didn't we all learn as kids that "two wrongs don't make a right"? I condemn all hate speech--it is dangerous, vicious, and destructive.)

Apart from the downright mean-spiritedness of the remarks (which was bad enough) Limbaugh made a series of big rhetorical mistakes in his diatribes against Sandra Fluke. First, he set up a paper tiger or a straw man: he turned her advocacy for insurance coverage of contraception on its head, claiming that she sought taxpayer support for contraceptives. Everything else he said flowed from this one great, gaping logical flaw. He then misconstrued how birth control works (deliberately, I suspect, since it's hard to imagine anyone being that misinformed), suggesting that if she had less sex, she'd need less birth control. Finally (well, probably not finally--I'm sure there are other sins we can enumerate), he engaged in what is called, ironically in this case, an ad hominem argument. That's when you don't take on the argument itself, but you attack the person making the argument--an argument "against the man." This, as Cicero pointed out centuries ago, is basically a distraction. Yet it's the meat and potatoes of a lot of political discourse.

And that's what I want to condemn. Disagree with me all you like. Tell me why I'm wrong and you're right. Find facts that support your position and demonstrate that mine is misinformed, naive, or just plain wrong. But don't ignore my argument altogether and just start calling me names.

The sad truth is that ad hominem arguments work. Mud-slinging works. Negative campaigning works. And it will keep working, no matter outraged we pretend to be, so long as we are willing to be swayed by it.

There are websites that check the accuracy of candidates' statements. Maybe we need one that keeps track of how often they call their opponents names instead of engaging the argument.

So I hereby foreswear all name-calling. And anyone who disagrees with me is just a stupid jerk. :o)

(And speaking of Edmund Burke, he also said this: "All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter." Yup. Something else we've lost track of.)

Today's cooking project

2012-01-06T18:10:00.000-07:00

Some students are coming over for dinner tomorrow night, which means I get to cook outrageous amounts of food (I can give them the remains, so that we don't get fat eating them ourselves).

One of the things I'm making is this pie. It is an extraordinary apple pie, with a filling unlike any other I've ever had: the long, low-temperature baking turns the apples into something smooth and creamy more resembling apple butter than a pie filling. It's heavenly!

One of the kids (I think it was Miriam, but if not, they'll set me straight) dubbed this "Apple Lasagna," because you are supposed to bake it in a 9 x 13" pan--the kind we usually use for lasagna. Actually, we fairly quickly decided that it was an obscene amount of pie unless you were feeding a HUGE crowd--it usually went bad before we could eat all of it. So I've done two things to this recipe. I've cut the proportions for the filling in half, baking it in a deep-dish 10" pie plate, and I use my usual crust recipe instead of the all-vegetable shortening one called for here. Also, to get the crust nice and flaky, I heat the oven to 425 degrees and turn it down to 250 when I put the pie in.

The main problem with this pie is that you have to smell it baking for 3 hours. By then, you are ravenous for pie, but you can't eat it for at least 4 hours! I hope there is some left when the students arrive tomorrow...

Leftovers never had it so good

2011-12-31T11:00:00.000-07:00

OK, I admit it. I'm nuts.

Leftovers made from Christmas turkey should, on the whole, be simple and straightforward. And mine were--until I started fussing. After all, Turkey ala King is nothing more than chunks of turkey in a cream sauce with maybe some peas and mushrooms in it. You can rustle that up in about half an hour--at most. Pour it over rice or buttered egg noodles, and you've got a really delightful supper.

So far, so good. The crazy part is that I thought it would be fun to serve the Turkey ala King not over rice or noodles, but in puff paste shells--vol-au-vents--made from homemade pastry, not the store-bought kind.

So on Thursday, I assembled the dough using Julia Child's modern method in her book The Way to Cook. That book, by the way, is brilliant and gorgeous. If you're familiar with puff paste, you know that the traditional method of making it is to make a dough, make a large pat of butter, place it on the dough, and then begin rolling it out and folding it to form layers. It's a tricky process: if the big mass of butter is too cold, you can't roll it. If it's too soft, it turns to mush. There's a lot of stopping and sticking the thing back in the fridge to firm up, and the whole procedure takes several hours.

Julia Child's updated method has you combine all of the butter with the flour. The proportions, by the way, are shocking: you start with six-and-a-half sticks of butter (you read that right) and combine them with four cups of flour.

Once you get a rough dough, you start patting and rolling it. You make a long rectangle and fold it like a business letter. As you keep doing that--four times on the first go--it gets more and more like dough. You chill it for 45 minutes and fold it twice more, and voila! puff paste ready to bake with. Wonderful.

