Flawed Mom

Under Pressure But Not Freaking Out

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 10:55:13 PST

This story on using a pressure cooker ran on Patch yesterday morning. Learning to use a pressure cooker with the cooking teacher Arlene Ward was one of the most pleasant learning experiences I've ever had---after I'd gotten over my initial anxiety about blowing the kitchen up. If you have the energy to make a comment, or offer ideas on other foods to make in the pressure cooker, please go to Patch and leave a comment.

Next week, I'll be writing about Thanksgiving, so if you have ay recipes or observations (funny and otherwise) you want to share, please let me know. Thank you!

Sunday Night Supper: Under Pressure

Once you get over the anxiety of using it, a pressure cooker opens a world of quick cooking possibilities and gives new meaning to the term, "PC."

By Laura Zinn Fromm
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November 13, 2011

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My friend Terri is a generous and terrific cook. When she asks if you want to have lunch, she means, "Do you want to come to my house, and I will make mushroom soup with three different kinds of mushrooms and the most delicious salad you've ever tasted with homemade lemon dressing, and afterward I will send you home with all the recipes?" So last March, when she asked me if I wanted to take a pressure cooking class at her house in Livingston, I knew at a minimum I'd be well fed and drive home with a sheaf of new recipes.

The class was taught by Arlene Ward, a lovely woman with a fierce attention to detail and a delightful sense of humor. Ward, 77, is co-author with Rick Rogers of Pressure Cooking For Everyone ($13.45 on Amazon) and an expert on using the pressure cooker in unexpected ways. Ward ran a cooking school and store in Wayne called Adventures in Cooking for more than 20 years, until a huge flood forced her to close the business in 2009. Since then, she has taught cooking classes at Kings, Chef Central and privately in people's homes.

With a large group of women, including my neighbor Laura K., I sat in Ward's class at Terri's house for three hours, took notes, ate some excellent food, then went home and ordered a Kuhn Rikon 5 quart pressure cooker ($199 from Amazon; also available at Cookware & More and Chef Central. Bed Bath & Beyond carries other brands.) When the pressure cooker arrived, I put it on top of the stove.

There is something energizing about a new appliance. Oh, the things that you'll make! But that energy can work against you if you don't actually use the thing. The pressure cooker was big. As I read the owner's manual, I became nervous. The physics of it scared me. The pressure builds up, the little black button on top (aka the safety valve) pops up and if there is too much pressure, the pot will hiss, signaling you need to lower the flame or push down the valve so it can let off some steam. Who needed an appliance that hissed? I had also heard stories from years ago of pressure cookers blowing up.

Meanwhile, Terri, Laura K. and my other PC-loving friends got busy making risotto, stews, soups, meatballs, brisket, turkey breast, chicken, butternut squash gratin, bread pudding, Bolognese sauce, apple sauce and cheese cake in their pressure cookers.

I made nothing. I didn't even wash the pressure cooker to get it ready. I did buy Ward's book and read through the recipes. The recipes looked delicious and none of them looked hard. Still, I was intimidated. What if I opened the pot too soon and instead of getting a mini facial, got burned by the steam? After a few weeks of staring at the pressure cooker on top of the stove, I opened our big oven, put the pressure cooker inside and closed the door.

Time went by. Every so often, Terri would ask, "Have you used the pressure cooker?" I'd shake my head no. "It's so easy!" she'd say and then describe the great ropa vieja she'd just made. Laura K. would rave about how much her kids liked the turkey breast and pea soup she'd cooked in the PC. "I'm going to come over and help you," they both offered. I was too embarrassed to say, "Really? When?"

So a few weeks ago, when Terri said that Arlene was coming back to Essex County to teach another class in her kitchen, I signed up and tried not to think of it as remedial.

The class was terrific and inspiring, Arlene made barbecue chicken, corn pudding and a cauliflower and mushroom gratin in the pressure cooker. Outside the pressure cooker, she whipped up a farfalle in creamy vodka sauce, a super easy, gluten-free, chocolate pot of cream and a salad made with vanilla vinaigrette. She made a plain, roast chicken in the oven and showed us how to carve it properly. My friend Lora, who is kind of a genius and was also re-taking the class, demonstrated how to place the gasket in the lid and watch the valve pop up, then suggested we film Arlene in action so we didn't forget what to do (see videos.) I went home feeling slightly more confident.

The next morning, I followed Ward's suggestion: I took a practice run. I washed out the pot, poured in two cups of hot water, locked the lid in place and brought it to a boil over high heat. After 10 minutes, I turned off the burner, pressed down the valve to release the steam through the vent, tilted the lid of the pot away from me, and dumped the water down the sink. I'd used the pressure cooker to heat up some water. Whoopee! At least now I was confident enough to make risotto and barbecue chicken for dinner.

There is nothing more delicious and satisfying than a rich, creamy risotto, especially on a cold night after daylight savings time kicks in and the days get dark so early. But risotto requires a lot of standing and stirring. If you've had a long day, you'll probably skip it. The great news is the pressure cooker makes the risotto beautifully without any standing and stirring and in half the time. I was doing a little mental victory lap in my kitchen when I saw how easy and fast it was to make that risotto. (Note: You do have to stay in the kitchen when the pressure cooker is on.)

My only mistake was adding one teaspoon of dried rosemary. Ward's recipe called for two teaspoons of fresh rosemary. That's the usual rule of thumb when using dried versus fresh herbs. But as Ward points out in her book, "Pressure cooking intensifies flavors, so about half the amount of dried herbs, spices and salt are needed than in traditional cooking methods." I had read those words and then promptly forgotten them. But you shouldn't. Use your dried herbs sparingly when using a pressure cooker.

The barbecue chicken was a snap to make and went down well with everyone who was speaking to me. My husband went out of his way to say how good it was, and my younger son had seconds. (My older son was annoyed that I had yelled at him for missing the bus that morning so ate his quickly and refused comment.)

Emboldened, I decided to make boeuf bourguignon (beef stew in red wine with bacon, onions and mushrooms) the next night. Boeuf bourguignon is one of those classic French dishes that tastes delicious and takes forever. Recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Craig Claiborne's The New York Times Cookbook are easy enough to follow, but they'll have you cooking for three to four hours. Not tonight, love. The boeuf bourguignon recipe in Ward's book promised that it only needed twenty minutes at high pressure. That was nothing! I started making a list of ingredients when Laura K. called.

"The risotto and barbecue chicken turned out great!" I crowed. "I'm going to make beef bourguignon tonight and it's only going to take twenty minutes!"

Laura K. chortled. "It's not going to take twenty minutes," she said. "Whenever you cook big hunks of meat, it takes the pressure cooker a long time to get up to pressure." Oh.

At 4:50 p.m., I started making dinner. My kids were hungry; I was determined to be done quickly. Ward's recipe called for one cup of hearty red wine, such as a Zinfandel. Craig Claiborne recommended a Burgundy, Julia Child recommended everything but what we had, which was cabernet sauvignon. At 5:20, I opened the bottle.

That's when Laura K. knocked on the back door. "You're opening wine?"

"It's for the beef!' (Really, it was.)

She walked in with her dog. "Do you want to go for a walk?"

"I can't, I'm cooking!" I looked at her. She's a sophisticated red wine drinker. I decided to do the neighborly thing and offer her a glass.

"It's kind of early," she said. I shrugged, took out two wine glasses and poured. We toasted and drank. What fun! Laura K. peered at the three pounds of meat (beef bottom round, $4.49/pound at Kings), cut into 1.5-inch chunks. "You're going to do those in batches," she said. She was right. I browned three batches in the pressure cooker, then added the mushrooms, shallots and garlic.

Our dogs wandered around, hoping something tasty would drop. Eventually, Laura K. left to walk her dog. I poured myself another glass of wine, slid the lid on the pot and turned up the pressure. The pot took a few minutes to reach high pressure and start to hiss. This time I wasn't afraid; I pressed down on the valve with a long wooden spoon, as Ward had advised, and let out some steam. By 6:10, the boeuf bourguignon was done. Voila!

I tasted the sauce. It was flat. Something was missing. The wine! We had been so busy drinking it, I had forgotten to add it. Oops. I added it to the sauce, put the heat back on, whisked it for five minutes and poured it back on the meat. Julia Child might have noticed the difference but no else one would. In the end, it took 90 minutes to make boeuf bourguignon in the pressure cooker. That's not 20 minutes, but it's less than half the time it would have taken to make it the classic French way. C'est bonne.

For more information on classes, contact Arlene Ward, (973) 694-5115 or award66@optimum.net. Ward charges $55-$75 per class, depending on size of class and ingredients used.

Arlene Ward's Risotto with Cheese and Rosemary (6 minutes under high pressure)

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/2 cup chopped red onion

1 tablespoon chopped garlic

2 teaspoons fresh rosemary

3/4 cup carnaroli or Arborio rice

1/4 cup white wine

1 3/4 cup chicken stock

salt and pepper to taste

1/3 cup grated parmesan cheese

1 tablespoon butter

Heat butter and sauté onion and garlic until softened. Add rosemary and rice and thoroughly coat it with buyer. Add wine and recede until absorbed. Add stock, salt and pepper to taste.

Turn heat to high and lock lid in place. Bring to high pressure and adjust heat to maintain pressure. Cook for 6 minutes. Reduce with quick release and remove lid, tilting it away from you to allow any excess steam to escape Add parmesan cheese and mix.

This makes enough for four people.

Arlene Ward's BBQ Chicken (10 minutes under high pressure)

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 medium onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, chopped

1/2 cup prepared barbecue sauce

1/2 cup water

1 3.5 pound chicken, cut into small pieces. (I used boneless, skinless chicken thighs.)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

In a 2.5, 5 or 7 quart pressure cooker, heat oil over medium heat. Add onion and garlic until vegetables soften, about 2 minutes .Stir in barbecue sauce and water. Add chicken pieces and coat with BBQ sauce.

Lock lid in place. Bring to high pressure over high heat. Adjust heat to maintain pressure. Cook for 10 minutes. Quick release the pressure. Open lid, titling away from you to block any escaping steam. Transfer chicken to an oven going serving dish, preferably metal.

Meanwhile, bring cooking liquid in pot to a boil over medium high heat. Cook uncovered, stirring often to avoid scorching, until sauce thickens, about 5 minutes.

Turn on broiler.

Pour sauce over waiting chicken, making sure every piece is covered. Place in preheated broiler about six inches from source of heat. Allow chicken to brown---about 5 minutes.

Arlene Ward's Boeuf Bourguignon (20 minutes under high pressure)

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon olive oil

3 bacon strips, coarsely chopped (I used turkey bacon)

3 pounds beef bottom round, cut into 1 1/2 inch thick pieces (ask butcher to do this for you; this was $4.49/pound at Kings)

1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste (I used more)

10 ounces white mushrooms, sliced into quarters

4 medium carrots, cut into 1 inch lengths (I used baby carrots)

1/2 cup chopped shallots

2 garlic cloves

1 cup hearty red wine, such as Zinfandel (I used cabarnet sauvignon, Julia Child recommends Beaujolais, Cotes du Rhone, Bordeaux-St. Emilion, or Burgundy)

2 cups homemade beef broth (I used College Inn organic)

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1/4 cup all purpose flour or 2 tablespoons corn starch

In a 5-7 quart pressure cooker, heat oil over medium heat. Add bacon and cook, stirring occasionally until bacon is crisp and brown, about 5 minutes. Transfer bacon to paper towels to drain. Put bacon fat into small bowl. Return 1 tablespoon of fat to cooker, reserving remaining fat.