I made the dough most of the way on Thursday and made the final two turns yesterday (Friday) evening. I shaped the dough into vol-au-vents by tracing a cereal bowl on the dough to cut eight discs. I then traced a mug on the inside of four of them, cut out the center, and put the resulting donut-shaped ring on top of the full discs. A little magic with some egg wash and a knife and some poking with a fork and a skewer, and they were ready for the oven. They looked like this:

I set the cookie sheets on a pizza stone in a hot oven for 25 minutes. Then I scooped out the centers, saving the tops, and slipped them back in the oven for 5 minutes more. Here was the result:

Not too bad, eh? And it's huge fun to think of that plain-looking dough turning into those spectacular structures. I then ladled some of the Turkey ala King into them, and they were ready to serve. The finished product is at the top of this entry. They tasted fabulous.

So once in a while it makes sense to fuss--even over something simple. Now and then, it's worth the trouble.

Happy New Year and much joy in 2012. I hope your year turns out like a good batch of puff pastry: unassuming at first, only to blossom into something glorious.

One percent for charity

2011-12-14T22:22:00.000-07:00

I had an idea today. I hope it will catch on.

It was inspired by watching this video. If, like me, you're impressed by the figures the video cites and you want to help, here's a place to do it.

Now, here's my big idea.

The average American spends something like $650 on holiday gifts (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and others). Altogether, Christmas and related spending amounts to something like $500 billion a year. Yup, half-a-trillion dollars--more than we spent (with such horror) to bail out the banks in 2008. (Not that I'm supporting the bank bailout, mind you, I'm just making a comparison here.)

If we gave just one penny to charity for every dollar we spend on gifts, we'd be giving FIVE BILLION DOLLARS at Christmastime alone. Five billion. That's bound to have an impact.

So my new crusade is 1% for charity. For the average person, that's $6.50. Some of us will spend more, some less. But if we all did it...well...you get the idea.

So think about it. And if you like the idea, pass it on.

A Use for that Turkey Stock

2011-12-04T17:41:00.000-07:00

By now, you've probably eaten all the leftover turkey, and all that's left are the gallons of stock you made from the carcass. What do you do with it? You make soup, of course (and you save some in the freezer for sauces and to make the next batch of stock for, say, the Christmas turkey).

Here's a very quick, hearty soup. The secret is using canned cannellini beans rather than dried ones. That saves soaking them overnight and the long cooking the next day. We're having this for dinner tonight. This is the second batch I've made since Thanksgiving--it's that good. Sue says it tastes like what you might get if a Polish person married an Italian and they made soup together. I think it just tastes good.

Sausage and Bean Soup
(Click here for a printer-friendly version of the recipe)

Ingredients:

1 small onion, chopped
2 T olive oil
1 lb. good smoked sausage, such as kielbasa, cut into quarter-inch slices
3 - 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 large bunch of Swiss chard
1 cup vermouth
8 cups stock, such as turkey or chicken
3 15-oz. cans cannellini or other white beans, drained
½ cup grated parmesan cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Procedure:

1. Remove the central ribs from the Swiss chard leaves. If you would like to add the stems to the soup, chop them as you would celery. Cut the leaves into quarter-inch ribbons (chiffonade).

2. Put enough olive oil into a Dutch oven or other large pot to film the bottom. Warm it over medium heat. Add the chopped onions and sweat them briefly. If you are using the chopped chard stems, add them after the onions have cooked a bit. Add the garlic, which should cook briefly but not brown.

3. Turn up the heat a little, and add the sausage. Brown it lightly.

3. Turn the heat back to medium. Add the cut-up Swiss chard leaves and let them cook until they are wilted a bit. (They will reduce considerably in volume. When you first add them, they will nearly fill the pot. As they cook down, they will fill perhaps one-fourth of the pot.)

4. Add the vermouth and turn the heat up to medium high. If there are any brown bits on the bottom of the pot from browning the meat, scrape it up using a wooden spoon. It will give the soup more flavor and a nice color.

5. Add the stock and bring it to a simmer. Let cook 5 or 10 minutes, until the chard is fully cooked.

6. Add the drained beans, and cook until the beans are hot. Stir in the parmesan cheese. Taste and correct for salt and pepper. (Do this at the end so that you don’t oversalt it--you probably already salted the stock; the sausage is salty, and so is the cheese. It may not need any salt at all!)

Serve with crusty bread and pass some grated parmesan for people to add if they like.

This will warm the coldest night--or just a chilly one. (We only think it gets cold in Phoenix...) And what's better than a little warmth?

Lard? Oy vey!

2011-11-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

A few notes in followup to yesterday's cooking frenzy:

PIE: For years, I've sought the perfect pie crust. I was once completely taken in when my boss's wife made a pie with a fabulous crust. When I asked how she made it, he gave me this whole rigmarole about temperatures, brushing the top with milk, and a few other ritualistic exercises. Turned out it was a Pillsbury crust from the supermarket. But the hunt was on. I thought I was doing pretty well until I tasted a pie Melissa Solomon made. This woman, a former student of mine, is not only a to-die-for soprano, she makes heavenly pie crust--light, delicate, flaky. I asked for her recipe. It was identical to mine.

I'll never match Melissa's light touch, but I came close yesterday. The secret? Lard (God forbid! my Jewish ancestors are saying) and vinegar. I know. Lard sounds positively awful. Just saying the word makes my arteries harden. But nothing makes a better crust, and believe me, I've tried about every option there is. I use half butter and half lard in mine, and it's fabulous. I also tried another trick I'd read about: adding a small amount of vinegar. Remarkably, this doesn't affect the flavor. (It's all the more remarkable because it turns out I haven't got any white vinegar in the house, so I used cider vinegar. No problem.) Apparently the acid in the vinegar inhibits the development of gluten. While you need gluten in cakes and breads, it's the enemy of flakiness in pie crusts. (By the way, Melissa has no need of such crutches as lard and vinegar: her crust is made with shortening.)

By now, you probably want the proportions, so here they are (click here for a printer-friendly version of the recipe):

2-1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter
8 tablespoons lard (leaf lard is best, I'm told, but the plain old variety I found in the store worked fine)
1 tablespoon vinegar
1/2 cup (or less) of ice water

You probably know how to make a pie crust, but just in case you don't, here's the method:

1. Combine the flour and salt.

2. Cut the butter and lard, which should both be ice-cold (even frozen) into small chunks and put it into the flour. Give it a quick stir to coat the lumps of fat with flour, then, using a pastry blender or two knives, cut the fat into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Be sure to use a cutting, rocking motion with the pastry blender rather than a mashing motion. Mashing will tend to encourage the formation of gluten.

3. Add the vinegar and 1/4 cup of ice water. Using a fork, stir things gently, adding more water bit-by-bit until the dough just comes together. If it's a tiny bit crumbly, it'll be hard to roll but all the more flaky.

4. Divide the dough in two and form each portion into a disk about an inch thick and about six inches across. Wrap in plastic wrap or wax paper and chill for at least half an hour. (You can chill it longer, even a day or more. Just take it out of the fridge for a bit before you start working with it.)

5. Roll it gently and quickly on a floured board until the disk is about two inches wider than your pan. So for a 10-inch pie, you want a 12-inch disk.

6. I recommend chilling the crust after it is formed. I pop mine in the freezer while I mix up the filling (be sure you use a Pyrex dish!). If I'm blind-baking the crust (baking it unfilled), I chill it in the freezer for 15 - 20 minutes before baking.

This will make two single-crust 10-inch pies or one double-crust 10-inch pie. If you don't have a use for the second portion of dough, freeze it. It will keep a long time that way.

TURKEY: The salting method I got from Saveur produced a bird with a beautiful bronze skin. The meat was juicy and flavorful, but I think not as flavorful as a brined bird. My 15-pound turkey, stuffed, took about 4-1/2 hours to cook. I was careful to take the turkey out of the fridge about two hours before I wanted to cook it: that shortens the time in the oven. After about 45 minutes, I covered the breast fairly closely with a double thickness of foil more or less shaped to cover only the breast. I heard about this trick someplace; the idea is to slow the cooking of the breast so that it doesn't overcook while the dark meat cooks--the dark meat needs to reach a higher temperature. I think it worked pretty well. On the whole, I was satisfied with this, but truthfully, I think a brined bird has more flavor. So my latest thought is to combine the two methods: brine the bird for 12 hours or so, then let it sit on a rack in the fridge for a day or two. I think the result would be spectacular--I suspect the skin of the salted bird comes out so well because the turkey is completely dry when it goes into the oven. Basting every hour or so also helped make the bird look spectacular, so I'll use the Saveur idea of putting a couple of cups of stock into the roasting pan when I put the turkey in the oven. I've used a covered roaster in the past, but I think an open roaster actually works better.

And today, of course, it's leftovers. I love leftovers--but none so much as those from Thanksgiving. As much as I enjoy cooking, it's nice to get a second meal from all that effort.

Of course, there might not be enough after I have a turkey sandwich for lunch...

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T13:43:00.001-07:00

A quick note while the turkey roasts.

I love Thanksgiving. It's basically an excuse to cook as much as I can stand--and I can stand a lot of cooking.

But--and this may surprise you--I don't do anything ambitious or fancy for Thanksgiving. To me, Thanksgiving isn't a gourmet occasion; it's a time for nostalgic food, well prepared.