Heat fat over medium high heat. In batches (probably three), adding more fat as needed, add def and cook, turning occasionally, until browned, about 4 minutes. Transfer beef to plate. Season beef with salt and pepper and set aside.

Put 1 tablespoon of reserved fat into cooker. Reduce heat to medium. Add mushrooms, carrots, shallots and garlic. Cook, stirring occasionally, until mushrooms soften, about 5 minutes. Add wine. Bring to a boil, scraping up any browned bits on bottom of pan with a wooden spoon. Stir in broth and tomato paste. Return beef and juices on the plate to the cooker.

Lock lid in place. Bring to high pressure over high heat. Adjust heat to maintain pressure. Cook for 20 minutes, Remove from heat and quick release the pressure. Open lid, tilting it away from you to block any escaping steam. Stir in reserved bacon. Using a large skimmer or slotted spoon, transfer the meat and vegetables to a deep serving bowl. Cover with tin foil to keep warm and let liquid stand for 5 minutes.

Skim fat from surface of cooking liquid. Bring to a boil, uncovered, over medium high heat. In a medium bowl, using a rubber spatula, work the butter and flour together until smooth. Gradually whisk about 1 cup of cooking liquid into flour mixture to make a thin paste. Briskly whisk paste into boiling liquid. Cook, stirring occasionally, until sauce is thickened and no trace of raw flour taste remains, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Pour sauce over meat and vegetables, stir gently and serve.

Embrace Your Inner Texan: Short Ribs & Soda

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:06:31 PST

This story ran on Patch Sunday morning. If you'd like to leave a comment or share a recipe (I'm looking for healthy ones), please go to Patch or leave a comment here. Many thanks!

Sunday Night Supper: Short Ribs Made With Soda in New Jersey? Yep.

Texans love to cook with soda. New Jerseyans can do that too.

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I don't usually cook with soda, though God knows, I've drunk enough of it. I spent high school years sneaking Tab at my friends' houses because my mother refused to keep it in the house. In college, I chugged diet Coke, and kept a couple of six-packs in my refrigerator cube.

When I was a reporter at Business Week back in the '90s, I wrote about Pepsi, but the vending machine stocked Coke, and that's what I drank, relying on the sugar and caffeine to help me make deadline. As an adult trying to set a good example for my kids, I keep soda out of the house, except for the secret stash I keep in the basement refrigerator. My kids periodically raid that stash, figuring they can pull something over on me by hiding the cans underneath the basement couch. I sneak it by them, making sure to toss the can in the recycling container before they get home from school.

So when I saw Lisa Fain's recipe for Dr Pepper ribs from her new cookbook, The Homesick Texan Cookbook, I settled in for a closer look. I wasn't a big fan of Dr Pepper but I've been stalking Fain's blog, and on it, read that you can substitute Coke for Dr Pepper in this recipe. I decided to make ribs and soda the week I had jury duty.

If you've been to jury duty in Newark, you know it's a lot of sitting around, waiting for your name to be called, with ample time to think. At the Veterans Courthouse in the Superior Court in Newark, they've spruced the place up, so I spent two mostly pleasant days, sitting at a bright yellow carrel in a modern computer lounge, enjoying free Wi-Fi and reading Debbie Nathan's riveting and excellent new book Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case on my husband's Kindle. (Note: Nathan is enrolled as a student in a writing class I teach in the city.) In other rooms, potential jurors sat and watched flat-screen TVs that were set to CNN, ESPN and HGTV. I drank strong, free coffee that a nice government employee made for me and waited for my name to be called. All around, people banged away at their laptops and checked their iPhones. It was like being in Starbucks except the parking was free and there were loudspeakers in the bathroom. But the courts stop serving coffee at 11:45 a.m. so in the afternoon, I wandered to the vending machine, looking for a jolt. One machine stocked diet Dr Pepper. This was a time for new beginnings: If I could read a book on a Kindle and enjoy jury service, I could try a new soda. That Dr Pepper was delicious. I immediately decided to go home and make it with ribs. All I needed was another can.

But then I was assigned to a courtroom in another building. The judge told us we had to return the next morning and let us know this could be a five-day trial. My heart sank. One of the clerks mentioned that we should also leave ourselves a little extra time to get there in the morning the because a film crew was taking over City Hall to film "The Dark Knight Rises," the third installment of the Batman franchise. He cheerfully warned us there might be a lot of traffic. (If you don't already know, the new Batman film stars Millburn High School graduate Anne Hathaway as Catwoman.) Then he handed us directions for alternate routes to the court house.

By the time I got to the parking lot, I was in no mood to buy Dr Pepper. But I had to make dinner and I knew we had ribs and a six-pack of Coke tucked away somewhere. I drove home, I mixed up the ingredients for the dry rub and got the ribs out of the fridge. Then I saw the words: Coat the ribs with the rub, cover them with plastic wrap, and place in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours. How had I missed those instructions? I blamed Batman and ordered a pizza.

The next day, I was released from jury duty. I went to Oscar's to get some Dr. Pepper and made the ribs. A note on beef versus pork: Fain calls for St. Louis pork ribs, which are long and thin. My husband grew up kosher so I used three pounds of beef short ribs. The ribs were $3.59/pound at ShopRite. Because I now had both Coke and Dr Pepper in the house, I decided to make two different sauces, using one soda in each, and see if anyone could taste the difference. My kids, of course, were delighted I was cooking with soda and kept asking how much I planned to use so they could drink the rest.

While I was cooking, mother came over. She went to college in the South and developed a taste for ribs. She declared both sauces delicious, but spicy. I tried to cut the spice by adding brown sugar but the ribs still kept their kick. The problem was the chipotle powder. Fain's recipe calls for 2-4 teaspoons. I added four. That was too much. I made pasta and put out red grapes and a challah, and those took the edge off. The Dr Pepper barbecue sauce was a bit mellower than the Coke sauce, but both were sweet and spicy.

At the end of the evening, under the cover of darkness, I tasted the ribs again. They were even better cold. If you plan to make these, try using one, or at most two, teaspoons of chipotle powder so you don't set your mouth on fire.

Real Texans eat ribs with their hands. If you're reading this post, you're probably a real New Jerseyan. Even if you are from Texas, I suggest setting your table with a fork, knife and spoon so you can scoop up that soda-filled sauce at the end.

Lisa Fain's Ribs With Dr Pepper (or Coke)

Ingredients for the ribs:

1/4 cup kosher salt

1/4 cup black pepper

1/4 cup brown sugar

4 tablespoons mustard pepper

1/2 teaspoon cayenne

2 teaspoons chipotle powder

1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

2 racks of St. Louis ribs (I used beef)

1/4 cup Dr Pepper or Coke (don't use diet)

Ingredients for the glaze:

2 cups Dr Pepper or Coke (don't use diet)

1 cup ketchup

1/4 cup yellow prepared mustard

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

2 tablespoons molasses

2-4 teaspoons of chipotle powder (use 1-2 teaspoons if you don't want them too spicy)

Note: Ribs cook fora total of 2.5 hours and eight minutes but you need to put the dry rub on them at least FOUR hours before hand.

FOUR HOURS AHEAD Make the rub: Mix the salt, black pepper, brown sugar, mustard powder, cayenne, chipotle powder and ground allspice. Coat ribs with rub, cover with plastic wrap and place in refrigerator for at least four hours.

TWO HOURS AHEAD Preheat oven to 300 degrees and bring ribs to room temperature. Line large baking pan with tin foil, arrange ribs meat-side up, pour in 1/4 cup Dr Pepper or Coke, cover pan tightly with foil and place in oven for 90 minutes.

While ribs are cooking, make the glaze. In a saucepan, pour two cups Dr Pepper or Coke, ketchup, mustard, apple cider vinegar, molasses and chipotle powder. Bring to boil, then turn down heat to low and simmer for 20 minutes until thick and syrupy. Set aside.

After 90 minutes, take ribs out of oven. Spread some glaze on both sides of ribs. Place back in oven, meat side up and cook uncovered for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, take out ribs and spread more glaze over them, then cook for 30 more minutes. Take ribs out of oven and TURN BROILER ON. Spread remaining glaze on ribs and cook ribs on each side under the broiler for 4 minutes (8 minutes total.)

Serve warm and eat the leftovers later, cold.

Friggin' Delicious Roast Chicken

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:31:05 PDT

This story ran on Patch yesterday. Because of the massive snowstorm that landed in New Jersey, it spent about a nano-second on the site, and was whisked away by stories about the power outage, trees that had fallen down and schools that were closing. Even the mall closed, which was shocking. But crazy, unexpected weather or not, you still have to eat and if you have power, you may actually feel like turning on the oven. This recipe is fantastic and so is the cookbook it came from. If you're house-bound today and have the ingredients, make this jalapeno mustard roast chicken. It takes all day to marinate so is perfect for a day when you're wondering how you're going to get through it. Not only is this jalapeno chicken one of the best dishes I've ever eaten, it's easy. And it stimulates feelings of love: Whoever eats it will fall all over you.

We aren't trick-or-treating this year because of all the scary-looking tree branches that are either blocking the roads or hanging over them, and because my kids are (thankfully) kind of getting too old, but if you are in a warmer clime and plan to go out, happy Halloween!

Patch's House & Home

Sunday Night Supper: Kid-Tested Jalapeno Mustard Roast Chicken

Even the kids agree: It's the best roast chicken, ever. Really.

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I spend too much money on books, particularly cookbooks, which are usually hard-covered and filled with beautiful, colored pictures. If I don't cook from them right away, I never cook from them and then they sit like expensive art books on the shelf. A few weeks ago, I bought Lisa Fain's cookbook, The Homesick Texan, and was determined to get my money's worth from it. (The book lists for $29 and Amazon sells it for $17.59.)

Ever since that book landed on my doorstep, I've been reading Fain's poignant and vivid essays about growing up Texan. Because most of her recipes aren't all that complicated, I've actually been cooking from the dang thing.

This week, I decided to make her jalapeno mustard chicken, which calls for honey, yellow mustard, lime juice, ginger, garlic, cumin, jalapeno and cilantro. I'll just admit right now, I'm a cilantro junkie. It makes me high and I look for reasons to smell, chop and eat it. Fain writes that she made this recipe, which calls for a half cup of cilantro, for her friend who was homesick for Texas. Her friend said it was the best roast chicken she ever ate. The only problem is that Fain recommends that the chicken sit in its marinade for eight hours. That's a long shift. But the marinade isn't hard to make - you dump a bunch of ingredients in the food processor, cover the chicken with it and go about your day. The main ingredients are cheap and easy enough to buy and keep in your fridge until you're ready to use them, so you just have to make this recipe on a day when you'll have time in the morning to think about what you'll be eating that night.

For me, yesterday was that day. The night before, I took a roasting chicken out of the freezer and put it in the refrigerator to defrost. Unfortunately, I hadn't bothered to look at how much it weighed. It was over seven pounds and the recipe called for a 3-4 pound roaster. Fortunately, I had enough cilantro, honey, mustard and garlic cloves to double the marinade. The chicken was $1.99/pound. If we had leftovers, so what? Two points to Mom for making two dinners at once.

Fain says the secret to success for this dish is to butterfly the chicken, remove its spine and lay it flat on a roasting pan, a process she calls spatchcocking. This, she writes, "is just a fancy way to say 'cut out the backbone and lay that bird flat.'' "

If you're from Texas, and you know about hunting, removing the backbone of your dinner probably sounds easy enough to do. But I'm from New Jersey and have never hunted or deboned anything in my life. And the thing about a seven-pound roasting chicken is that it looks like it once had a life. It may be headless but it's the same weight as a new baby, and looks about as helpless. I removed the roaster from its plastic wrap, put it on a cutting board breast side down, stared at it, and couldn't bring myself to remove its spine. It seemed too cruel. So I made the marinade (took about ten minutes), spread it all over the chicken, covered it with plastic wrap, put it in the fridge and went for a walk with my neighbor. I told her about the chicken and my fear of crippling it.

"You should have asked the butcher to do it at the supermarket," she said. Oh yeah, the butcher. I'd forgotten about him. You shouldn't.

Eight hours later, I screwed up my courage, took out a poultry knife and a fork, and cut the spine out of its back. I felt like a hunter, instead of a gatherer, and it felt pretty good. I put the chicken in the oven. The whole house immediately started to smell delicious. Two hours later, it was done. I let the chicken rest a bit, made some pasta, chopped up raw vegetables and called for my kids. It was 5:45. My friend was coming over later that night to have a cup of tea while her daughter took a lacrosse clinic in town, and I had to get my older son to and from the geometry tutor before she arrived. We had to eat quickly. I started to carve the chicken and told my younger son to call for my older son. My older son either didn't hear him or was ignoring him. Finally, I started to yell.

My older son sauntered into the kitchen in his boxer shorts. "I'm not hungry," he said, yawning. "Civilized people don't eat before 6 p.m." If you have a teenager and it's the end of the day, you know they are either famished or up to no good. I glared at him while I carved. "When someone makes you dinner, you sit down and eat it."

My kids started to bicker. I brought the chicken to the table. They dug in. I waited for their reaction.

"Oh my God, this is shamefully delicious," my older son said. "Can you perpetually have a bowl of this sitting in the kitchen? This is friggin' delicious."

"Can you make this every night?" my younger son said. He reached for the platter. "This sauce is amazing. Can I have more?"

Yes, they really said all that. This chicken is the best chicken any of us ever ate. It would have gone well with the frisee salad I meant to serve, but we were so busy gobbling up the chicken that I forgot about that. We finished the meal in great moods. While we were cleaning up, my older son kissed and hugged me. My younger son started to sing. "Laura Fromm, she is the bomb..." Before I sicken you any further, let me just say, this chicken is the bomb. Make it tonight.

Lisa Fain's Jalapeno Mustard Roast Chicken
Ingredients:

1/2 cup yellow mustard

1-2 jalapeno chiles, steams and seeds removed, chopped

1/4 cup lime juice

6 gloves garlic

1/2 cup cilantro

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cumin

2 tablespoons honey

Salt, to taste

1 3- to 4- pound chicken

In a food processor, blend mustard, jalapeno, lime juice, garlic, cilantro, ginger, cumin and honey. Add salt if needed.

Rinse chicken and remove giblets. (I cooked them along with the chicken and they were delicious.)

To butterfly the chicken for more even cooking, remove the spine from the back of the chicken with a poultry shears.

Light salt chicken all over. (I used kosher salt), about 1-2 teaspoons.

Take mustard marinade and rub all over chicken, gently lifting skin so you can spread some of it on the meat under the skin. Place coated chicken in a plastic bag or put it on a plate and cover it with plastic wrap. Refrigerate for eight hours.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees and line cookie sheet with tinfoil

Take chicken out of fridge, lay it flat on sheet, breast side up. Let it sit for 20 minutes before putting it in the oven. Cook for 45 minutes to an hour for a 3-4 pound chicken, and about 2 hours for a 7-pound chicken. Let chicken rest for 10 minutes before serving.

Sunday Night Supper: For Chile and Chili Lovers

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 04:26:31 PDT

If you're looking for a great new cookbook, and/or an excellent turkey chili recipe, courtesy of my college friend Lynne, check out Patch today. And if you have any recipes that you want to share, please let me know. Thanks for reading, as always.

Sunday Night Supper: Green Chile Chowder and Turkey Chili

Sunday is my day to cook. While my kids do homework, I make meals I won't attempt during the week. An hour alone in the kitchen is therapeutic. And by dinnertime, you're all glad to see each other.

Maybe it's because I've been reading too much about Rick Perry and just finished K.L. Cook's beautiful novel about the Texas Panhandle, The Girl From Charnelle, but I found myself wanting to go to Texas and see what all the fuss was about. Since that wasn't practical, I started to read Lisa Fain's new cookbook, The Homesick Texan Cookbook and decided to make one of her recipes on a Sunday afternoon. New cookbooks make me dreamy, but Fain's cookbook took me to another place. By the time you finish this book, you will be in Texas, eating Frito Pie, shucking corn and driving a tractor.

A seventh generation Texan who moved to New York in her twenties, Fain set about making recipes to remind her of home while living in a small apartment with a tiny kitchen. In her book, she packs in stories of the pimento cheese served at her grandfather's funeral, alongside recipes for fried green tomatoes in buttermilk dressing, short ribs made with Dr. Pepper (Texans love to cook with soda), her grandma's Chocolate Pie, and her Dad's chicken fried steak with cream gravy (a dish she calls "dangerous" because of all the hot oil splattering and small chunks of meat flying.)

Fain offers helpful hints: Run milk over your hands to get rid of the heat from chili peppers. If you want to make your own lard, ask the butcher for back fat and be prepared to stand and stir for an hour while the fat renders. Mixed in with fond memories of her grandmother, she offers up grandma's's recipe for pie crust, which has the odd combination of oil and milk but which Fain says makes the best crust you'll ever eat. There are also excellent-looking recipes for two kinds of Texas chili, crab cakes with chipotle chiles and corn, fancy pants chicken casserole, jalapeno mustard roast chicken, tomato cobbler and tomatillo cheese grits. But the recipe that caught my eye first was the green chile chowder.

Whenever I see a recipe that calls for cumin, cilantro, garlic and lime juice, I'm in. Fain's green chili chowder called for all of that, plus four poblano chiles, two jalapeno chiles, and two pounds of potatoes. Fain tells you to rub the skin off poblano peppers and then chop them. At first, this seemed easy, like peeling a scab. Then it got harder. The poblano skin stuck to the pepper meat. I figured I could stand there for forty minutes and peel the skin off the poblano peppers, or I could tug at the skins gently for one more minute, give up and hope no one was the wiser. I chose the latter.

If you're like me – ambitious but lazy – you will look at those six peppers and think, Oh I don't need to chop all those, the food processor can do that. The food processor can chop chile peppers up to a point, but then you must take your spatula, spoon the peppers out and start chopping them yourself. The good news is that after the stint with the peppers, the rest of the recipe was easy and the chowder was so good, it was shocking. At the end of the night, when I wasn't hungry at all, I was still licking the pot. My kids, my husband and my mother (who showed up unexpectedly) all devoured it.

"Is this fattening?" my younger son asked."Well," I said, "if you only have one cup full, it's fine because it has a lot of protein and vegetables in it." He looked at me; he has to make weight for football. Okay, yes, it's fattening but your lips will be tingling pleasantly for hours and the soup is outrageously delicious. The only complaint I have is that Fain does not tell you how long a recipe takes. This chowder takes an hour.

Emboldened, I decided to make Fain's Seven-Chile Texas Chili the following Sunday. It called for twenty chile peppers! Though it sounds delicious, you don't learn until you turn the page and read about her One-Hour Chili that the Seven-Chile Chili takes all day. I don't think so. I checked out the One-Hour Texas Chili, which looked less daunting, and saw that it called for two teaspoons of masa harina. I didn't have masa harina (dry corn flour) and didn't know where I could get some. (My editor, who hails from Texas, tells me that Fine Fair on the South Orange/Newark border carries it). I wanted to make chili but I wanted it to be easy, or at least, easier. Then, out of the blue, my friend from Chicago emailed me a recipe for turkey chili.

So last Sunday afternoon, I made turkey chili. It breaks the cardinal rule of Texas chili, in that it mixes the chili in with beans, which no self-respecting Texan would do. But if you can get past that, this recipe is a winner. It takes twenty minutes. It is so easy that I was able to start making it, drop my older son off at the gym, go back to cooking, then pick my son up. The chipotle peppers we had weren't in adobo sauce but the dish was teriffic anyway. And because part of me can't leave well enough alone, and the other part loves to jam garlic through the garlic press, I added two cloves of mashed garlic.

Lisa Fain's Green Chile Chowder

Ingredients:

4 poblano chiles

2 jalapeño chiles

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 medium yellow onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 pounds Russet potatoes, peeled and diced

4 cups chicken or vegetable broth

1/2 cup cilantro

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1 1/2 cups whole milk

1 cup half-and-half

Salt and pepper, to taste

2 tablespoons lime juice

Grated Monterey Jack cheese, tortilla chips and chopped cilantro, on the side

Roast poblano chiles and jalapeños under broiler until blackened, about 5 minutes each side. Place poblano chiles in paper sack or plastic food storage back, close tightly and let steam.

Meanwhile, remove stems fans seeds from jalapeños and dice. After 20 minutes, take poblano chiles out of the bag and rub off the skin. Remove seeds and stems and then dice the poblano chiles.

In large pot, melt butter over medium heat. Add diced onions and cook for 10 minutes until they brown. Add garlic and cook for 3 more seconds. Add to the pot the diced poblano and jalapeño chiles, the potatoes, chicken broth, cilantro and cumin. Bring to boil, then simmer for 20 minutes or until potatoes are tender.

Scoop out 2 cups of soup and set aside. Puree the rest of the soup until smooth, then mix the chunky set-aside soup with the smooth. Add milk and half-and-half to soup and cook until warm. Add salt and pepper to taste. Squeeze in lime juice and serve warm or cold, with grated cheese, tortilla chips and cilantro on the side.

Lynne's Turkey Chili

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, mashed

1 green bell pepper, seed and diced

2 chipotle peppers in adobo, minced, plus 2 teaspoons sauce

1 to 1.5 pounds pound ground turkey meat

1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes

1 15-ounce can kidney beans, drained and rinsed (Lynne uses pinto beans)

Kosher salt, to taste

1/2 cup graded cheddar cheese, for topping

Garnish (which can and should be turned into guacamole)

1 avocado, peeled, sliced, mashed

1 lime, juiced

1 small red onion, diced

Heat oil in a medium pot over medium heat. Saute onion, garlic and bell pepper until tender, 6-8 minutes.

Add chipotle pepper and adobo sauce and cook for one minute.

Add turkey, breaking it up with the back of a spoon, and cook until it is no longer pink, about 3 minutes.

Add tomatoes with juices and beans. Bring to a boil. Redue heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until slightly thickened, about 30 minutes (add water if you want to thin it out). Season with salt.

With fall here and winter not too far off, it's a great time to make chili. Do you have a favorite recipe?Tell us in the comments.

Nobel Prize for Economic Science goes to my cousin's husband Tom Sargent

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 16:48:18 PDT

Hope Springs Eternal and Sometimes Materializes

My mother's cousin's husband Tom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, giving me hope for the economic future.

By Laura Zinn Fromm | 12:28 AM

This story ran on Patch today.