So here's what's cooking:

Mom is bringing cheese, crackers, and a spinach dip she makes using a packet of Knorr vegetable soup. I think the recipe is on the box. We'll nibble on those beforehand, in case the turkey takes longer than I thought it would in the oven. (Have you noticed that timing the roasting of a turkey is a distinctly iffy business?)

We're having turkey, of course, with stuffing. I do cook the stuffing inside the bird, despite all the snobbery against it. I'm sorry; it just tastes better when it's soaked up all those juices from inside the bird. My stuffing is bread, onions, celery, and chestnuts with some seasoning. OK, so I got adventuresome this year and threw in the grated rind of a lemon, the juice from said lemon, and two chopped Granny Smith apples.

In the past, I've brined the turkey, and it turns out well. There are two drawbacks: first, it's murder to find something large enough to hold the bird that will also fit in the refrigerator, and second, it can wreak havoc with the stuffing--all that salt water soaks into the stuffing, making it both too salty and rather soggy. So when I heard of a different method that involves salting the bird but not using water, I thought it worth a try. It was discussed on NPR last Sunday, and the article describing the method is here, in the latest issue of Saveur, a great magazine.

Along with the turkey and stuffing, there's gravy, of course (Miriam thinks this is absolutely crucial). We're sauteeing Brussels sprouts in olive oil and garlic, we'll steam some butternut squash, and we'll have mashed potatoes. Sue will probably make a salad with some nice Comice pears we found in the market. (I love Comice pears. This is the variety made famous by Harry & David; you can find smaller specimens that are just as tasty for a lot less money in many grocery stores these days.)

We have some students joining us. Justine will bring some homemade cranberry sauce--otherwise, I would have made a compote of cranberries, apple, pear, orange, and pecans.

For dessert, there's pumpkin pie and chocolate cream pie. The second strikes me as unusual, but another student, Melissa, adores this and for her it wouldn't be Thanksgiving without it.

Some years ago, we began inviting students to join us--I hated the idea of students who couldn't get home having no place to go on this family-oriented holiday. Each time, I've asked them to tell me what dish says "Thanksgiving" to them, because to me, that's what it's all about: that one dish that just takes you back to those Thanksgiving holidays of your dreams. One student said it was creamed corn; she was astonished when I pulled out the corn, butter, and cream. I think she was used to something from a can or a frozen packet.

I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving with that one dish that is de rigueur. I know we'll be enjoying ours--the turkey smells amazing!

Getting Ready (a baking spree)

2011-11-17T11:32:00.001-07:00

Last Saturday was the inaugural concert of the Barrett Choir, my new group at ASU. So how did I prepare the day of the concert? I baked.

See, the program was fairly short, and I thought that people should have a good reason to hang around for a while. I had suggested that the students might want to organize a reception, but this is tricky for undergraduates who live in dorms and don't have ready access to a kitchen, ingredients, etc.

So I sallied into the breach. The fruits of my labors are in the photo. I baked two batches of pumpkin bars (I found several recipes for these online--all alike. I chose to top them with a dusting of powdered sugar rather than ice them with cream cheese frosting.), a batch of my peanut butter cookies, two big batches of Toll House cookies--nothing fancy here, just the recipe on the 24-oz. bag of chocolate chips--and a batch of spice cookies. I'll give that recipe below.

Sue was understandably worried: we don't like to have a bunch of this stuff around the house, because we're always watching our weight. She need not have been concerned. There was a good-sized audience, and they scooped everything up in a heartbeat! There wasn't a crumb left. (The concert was pretty good, too.)

Now, the spice cookie recipe. I'm a little apprehensive about posting this, because I honestly don't remember where I got it! So if this is your recipe, I heartily apologize if I've stolen it. It's really good, and it's quick and easy.

SPICE COOKIES
(click on the title to open a printer-friendly version of the recipe in a new window)

Ingredients

2 sticks unsalted butter, melted and cooled to lukewarm
2-1/2 cups of white sugar
1 teaspoon each of ground cinnamon, cloves, and ginger
1/2 teaspoon each of ground cardamom and nutmeg
1 beaten egg
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 tablespoon of baking soda (yes, a TABLESPOON) dissolved in ¼ cup of warm water
¼ cup molasses (warm it briefly in the microwave for easy pouring)
4 cups flour

Procedure

1. In a large mixing bowl, combine the melted butter with the sugar, spices, eggs, and salt.

2. Mix up the baking soda-water mixture and pour it into the batter; stir to combine.

3. Stir in the molasses.

4. Stir in the flour; the dough will be quite stiff. Keep working it with a wooden spoon until it is well combined.

5. Drop the dough in walnut-sized lumps onto greased cookie sheets about 2 inches apart.

6. Bake at 350 degrees F for 8 - 12 minutes, until brown and crackled.

Makes about 4-1/2 dozen cookies.