No answers but maybe some hope

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:37:00 PDT

My sons keep asking if Obama can be re-elected. I tell them I doubt it, because the economy is doing badly and people vote with their purses, even if they don't think they do. I hope that whoever ends up as our next president has a strong grip on how to fix the country's financial problems. I don't feel all that hopeful that any of the Republican candidates has that grip. I'm not sure Obama has a particularly strong grip either. Every time I look at the unemployment numbers, I think, "Oy." But then something happens, and I think, "Okay, yes, maybe, we can start to feel hope, maybe someone out there really does know how to fix the economy!" This happened to me this morning, though I went looking for it this weekend.

Friday night, after Kol Nidre, I started reading Michael Lewis's book Boomerang. I love the way Michael Lewis writes; he turns his business reporting skills into entertaining stories about financial disasters, which isn't so easy to do. I started reading his book in bed, became immersed in his chatty description of the series of financial missteps that undid Iceland, handed the book to my husband and told him he should read it too. My husband said he'd wait 'til I was done. I can't say I blame him; though the book is a surprisingly fun read, it's actually pretty bleak.

I kept looking for hope so last night, I went to see the new Ryan Gosling/George Clooney movie, "The Ides of March." Maybe there would be some cheeky insights into the political process, on top of all that pretty beefcake. The movie starts so well and I started to hope that Ryan Gosling would run for President. And though there were great, acerbic performances by Paul Giamatti and Phillip Seymour Hoffman who appear as chubby, dueling campaign managers, the movie ends with a melodramatic thud; the only interesting observation comes when Gosling's character tells Clooney's character that Presidents and Presidential-hopefuls can get away with lying, cheating, and starting wars, but the world gets fed up when the big boys start sleeping with interns.

Then my mother called this morning, and said that her cousin Carolyn's husband Tom had just won the Nobel Prize in economic science. Thomas J. Sargent, a professor of economics at New York University, who also teaches at Princeton, won the prize with Christopher J. Sims, a professor of economics at Princeton. The New York Times reported that the two men won the prize "for their research on the cause and effect of government policies on the broader economy, a major concern of countries still struggling to address the aftermath of the recent financial crisis...Dr. Sims said that his research was relevant for helping countries decide how to respond to the economic stagnation and decimated budgets left by the financial crisis. 'The methods that I’ve used and that Tom has developed are central for finding our way out of this mess,' he said. But asked for specific policy conclusions of his research, he responded, 'If I had a simple answer, I would have been spreading it around the world.'” Sims and Sargent will split the $1.5 million prize.

I don't know Tom Sargent. Maybe I've met him a couple of times at a Seder or family birthday party. My mother thinks he came to our wedding but we're not 100% sure. But his wife definitely came and I do know her. Carolyn is lovely and smart. Her father, Moses Greenfield, was a professor of radiological science at UCLA and my Grandpa Sam's kid brother. Knowing that Carolyn's husband is out there, doing research with his colleagues, trying to find solutions to the world's multiplying financial problems, made me think that maybe, possibly, there are people intelligent enough and motivated enough to engineer a financial solution and nudge the world's economy back to health, or something close to it.

Pray, fast, eat

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:03:53 PDT

Yom Kippur is one of those holidays that makes me think about food. It's not supposed to do that, of course. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement and it's a holiday that should get you thinking about confessing, forgiving and atoning, making peace with the people you love, trying to reconcile your feelings for the the people you used to love and don't really love anymore but are still thinking about, making plans to be kinder to your family, friends, neighbors and colleagues, and eventually, hopefully, forgiving yourself, even if you've made some mistakes that you shouldn't necessarily be forgiven for.

You're not supposed to eat on Yom Kippur, and there are many reasons for that, but I think the main one is that when you fast, your feelings are heightened. Your stomach grumbles and you think a lot. You think about the things you said that you wished that you could take back, the people you complained about or ignored, the events you skipped, the games you only half-watched, the invitations you tossed, the comments you rolled your eyes at. With fasting, comes forgiveness. When you're sitting for long stretches of time on a wooden pew in the same place with a prayer book in your lap, listening to the cantor sing and the rabbi speak, you end up (metaphorically) in a different place. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you end up with a sense of peace.

That all sounds very high-minded so I'll just confess right here that I often end the day thinking about how famished I am and wondering how many calories I've burned fidgeting. Around 4:30, I start to wonder when I can go home, heat up the casseroles, make a pot of decaf, take the platters of lox, white fish, tuna, egg salad, herring and chopped liver out of the basement refrigerator, set them out on the dining room table and wait for company to come. Thank God, they do. Friends, relatives, neighbors, gather around the table at the end of the day, exhausted, hungry and grateful for a wide range of things, one of which is that the fast is over.

I love a good break fast. We started hosting them years ago when I realized they were an easy, fast way to have a dinner party that I didn't have to do much for. I'd order cold platters of bagels, fish, and cheese the day before the holiday, let the guests bring fruit and dessert, and call it a day. Then, five years ago, my friend Wendy and I got puppies within a few weeks of each other. We started spending time in her back yard, talking about food and kids while the dogs played. Wendy is an excellent and generous cook and one morning, she started describing her mother's challah soufflé. She said it was really easy and gave me the recipe. It was easy and my husband and kids loved it, so ever since then, I've been cooking that, plus other casseroles and kugels, for break fast. I don't make anything fancy or l0w-cal and I don't make anything that can't be made or frozen several days before. You won't lose weight eating any of these dishes but at the end of a fast, you're thinking about expanding your belly, not shrinking it.

This morning, my neighbor and I went for a run. We started talking about what we've been talking about all week: What we were making for break fast. My neighbor then asked me what I was making for dinner tonight. Uh, nothing. Okay, macaroni and cheese out of the box. My neighbor said she'd bought a huge piece of salmon at Costco. Did I want half? I sure did. She offered to marinate it first. Bring it on, sister.

I spent a couple of hours making my mother-in-law Dorothy's sweet potato casserole and a potato-and-onion casserole that calls for fresh, chopped rosemary (a call you should answer), which comes from Jayne Cohen's excellent cook book The Gefilte Variations. Then I went to pick up my younger son from school and while I was gone, my neighbor let herself in the back door and left a dish of marinated salmon in the refrigerator. I broiled it for five minutes on each side. It was one of the most delicious pieces of salmon I've ever eaten. It would also work beautifully served cold for break fast. All I can say to my neighbor is thank you. Her recipe works for any religion and will make you a true believer in the power of buying vast quantities of fresh fish from Costco and sharing it.

Laura K.'s Costco Salmon

Ingredients:

Salmon (2 pounds)

Lemon juice

Soy Sauce

Honey

Olive Oil

Combine equal quantities of moist ingredients, then add a little garlic powder. Marinade salmon for two hours. Broil for five minutes on each side.

Wendy's Challah Soufflee

Ingredients:

3/4 pounds cheddar cheese, sliced from the deli

9 eggs

3 cups milk

1/4 pound melted butter

12 slices stale challah

Beat eggs, mix with milk and melted butter.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

Cube challah and lay half the cubes in a greased baking dish.

Layer some of the sliced cheese on top. Alternate layers of cheese and challah.

Pour milk/egg/butter liquid over challah/cheese.

Let set overnight.

Bake uncovered in a preheated 350 degree oven for 45-60 minutes. Should be golden brown and only slightly wet.

Onion-Crusted Light Potato Kugel

Ingredients:

1 1/2 pounds onions (6 cups), thinly sliced

Salt, pepper

6 tablespoons oil, with additional for drivingly at the end

1 teaspoon minced fresh garlic

6 large or 8 medium russett (baking) potatoes

4 large eggs

1 teaspoon baking powder

1-2 tablespoons fresh, chopped rosemary

Separate onions into rings. Toss in a large bowl with 2 teaspoons salt and set aside for 20 minutes so moisture is extracted. Turn onions from time to time. Dry onions between sheets of paper towels or kitchen towels, pressing down to soak up liquid,

In a large frying pan, heat 3 tablespoons oil over medium high heat. Add onions and garlic and cook for 15-20 minutes until golden brown. Add salt and pepper.

Dice two large or three small potatoes in Cuisinart or with hand grader, and place in a saucepan of salted a water. Bring to a boil an, then simmer until potatoes are tender. Mash potatoes, and place in large bowl Stir in half the fried oven, setting the other half of the onions aside for later,

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Grate remaining potatoes. Place potatoes in colander and then rise with cold water to remove starch. Add these potatoes to the other potatoes.

Beat eggs in another bowl until thick and light. Whisk in baking powder, combine eggs with potatoes and season generously with salt and pepper.

Pour 1-2 tablespoons of oil into each casserole dish (use ceramic or metal, not glass.) Rub oil around bottom and sides of dishes and place both dishes in oven until hot (about a minute.) Remove dishes from oven. Transfer potatoes to casserole dishes, spread out with spatula and top with fried onions Sprinkle with rosemary and a few drops of olive oil.

Put casserole dishes on top shelf of oven and cook for 30 minutes at 400 degrees. After 30 minutes, turn heat down to 350 degrees and continue baking for 25-40 minutes longer until onions are crunchy and dark on top.

DOROTHY'S SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE

Filling:
2 cups (one large can) of sweet potatoes
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup milk (I used skim)
3/4 stick butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

Topping:
1/3 cup brown sugar
3/4 stick melted butter
3/4 cup mashed graham crackers

Set oven for 400 degrees.
Mash sweet potatoes in food processor. Mix together sweet potatoes, butter, milk, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon. Grease a casserole dish and pour in filling. Cook for twenty minutes.

While casserole is cooking, make the topping. (If you don't want to use graham crackers, just mix the brown sugar with the butter and pour it on top of the casserole). Mix the graham crackers with butter and brown sugar, take casserole out of the oven and cook for 10 more minutes.

My Inner Fruitcake

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 09:58:41 PDT

I've been mulling over putting together a book of essays about food and family called My Inner Fruitcake. This title was suggested to me by my cousin, Deborah Freedman, a wonderful children's book author whose gorgeous new book, Blue Chicken, is out this month. Debbie is an artist and an architect and the illustrations in this book are breathtaking. When I showed the book to my younger son, he said, "I can't believe someone in our family made this!"

We spend a lot of time thinking about chicken in our family. I've been cooking and writing about chicken a lot, maybe because it's a wonderful thing to make on a cold night. (Needless to say, I've never made fruitcake.) Below is the first of what I'm hoping will be a series of columns for Patch called "Sunday Night Supper," columns that will be about cooking and feeding the people you love and occasionally yell at. Of course, this column is about chicken. If you would like to read more about food and family on Patch, please go to Patch and leave a comment. Thank you!

Sunday Night Supper

Pam Riesenberg teaches a series of weeknight dinner classes for those who want easy and excellent.

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I'm not one of these people who stands around making tomato sauce from scratch, but a couple of weeks ago, I realized I needed a steeper learning curve. My kids were back at school, getting new lockers and tackling geometry. I wanted to learn new subjects too. I thought about taking up knitting and bridge, but I knew both activities would require hours of sitting still and using my hands, which I did enough of already as a writer. So I signed up for a cooking class with Pam Riesenberg, figuring I would stand and use my hands.

Pam began teaching cooking classes out of her kitchen three years ago, after working part time at the Kings Cooking Studio. "I started the cooking classes after hearing feedback from those attending that what they really needed are quick and healthy recipes for their families," she says. She now teaches under the aegis of Home Appetit.

The first class of the fall season was billed as a weeknight dinner series that would begin with Meatless Mondays. The class met, appropriately enough, on a Monday. The idea is that on Mondays, you cook without meat, a movement that has turned into a national phenomenon and a website.