There are lots of ways to make people happy. One is to sing beautifully to them. Another is to give them a tasty homemade cookie. And sometimes it's nice to do both.

We're coming to the season of tasty treats. I hope yours are delicious and gratifying as a song.

You only THINK you're popular

2011-10-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

Traffic on the blog has been reasonably steady even though I've been delinquent in posting. And I'm getting hits from all over the world. Great, right? I'm famous, right? And popular?! (Finally! I was such a nerd in high school...)

Not so fast. It turns out that the biggest number of hits is coming from the fact that I used a photo of a rubber ducky to illustrate one blog post and a famous Pogo cartoon to illustrate another. People looking for images of ducks and that particular Pogo cartoon are landing on the blog...but I don't think they're staying long.

But heck, it's better than nothing. And who wanted to be famous or popular, anyway? (I did!)

(Oh, and in case you missed it, I posted a good chili recipe the other day.)

It's Chili Outside

2011-10-28T00:31:00.003-07:00

It's actually getting cool here in Arizona, so it's time for chili. Now offering a recipe for chili is a very risky business. If you have a recipe you adore, don't let me stop you! If you think beans in chili are an abomination, that's OK by me! But if you need a good basic recipe, this is for you. You don't need to buy overpriced "chili kits" in the grocery store. Just a few basic spices--and some chili powder (purists are cringing)--will produce really fine results. I like Gebhardt Chili Powder, by the way, but the choice of chili powder can also be fightin' words.

Chili is really simple to make, and it can actually be fast. My recipe suggests that you cook it for two hours (six if you use a crock pot), but if you only have half an hour or 45 minutes for it to simmer, it will still be good. No worries about under-cooking it, either: the beef is essentially cooked when it's browned. The longer cooking changes the texture of the chili (it'll be--how shall I say it?--smoother, more amalgamated) and allows the flavors to come together more.

So here goes. My friends from Texas need not read on.

TORTOISE CHILI
(click here for a printer-friendly version of the recipe)

1 large onion, chopped
3 or 4 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 - 3 tablespoons vegetable oil--enough to coat the bottom of the pot lightly
2 lbs. 80% lean ground beef
1 14-oz. can diced tomatoes, with their juice (don’t drain the tomatoes), plus one can of water
1 6-oz. can tomato paste
3 tablespoons chili powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 tablespoon smoked paprika (you can use regular paprika if you like, but smoked adds an interesting depth of flavor)
1and ½ tablespoons ground Mexican oregano (if you only have Greek or anonymous oregano, it won’t be the end of the world)
½ teaspoon ground cayenne pepper (more or less to taste)
1 or 2 teaspoons salt (start with 1--you can always add more later)
generous grinding of fresh black pepper
optional: 2 15-oz. cans kidney beans, drained

1. In a dutch oven or large saucepan, sweat the onions in the oil over medium heat. Then add the garlic and cook briefly (do not let the garlic brown, or it will become bitter).

2. Add the ground beef, breaking it up with a fork, and cook until it looses its raw, red color.

3. Add the spices and cook briefly.

4. Add the tomatoes, then fill the can with water and add that. Add the tomato paste.

To cook on top of the stove: bring to the boil, then reduce to simmer and cook for approximately 2 hours. Stir occasionally, and add a little water if the chili seems to get too dry.

To cook in a crock pot: place everything in the crock pot, set the heat to low, and cook for 6 hours or more. Stir occasionally, and add a little water if the chili seems to get too dry.

Taste and add more salt if needed before serving.

Optional: In the last half-hour of cooking, you may add 2 15-oz. cans of kidney beans, drained.

Serve with garnishes as desired: grated monterey jack cheese, sour cream or yogurt, crackers, tortilla chips, hot sauce, etc.

This will serve four hungry people. My college roommate liked to serve chili over rice--that can stretch it further if you like.

Make something hot: we can all use a little warmth now and then.

An Occupation

2011-10-27T01:42:00.001-07:00

When I taught at Salem College, I didn't always see eye to eye with the college president, Julianne Still Thrift. But she once said something that I have never forgotten: "Capitalism, unchecked, is prone to greed. The role of government is to constrain that greed before it gets out of control." I think she was right, and I think that could be the manifesto of the Occupy Wall Street (and a lot of other places) movement.

What the Wall-Streeters seem to get that the Tea-Baggers don't is that we need both government and business. In a way, smaller government (especially when it concerns regulating businesses) means bigger business. This is good for people who own businesses and get rich from them; it's not so good for the rest of us. Not only has business grown, but personal wealth--at the top of the ladder--has grown by leaps and bounds. At the bottom, things are pretty much stagnant. That has been going on for the last thirty years--significantly, in my opinion, since about 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Don't take my word for it; have a look at a new report released today by the Congressional Budget Office. In 1979, the top fifth of the population earned an average income of $136,400. The top 1% earned an average of $534,800. In 2006 (the most recent data year), those figures were $248,400 and $1,743,700. That means that income for the top fifth more than doubled, and the top 1% saw its income grow more than three times. That might be OK, were it not for what we see at the other end of the spectrum.

In 1976, the bottom fifth averaged $16,200 a year. In 2006? Wow. They'd improved their standing by a whole thousand dollars to $17,200. In fact, their income has gone down: in 1999, the average for that segment of the population was $18,000. Note that at the top of the scale, income has increased pretty steadily. Those folks saw some declines from 2000 - 2002, but they've more than made up for it since. The poorest earners in our population haven't caught up to where they were in 1999.

I'm all for capitalism. In a fair capitalist system, everyone has a chance to improve themselves. What I'm against is stacking the deck. In our present setup, where politicians are largely bought by corporations and rich people and where their information mostly comes from highly paid lobbyists, government is essentially in bed with the wealthiest segment of the population. Everyone else has to fend for themselves, and they're generally not faring very well.

Banks are too big to fail and get bailouts in the billions. Homeowners, on the other hand, have watched the value of their homes plummet in the last three years. Something like a fifth of all mortgages are higher than the value of the home--and in some areas of the country, like Arizona where I live, the proportion is much higher. For those homeowners, there doesn't seem to be a lot of help--not even from the banks that we so generously saved with our tax money. President Obama has put a new program in place that is designed to address this, but even the White House acknowledges that at most it will help about a million homeowners. That's a lot, but there are something like 11 million homeowners who owe more than their house is worth. In other words, that program will benefit less than 10% of the people in trouble.

This is only one example. There are signs everywhere that as government has gotten smaller and supposedly off our backs (I dunno--somehow they can still tell you who you can marry...), income has risen exponentially at the top and only glacially at the bottom.

This cannot go on. Ronald Reagan famously declared in his first inaugural address, "Government is not the solution to our present problem; government is the problem." (Interestingly, the official text of the speech didn't include the forthright statement that "government is the problem," but Reagan said it--perhaps ad libbing?--when he gave the address.) This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you say that government is incapable of solving problems--or indeed, that government causes problems--then you never call on government for solutions. And lo! Suddenly the government can't solve anything.

The present gridlock in Congress, which renders solutions to even the most urgent problems impossible, is the ultimate outcome of this thinking. We have reached a crisis point, I believe. We can all agree that we're frustrated with government--it seems incapable of doing anything. We may not agree about where the solutions lie. There seem to me to be two choices: you either shut government down altogether, which is apparently the ultimate goal of the Tea Party, or you fix it and make it more robust. Personally, I prefer that we try to strengthen government. The alternatives--unbridled greed from corporations and the wealthy (an oligarchy, in other words) or outright anarchy--don't seem very palatable to me.

To demand stronger government and true democracy should be the mission of the Occupy Wall Streeters. They are standing, scrappily and disjointedly, for a kind of justice, a restoration of a moral barometer that reminds us that we are all responsible for one another. We can't just take as much as we can grab and leave everyone else the scraps. We shouldn't do it in the world as a whole, and we shouldn't do it inside our country.

So I emphatically disagree with Ronald Reagan and with his fundamental philosophy that has brought us to this pass. Indeed, I believe that the only solution to our present problems is to restore a strong democracy by wresting it from the clutches of the wealthiest and greediest members of our society. Only then will have both government and an economy that work--for everyone.

Odds and Ends

2011-10-25T10:51:00.001-07:00

Blog? Did somebody mention a blog? Sheesh. I haven't been very conscientious lately.

Elizabeth was in town this weekend, and she's on a bit of a pumpkin kick. Since she arrived the day after her birthday, I decided to bake a pumpkin cake. It was a layer cake with pumpkin pastry cream between the layers and a cream cheese frosting, and it tasted good! I have some kinks to work out: when I do, I'll post the recipe.

And Thanksgiving's coming: any special recipe requests?

Presidents Crow and Obama at ASU Commencement, 2009

Meanwhile (because you need something to read, obviously), Arizona State University president Michael Crow has published this very eloquent defense of the liberal arts in Slate Magazine. To the governor of Florida I would make this observation: it seems to me that the idea of deciding how many of each occupation was needed and training the population accordingly has been tried before--by the Soviet Union and Maoist China. Last time I looked, those were, um, communist countries.