On Pam's MM menu were four dishes that all sounded fabulous: Middle Eastern Pizza, Ravioli Lasagna with Spinach, Tempeh Stir Fry with Mushrooms and Sweet & Spicy Tofu with Veggies. I tried to get my friend Debbie to go to the class with me, but she had to work, so I went with my friend Terri, who is one of the most adventurous and ambitious cooks I know. Together, we gathered with two other women for a two-hour class in Pam's kitchen sunny, red-and-white kitchen in Millburn.

I'm not sure what I expected. I just knew I needed to recharge my culinary batteries, and by the end of the class, I had. Pam's kitchen isn't big and she doesn't have a large staff to assist her, which is comforting, because if she can make four different meals in two hours in her space, so can you. Over the course of the class, Pam prepared the dishes and gave us advice on where to go and how to shop. Costco is great for feta cheese but don't buy the fat free version. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's sell excellent pizza dough, as do the major supermarkets. You can be super ambitious and make the pizza dough from scratch, but I did that once and it wasn't worth the effort. My neighbor said she goes by La Strada and gets a ball of pizza dough from them for $4.

Pam showed us how to make tomato sauce from scratch in 20 minutes (use good, canned tomatoes) but said you can also be lazy and use a high-quality tomato sauce for this dish, like Rao's. A couple of other tips from Pam: You can freeze fresh ginger, as long as you mince or grade it first. Sesame oil is perishable but will last four or five months in the refrigerator. Get your knives sharpened at Kitchen a la Mode in South Orange, Kings or William Sonoma at the Mall.

The beautiful moment came at the end of class, when Pam served us lunch. When was the last time someone prepared you a hot lunch in their kitchen and gave you the recipes to go wtih it? It was bliss. The Middle Eastern Pizza, with its delicious combination of eggplant, olives, sun dried tomato slivers and feta cheese, and the Sweet & Spicy Tofu, were my favorites.

A few days later, I went to Whole Foods on a Saturday afternoon to stock up on ingredients for Middle Eastern Pizza. Here is the beautiful thing about going to the supermarket on Saturday: You can sail out your front door saying, "I'm going to the market!" and be sure no one wants to come with you. I easily found everything on Pam's ingredients list except for fresh mint and slivered, sun-dried tomatoes. I bought a basil plant and substituted the mint with basil, and eventually discovered slivered sun-dried tomatoes at the salad bar. (The great thing about buying food off the salad bar is you can weight it and buy exactly the amount you need.)

On Sunday afternoon, while my kids were doing their homework, I set about making the Middle Eastern Pizza. Because my younger son and my husband don't like olives or feta cheese, I poured half of the eggplant, feta and olive combination on one side of the pizza for my older son and me, and put just the tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese on the other side for them. By the end of the meal, we were all fat and happy.

I was feeling pretty good so a few days later, I went back to Pam's for Class #2, this time with Debbie. In the class was a woman I'd gone to Hebrew school with way back when and the sister-in-law of a girl I played soccer with in high school. (That's what you get when you move back to your hometown.)

Over the course of two hours, Pam deftly made four chicken dishes: "Chicken Arturo" (an old-fashioned recipe handed down from Pam's mom that calls for two cans of Arturo Sauce, onions, carrots and dried herbs) Chicken & Rice with Mushrooms (fantastic, see recipe below), Breaded Chicken Cutlets (easy, great for kids) and grilled Lemon Grass Chicken (memorably tasty and excellent for those on a low-fat, high-protein diet.). Pam was clearly in her element: "I could just teach cooking classes and live happily ever after," she said.

Again, Pam showed us what to do and how to do it: For the breaded chicken cutlet, she demonstrated how to thin out thick, boneless, chicken breasts: Open up the chicken breast, flatten it on a washable surface, cover it with saran wrap and pound it out. To bread the cutlet, she used Wondra, a fine, light flour, which I had never seen before, and which made the cutlets taste ever so slightly fried and gave them a nice crunch - like a healthy chicken finger. Pam ended up giving us more than chicken recipes that day: When one of the women said her teenage son liked to eat a lot of steak and she needed a new way to cook it for him, Pam ran to find a quick recipe for flank steak marinade and read it off to us: Three tablespoons balsamic vinegar, two tablespoons soy sauce, two tablespoons olive oil, one talbespoon sugar, one teaspoon garlic powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt or paprkika. Marinade for two hours to overnight. (I can vouch for this recipe: I made it last Tuesday night and it was terrific.)

All the chicken dishes were easy and excellent, and I figured I would make the chicken cutlets first and use that super fine flour she introduced to us, but by the time Sunday rolled around, I hadn't gotten around to buying superfine flour and when I opened up the freezer, I saw that we didn't have boneless chicken breasts either. We did have a large package of frozen chicken parts so I defrosted them, just in time to discover that we didn't have peas, mushrooms or Carolina rice. Oh dear. But we did have basmati rice. My grandmother used to make a chicken and rice dish that didn't rely on any vegetables and it was always good so I adapted Pam's recipe, skipping the veggies, substituting the basmati rice for Carolina and hoped for the best. It happened, this dish is flexible and superb. The rice was crunchy and delicious, and if you like standing in the kitchen, and scraping spoonfuls of rice off the bottom of a pot when no one is looking, this dish is for you. My younger son, who doesn't normally like chicken-on-the-bone, said, "This is really good, Mom, this is fantastic," and had seconds. High praise coming from him. My older son also loved it. My husband had four helpings, and when some chicken and rice fell off the counter and onto my foot, our dog was all over it.

I'm going back to Pam's for a fish class next Wednesday. See you there.

Home Appetit classes are $45/class. For more information, contact Pam Riesenberg, Home Appetit, pamfood@aol.com, 973 467-2633.

Middle Eastern Pizza

Sauce Ingredients

1 Tbsp. EV Olive Oil

1 small Onion, chopped

2 Garlic cloves, chopped

1 28-oz. can Whole San Marzano Tomatoes (or 2-14oz cans)

Kosher Salt/Pepper or Hot Pepper Flakes, to taste

Pizza Ingredients

4 Tbsp. EV Olive Oil

1 lb. Prepared Pizza Dough, at room temp.

1 medium Eggplant, peeled & cubed (in 1/2 inch pieces, about 5 cups)

1 Large Red Onion, thinly sliced

1 tsp. Ground Cumin

4 Cloves Garlic, minced or crushed

8 oz. Fresh Mozzarella Cheese, diced

¼ Cup Pitted Kalamata Olives, chopped

½ Cup Oil-Packed Sun Dried Tomato Slivers

¾ Cup Feta Cheese, crumbled (6 oz package)

Fresh Mint, to garnish (optional)

Preparation instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

2. To make sauce- Heat olive oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and cook until soft, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic & tomatoes and cook until thickened, about 20 minutes. (Partially cover) Season with S/P.

3. To make pizza- Drizzle a rimmed baking sheet with 1-2 Tbsp. olive oil and stretch pizza dough to fill the pan. Brush the dough with olive oil and bake 10-15 minutes, (on bottom shelf) until golden.

4. Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat 1 Tbsp. olive oil over medium high. Add the eggplant, red onion, cumin, garlic, and cook about 15 minutes, until eggplant is tender.

5. Top the pizza crust with 1 cup sauce, the mozzarella, eggplant & onion mixture, olives, sun-dried tomatoes and feta. Return pizza to oven and cook 15-20 minutes, or until cheese is melted.

6. Remove pizza from oven & top with fresh mint. Slice & serve.

7. Serve with a salad of mixed greens with lemon/olive oil dressing or Tahina.

Chicken and Rice

Ingredients

2 Whole Chicken Breasts, split in half (4 pieces-about 2 ½ lb)

Salt/Pepper

2 Tbsp. Olive Oil

1 Medium Onion, Chopped

2 Cloves Garlic, Minced

1 Package (6-8oz) Whole or Sliced Mushrooms (slice, if whole)

1 Bay Leaf

½ Cup Dry White Wine (or Dry White Vermouth)

½ Cup uncooked Rice (Carolina)

1 ½ Cups Chicken Broth

1 tsp. Paprika

Optional: ½ Cup Frozen Peas, Defrosted

Garnish: Chopped Parsley

Salt/Pepper, to taste

Preparation Instructions

1. Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper.

2. Heat over medium high, add 2 tsp. oil in a large sauté pan and add chicken pieces, skin side down. Brown about 5 minutes and turn over.

3. Scatter the onion and garlic between (not on top) the chicken pieces and add the mushrooms and bay leaf. Cook 5 minutes.

4. Add the wine and cook until it is almost all evaporated, 1 minute. Add the rice and broth (rice should not be on top of chicken pieces), and paprika. Bring to a boil, than lower heat to a simmer, cover the pan and cook about 20 minutes or until rice is tender.

5. Remove from heat, add peas if using and cover pan for 5 minutes.

6. Can garnish with chopped parsley. Season with salt & pepper.

7. Serve with: mixed green salad & crusty bread.

Writing Raw on Meditation and Baseball

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:43:15 PDT

This piece was supposed to come out last June on the Writing Raw website but even the Internet slows down sometimes. If you have any interest in reading about meditation, baseball and writing (again), please check out the latest issue of Writing Raw.

Girls Night Out: Shana Tova

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:03:38 PDT

Every Rosh Hashanah, I look at the dog-eared copies of bon appetits piling up in our kitchen and think, "I'm gonna make something new and different this year!" The stakes were really raised this week because my neighbor and I decided to join forces and celebrate the New Year together at her house. My neighbor's husband is an excellent cook, the kind of guy who reads the New York Times Dining section and gets out his fryer on Thanksgiving and fries turkeys in the back yard. Plus, my good friend from high school was coming with her family, as were my mother and stepfather, and my neighbor's extended family. All of these people had eaten my standby holiday food too many times before so I wanted to make something other than brisket, string beans and my mother-in-law Dorothy's sweet potato casserole. But then I realized I didn't really have time to start playing around with new recipes and making eight trips to the grocery store. My neighbor was making chicken and noodle kugel. The most I could do to change things up a bit was to make a new kind of sweet potato casserole, the one Amy had given me last year, which calls for fresh sweet potatoes.

Amy is my younger son's Spanish tutor. She and my mother-in-law are the kind of women who make you relax as soon as they walk in the door. They smile, say something cheerful, offer a compliment, make themselves comfortable and put you at ease, all at the same time, even though it's your house and you should be putting them at ease. The word for these women is "lovely." Amy used to teach Spanish at a local public high school and she likes to cook. She comes over late afternoons, and I always seem to be making dinner while she's here. Last year, she gave me her recipe for sweet potato casserole. It was a little more challenging than my mother-in-law's, in that it required buying the potatoes, boiling them and then peeling them, but other than that prep, the recipe was easy to make and really yummy. Amy's recipe also calls for a bottle of apricot brandy and a jar of marmalade. My mother-in-law's recipe is more old-fashioned, relying on canned sweet potatoes, lots of melted butter, brown and white sugar and graham cracker crumbs. Needless to say, you won't lose weight eating either casserole but you'll be go to bed happy. Greasing an old white Corning casserole dish, pouring in the sweet, chunky mixture, adding the topping, sticking it in the oven and knowing that every hot spoonful is going to be delicious is a wonderful way to spend an hour.