Oh yeah.... (a skeptic 'fesses up)

2011-09-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

I never saw a gavel used,
but it seemed like the right image for this post.

I think I used to keep a blog...

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted anything here. I'd give an excuse, but it would be lame. We're all busy.

I guess my big news (it isn't, really, but it makes conversation) is that I served on a jury this week. I spent Monday being interviewed, which means that you sit in a courtroom with a lot of other people responding to generic questions like, "Is anyone in your family a police officer?" (Actually, the questions tend to sound more like this: "Is anyone in your family a police officer? Do you have any close friends who are police officers? Have you ever met a police officer? Do you know anyone who has ever met a police officer? Do you know anyone who knows anyone who has ever met a police officer?" And then after someone responds, "My sister's brother-in-law's cousin once had a date with someone who may have known a police officer," the judge asks, "And do you think this would impair your ability to render a fair and impartial verdict in this case, in which there will be testimony from a police officer?" Your correct response is, "I couldn't possibly render a fair verdict. She said it was an awful date.") The people who are left after this winnowing process form the jury. They are suckers like me who try to answer the judge's questions truthfully and who are very bad at guessing what answers will actually get people excused.

Take the beginning of the selection process. The judge read a very clear statement about the legal reasons he could excuse a juror automatically. Basically, they were 1) if you were in poor health, or 2) if your being on the jury would adversely affect the public welfare (in other words, if you're a firefighter, we want you out fighting fires, not cooped up in a trial for a couple of days). Eight or ten people claimed that they should be excused for one of these reasons. The judge asked each one to explain. One lady said, in accented but otherwise good English, that she had trouble understanding English. The judge asked her if she had understood everything he had said. She replied that she had, but she was worried she might not understand someone else. She was excused. Another lady said she had to meet her son when he got off the school bus. She was excused. Someone else had to help his wife change her oxygen tank once a day. He got excused. Now I'm not saying that all of these things weren't important. It was just that I didn't think any of them met the test that the judge had articulated.

It went on like that. One by one, people were turned out of the room. The last question was, "The defendant has chosen not to appear in court for this case. Would this affect your ability to render a fair and impartial verdict?" Four or five people said, emphatically, "yes," and off they went. I missed my one best chance. So of course, I was seated on the jury, along with one of my former students, which no one should have allowed. (People whose prior relationships put them in unequal power positions shouldn't be in a situation where they have to come to a unanimous decision. It's not fair to either of them, but it's especially not fair in this case to the student.)

The case involved a man who had been punched in the eye so badly (how many times wasn't clear) that his eye was swollen shut for several days. During the incident, his phone was taken from him. The person accused of doing this was charged with aggravated assault and aggravated robbery. The claim was that a second guy held the victim down while our guy did the punching. Then the second guy took the phone. At least that was the story the prosecution presented.

It was a plausible story. The trouble was, there were equally plausible stories. We were first told that the victim had gone out with his girlfriend at 11:30 at night to buy cigarettes, were accosted by these two guys who first asked for a cigarette and then started taunting the victim about being older than his girlfriend. Words were exchanged, blows were exchanged, the victim ended up on the ground beaten, and the guys who beat him up somehow got his phone. Open and shut case.

But not so fast. It turns out that the victim and his girlfriend may not have left the house together. She may have left because he had gotten angry with her (no one ever said about what), tried to hit her, and tried to lock her into her room. She went outside and met up with these two guys in the street, who she later referred to as her "homies," although she later denied knowing them. Out comes the boyfriend to try to find her. He's mad. He starts cussing out the guys because they're with his girlfriend, and as far as he's concerned they're flirting. There's an exchange of unprintable words, and then he kicks one of the guys in the groin (which he demonstrated on the stand). Evidently he does this several times. The other guy tries to pull him off; the guy who he's been kicking punches him to get him to stop kicking. It ends with the so-called victim down in the street. His phone is gone. This story seems just as likely as the first story, and things are now not so clear.

There's a further problem: no one can tell this story (or any story) in a consistent manner. Indeed, at some point, the victim gave some part of both those sets of facts. Our poor victim, a 225-pound guy who I sure wouldn't tangle with and yet who clearly got the tar kicked out of him, couldn't remember statements he'd made only a few minutes before. So we had exchanges like this for the better part of a morning: "Mr. D, you said earlier that you and your girlfriend left the house together. Is that correct?" "No, it isn't." "You didn't leave together, or you didn't say it." "I didn't say it." (But we'd just heard him say that very thing.) "All right, Mr. D. Did you leave the house together?" "No." "Mr. D, on February 10 of this year, you stated under oath that you and your girlfriend left the house together. Do you remember testifying to that?" "No, I don't." "OK, Mr. D. Take a look at the transcript that's in front of you. Look at page 27, lines 5 - 9. Read it to yourself. Does that refresh your memory?" (man reads) "Well, I guess I said it, but that's not what happened."