But then my editor at Patch asked me to cover a meeting in town the night I was supposed to cook. I should add that this request came after my editor told me that my stint with Patch was coming to an end, since her freelance budget was being cut to nada for the fourth quarter. "I want to give you as much work as possible before September 30," she emailed, after she'd basically kicked me in the gut. I should add that I really like and respect this woman: I don't know many women who work ''round the clock, but she seems to, and she has two kids who are exactly my kids' ages. I always feel like a bit of a sloth when I talk to her, because she stays on top of a website that is live 24/7 and had to cancel her vacation when Hurricane Irene stormed through our town at the end of August. I suggested that Patch start charging readers for on-line subscriptions like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and that Patch charge people to leave comments on the Patch website. The ability to leave comments on the Patch website drives a lot of readers to the site, but no one pays to be there. There's a lot of on-line arguing going on, and my editor spends a good amount of time playing on-line referee. "Tell people to leave two cents if they want to leave their two cents..." I said, trying to think of ways Patch could keep making money so that I could.

My editor ignored my suggestions. She just wanted to know if I could cover the meeting. The town sub-committee on Hurricane Irene was planning to listen to residents and business owners describe their seriously bad flood experiences. My editor said the meeting started at 7:30 and was likely to go to 10 p.m or later, on a school night. Oh boy, that sounded like fun. I could just imagine my kids rattling around the house, sweaty from football and water polo practice, cruising Facebook and iTunes and not doing their homework. But my editor was giving me a chance to write my last swan song. She added that she couldn't go to the meeting because she had to go to her son's back to school night. How could I say no? I wasn't happy that my stint with Patch was grinding to a halt---I don't make much money writing for Patch, but I like the steady drumbeat of a deadline. Writing under pressure is a great way to shatter writer's block. But the best part of writing for Patch was having a sharp, gracious editor to talk to and hash out story ideas with. Plus, cranking out stories gets your adrenaline pumping and makes the more leisurely pace of writing fiction and creative non-fiction that much more pleasurable. The yin of news reporting fueled the yang of creative writing. Now, the gig is over. I'm trying to take the advice I'm always doing out to my kids: When one door closes, another opens.

Before the door slammed shut, I agreed to go to the sub-committee meeting, knowing that the next morning, I'd be churning out copy instead of cooking. Armed with a bag of chocolate covered espresso beans, I spent two and a half hours at town hall, typing like a maniac, trying to make sense of tributaries, reservoirs, river basins, ponds, ground water, overland flow, flood plane storage, bridges, sewage, dredging, basements, and record rainfall, all of which would explain why our downtown flooded so badly during a tropical storm. Despite the espresso beans, I forgot to take pictures, but if you feel like reading about the collective stress of living through a flood in a small New Jersey town, click here.

This afternoon, I set about cooking for the holidays. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to buy sweet potatoes and I had no idea where the apricot brandy was. During Hurricane Irene, we lost power for several days and had to throw out everything in the refrigerator. The jar of orange marmalade I had bought to make Amy's sweet potato casserole last spring was gone. I looked in the pantry: There were three old cans of sweet potatoes. One can was starting to rust but the expiration date said October 16, 2013. That was my brother's birthday! To borrow an old Yiddish expression, it was bashert (destiny). We also had a package of graham crackers. I wasn't sure how old it was, but it didn't matter. Once you mix graham cracker crumbs with the amount of butter and brown sugar my mother-in-law's recipe calls for, it doesn't matter if you're cooking with dust.

Both Amy and Dorothy's recipes are below. L'shana Tova.

AMY'S SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE
5 pounds sweet potatoes
5 teaspoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 cup Triple Sec or Apricot Brandy
1 jar of marmalade
cinnamon

Set oven to 350 degrees.
Boil sweet potatoes until soft. Remove skins.
Mash sweet potatoes with milk until smooth.
Add all the other ingredients, except cinnamon.
Put in a baking dish and then spread marmalade over the top and sprinkle with cinnamon.
Bake for 30 minutes.

DOROTHY'S SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE
Filling:
2 cups (one large can) of sweet potatoes
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup milk (I used skim)
3/4 stick butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

Topping:
1/3 cup brown sugar
3/4 stick melted butter
3/4 cup mashed graham crackers

Set oven for 400 degrees.
Mash sweet potatoes in food processor. Mix together sweet potatoes, butter, milk, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon. Grease a casserole dish and pour in filling. Cook for twenty minutes.

While casserole is cooking, make the topping. (If you don't want to use graham crackers, just mix the brown sugar with the butter and pour it on top of the casserole). Mix the graham crackers with butter and brown sugar, take casserole out of the oven and cook for 10 more minutes.

Epic and tiny, both

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:03:38 PDT

Last weekend, I tried to think of something to write about 9/11. I couldn't come up with anything. A boy who played on my younger son's baseball team for two years lost his father in 9/11. Whenever that sweet-looking, blonde child went up to bat, I thought of his loss and what his mother had gone through. Compared to him, I had nothing to say.

Then I read Colum McCann's essay in the September 12 issue of The New Yorker. McCann is the author of Let the Great World Spin , one of the most beautiful short story collections I've ever read. McCann calls the book a novel but it's really a book of interconnected short stories, with characters who know each other and wander in and out of each other's lives. The one event that connects them is that they all saw or heard about the tight rope walker, Philippe Petit, who lay down a wire and walked between the Twin Towers in August 1974.

In The New Yorker essay, entitled "Dessert," McCann describes watching a woman on the East side eat a slice of chocolate cake the day after the Twin Towers came down. The woman eats slowly and deliberately, and McCann is appalled that anyone can eat dessert the day after such a catastrophe.

"The woman unrolled a fork from a paper napkin, held it at her mouth, tapping the tines against her teeth. She ran the fork, then, through the powder, addressing the cake, scribbling her intent.

Our job is to be epic and tiny, both."

McCann ends the essay this way:

"I still have no idea---after a decade of wondering---whether I am furious at the woman and the way she ate chocolate cake, or whether it was one of the most audacious acts of grief I've seen in a long time."

After reading that essay, I thought about how and why food takes the edge off of tragedy and/or the aversion of it. My family dodged two bullets on 9/11. My brother was near and my first cousin was in one of the Towers when the planes hit. My cousin had a meeting on one of the top floors and stopped on the first floor to go to the bathroom. He ran out of the building as soon as he heard the plane hit. My brother worked a block away. He jumped on a ferry to New Jersey and then took a train to the station near our house. His cell phone wasn't working and we were all frantically wondering where he was when he showed up at our front door. My father drove over and I started taking out cans of tuna fish and mayonnaise, heating up bagels and making everyone lunch. We stood around the kitchen and laughed nervously. My husband was out of town. Our sons were 5 and 1 then, and I remember thinking that if I just kept everyone safe and fed, crammed into one room together, everything would be okay. Of course, that's not true and it's shocking that some people can survive a disaster and go on and eat cake, but I think food and the sharing of it can provide some relief, some of the time.

This week, I did what I usually do in early September: I wrote, prepared to start teaching again, made dinner, walked the dog, exercised, drove my kids around, talked to my neighbor. Nothing was particularly difficult. My class was filled, my kids had no pressing issues, the back to school dust was settling. But in the middle of the day yesterday, I had a surge of anxiety. I made a cup of hot chocolate, spiked with coffee grinds, which usually serves well as Mommy's little pick-me-upper but I still felt rattled. I decided to make dinner. It was still early in the day---I had just eaten lunch--and way too early to start thinking about dinner, but I was supposed to interview someone at 4 p.m. and I rationalized that I should start getting dinner early so that I wouldn't have to rush home from the interview and start cooking. But really, I was just looking for a distraction and leafing through old cookbooks and defrosting chicken breasts provided it.

I took down Ruth Macpherson's Food For Friends. Macpherson used to live up the street from me, in a charming Tudor on a busy, main road. The train tracks ran behind her back yard. Shortly after I moved to town, my neighbor gave me Macpherson's cookbooks as a birthday present. Her other books are Discover Brunch and That's Entertaining. They are little spiral notebooks, with soft covers and no illustrations. They're the kind of thing you see in a school, synagogue or church bookstore.

Macpherson doesn't break new culinary ground but her books are small blessings. The recipes always work. Her prose is charming, and she writes in an offhand, friendly way that makes you feel she's just dashing this great recipe off and emailing it to you. There is something simple in her approach in that she does not necessarily expect you to have fresh herbs on hand and she never expects you to make breadcrumbs from scratch. She offers practical advice, such as, "You may wish to pass the soup in mugs before sitting down for the main part of this delicious meal." There are all sorts of menus for tennis team luncheons, elegant baby showers and friend's going away lunches, which make the books feel lady-like and a bit anachronistic, but in a lovely, old-fashioned way that works. Her voice is straightforward and comforting. She just knows you'll figure out a way to get the appetizers in the oven before company comes.

I used to see Macpherson walking her dogs in the reservation. She wore her hair in pigtails and she was always eager to talk about her dogs, the weather, and whatever was going on in town. A few year ago, I heard that one of her dogs wandered onto the train tracks and was killed. Macpherson sold her house and I don't see her anymore but I still use her recipes and am grateful for her voice.

I made her recipe for Lemon and Tarragon Baked Chicken, went to do the interview, and came home. My older son called and said he'd missed the late bus. The late bus is the last bus, which meant at 6 p.m., I had to drive forty minutes round trip to retrieve him. My younger son had a Spanish test the next day and wasn't feeling well. I was not happy but I knew when I got home, I would stand at the kitchen counter where I had stood with my father and brother all those years ago, and spoon buttery crumbs of chicken and tarragon into my mouth.

I got in the car, and put on Jill Scott's The Light of the Sun. This album combines feminism, gospel, rap and rock with love and the longing for it. The first song on this gorgeous album is called, "Blessed." Scott sings of wanting to finish recording so she can go home and see her baby boy. She sings of feeling blessed.

If we can eat, drive, listen to music, and read, we are too.

Lemon and Tarragon Baked Chicken
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, melted
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup dry bread crumbs, unflavored
1 tablespoons grated lemon peel (takes two lemons)
1 teaspoon dried tarragon
6 large chicken breasts, with bone and skin (can also use boneless)
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line baking pan with foil.
Melt butter over low heat. Add garlic to butter and saute one minute. Remove from heat and sir in mustardd and lemon juice.
Mix bread crumbs, lemon peel and tarragon in a bowl.
Wash and dry chicken. Turn chicken breasts in butter mixture to coat, then turn in crumbs, coating completely.
Arrange chicken in prepared pan, add salt and pepper.
Bake about one hour. Baste, occasionally.

If you are using boneless chicken breasts, bake for 50 minutes.

God bless Apple, poetry, and the long and winding road

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:23:40 PDT

The stock market's tumble, the U.S. debt downgrade and the wobbly state of European and American banks are generating a lot of anxiety. But the wonderful poet Philip Levine was selected to be the next poet laureate and that, plus great music, a strong wind and a trip to the beach, distracted me from the more pressing news yesterday.

Philip Levine's book, The Simple Truth, is one of the most beautiful poetry books I've ever read. One of my high school friends married a man who became a published poet (his name is Peter Waldor and his lyrical book of poems, Door to a Noisy Room, came out in 2008.) For my husband's thirtieth birthday, Peter gave him (us) two books of poetry, Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems and Levine's The Simple Truth. What I love about Levine is that he transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The title poem of "The Simple Truth" is about friendship, food, cooking, memory, loss, longing and New Jersey. It is so detailed, evocative, painful and exquisite, you are speechless as you finish it (see poem below).