It basically went on like that for about two hours. The girlfriend also varied her story. There were minor inconsistencies in the police accounts. (One was positively out of Sherlock Holmes. An officer testified that she had received a radio call from 911 telling her to look out for two males and a female. We had heard the 911 call. The caller--the only person who gave clear and consistent testimony--distinctly said that he could tell nothing about the people he thought were doing the beating. He had been specifically asked about their genders and he replied, "All I could tell is that there were three people. I couldn't tell their gender, age, or race." He gave very average height estimates. So how did the officer know to look for two men and a woman? Probably because the officer who found the victim said that, and she conflated the 911 call with the second call from the other officer. I quite enjoyed noticing that, even though it didn't materially affect anything about the case.)

The testimony took a day. The next morning we heard closing arguments and got instructions from the judge. By then it was lunchtime. We chose a foreman, broke for lunch with everyone saying, "Well, this won't take long." We came back after about an hour and took a vote: we were split exactly down the middle, half of us thinking the accused was guilty and half thinking he was not.

What fascinates me about this is that everyone was convinced of their own point of view to such an extent that no other conclusion seemed possible to them. I think all of us figured the first vote would be unanimous or nearly so, and I include myself in that.

Two hours of lively discussion followed. Gradually, as we focused not on what we thought had happened or could have happened, but on whether or not the state had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that their version of events was the true one, it became clear to everyone that the state had failed. There were just too many questions, and the case seemed to rest primarily on a witness who, for whatever reason, couldn't corroborate his own statements. It was a very weak case, and it didn't hold up to scrutiny. It seemed equally likely that the victim had picked a fight, that the two guys were defending themselves in some form, and that the victim got badly beaten because he kept fighting the other two. No one, not even the prosecution, could clearly explain what had happened with the phone. Had it fallen on the street and someone picked it up? Was it taken from the victim's pocket? Had the victim's girlfriend picked it up and handed it to one of the other guys--who, by the way, she walked off with, leaving her boyfriend bleeding in the middle of the street, a fact that still puzzles me. We voted to acquit.

This was the outcome I expected, and yet I felt terrible when the process was over. It wasn't fun trying to convince people that they were wrong and that they couldn't be so sure they knew what had happened. It was even less fun to let the person who probably had done this go just because the state had failed to meet its burden. It was also frustrating as a taxpayer to think of all the resources, including the time of all those jurors, that had gone into trying to prove so fragile a case.

The word "verdict" means "to say the truth." I am not sure what the truth is or was in this case; it's probably different depending on who is telling it, which in itself is fascinating. I doubt anyone consciously lied in that trial. They may have embellished; they may have filled in blanks because they wanted to give a good answer to someone asking them a question--we all do that. The problem in a court of law, though, is that you have to prove that your version is true beyond a reasonable doubt. And it seems to me that if there's another equally plausible explanation that fits everything we know, then nothing's been proven.

I'm not sure what I learned here. I had a glimpse into a world that I don't ordinarily encounter (I don't think I've ever seen a real-life photo of a beating victim). I found that when people hear a story that is likely to be true, they will accept it as true, even if there isn't a lot of evidence to back it up. I found that people had trouble separating two ideas: what happened? what did the prosecution prove happened? It's possible that it happened the way the prosecution said it did, but it's at least reasonable to suppose that it didn't. The whole thing was sordid, and I'm glad it's over. Next time somebody asks me how impartial I can be, I will say, "Not at all. I'm a bigoted SOB, and I'll convict anything that breathes."

Or maybe not. See, I can't decide: would another jury have convicted that man? Would that jury minus me have convicted that man? Did I help to keep an innocent man out of jail, or did I let a bad guy walk the streets to hurt someone else another day?

My life is full of ambiguities. But frankly, I'd rather be mulling whether I should go faster or slower in a passage in a piece of music than deal with anything like what I was trying to decide in that trial. My kind of ambiguity is just a matter of taste and affect. It doesn't affect people's lives. I'll stick to my kind, thanks very much. But I guess, if called on, I'll try again to listen carefully and decide if something's been proven or not. Trouble is, I'm a hard sell. Your case had better be ironclad, because my natural habitat is one of doubt--reasonable or not. I'm a skeptic. I've made a career of it, because that's what academics do. So you probably don't want me on your jury if you're the prosecution, because I'm tough to convince. Is there such a thing as an open and shut case?

I doubt it.