I have to admit I wasn't thinking much about poetry yesterday morning when I drove my older son down to Long Beach Island to visit his cousins, my brother, my sister-in-law and her extended family. I often like silence in the car but my son always likes music so we listened to Adele's album 21 for the zillionth time. I can't listen to "Rolling in the Deep" ever again but my son and I both love "I'll Be Waiting," "Lovesong" and "Someone Like You." I pointed out that when Adele sang Lovesong (a cover of the Cure's Love Song) she was thinking of her mother, whom she lives with, bought a house for and loves. This led to a discussion about Eminem and the beautiful, angry song he wrote to his mother, Cleanin' Out My Closet and the influence of mothers on musicians, for better or worse. We wondered whether or not Lady Ga Ga liked her parents. Then my son put on Born This Way. I like what Lady Gaga stands for---she's scary, sexy and a great boundary pusher---and "Judas," "Government Hooker," and "Americano" make your heart race, but in my humble opinion, her voice and her lyrics don't hold a candle to Adele. My older son disagrees but fortunately, we were only one song into Born This Way when we pulled up to my brother's house.

We unloaded a new Aerobed, some old blankets, a mattress pad, one set of sheets, several bottles of suntan lotion, two dozen sliced bagels, some cream cheese and my older son's stuff. Then, because I am the family freak, and often prefer solitude to other people's company, I left them all at the beach and went paddle-boarding. My son, bless him, asked me if I would be wearing a life jacket.

The wind was coming up from the south end of the island and the men at Harvey Cedars Marina warned me to stay close to the shoreline. "You'll get a good work-out," they said. They were right. As I headed south, the wind was so strong that I barely moved. Still, a little boy stood up on his kayak and said he wanted to go paddle boarding. Another kid on a dock yelled that he wanted to go paddle-boarding too. I was so close to the shore, I heard every word he said. I think I paddled about 2,000 feet. Maybe less. Then I headed north. The wind was at my back. I lifted my paddle out of the water. The wind pushed me forward. I was flying across the water. Whee! Then I rammed into a Hobie Wave. Whoops. I knelt down, paddled towards the sand, drove back to the beach, kissed my older son goodbye and drove home.

The highway was peaceful, the sky was clear, there wasn't any traffic and the sun was out. I had finally found the right day and time to leave the beach (Wednesday, 4:06 p.m.) The sun and the water had made me sleepy so I decided to take advantage of Apple's hegemony and plugged in my iPod for the second time. (The first time, I listened to local Jersey girl Chelsea Handler's Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea. More about her in another post.) I am probably one of the last people on earth to purchase an iPhone but at the end of June, I broke down and did it. My younger son synced my phone with our family iTunes account. I had no idea what was on there---my husband and sons have been downloading music for years but since I was the only one in the family without an iToy, I never paid attention.

What sounded like country music started to play. What fresh hell was this? It was the Beatles White Album and I was hearing the first few bars of "Rocky Raccoon." Then the beat changed. There is nothing like hearing old, familiar music and realizing it can still rock you. The iPod jumped to Tom Petty's Wildlflowers. Then, the music from Jersey Boys started up and "Beggin," followed by "C'mon Marianne" came on. You can't be from New Jersey and not feel optimistic when you hear music by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. The iPod went on to play songs from "On the Town" (my mother must have hacked into our iTunes account) and then some Hebrew songs. I looked down. The iPod was playing Ehud Banai's Mamshich Linsoa ("Keep Moving"). Ehud Banai is an Israeli singer and songwriter. My husband must have downloaded this album while we were in Israel. I couldn't understand a word he was singing but the music was gorgeous.

Sometimes you don't need words. Sometimes you do. We take our pleasures where we can. Some great words by Philip Levine are below.

THE SIMPLE TRUTH

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat," she said,
"even if you don't I'll say you did."

Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

Back in Business

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:44:10 PDT

During the waning decades of the 20th century, I wrote for Business Week, now Bloomberg Business Week. I toiled there from 1987 to 1996 and loved it. Then I had a baby, my father's mental health started to deteriorate and I decided that writing business stories, nursing my son and being married to someone who worked 24/7 was too difficult. I didn't want the grind of deadlines or the stress of racing to interviews anymore. I wanted to be an auteur and an artiste, penning novels, short stories and autobiographical essays, pursuing high art and emotional truth, la-di-da. I went to graduate school for an MFA in fiction writing. I thought I was leaving one career for good and starting a brand spanking new one. I didn't realize that an MFA doesn't really qualify you to do much more than teach creative writing, and creative writing teachers are like cockroaches---hungry, resilient and everywhere.

Two agents were interested in my work. I blew off one, disappointed another, had another baby and focused on raising my sons. I taught creative writing for free at Columbia and eventually, landed a paying job teaching fiction and creative non-fiction through New York Writers Workshop. Not every moment has been glorious but on the whole, my students have been really sharp, well-read, ambitious, generous and decent. I've taught psychologists, doctors, lawyers, engineers, community organizers, artists, copywriters, journalists, decorators, actors, movie producers, receptionists, models and kindergarten teachers. They've been gay, straight, single, married, divorced. A couple of students were abused by family members, and one was mentally ill. Teaching them and leading workshops in which we discussed their work were some of the toughest experiences I've ever had. But there have been magical moments too. A few students have published stories and essays they first workshopped in class. One, Beth Raymer, sold her wonderful memoir Lay the Favorite: A Memoir of Gambling, which is now being turned into a movie.

Along the way, I applied to teach creative writing at a local state university. There were no creative writing jobs available but there was an opening for an adjunct journalism instructor. Beggars can't be choosers so I started to teach news reporting and business reporting. I brought working reporters in to talk to the students about their jobs. This one was working for The New York Times! That one was working for NPR! I started to feel wildly jealous. I missed being a journalist. I wanted to be stressed out and poorly paid again.

A few months ago, I started writing for Patch, an on-line, hyper-local newspaper. In June, I wrote about the family dynamics of a local hardware store. My editor is terrific. We started talking about covering local businesses more aggressively. I suggested we launch a column called, "What's in Store?" The first round of "What's in Store?" stories are here: What's in Store, Flywheel Takes Millburn for a Spin, Red Mango Aims to Open by October and Food, Liquor, Coffee and Clean shirts: Change is coming to Short Hills station.

Business reporting isn't always pretty. Writing short stories, essays and novels is like furnishing a living room. You want everything to be beautiful, elegant, carefully chosen and precise. The best creative writing makes your jaw drop. Writing business stories is more like buying carpeting for the basement---you need to get the job done but it isn't always stunning. But business reporting is steady work. Creative writing? Not so much. But I'll keep banging my head against the wall and do both.

As always, my worth is measured by the number of people who traffic the Patch site and leave comments, so if you have any inclination to do so, I would be grateful.

The Joy of Cooking...the short story

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 18:25:50 PDT

I subscribe to a bunch of literary journals. They pile up in our bathroom. Alimentum, Glimmer Train, and One Story are the ones sitting next to our bathtub now. The stories in them are rarely page turners, and I never read them cover to cover but there's usually at least one story, essay or interview that is worth reading, keeping and talking about. One Story only publishes stories. You pay $21 a year and they send you a story every three weeks. Sometimes I start reading the story and it starts so slowly that I put it down, never to pick it up. But this week, One Story sent a terrific short story, "The Joy of Cooking" by Elissa Schappell, one of the founding editors of Tin House and a contributor to Vanity Fair. The story is part of Schappell's new short story collection, Blueprints For Building Better Girls, due out in September.

The story consists of a phone conversation between a middle aged, divorced mother and her anorexic, twenty-something daughter. There are poignant flashbacks, and you get the feeling that these two women were part of a happy family, once upon a time. The ex-husband is a philandering bum, there's another sister who is in med school and sounds pretty perfect, the mother is just starting to date, and the daughter on the phone has had an extremely disturbing but occasionally comical approach to food for years. During the course of the story, the daughter attempts to cook for the first time what she thinks is a chicken. She calls her mother for advice. Her mother would like to give her advice but she'd also like to make it to yoga class. Still, she walks her through the recipe, which requires plenty of butter, lemon, yarn, a needle and memories, as each woman struggles to give the other woman some combination of love, reassurance and a reality check. Their relationship is agonizing, funny and familiar.

Here are the opening lines:

I was halfway out the door when the phone rang. Another person would have let the machine pick up, but you know how it is when you’re a mother.

“Thank God you’re there,” my daughter Emily said, sounding out of breath.

“I am, but sweetie,” I said. “I’m in a bit of a rush...”

“No, no, wait! Don’t go,” she cried. “Please, Mommy? I’m begging you. I just need one thing, I promise.”

I looked at the clock: 4:00. Yoga started at 4:30. After yoga, provided I wasn’t bleeding or paralyzed, I was planning to pop into the drug store and buy new lipstick. Something youthful but sophisticated, with shimmer. My mother always said that a woman should have a signature lipstick the way a man had a signature cocktail. I’d married and divorced Emily’s father, Terry, in Cherries in the Snow. After the new lipstick, I was going to treat myself to an overdue haircut. Something new, possibly even a little racy. I’d been toying with the idea of bangs. Then, at 6:30, I was meeting Hugo, the new man shelving the philosophy section at the bookstore where for the last fifteen years I’d been working as a cashier and bookkeeper. I had shaved my legs. It was just coffee, but let’s just say it had been a long time between cups of coffee. 1,825 days to be exact. Five years. Not that I was counting.

The dialogue in "The Joy of Cooking" is so sharp, the combination of hostility, affection, confusion and yearning so plausible, you have the sense you are watching an autobiographical play, or have hacked into a cell phone conversation that segues into a therapy session. The ending is stunning and brutal in its honesty. (To buy a single copy for $2.50, click here.)

Schappell's story reminds me of this wonderful quote that I read in The New York Times Book Review several years ago. The writer Emily Nussbaum was reviewing the poet Deborah Garrison's second book of poems, The Second Child. Nussbaum didn't love the book, and argued that Garrison's work had become too sweet: "In real life, I'd rather have a likable next-door neighbor than a bipolar goddess as a confidante. But in writing? Give me the strange mother over the sweet one any day."

It's a pleasure to read about a strange mother and her daughter in Schappell's story.

Fried pickles and LBI

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:52:34 PDT

Some days, you're in the mood for fried food and nothing else will do. Oh hell, I'll just admit it, sometmes you have PMS and you're in the mood for something fatttening and delicious and nothing else but fried food, white wine and chocolate-covered Oreos will do.

But this post isn't really about PMS. This post is about what PMS makes you eat. This post is about fried pickles.

My husband and I spent this past weekend in LBI, aka Long Beach Island, aka the Jersey shore. I wasn't always a Jersey Shore girl. One summer at the end of the Eighties, I summered in East Hampton. I was broke and had recently had my heart broken by a guy who did something very well in finance. He had made a fortune at a young age and had given me a thick gold bangle bracelet and taken me to St. Bart's six weeks after we had met. It was all very tra la la. Alas, I wasn't what or who he was looking for, so he dumped me while we were on a bike trip in France, and I went back to living alone and supporting myself as a journalist. I made next to nothing and what I did make, I spent on rent, dry cleaning, haircuts, step classes and David's cookies. But I remembered the good life I had lived with him so when a friend from high school found us a share in a house in East Hampton with a big group of twentysomethings, I said okay, even though I didn't quite have the $1,200 required to purchase the share.

Neither my friend nor I had a car but my old boyfriend had bought me a bike and my friend still had hers from college, so we biked around East Hampton. We would take step class with Phys Ed in town, go to the Barefoot Contessa for croissants and iced coffee, bike along Lily Pond Lane, then make our way to Georgica Beach. My friend was also nursing a bruised heart at the time, and we were both secretly hoping our old boyfriends would show up at the beach and see us. They never did. Or if they did, they saw us and ran.

A couple of years later, I met my husband, my friend met her husband and eventually, we all moved back to our hometown. (That's how it works in New Jersey.) My husband had had a share in Fire Island, but once we moved to New Jersey, we came to our senses and decided that commuting to New York to go to the beach was insane. When our older son was two, we started going to Long Beach Island, a long, skinny, barrier island along the Jersey Shore.

This is not the Jersey Shore that spawned Snookie. LBI is flat. It's 18 miles long and at the end northern end, there's almost nothing to do. That's where we go. Even though it's only 25 miles from Atlantic City, on the northern end, there's no gambling and not a single movie theater. The further north you go on the island, the harder it is to find a bar. You end up telling yourself that ice cream, miniature golf, big waves, a walk on the beach after low tide, a strong wind for sailing, and a light wind for paddle boarding are all you really need to have a good time. (And if you don't believe yourself the first time you tell yourself that, tell yourself again.)

LBI reminds me of the Midwood section of Brooklyn, where my grandparents lived for 70 years. The buildings are low and there are tons of kids riding around on bikes without helmets. There's a store that still calls itself the 5&10, the sidewalks are crowded, middle aged men go for runs without their shirts on, gorgeous young girls ride past in bikinis and good-looking teenage boys in muscle shirts run after them. It's hot. The delis offer such goodies as "nooners" (burgers) and there are lots of people of various generations, sitting around in bathing suits on their porches, eating lunch and talking about what they're going to grill for dinner. Parents jam their chairs, umbrellas, pails and boogie boards into grocery carts and walk their kids across the boulevard to the beach. There's no shortage of sweaty, tattooed bodies on the beaches in LBI. Most of the bodies look pretty good and the ones who don't, don't seem to care.

The island has its charms. At one point in Harvey Cedars, the island is only 1/5 of a mile wide and you can see the bay and the ocean simultaneously. There are several excellent restaurants, Yellow Fin, Black Eyed Susan's and Cafe Aletta, among them. None take American Express and Black Eyed Susan's only takes cash. LBI is nothing fancy and somehow, despite my earlier love affair with the lush life in the Hamptons, I've come to love it.

My husband and I spent the weekend eating, sailing, running and paddle-boarding. Paddle-boarding on a summer day is a beautiful thing. You stand on a surf board, suck in your stomach, lower your sunglasses and paddle around. After an hour, your foot is asleep and your arms are sore. You move so slowly that people in motor boats offer to tow you in. Don't let that dissuade you; paddle-boarding is delightful. There's something meditative and almost Biblical about the experience. You're standing still, but you feel like you're walking on water.

On our way home, we stopped at a restaurant in Manahawken called Mud City Crab House. You just know that a restaurant with that name is going to mess you up. We walked in and sat down. Sometimes, you look at a menu and you can't decide what to eat. I knew immediately. Crab claws with mustard sauce and fried pickles with Thousand Island dressing on the side. I love fried pickles. There’s nothing worse for your breath or your digestive system and six hours later, you're still feeling them but they are the most delicious fried food I've ever had.

The waitress brought over six fried pickles, a vat of Thousand Island dressing and a small plate of crab claws. I felt sorry for the claws. They had nothing on the pickles.
My husband had ordered a jerk chicken sandwich. He was looking at me with some combination of interest and disgust.
"Do you want a pickle?" I asked him.
"No," my husband said, "I don’t like pickles."
"They're good," I said out loud, but inside, I thought, More for me. Oh, that initial taste of salty, crunchy pickle, dipped in buttermilk and flour and fried in oil! Some wonderful chemical shoots up into your brain and makes you feel alive like nothing else. The pickles were so good I forgot where I was.
Eventually, my husband picked up a fried pickle to taste. I only had two left. Was he going to keep eating the one he picked up? No, he was not. He put the remaining half a pickle down. I grabbed it.

Why is fried food so friggin' good?

Once we got home, my husband went to the gym and I went for a run. While I was running, I was acutely aware that I had eaten about 3,000 calories worth of fried pickles. When I got back, I saw that our peaches, nectarines and plumbs had ripened nicely over the weekend. I started slicing them up and making a platter for us to nibble on while we figured out what we wanted to eat for dinner. But who was I kidding? My husband went upstairs to shower, and I went to my secret stash in the freezer, the place where I keep chocolate covered espresso bean (lovingly known as "Mommy's little helpers") and two chocolate hockey pucks left over from my older son's bar mitzvah. It would be a shanda to eat those pucks and I didn't really feel like going on a caffeine binge at dinner time. I poured myself a glass of wine, and started rummaging around, looking for something I might have forgotten about. There it was, a bag of white-chocolate covered Oreos from Godiva. I had bought them back in June, when I was trying to educate my older son about the pleasures of Oreos dipped in chocolate. There were three left. I ate them all in the time it took me to write this paragraph. Maybe less.

Back to the pickles. A quick Wikipedia search reveals that fried pickles were first invented in 1963 by an Arkansas man named Bernell "Fatman" Austin. Enough said.

Fried Pickles*

1/2 cup buttermilk
salt and black pepper to taste
1 (16 ounce) jar dill pickle slices
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups fine cornmeal
1 teaspoon seafood seasoning, such as Old Bay™
1/4 teaspoon Cajun seasoning
1 quart oil for frying

1/2 teaspoon Cajun seasoning
1 (12 ounce) jar buttermilk ranch dressing
Directions

Cover a plate with parchment paper or wax paper. In a shallow dish, combine buttermilk, salt, and pepper. Place pickles in mixture and set aside.
Pour the flour, cornmeal, seafood seasoning, and 1/4 teaspoon Cajun seasoning into a large, resealable plastic bag; shake to mix well. Add pickles a few at a time and tumble gently to coat evenly with the flour mixture. Remove and place on prepared plate.
Heat oil to 365 degrees F (180 degrees C) in deep-fryer or heavy deep skillet.
Fry pickles in several batches until golden brown and slightly crisp on the outside with a moist interior, 1 to 2 minutes. Drain on paper towels.
In a small bowl, combine buttermilk ranch dressing with 1/2 teaspoon Cajun seasoning; blend. Serve as a dipping sauce for warm pickles.
Footnotes

Editor's Note:
The nutritional analysis for this recipe reflects an estimated 10% of the oil for frying as well as the full amount of the coating and breading. Therefore, the values represented may not be accurate.
Nutritional Information

Amount Per Serving Calories: 364 | Total Fat: 27.7g | Cholesterol: 10mg

*This recipe is from Allrecipes.com.

Skip Plan C and Go Right to The Big C

noreply@blogger.com (Writermom) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:58:09 PDT

Ah, summer time. The kids are away, swimming, hiking, studying screenwriting, eating new stuff and making their own beds (here's hoping, anyway.) I'm not teaching this summer so I have had the luxury of doing whatever the hell I wanted these past few weeks. I promised myself I would do a little work and not get swamped by domestic chores: I would write a short story (started it.) I would write an article (in the middle of it.) I would self-publish a book of recipes and essays called My Inner Fruitcake on Amazon (haven't even begun.) What I have done, besides sitting on the patio, paying bills, seeing doctors, submitting medical claims, muddling through Cutting For Stone and hiring a crew of painters to paint the basement, is watch a lot of TV, specifically, "The Big C."

Every summer, I get a mammogram, sonogram and pelvic sonogram. A lot of women I know schedule these appointments while the kids are away so that we can, as my sister-in-law says, make sure our lady parts are in working order, without having to worry about other people's feelings if the results aren't what we hoped for or expected. I had a couple of scary moments and in the end, everything was fine but while I was waiting for results and going back and forth to the city for tests and biopsies, I started watching "The Big C" on Showtime.

If you haven't watched this show, you are lucky, because now you can start! For the past ten days, my husband has come home from work, and there I've been, sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc, blissed out and laughing as Laura Linney, Oliver Platt, Idris Elba, Gabourey Sidibe, John Benjamin Hickey and Gabriel Basso make you believe that you are watching an extended family of smart, screwed-up people deal with the fact that Laura Linney's character, Cathy, has cancer and lives in Minnesota.

I know that sounds depressing, but this show is so funny, sharp, sad, sexy and thought-provoking, you won't be able to stop watching or thinking about it. At the end of every episode, I was laughing or crying. My friend Liz, a writer/artist/designer who runs the firm Elizabeth Conn Design,, told me about "The Big C." I have to admit, I was initially dubious. The premise sounded upsetting and besides, I've spent the past few years watching "Weeds" and couldn't bring myself to watch another show about a middle-aged mother on Showtime. "Nancy Botwin," Mary-Louise Parker's character on "Weeds," was the worst mother on TV but she was so much fun to watch. At the end of last season, "Nancy" chose Plan C, turned herself into the police for a murder her younger son had committed and went to prison. This season, she's living in a halfway house, her handsome, drug-dealing husband, "Esteban" is supposedly dead, her kids seem just fine, and I didn't care about the characters anymore. I needed a new viewing distraction so I started watching Laura Linney and Oliver Platt in "The Big C."

The show is addictive. Linney plays Cathy, a beautiful, blonde, 42-year old wife, mother and high school teacher who has stage four melanoma. (Linney is 47 in real life but easily passes for younger.) She initially doesn't tell anyone she loves about her diagnosis because she doesn't think they can handle it. Only her good-looking, thirtysomething oncologist knows what's going on. She keeps her illnesss from her handsome, homeless, bipolar brother, Sean (the awesome John Benjamin Hickey, who just won a Tony for his role in "The Normal Heart'), her husband Paul (Oliver Platt, overweight, self-conscious and unattractive but so funny, loving and sweet, you can see why Cathy adores him), her teenage son Adam (Gabriel Basso, really good and believable as a cute, confused 14 year old boy) and her favorite student, Andrea (Gabourey Sidibe, who was so beaten down, sad and vulnerable in "Precious" and is so wise, sassy and articulate here.) Eventually, Cathy tells her 79-year old neighbor, Marlene (Phyllis Somerville, beautiful and moving, even though she plays a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic woman with Alzheimer's) and slowly starts to tell her family and students what is going on. Along the way, she has an affair with Idris Alba, who plays a charming, gorgeous artist with an English accent and great taste in women's scarves. Alba struts around in beautiful, linen shirts---that is, when he has his clothes on.

The first season of "The Big C" consisted of 13 episodes. The second season, which started a few weeks ago, has three so far. Alan Alda and Liam Neeson show up as men who try to cure Cathy, and Cynthia Nixon, looking skinny and vampy, appears as "Rebecca," a morally compromised, flirtatious pharmaceutical rep who is Cathy's best friend from college. Nixon's character is the polar opposite of her role as "Miranda" on "Sex and the City" and she is wonderful.

During the last ten days, I've watched every single episode of "The Big C." Yes, that's eight hours in front of the telly, hours when I could have been reading, writing and spending time with my loved ones. What can I say? Sometimes watching TV beats all else. The twelfth episode of season one was shocking. The thirteenth and final episode of season one made me bawl. One of the most memorable lines from the show is, "Getting old is a privilege."

If you haven't watched this show, you can watch the first episode free on line. Enjoy.